Category: Nutrition

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: What is going on with my friends? Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about analyzing thyroid markers.

Our special guest for today is actually the person who was the first guest ever on this podcast all the way back in January of 2021. Kind of crazy that this has been going on for almost two years. I cannot wait for that two-year mark.

His name’s Ryan Monahan. He is someone that if you’re in the world of FDN already, you know this guy, you probably love him. If you’re someone who’s just training or are considering the course or whatever, you might not know this guy yet, and that’s completely fine. He’s someone that helps a lot with the graduates, and he’s just a wealth of knowledge.

It’s one of those individuals who does not stop learning ever, but also knows how to execute, and that’s a really fine line. I know a lot of people who execute and don’t continue to learn, and then I know a lot of people who learn infinitely and never actually take the steps necessary to apply what they learned and actually help other people with it. Ryan, at least from my view, seems like a perfect mix of both of these things. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this today.

About Ryan Monahan

Now simply because it’s been so long that he’s been on, over 180 episodes at this point, we do touch on his story a little bit today, very brief summarized version. It’s only going to be like six, seven minutes, and it’s relevant to today’s topic. I think it’s worth listening to anyway. But of course, if you guys want to listen to his original episode – Episode 2, that will be in the show notes for you guys. I do want to read his bio though, and then we will get into this today and explain what we’re actually doing.

Ryan Monahan is an FDN, of course, a board-certified health coach, clinical advisor for Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and certified AIP coach, which is autoimmune protocol coach. He has a passion for uncovering hidden stressors that contribute to thyroid disease.

Throughout his journey, Ryan spent over 10 frustrating years visiting more than 40 health professionals to find answers to his chronic health complaints until being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 2012. Since then, his mission has been to change the dialogue about chronic disease towards a holistic, functional approach, all while helping others restore their health to normal function.

Typically, his clients are people who have struggled with finding relief from their autoimmune symptoms. Oftentimes, they feel that they’ve tried everything, and that traditional medicine hasn’t served them. In his experience, there is a better way, and we’re sure going to talk about that better way today.

Analyzing Thyroid Markers and Their Trends

What we are actually doing is analyzing thyroid labs, and they are the thyroid labs of yours truly. It is a full thyroid panel, well almost full. We’re missing one marker.

We’re going to go through all of these markers, what they actually mean, why they matter, how Western medicine has a slightly different interpretation, and most importantly, how, even though my labs look great today from a functional perspective, there were trends that were starting to be seen on them already.

You can follow us along on the audio just by continuing listening to this podcast, that is totally fine. It will not affect you in any way because we’re going to read out the markers and read out the reference ranges. It’s something that we will say everything verbally for you guys. We’ll make sure it’s covered.

But if you want to see the labs and see the ranges and see our faces, if you are listening to this right now, then this is also Live on our YouTube page at Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. Just search for us on YouTube. I will have this linked in the show notes once the link is available. Without further ado, let’s get to today’s episode.

All right, everyone, we are back with an FDN fan favorite. It’s Ryan Monahan. Women love him. Men want to be him. How are you, my friend? We’re glad to have you back.

[00:03:32] Ryan Monahan: Love the intro. Doing really good. Really happy to be back.

[00:03:38] Detective Ev: The funniest part is we’ve been talking for like 15 minutes and he doesn’t know I’ve been holding this in the whole time and smacked him with it as soon as we went Live.

Doing Great Work Personally & for FDN

Ryan Monahan was the first guest on the Health Detective Podcast. We weren’t even called that back then. We were the FDNthrive Podcast. Now, by the time you’re released, you’re going to be Episode 182, my friend. It’s kind of cool to finally have you back on.

I should have gotten you on way long ago, but I know you’re busy. I mean, you’re out there doing the work both in the actual side of the course side of FDN, helping the graduates and stuff, and then running a beyond full-time practice yourself because he helps a lot of people out there.

We’re glad to have you back.

[00:04:12] Ryan Monahan: Glad to be back. I can’t believe it’s already been 180 guests on the podcast. That’s amazing.

[00:04:18] Detective Ev: Yeah. And some of them are solo episodes to be clear. But we are definitely over a hundred guests, that’s for sure. Cheers to a hundred more. We’re going to keep going and not stopping anytime soon.

If you guys want to hear Ryan’s story, I highly recommend it. The audio quality’s going to be a little funky. There’s no video. It’s primitive times at the FDN podcast. But we had talked a lot about the thyroid things that Ryan dealt with. I encourage you guys; I’m going to have it in the show notes. Go click on that episode – Episode 2, listen to it, check it out.

There’s so many things there that you’d want to hear. But I think for today, just because it has been so long, Ryan, it would be worth just giving a small preface before we dive into our topic today of thyroid stuff and why the labs kind of trick us.

Searching for Answers & Finding None

Then we’re also going to do a screen share. We’re going to be analyzing some labs Live. You’ll be able to check that out on our YouTube if you guys are listening. But it’ll also still be audio friendly. So, you can do either.

But can you just give us a quick story of like, what was going on with the thyroid thing? How did you guys end up finding out that that was a major component of your health?

[00:05:12] Ryan Monahan: I’m happy to give an abridged version of that, kind of a condensed, abridged version.

Basically, had been struggling with chronic health related symptoms for over a decade that started by the time I was a teenager. That included chronic allergies and asthma, depression, constipation that developed into chronic fatigue. By the time I was in my early twenties, I had all kinds of unexplained skin lesions and rashes throughout my body. It was kind of a laundry list of symptoms. It just kind of went on and on.

Throughout that 10-to-20-year period, even, it was a long chunk of time, I had been basically jumping from doctor to doctor, to practitioner to practitioner. I had even attended what’s called a Grand Rounds at Yale-New Haven Hospital. About 40 medical students assessed my health condition in one day. Even still up to that point, still hadn’t found any answers to what was going on with my health.

Throughout my twenties, I lived a very poor and miserable quality of life, dealing with the depression, chronic fatigue. The allergies and asthma were so debilitating that I would wake up every night, pretty much wheezing and not being able to breathe. That was even with the assistance of antihistamines and inhalers.

A Diagnosis That Led to Lifestyle Medicine and FDN

I was just kind of like managing and just getting by. Just sneezing like 50 to a hundred times a day, constantly. Couldn’t get through a conversation without like mucous running down my nose, or sniffling, or sneezing. Also, all this affected my self-esteem, my day-to-day ability to live a normal life.

I started at a certain point to experience a lot of puffiness or edema in the face. So, my biological age, if you look back at pictures of me from the early 2010s, like 2010, 2012, I feel like I look older then than I do now. I actually feel like I’ve been able to reverse my biological age through this kind of functional healing approach. Maybe we could include a before and after picture in the show notes as well.

As it turned out, I’ll keep it short, I was eventually able to find a doctor in the Atlanta area where I was living at the time. He was a traditional medical doctor that was also licensed in traditional Chinese medicine.

He actually did spend some time with me, and he ran a whole array of labs that no doctor had ever run on me before, including a thyroid panel. This is really key because no doctor up to this point had ever suggested the thyroid or even run a simple or basic thyroid panel. Calls me up within 24 hours and says, hey you’ve got Hashimoto’s Disease.

I’m like, What the heck is that? I’m like, I don’t even know what the thyroid is, let alone this Hashimoto’s character, right? This kind of was the beginning of a journey for me that led into the functional approach to lifestyle medicine and the FDN type approach.

Feeling Better in One Day

I can tell you that it was a huge relief off my shoulders in a weird way, knowing that there was a diagnosis, that there was something wrong. It wasn’t just all in my head. It wasn’t crazy.

Within one day of getting on thyroid medication, and I say this with no exaggeration, it was overnight, I became a new person. My body was starved for thyroid hormone. I woke up that next morning, for the first time I had done this, maybe since I was a kid, I woke up with the sunrise without an alarm clock. Where I used to sleep through my alarm, just hitting snooze sometimes for two or three hours before I would wake up, cause the chronic fatigue was so bad. So, woke up with a pep in my step. The depression lifted; my energy improved.

From that point on, I was just hungry to learn more. You know, how does the thyroid work? Why does it become dysfunctional? What are the diet and lifestyle factors that are related there? That kind of just led into an obsession, which still lasts today.

[00:09:02] Detective Ev: Thank you. That was like actually a perfect summarized version because I still think there’s a ton of value then in the original podcast if they want the story. But today it shows, okay, this is why we’re talking about this.

It’s amazing. You know, you think, well, I thought at least somehow, how are we going to do all these episodes every week? Like, aren’t we going to run out of topics? Yet here we are talking about something that you would actually think is quite basic in our world.

Thyroid Markers: TSH

There’s so many stories, so many topics that sometimes it takes this long to get to these types of things. I’m glad to have you on today to do it.

One thing I don’t think we even talked about in that story though, and perhaps you were saving it for when we’re actually looking at these individual markers together today, was what your TSH was once you got the thyroid labs back. We’ll dive into it more.

But just for right now, so the audience isn’t like sitting on the edge of their seats, what is like a normal range of TSH and then what was yours at the time, my friend?

[00:09:50] Ryan Monahan: I’m glad you brought that up because it is the most traumatic part of the story.

So TSH, which is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, that’s what the acronym stands for. The clinical range from a conventional medical perspective is about 0.5 to about five. You might see some variation within that, but that’s typically what you’ll see. From a functional perspective, we want to see that even tighter, about 0.5 to 2.5, maybe even 0.5 to two. Okay.

Now, the thing to understand is that this is an inverse marker. It’s a little counterintuitive, but I’ll explain for the audience. The higher that number goes above a two or even a five, the more elevated that number, the more it’s an indication that your thyroid is slowing down. As a result, that’s going to slow down your metabolism, your mood, your energy, your digestion, your body temperature. It’s like the thermostat for the body.

Thyroid Markers: Essentially Like Being in a Metabolic Coma

So, if TSH is elevated, it’s like a thermostat that’s dialed down to like 60 degrees, right? I don’t know who’d want to live in an environment like that, but that’s kind of what’s happening in your body. Just wanted to provide some context there.

When I was first diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism, my TSH was at 150. To do some quick math here, if we’re using even the conventional upper limit of a five for TSH, that’s 30 times above that reference range. If we’re using the conventional range of like a 2.5, then it’s 60 times above that reference range, which is kind of essentially like being in a metabolic coma.

The first thing the doctor said to me was, I do not even know how you’ve been able to get up in the morning. Not only that, I’ll add one more detail to this. On the lab report itself, I still have a copy. It didn’t just say that the TSH was 150, it said greater than 150.

The doctor explained that that’s where the lab actually tops off. That it was some number greater than 150, but the lab couldn’t get a reading higher than that. So that could have meant maybe it was 151, maybe it was 200. We don’t know. In either case, astronomically high.

In my practice working with clients with slow thyroid function in the past seven years or so, I still have not seen anything come close to that. Not that it’s a competition.

[00:12:11] Detective Ev: Not one you want to win, that’s for sure.

[00:12:14] Ryan Monahan: No,it’s not one you want to win. But just to illustrate just how out of whack my thyroid was. I was in a pretty bad state.

Lab Results Validation

[00:12:22] Detective Ev: I think it was good that we mentioned that because it is the craziest part for sure. It’s great that you found these answers eventually.

I’ve debated back and forth with certain people, not in our world, but they’ll be like, well, do you think these labs are useful? Don’t you think you’re scaring people sometimes if they see something. All I ever say to them is like, I am so thankful that you have never been so sick that that is your perspective on lab testing like this.

Because for us it is the exact opposite. It’s validation. It’s not scary per se. I’m sure you didn’t appreciate seeing that in that sense, but like, I also now have something to work on. I can go attack this. It’s not like you were a particularly natural focused guy at that time, so you were probably just happy to find anything that could help you with relief. I mean to the point that the next day the medication is doing this.

I’m in the same boat. I mean, I probably have not run nearly as many thyroid panels as you, but there was the one woman I actually brought her up to you before. She was at a 111 and that was four times higher than the highest I’ve ever seen in my personal practice where I’m using labs on people. It’s really high. It was ridiculous.

So I kind of credited her with the same thing. She’s a mom, you know, she’s doing all this stuff. I said, you know, I think it’s fair, if we say it at 150, it’s probably fair to say it at 111. I remembered your story immediately and I referenced it.

The Medication Lifeboat

I said, it’s impressive that you’re doing what the heck you’re doing every single day, playing mom, playing wife, when you got all this going on. Cause your body is not working with you right now, or the things you’re doing is leading to your body not working with you right now.

Between a combination of that medication, because she did use that. I like that you bring this up because I always try to show people on this podcast, we’re not being dogmatic one way or another. We believe that the functional, natural side is grossly underrepresented, but the medication is what got Ryan Monahan moving so that he could become the Ryan Monahan of today.

You know, that’d be pretty tough to have all the necessary motivation to just habit your way into a better thyroid number there. Like you needed some kick. And I’m sure getting that relief in a matter of (I mean, it wasn’t perfect, right?), but a major relief in 24 hours. Yeah. That’s gotta be pretty motivating for someone who had felt like you felt.

[00:14:19] Ryan Monahan: Really great point. I’m glad you brought that up.

I do have a good handful or percentage of clients that come to me and they’re kind of anti-medication or they want to get off their thyroid medication. And I understand where they’re coming from.

What I’ll explain to them is that when the thyroid is under functioning, sometimes we need to throw you a lifeboat when you’re drowning before you can get back on the shore. Then once we have the high ground, then we can do that deeper investigation to find out what the hidden stressors are in the body and support the physiology.

Focus on Getting Your Body Healthy

Then from that point, once your health starts to improve, then maybe you can look at potentially weaning off that thyroid medication. But I really don’t believe that’s the best approach to do in the beginning when you don’t have the lab data available. You don’t know what’s going on in your body, you’re still struggling with these symptoms. We need that lifeboat sometimes.

That’s where the FDN approach, we see ourselves as allied health professionals and we’re not anti-medicine. We want to use the best of both worlds. Like you said, I do feel that the holistic side is grossly underrepresented. But that’s why we’re here to teach our clients this set of skills, so that they can use these tools for a lifetime to maintain their health.

[00:15:36] Detective Ev: Absolutely.

People also need to realize if they’re coming to us as clients, while there are many doctor FDNs, the majority, like higher than 50%, are not doctors. You can’t come to us and say, I want you to get me off medication, that’s not what we’re doing.

What we can do is help you get your body so healthy that you and your doctor might be able to decide that you no longer need that medication. That’s very realistic. That happens all the time in our world actually. But that can’t be the focus that you’re working on us with.

Let’s make the focus, getting the body healthy. If you have that goal in the back of your head, totally fine, that’s a personal goal. But we gotta make sure we’re doing that stuff properly. And I’ve had that experience with mental health clients, right? I’m like, I’m not telling them to get off medication, I’m not advocating for it at all.

Conventional Medical Perspective with Thyroid Markers

But sometimes the medications end up leading to symptoms because they no longer need it. You’ll know when you’re ready to get off the medication, it’s not going to kill you. Then you can go make that decision with your doctor.

With that all said, I want to actually go over these lab results with you. Now, thankfully these are pretty decent ones. But nonetheless, it’s still going to give us an opportunity today to really break down each marker. Sorry, I jumped a little bit ahead.

Before we do that, can we explain the difference really quick between what Western medicine, if they run the thyroid markers at all, what are they going to run versus what would we want when we say a quote/unquote “full thyroid panel”? Because that gets thrown around a lot, and I think there’s a lot of confusion as to what that means.

So what will Western medicine do typically, versus what we actually want?

[00:16:58] Ryan Monahan: Yeah. From the conventional medical perspective, they’re typically going to run one single marker and one single marker only, and that’s going to be TSH, which is that thyroid stimulating hormone.

Now, here’s what’s interesting about that. TSH is not produced by your thyroid at all. It’s a hormone that’s produced by your pituitary gland. Essentially what that marker is telling you is the pituitary, which sits at the bottom of your brain, the base of your brain, that’s producing this hormone to stimulate, kind of like poking the thyroid to say, hey, wake up, make more thyroid hormone, right?

That’s why when the marker’s more elevated, that’s usually because the thyroid is slowing down and the pituitary is trying to stimulate it back into action.

Functional Medicine Perspective with Thyroid Markers

But technically, you’re really measuring this pituitary marker, which doesn’t give you any insight at all into what the thyroid is actually doing, and is therefore, in my strongly held opinion, a very, very limited perspective. Extremely limited, right? It’s like looking at a mountain range throughout like a peephole, you know, and trying to see the big picture.

If you’re lucky, sometimes they’ll see doctors also run maybe T4, like total T4 or Free T4. We’ll get into those when we look at the panel. Maybe if you’re really, really lucky, they’ll also run T3 as well. But I would say that’s still fairly limited.

What I’m wanting to see within a full, complete comprehensive thyroid panel is the TSH, Free T4, Free T3, something called Reverse T3, and then thyroid antibodies, which are the TPO which is thyroid peroxidase, and then TGAB, which is Thyroglobulin Antibody.

Those two antibodies will tell you if the immune system is mounting an inflammatory response to the thyroid gland. That’s where you get into the autoimmune territory, which as it turns out, is more or less inseparable from hypothyroidism. That’s another thing I’m always trying to get the opportunity to teach or educate on, is that when someone says they have hypothyroidism, chances are their doctors have never run their thyroid antibodies.

But there’s about a 95% or more likelihood that they do have antibodies when there’s hypothyroidism. The two are inseparable. The hypothyroidism and the Hashimoto’s, 95% or more of the time they go hand in hand. So that’s just another point I thought I would throw out there. For those that think like the antibody component doesn’t matter, that’s false or incorrect.

Western Medicine’s Perspective on Antibodies

[00:19:38] Detective Ev: Yeah. The problem is, I think, is Western medicine (I mean, there’s an extreme end of this, and I don’t want to misrepresent what they do), but a lot of the times, if the antibodies are only elevated to a certain degree, you guys gotta understand, Western medicine doesn’t know what to do about that. They’re not thinking about the many triggers that could lead to a thyroid being attacked. They can only treat it once there is symptoms.

So, if you’re reacting, a very common one, this is elementary stuff in functional medicine, but gluten is a very common thing that is going to end up leading to the thyroid antibodies going up for people that are sensitive. There’s a process that can occur, which leads to that.

Well, Western medicine is not even thinking like this most of the time. They can only do so much with these markers anyway. It’s not that they don’t know they exist, it’s not that they’re being blatantly negligent. That’s not what the training includes. And even if it does include it, there’s only so much they can do.

My mom, you know, she got missed for years with this. And even trickier, because the Hashimoto’s stuff can be hard enough to find, the hypothyroidism stuff can actually be hard to find. But she was dealing with Grave’s disease, which is the much less common thyroid autoimmune disorder.

It’s pretty much, in a sense, the exact opposite for those listening. Whereas, you had said, like there’s this counterintuitive thing where the TSH is high, and it actually means things are going slow. My mom’s TSH was extraordinarily low, like well below the reference range in functional and Western medicine, and it’s everything speeding up.

Looking at Detective Ev’s Thyroid Markers

Whereas the Hashi’s patients, they’ll be eating 1200 calories a day, as fully grown women and they’re gaining weight, gaining weight, gaining weight. My mom, because we didn’t know anything at this time, 10 years ago, she’s coming home and eating (this isn’t a joke, right?), she’d eat a full thing of Chips Ahoy.

She had these intense cravings and could just burn through food. She’s getting like three, four hours of sleep a night. Her heart rate was sitting at around like 120, 130 beats per minute, resting, just resting on the couch. It is an entirely different type of uncomfortable because many of the Hashimoto’s patients are very uncomfortable.

So yeah. Without further ado, let’s get to some of these lab results here. I’m going to pull mine up. Just for some context, this is from May of 2020. I was running a very large blood panel. I mean, there’s a whole, we could spend three hours on this panel together. I just ran general blood work.

I wanted to see where I was at with certain things. Many things, you know, I expected. Other things, I didn’t expect. But the thyroid stuff is something I don’t mess with because of this family history of the Grave’s Disease and the very similar symptomology my mom and I have had throughout time.

So, what do you think of my thyroid panel, Ryan? Do we approve of this? Is this full enough for you?

[00:22:02] Ryan Monahan: Great question. So, the first thing I’ll start with is the TSH.

Thyroid Markers: The Thyroid Is Interconnected

Actually, let me take a step back here just for those that are going to be listening to this. I like to say that when the thyroid becomes dysregulated or dysfunctional, that this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Another way that we can say this is that the thyroid dysfunction is not the problem. It’s a result of the problem.

When we’re looking at a thyroid panel, we want to remember that the thyroid doesn’t function in a vacuum. It doesn’t function separate from all the other functions in the body, from what your liver is doing, your gut, your lymphatic system, your brain health, it’s all interconnected, right?

As FDNs, we’re speaking the language, same language, you and I, Evan. We know that everything is interconnected and I just kind of wanted to make that general point first.

Okay, that TSH there, it’s a 3.19, is that correct? The font size is a little small on my screen. I don’t know if you can zoom in a touch.

[00:22:59] Detective Ev: How about that? Does that help?

[00:23:01] Ryan Monahan: That’s fine. Yeah. 3.19. Technically, that would be a touch high. That’s something I would want to investigate a little further. Now notice there, given the provided lab range is 0.45, so about 0.5 to 4.5. That’s that conventional medical range there. So, you’re going to see the TSH looks “normal,” quote/unquote.

How many times is a doctor going to look at your lab test and say, everything looks fine, everything looks normal, right? Classic line. When we’re looking at functional ranges or optimal ranges, they’re going to be a little tighter because we want to be more proactive with our health and identify biomarkers before they start trending out of range.

Thyroid Markers: Symptoms of High TSH

From that tighter functional perspective, I don’t really like seeing that above a 2 or a 2.5. 3.19 is technically a touch high. Nothing that would scare me or cause me to create a sense of alarm for the client, but it is something I’d want to investigate a little further. If I saw that TSH trending a little high like that, I would want to look at the other thyroid hormones and see if those might be low.

Because remember, the higher the TSH goes, typically what we’ll see is that the actual thyroid hormones themselves are a little on the lower side. For example, the T4 direct there, which we see at the bottom of the page, it says 1.34. I generally like to see that between 1.4 and 1.8. So, this is making perfect sense. The TSH is a little high by just a touch. The T4, the Free T4 is also just a touch, a little bit low.

So let me ask you a question, Evan. At this time, do you feel like you were feeling mildly sluggish, like a little bit of fatigue, brain fog, sleep issues, depression, anything in that realm? Cold body temperature?

[00:24:54] Detective Ev: Not the depression, actually. A little bit of fatigue. Really this had come after the pandemic. In the beginning at least, was almost a blessing in disguise for me. You and I are very similar in this sense, like we’ve had our health taken from us, but we’re also super passionate people.

Thyroid Markers: Correlating with Symptoms

This is when I was working on my book, I was speaking full time. I was still working other jobs. I was not in my space full time yet. I was doing other things I didn’t want to do 40 hours a week, and then going and doing the other stuff. So, I was just coming off of that. That had just ended in March of that year, thankfully permanently.

I knew I wanted to check in with my body and see how are we doing here? Thankfully, for whatever it’s worth, I should have prefaced this, I do know that the TSH is within range now. I ended up running this later, and it was finally, this was the first time in my life it was in that 2 to 2.5 range, it was a 2.4.

Because as a kid it was a 4.5 and they said nothing about this at 17. My parents and myself didn’t have the training. We said, oh, it’s within range. I’ve seen this trend historically, where when I was really sick it was higher and then it had went down over time. So, I didn’t feel particularly bad.

Well, I guess I didn’t feel bad in a mystery sense. I knew what was going on cause I had just beaten the heck out of my body for the last year or so.

[00:26:04] Ryan Monahan: Got it. And you know, a lot of what I’m saying now too, is somewhat nitpicky because we’re already looking at pretty tight ranges. It’s not that I would expect anything dramatic here, if anything would be pretty subtle.

Thyroid Markers: Free T3

You asked too, what your grade would be, maybe call this like a B+ so far.

So, let’s look at the Free T3, which is just below that’s cut off on my screen.

Detective Ev: 3.1.

Ryan Monahan: 3.1, okay. So again, not bad. If I’m being nitpicky, the optimal functional range for Free T3 might be about 3.4 to 4.4. That would technically be from a functional perspective. If we’re looking at wanting to achieve optimal health, just a touch low.

Now Free T3, I’ll just make a couple points here about these thyroid hormones, just to throw in some kind of interesting context.

Detective Ev: This is perfect. Cool.

Ryan Monahan: With Free T3, that’s the actual bioactive form of thyroid hormone. Free T4, it doesn’t really have as much of a metabolic effect on our cells and tissue. That T4, primarily, about 80% of T4 gets converted to T3 in the liver. That means we also need the liver to be functioning well in order for that conversion to happen properly from T4 to T3. 80% of that conversion, that’s a lot. The conversion doesn’t happen in the thyroid. That’s why again, this holistic picture is so important.

I like to say that free T3 is like the accelerator pedal for the body. It is that important. We have receptors for T3 in every single cell of our body. I believe the only other hormone that could be said for is vitamin D. Those are the only two hormones in the body, and vitamin D is a hormone.

It should be called hormone D, not vitamin D. Those are the only two hormones in the body that we have universal receptors for. That ought to tell you something about the importance of T3 to our body.

Thyroid Markers: Reverse T3

If T3 is the accelerator pedal, then let’s now talk about what the brake pedal would be. The brake pedal is going to be a little bit above at the top there, it’s going to be the Reverse T3, it’s called.

[00:28:32] Detective Ev: I think there’s a little bit of a delay that comes on yours. There we go.

[00:28:34] Ryan Monahan: So Reverse T3, what it actually does is it blocks the Free T3 from getting into the cells. With this Reverse T3, we actually don’t want it to be too high. The optimal range for Reverse T3 is really anywhere below 15. We want to see that ideally below 15. Again, so nitpicky here, I know. But these results are pretty decent to begin with. We are technically a little bit above that 15 at a 17.3.

Here’s what happens. If the Free T3 is a little bit on the lower end, it’s kind of like we’re letting off the gas in the body. Things are going to slow down. At the same time, if the Reverse T3 is high, we’re simultaneously putting down the break. If we’re letting off the gas and pushing down the break at the same time, what’s going to happen? Things are going to slow down even further. There’s kind of a double whammy effect there when the Reverse T3 is high and the Free T3 is a little lower.

Now, in terms of the “why”, why does Reverse T3 become elevated? Can be a number of factors. Stress is one of the biggest factors, and you mentioned that actually. That actually means our body has this really intelligent, innate mechanism to kind of force us to slow down.

Thyroid Markers: Factors Behind Elevated Reverse T3

When we’re trying to push too hard and put too much stress on the body, your metabolism goes, whoa, slow down. Let’s put on the brakes. It’ll do that for you if you’re not doing it for yourself, which is kind of cool, right?

Vitamin D deficiency can result in higher Reverse T3. Estrogen dominance, so high levels of estrogen. Cortisol dysregulation, so high cortisol, low cortisol, which is really synonymous with stress if you think about it. Iron or Ferritin deficiency would be another one. So those are the four or five factors that would cause elevated Reverse T3 which again is going to slow down the body.

Kind of fun to get into some of these dynamics and talk about how things are interconnected. If you’re interested, I’ll give your listeners another one.

[00:30:38] Detective Ev: This is exactly what I wanted to do today. We don’t always get as nerdy on here, we kind of get into the stories and there’s value to that, but I know that they also love this. This is amazing. So please, yeah, whatever else you got.

[00:30:49] Ryan Monahan: Well, very cool. Let’s go back down to the Free T4 and T3 please, if you don’t mind. I’m going to tell you guys today, something that even I have found probably 95% or more of functional practitioners don’t know. That is, what are the building blocks for thyroid hormone? This is important because it means we need to get enough of these building blocks somewhere, and we’re going to ideally get most of those from the diet.

So, let’s take T4. Going to break this down really simple. What does the “T” actually stand for in T4?

[00:31:28] Detective Ev: You taught me this before too.

Thyroid Markers and Tyrosine

[00:31:30] Ryan Monahan: It’s okay if you don’t know.

[00:31:32] Detective Ev: I forget. You have told me, I remember you telling me, but I forget.

[00:31:35] Ryan Monahan: So, the “T” stands for tyrosine. Tyrosine is an amino acid that we primarily get from protein in the diet., meat, fish, chicken, eggs, pork, bone broth, collagen. Right? Those are all going to be sources of tyrosine. Let’s suppose we’re not getting enough of those foods in the diet, or maybe we are, but we’ve got poor absorption because of what’s going on in the gut.

If there’s gut dysfunction, maybe we’re not breaking down protein into amino acids very well because there’s issues with malabsorption or low stomach acid. That’s how digestion could be related to lower tyrosine intake, which can compromise our thyroid hormone production.

So, we need tyrosine, we need it to make thyroid hormone. Now, maybe this is a discussion for another time, but at the time of my thyroid diagnosis at that point in my life, I was actually a vegan. I was eating a plant-based diet. I was definitely not getting enough tyrosine in my diet, which was probably compounding things. It’s going to be much more difficult to get enough tyrosine from a plant-based diet.

So, the number 4, what that actually stands for is the number of iodine molecules that it takes to make that thyroid hormone. With T4, we’re looking at tyrosine plus 4 iodine molecules.

Iodine deficiency, I believe is rampant. Most iodine in the diet we get from seafood, shellfish, and seaweed, like kelp for example. Those are not foods that are in most people’s diet within the standard American diet. But you actually need iodine to make thyroid hormone.

Good Optimal Thyroid Function & Nutrient Density

The only difference with T3, it’s the same formula. The “T” is tyrosine, but instead of 4 iodine, we have 3 iodine. That’s what those numbers actually stand for. Four iodine molecules and then three iodine molecules respectively.

The reason I’m going through all this is not just to geek out but to talk about the importance of nutrient density and the importance of those specific nutrients, that tyrosine and iodine, that we need to be getting from the diet to have good optimal thyroid function and to keep our thyroid hormone levels optimal.

[00:33:56] Detective Ev: One thing I’ll throw in here because it was kind of weird. I didn’t have confidence in the answer. What you had said, like, I did not remember that it was tyrosine. But somewhere Ryan Monahan’s words must have rang true because when you said, what are the building blocks here? I’m like, oh, amino acids. I know it’s gotta be amino acids.

But I didn’t make that connection immediately between the tyrosine and stuff like that. And yes, you were absolutely correct that I would say many functional practitioners, if not that 90, 95% that you talk about, do not know that. I have never heard that discussed one time anywhere else except by you. It’s pretty interesting to know.

It’s also fascinating as someone who has this family history of thyroid issues that I’ve also had an issue with the dopamine side of things. I don’t know if it’d be diagnosed ADHD, but there’s definitely an aspect there prone to substance abuse, prone to just obsessive natures with things that I’m super interested in. Then this like mixed ability, especially in school where I know everyone obviously does better if they’re interested in the topic. That just makes sense.

Get More Meat Protein for Tyrosine Deficiency

But I’ve always described it to people that it was so extreme on either end. It went from, if I’m interested, like truly interested, it’s nearly perfect retention, to, if I’m not interested, I just can’t even do the bare minimum to get by in that area of schooling or learning or whatever.

It’s kind of fascinating because, FDN, I flew through it, no problem. Then you give me something that is five times less hard than FDN and I will struggle with it so greatly cause I just cannot get the focus. I mean, this’s a little better now. But I just couldn’t get the focus there to be able to do something like that.

I find it interesting that we’re talking about tyrosine, which I would assume many listeners know this if they’ve made it this far and are nerding out this way. But just in case, tyrosine can be the thing that helps produce the dopamine, right? There’s phenylalanine involved as well. But, you know, this is something that would be related.

I’m kind of making that connection there in my head, already thinking about what I was like in high school with this high TSH. I’m assuming these other numbers would’ve looked terrible had someone actually ran them. And my inability to focus and the lack of happiness and the need for substances to get through the day at that time of my life.

[00:35:53] Ryan Monahan: Yep. Makes perfect sense. Those symptoms you’re describing, like the low attention, distractability. Those are classic low dopamine symptoms.

And if I have a client in that predicament, one of the first things I’ll suggest to them is just getting more protein in the diet, so they’re getting more tyrosine.

Thyroid Markers: Thyroid-Binding Globulin

Also, improving their digestion and absorption so that they’re breaking down the tyrosine from the protein and their diet. Then if those basics aren’t working, we might work in some amino acid precursors, like the tyrosine. There’s some formulas out there. There’s one I like called DopaPlus from Pure Encapsulations that has not only the tyrosine, but the other co-factors like vitamin B6 and folate that you need to convert the tyrosine into dopamine.

[00:36:38] Detective Ev: Cool stuff. What else do we need?

Here, I’ll ask questions that I could imagine would come up with the audience. All right. So, we have the T3 uptake and then we have the Free T3. And again, maybe they haven’t even heard of some of these markers. Then, of course, there’s just the general T3.

I know that’s probably a loaded question, but like, what the heck is the difference between all of those things? I don’t think we’ve touched on the T3 Uptake yet at all.

[00:36:58] Ryan Monahan: Yeah. So, when we’re looking at Free T3 and Free T4, what the word Free means is that it’s not bound to a carrier protein.

One thing that is not on this thyroid panel that you usually won’t run or see very much is something called Thyroid-binding Globulin. It is something you technically can include in a thyroid panel. That Thyroid-binding Globulin is the carrier protein that’s kind of the transporter to bring this thyroid hormone around the body.

Thyroid Markers: “Free” Means It’s Bioavailable

On a little side note, if your Thyroid-binding Globulin is too high, that can be one of the reasons why your Free T4 and Free T3 are low. Because too much of the Free thyroid hormone is bound to the carrier protein. It’s like the thyroid hormone is still in the car and it’s not getting out of the car, just to use like a loose analogy.

So that Free, that word “Free” means it’s bio available. It means your cells can actually take in that thyroid hormone.

When we look at Thyroxine there, that’s looking at the total amount of the T4 in the body, but not the Free fraction or the bioavailable fraction of it. And same thing with that Triiodothyronine, it’s a kind of a mouthful, that T3 there, which is at a 98. That’s the total T3 in the body. So those can give you a quick check to make sure, like, is the body making enough of those total amounts of thyroid hormone. The Free fractions of those are telling us that there’s actually enough for the cells to use and take in.

Then the T3 Uptake, as the name implies, it’s how much of that Total T3 are the cells uptaking or taking in. That’s expressed in a percentage form there because it’s the percentage of that Total T3.

Then, we didn’t quite get into the thyroid antibodies. We have the Thyroglobulin and the Thyroid Peroxidase. We can see those are below one and below nine respectively. Those are the two thyroid antibodies that I mentioned earlier. Those look great. But supposing that either of those were above 10, that’s when I might start to consider that there’s an autoimmune process going on here.

The Body Doesn’t Make Mistakes

What that actually means is that the thyroid is creating these antibodies, which is signaling the immune system to produce neutrophils or other first responder type cells, to come in and actually cause destruction or attack the thyroid gland. In a sense, some people would say that when there’s antibody presence to the thyroid, it’s almost like a type of betrayal, like the immune system is turning on you and it’s attacking your body’s own tissue.

The one important caveat I would add to that though, I really don’t like that kind of language with autoimmunity, there’s some kind of betrayal or that the body is somehow stupid and doesn’t realize it’s attacking itself. I don’t believe there are any mistakes. I really think the body’s always doing its best to protect you. The outcome may not be desirable. I’ll go on a little tangent to explain this.

I was working with a client about a year ago who’s a family therapist. She said something that stuck out to me as a reflection on her career in family therapy. She said, there is no dysfunction, there are no dysfunctional families, there’s only function. I kind of got what she was saying, but I asked her to elaborate and explain.

What she meant was that everyone is doing the best that they can with the tools that they have available. It may not be the most desirable outcome or situation that you’re wanting within that family structure, but it’s not dysfunctional. You’re functioning, it might just not be functioning the way you want it to.

I immediately had this epiphany, philosophically, with the body that there are no mistakes, there’s no dysfunction. The body’s always functioning within the best of its capacity with the tools that’s being given.

“Friendly Fire” from the Body

Where we see these kinds of errors of the immune system, so to speak, is usually when there’s a lot of stress in the body. Whether mental and emotional stress, infections in the gut, toxins, which even toxins can actually get into the thyroid. The thyroid is almost like a sponge for toxins. It has a high affinity for absorbing things like heavy metals.

Just to give an example, what the immune system might be doing when it’s trying to cleanse or detox your thyroid from heavy metals or other toxins, in the process that’s causing damage and destruction. But it’s actually trying to protect you.

Or as another example, if you’re eating gluten in the diet and that gluten represents an antigen or a food sensitivity, gluten can be a major trigger for intestinal permeability. The gluten can leak through your gut into the bloodstream. Then that creates a situation where your immune system’s trying to resolve that gluten antigen by breaking it down or removing it from the body.

It might start firing off granules or little chemical bullets at the gluten. But then maybe there’s a protein in the thyroid that looks really similar to the gluten protein. So, it starts also attacking the thyroid gland because it loses the ability to make the distinction between the gluten and the thyroid. That process is called molecular mimicry.

It’s kind of like in the military they use the term “friendly fire” which is not very friendly at all. It’s kind of a euphemism. In that case, again, that’s your body trying to protect you against some kind of foodborne antigen or toxin in the body. In the process, unfortunately, your thyroid gets caught in the crossfire and you can end up with physiological damage to your thyroid.

The Fundamental Difference Between Western & Functional Medicine

I know I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I wanted to make that distinction cause I do see a lot of practitioners out there saying autoimmunity is your immune system attacking your thyroid. There’s a little more to it than that. And I do think it’s your body doing its best to try to protect you.

[00:43:04] Detective Ev: It’s interesting that you brought that up because it was a subtle thing, but you would probably know why I said it that way. I corrected myself in the beginning because I said something along the lines of that woman with the 111 TSH, I said her body was really messing her up.

Then I stopped myself and I said, well, the things that she’s doing is really getting the body out of whack. Because the TSH, it wasn’t the body’s problem. She was eating certain things and doing certain things that were leading to this.

Even in a case like cancer, cause I can imagine if I’m an audience member, maybe one of the first rebuttals I would have to something like what you just said is, well what about cancer tumors? That’s the body doing something wrong. It’s like, well actually it couldn’t be doing something more right. It is trying to concentrate all that bad and then you get a tumor. That’s why they cut it out because they’re trying to concentrate all that bad there. Like sequestering kind of.

[00:43:46] Ryan Monahan: Sure.

[00:43:48] Detective Ev: This is describing, technically, this philosophical idea that you’re proposing, is the fundamental difference in a sense between Western and functional medicine.

Doing the Right Things but Using the Wrong Fuel

The minute that you believe the body is doing something inherently wrong, you treat it with medication. When you believe that the body is doing everything right, but it’s getting the wrong fuel, it instantly changes to a personal aspect where, well, what am I putting in? What’s going on? And it’s not so black and white.

We talked about the aspect of like the life jacket type of thing with needing the thyroid medication. That’s fine. There is a certain time where we get in our health where yes, we might just need the Western medicine and that’s totally fine and appropriate. But generally speaking, you have to understand this philosophical difference. Otherwise, there’s no reason to take the natural route.

Your body though is meant to survive. And if you buy into the idea, which I personally do, that we are the best of the best genetically that have made it to this point. I mean, there’s a lot of things that have to happen in history for you to be alive right now listening to this podcast.

In theory, you should be the strongest of the strong, genetically. So don’t tell me that the strongest of the strong somehow leads to 50% of Americans, or 48% of whatever it is, having diagnosed chronic diseases, one in four dying of cancer, one in four having mental health issues. I’m not buying that is what the strongest of the strong genetically just happened to look like.

I think this is a result, and clearly you believe this as well, of the things that we’re doing in our modern world. The body’s doing the right thing. It’s trying to protect you. But when we do the right things and put in the wrong fuel, it’s never going to work.

Normalizing Insane, Unhealthy Practices

[00:45:21] Ryan Monahan: Such an extremely important point. Because when we’re looking at that “dysfunction”, quote unquote in the body, we have to look at the entire epigenetic environment. You know, what is that person putting into their body? Are they putting in fuel that is biocompatible with their cellular machinery? Or are they putting sand into the gas tank and then wondering why my body is not working?

Are they exercising? Are they managing stress? Are they optimizing their sleep hygiene? Right? All these different factors where we are this finely tuned biological machine that has to kind of follow in a sense, these laws, these biological laws.

And if we try to break them, a really simple analogy, I sometimes use this with my clients. Like, we know in order for a plant to survive, it needs some pretty basic things like sunlight and water and healthy nutrient dense soil. I’ve got a snake plant behind me. And if you saw me pouring like a liter of coke in there to water the snake plant, you would think I’m insane or that something is wrong with me mentally. Because, you know, just automatically, intuitively, that, that’s going to kill the plant, that the plant is going to fail to thrive or maybe even die.

[00:46:35] Detective Ev: Yet amazingly, you could do that same thing with a human, and no one bats an eye.

[00:46:39] Ryan Monahan: No one bats an eye, right? I would look at that as the same type of insanity. That we’re putting something that’s completely incompatible with our biological function, but we normalize it, and we justify it as normal.

A Science Experiment with Processed Foods

Then we wonder why we have a nation of people struggling with diabetes and obesity and insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and all these things are on the rise.

For hundreds of thousands of years Coca-Cola, or sugar water, wouldn’t even have been something that would be available for humans if we wanted it. Obviously, it’s kind of a new phenomenon. So, we’re amidst this kind of science experiment that we’re conducting on the human race with processed foods.

Then you add onto that, like a sedentary lifestyle, increased amounts of work-related stress, toxins in the environment. You get into this kind of perspective on disease that it’s actually the environment or the epigenetic environment we find ourselves living in, that’s just not compatible with our optimal function from that evolutionary perspective.

[00:47:42] Detective Ev: Me and you could go forever. I know we’re running a little short on time and I want to be respectful to it. So, thank you so much for coming on.

One thing I wanted to do really quick, and we could just kind of fly through it, is I picked these labs. I mean, I know they’re mine, but I actually picked them very specifically because I knew that they were walking on the edge of the functional side.

For those that are on the audio only, I will put it this way. Every single thyroid marker that we talked about today on my labs, to be clear in the Western sense, is all within range. And you’re a brilliant guy, so maybe it’s not that hard for you to do offhand, but I don’t know if you were just talking functional ranges for certain things versus Ryan Monohan ranges.

Thyroid Markers: Are They In-Range Optimally?

Let’s talk about generally accepted functional ranges we’re just going to go over for the audience. I’m going to go marker by marker. I’ll read them out loud and you tell me if this actually would’ve passed a functional range.

Detective Ev: So, Reverse T3.

Ryan Monahan: No.

Detective Ev: Okay. Thyroglobulin. Well, sorry, the antibodies. They’re all good.

[00:48:35] Ryan Monahan: The antibodies. Yes. That’s where you get a passing score.

[00:48:37] Detective Ev: Yeah, and I really cared about that, obviously, with this history of the Grave’s Disease in the family. I was happy about that.

TSH we already discussed would not pass a functional range, Correct?

Ryan Monahan: Correct.

Detective Ev: T4.

[00:48:48] Ryan Monahan: T4, I would say it’s, no. I’d want to see that a touch higher. Let me think here. I’d want to see that at least at an 8. At least at an 8 or a little higher.

Detective Ev: Okay. T3 Uptake.

Ryan Monahan: Yeah, would want to see that above like 30, 35, more towards the top end of that reference range.

[00:49:09] Detective Ev: The Free Thyroxin Index.

[00:49:13] Ryan Monahan: That Free Thyroxin Index, again, I’d want to see that above, like a 2.5 or a 3. So no, wouldn’t pass that optimal score.

Detective Ev: Okay, T3.

Ryan Monahan: Yeah. Again, you know, at least above 120, 140. So not quite.

[00:49:31] Detective Ev: And then the Free T4 and Free T3.

[00:49:35] Ryan Monahan: Nope.

[00:49:37] Detective Ev: Okay.

This is why I picked these labs because this is to prove the point to people. Because thank God, I was trending in the right direction. I already know this health stuff, so I’m moving in the right way.

Living As Optimally As Possible

But there’s many people that are sitting in this right now. And if you are lucky enough to get the full thyroid panel, which is a one in a hundred thousand circumstance, it seems, what wouldn’t have been shown here is that out of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 markers, 8 out of 10 of them did not pass a functional range. Yet everything came up fine.

It looks green for those on audio. Like in Western Medicine, this is all good. I never intended it for it to be that back in May of 2020. But this ends up being a perfect example of where Western falls really short with preventing these issues with people, in my opinion.

[00:50:19] Ryan Monahan: Yep. And you know, I’ll say again, I’d still give it like a B+. Nothing is dramatically off. But still, don’t we all want to achieve optimal health, not just kind of pretty good. Is that how you want to live your life? It’s good enough, right?

Maybe, I don’t want to pass judgment, for some people that might be perfectly fine. But for me personally, I am here to live an optimal life as much as possible. Most clients come to me because that’s what they’re looking for themselves as well. So that they can go out into the world and kick ass in their career, their family, travel, start a business. So that their health is not an obstacle that’s in the way of their being able to live the most fulfilling life possible.

Two Different Teaching Gifts

[00:50:58] Detective Ev: And speaking of clients, guys, obviously you can tell this, I think, if it’s your first time listening to Ryan, one, I tell you this all the time, my friend. Obviously, you’re brilliant. But then on top of that, you have the extra level of being able to teach this.

Because I have seen you when you’re just going off. The level of depth that you can take with these things, if you actually want to and just show off or something like that, or just maybe you’re talking to someone who is able to understand it, is amazing. But then to be able to flip that and use probably 25 different analogies today that actually help it stick into people’s heads. That’s two different types of gifts. So that’s very cool.

If someone wants to work with you and have those gifts used on their own case, where can they find you? And what’s your niche if you have one still to this day? Because I know you probably work with a lot of people.

Where to Find Ryan Monahan

[00:51:40] Ryan Monahan: For those that are interested in reaching out to me, asking a question, or potentially working together, they could find me at my website at themindfulnutrivore.com.

I actually have a biography, a video biography right on the homepage. That’s a great starting place. It’s about a five minute mini documentary about my own health journey. Definitely watching that, it was a labor of love. I worked with a close friend of mine that’s a cinematographer, so we got some really beautiful shots.

I have a services page on there that outlines like how I work, what my rates are, what those packages include.

You could also email me at [email protected] if you are interested in setting up a free 20-minute consult. We can chat about your health history, can learn more about what your goals are, and we can see if we’d be a good fit to work together and kind of talk further about that.

Definitely available to work with folks that are interested.

[00:52:30] Detective Ev: And if you guys are going through the FDN course, this is someone, Ryan, that is, someone that you’ll see all the time once you graduate. He literally is in there constantly helping people. So, thank you so much for coming on today, my friend, and doing what you do.

[00:52:41] Ryan Monahan: Thanks so much, Evan. Glad to be here. Let’s do it again soon.

Conclusion

[00:52:43] Detective Ev: All right folks. That’ll do it for today’s episode with my friend Ryan Monahan. I hope you guys enjoyed listening to this one. This is a different format. We had tried it before and then the video didn’t work out because the person was on their phone and I was like, oh my goodness. Not Ryan, but someone else, our friend Barbara. We didn’t realize that it wouldn’t work on the phone, and we didn’t have the video of the labs despite her awesome analysis of my labs.

So, we hope you like this one. We are definitely going to do this in the future with other labs. Because you can listen to it if you want, but you can also get the video experience and really learn something on these types of episodes.

Let us know what types of labs you would like to see next. Would you like hormone testing, stool testing, functional blood chemistry? We can do it all at FDN. If you want to see those, drop me a comment on Podbean. Go to google and search for Podbean, the Health Detective Podcast. It’ll come right up and then you can leave a comment there.

I am looking forward to talking to you guys again soon, but until that day, take care.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

To hire a coach, go to fdnthrive.com.

For a FREE Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.

A typical Health Coach in the U.S. averages a base salary of $48,236.4 But, some certified Health Coaches can easily double that. 

As mentioned earlier, FDN Founder, Reed Davis, tells his graduates that:

“If you’re not making $100,000 your first year, you’re doing something wrong.”

And that’s not even with full-time work. Reed encourages his students to carve out plenty of time to do the things they love most in life, whatever that is for them. 

Health Coach Salaries Summary.  

No matter the certification you receive, you are going to improve the lives of many, and like we mentioned at the very beginning, that’s worth a lot! 

Buttt, becoming an FDN Practitioner definitely allows you to charge more. 

Why? 

RESULTS.

Real, lasting results. 

And what does this mean for you? 

Better results = higher pay.

It means you’re able to charge more for your services, and feel good about it because you have a track record of getting real results for your clients. 

So how are FDN Practitioners able to get these kinds of results? 

The FDN program teaches students how to develop highly-personalized protocols based on very specific functional lab tests that most Health Coaches simply do not have access to. 

Not only are you able to order these labs as an unlicensed practitioner, you are trained as a health detective & equipped with the programs and tools necessary to get to the bottom of your client’s symptoms. 

The bottom line is that the training puts you in another league compared to conventional Health Coaches.

Ready to Look Beyond Health Coach Salaries? 

Now that you’ve explored health coach salaries & know how much you can make as a Health Coach or Functional Practitioner, it’s time to take the next step!

If you’re ready to change lives (including yours), we’d love to chat with you. 

Book a free call with one of our Course Advisors here. 

We’re friendly, we promise!

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show concerning mental health.

We are bringing back someone for the second time, her name is Renee Bergman. If you remember her episode, congratulations, because you have been listening for quite some time. Renee Bergman was on with us in Episode 61. We talked about quite a few things there. The title was Infected Teeth, Natural Chemo, and the Enneagram. I will have that in the show notes of course, because that’s where you’ll get to hear her full story if that’s something that you’re desiring to do after this podcast.

Today we are back with a slightly different topic, but also a revisiting of another topic that we had discussed quite in-depth last time. That topic was the Enneagram. We basically were totally analyzing the usefulness of this personality typing system. If you know me in person or know me closely online, I’m a huge personality theory nerd.

I love Myers Briggs; I love the Enneagram. I do enjoy the Big Five. I almost feel weird about it because the Big Five has the most scientific data behind it. But that’s the one I am least attracted to. For some reason, I have found so much resolution in problems in my own life through Myers Briggs.

I don’t just mean the letter by letter. I don’t believe the whole, well, my letters can change over time. There’s a whole theory behind this if you really get into the depths of it. It’s based on union analytical psychology by Carl Jung.

The Enneagram Test

He was someone who, obviously, a very famous psychologist, but also theorized that we used these cognitive functions, as he referred to them. And that we use them in specific orders based on what type you were. We can spend a whole episode on that. I’m not here to get into that today. That’s my favorite one.

But I also really like the Enneagram. One of the problems, last time when we talked, Renee and I, at the end of the episode that we did, she was trying to type me because I had been through the tests before. I hadn’t studied that one as in depth, but then I was stuck between two types. So, she did the best that she could.

But any good Enneagram specialist or someone who works with that will tell you, the only person that can give you your Enneagram type is yourself. It takes a bit of self-awareness, and I was close. There’s nine types total in the Enneagram. I was stuck between two and it turns out we actually got the one that I am, wrong on that first episode.

I learned which one I am now, my girlfriend helped me with that. It was quite obvious to her. It’s kind of funny how it can be a little more obvious from an outsider’s perspective. Again, we just said this, you need to type it yourself. You’re the only one that can type yourself. But getting that outside influence from someone that I trust, and I know has my best intentions and knows me very well, that was pretty encouraging. I’m like, Okay, I feel like this is pretty solid.

A Health Journey Plus a Personal Development Journey

She presented me with evidence that made me feel very good about this typing and now I can use this to develop myself and work on the areas of my life that need to be worked on.

That’s the whole point of these things. That’s why it relates to what we’re talking about here on the Health Detective Podcast. I don’t want this to sound like just some cool thing that I’m passionate about, but it’s totally irrelevant to the normal content on the show. It’s not exactly.

When you are on a health journey, if you’ve been on one ever, maybe you’re currently on one, you know how this goes. This is a personal development journey as much as it is a health journey. I could run all the labs with someone, I could give them the protocols, and in theory, they’re really not that hard to go through. I mean, it takes a lot of knowledge to know what to educate someone on and kind of create a protocol for them. That takes a lot of knowledge.

But in terms of like actually doing this stuff, this isn’t rocket science per se. Most of it’s not. I mean, it’s pretty simple. You gotta eat certain things. You’re going to have to have a certain sleep schedule. You’re going to have to maybe implement some products just to survive in today’s modern world, and you’re going to have to utilize some supplementation probably targeted towards you.

Mental Health Sometimes Gets in the Way of Healthy Living

You might not understand fully what everything is in the beginning. Fine, fair enough. But this is not particularly complicated in terms of the actions. It’s like, can you just take this stuff or eat this way? So, if it’s so simple, how come everyone listening right now knows in practice, it is never that easy. It might be simple, but it’s not easy.

There are limiting beliefs. There are habits that we have. There are neural pathways that have been totally solidified almost because of things that we developed in our past. Maybe, for example, we learned to emotionally eat. Then whenever stress in life comes up, we emotionally eat and self-sabotage.

Okay, so you do well maybe 25 days out of the month and then the other five to six days is a total nightmare because there’s stressful situations going on or things are happening to you. My point in mentioning this, I hope this all makes sense cause I’m about to connect it, is that again, it’s as much a personal development journey, if not more, than it is a health journey.

That means we need good, solid, time-tested tools that can help us on the personal side to get the best results for the health side. Does that make sense? Is the Enneagram the first thing I might use with someone when it comes to the personal development side on a health journey? Not necessarily, but I think it is a very powerful thing to have in one’s pocket.

At the very least, I know you guys are going to enjoy the first part of this conversation because of the passion Renee and I exhibit for this going back and forth.

Functional Medicine, Mental Health, and the Enneagram

I sometimes listen to podcasts where I don’t really know what the people are talking about, but they are so excited about it that that excitement is contagious. You can’t click off. I want to hear more. I’m excited for them. I want to know what they’re talking about and it’s working on me now where I want to learn more about the topic.

I hope that is your experience in the beginning of this show, but really our core focus today is actually the mental health side. We are going to be talking a lot about functional medicine and mental health. We are talking about the Enneagram first. Like I said, that’ll last about 20 minutes. What we are also doing towards the end of that first part of the conversation is mentioning how the Enneagram can be linked with the mental health side of things.

It’ll all make sense once the episode is completed. I think you guys are really going to like this one. I love Renee. It is very fun to talk to someone I already have rapport with and that I can just bounce back and forth with for hours. Without further ado, let’s get to today’s episode.

All right. Hello there, Renee. Welcome back to the Health Detective Podcast. How are you?

Renee Bergmen: I’m doing great. How about yourself?

Detective Ev: I am doing very well. I was thinking, and I’ll put this in the show notes. The last time you were on, when you came on to tell your story and just how you got into this world of FDN and functional health in general, I’m pretty sure we were the FDN Thrive podcast. That’s how long ago this was. That’s pretty cool to know.

Self-awareness Is Required

When you’re released, it’ll be Episode 181. At that time, it was Episode 61. That’s pretty cool to have you come full circle here. That’s so great.

One thing I gotta address right from the get-go, we’re going to just jump right into it. For those that don’t know, when we have someone on for the second time, it’s when we typically nerd out on just one topic. So, if you guys want to hear her story more than just the bio that I just read, then please check out that Episode 61.

Feel free to listen to it first. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary, but you can feel free to do that. However, we had talked about the Enneagram last time because I am a personality typing nerd. I love Myers Briggs. I love the Big Five. I don’t love DISK. I think it’s interesting. I’m not saying something’s wrong with it, it’s just I never felt as drawn to it. The Enneagram is something that was always appealing to me.

What we ended up doing last time is we attempted a Live typing. Now, all these personality typing things, especially if it’s Live and there’s pressure there, require some level of self-awareness. Again, you probably heard this in the bio, but in case you’re someone that skips intros, Renee specializes in this.

I mean, what do you even call that? I don’t want to misspeak. What is that certification or program or whatever it is?

[00:07:49] Renee Bergmen: I’m Enneagram certified. It’s as simple as that.

[00:07:53] Detective Ev: I don’t know how I haven’t done these yet. I gotta go get the Myers Briggs one and this one. That would just be fun to do.

Lack of Self-awareness

But I remember we were going back and forth between Type 3 and Type 8. We concluded loosely Type 3 because it was based on one question that you asked. I believe the question was, do you think that you make decisions more with, I think you said, thinking or logic versus the heart.

I said, I want to believe it’s like the logic, but it’s probably the heart. Then so we said, Okay, well it’s probably Type 3, but we have some more work to do. I ended up, you know, I went through the Enneagram again, I’ve done some more stuff with it, and I gained self-awareness.

Because it also requires the person to be self-aware, you said that only the person can really type themselves. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, Renee. I think on one side it’s great that I would acknowledge, like the reason I thought I was Type 3 is because of my affinity for the people.

I’ve had plenty of problems being self-conscious in my life. So, I’m glad that I had the awareness there. But I think that was actually at the detriment of awareness for some of my other stuff. We, in my immediate circle, have concluded what should have been an obvious Type 8, but because of my lack of self-awareness, missed this.

When my girlfriend Maddy took this test for me, it scored so high Type 8 compared to the rest, it wasn’t even funny. When she read the descriptions, because she doesn’t have a bias, she didn’t even know what an enneagram was. I showed her Type 3 and Type 8, and she asked me, she said, are you joking?

The Details Behind Detective Ev’s Type

I’m like, what do you mean? She was like, it’s this one and she points to Type 8. She was like, you don’t see that? And I’m like, Wow! Okay, I got some learning to do. Again, I apologize for going off three minutes. I normally would want the guests to talk, but this is unfinished business here. I’m glad to have you back on.

I feel pretty secure in that now. I think I’ve been able to work through a lot of the more negative stuff. But when I look at like admittedly the worst of the worst for the 3 and the worst of the worst for the 8, and I look at where I’ve been in my life, it becomes pretty straightforward. It’s like, okay, obviously the 8 was more involved at that point.

[00:09:42] Renee Bergmen: Yeah. You know, I’d love to hear from her perspective. How did she really see that 8? Is it because of like you’re a protective challenger, that you really try and challenge everyone? Cause you talked a lot last time about, you’re a people person. You’re really for people and you want to protect them. That’s where that conversation went back and forth, 3 or 8.

What specifically stood out to her about you that made her certain you were an 8? Do you know?

[00:10:09] Detective Ev: Well, on the good side, there would be stuff like that, like the protective nature. I mean, this is serious, and I don’t think about how, maybe not strange, but not standard this is.

The Difficulty of Recognizing the Inherent Aspects

I love Maddy, she’s a wonderful woman. I’ve always wanted to do MMA. I am now doing that. My gosh, you have an ability to get me to be very vulnerable immediately. So, for those that have not listened to other episode, you’re probably like, what the heck? But I’m just going to go right into it.

I have such extreme fantasies about what it would be like to not protect someone that I care about, especially in a physical sense. If someone hurt Maddy, and it was because I couldn’t protect her because of physical stature, I would probably have suicidal thoughts because of that. Like, that is my worst fear to have that happen.

It’s enough drive that it’s pushing me. Like there’s personal training right now from a boxer of 20 years. I’m doing wrestling stuff. I just started with my friend; he was a state champ wrestler. Like, I am paying these people decent money, money that I shouldn’t necessarily be spending on that because of that.

Then on the maybe not so favorable side, but a side I’m willing to admit to, is just the controlling nature. I mean, I have to turn it off in relationships, but it’s still evident. It’s not a secret. The challenging part is so inherent that I wasn’t able to recognize that before.

I’m just trying to think of an example where something is so innately you that you don’t even realize that it’s different from other people. She likes it because she’s like that in a sense too. But she’s like, everything with you is challenging. What are you talking about? Like, everything’s a competition. Everything’s, you know, this, that, or the next thing, completely blunt. Like if I think something’s wrong, it’s wrong.

Mental Health: Childhood Messages Drive People’s Core Emotions

I don’t want to act like my personality on the podcast is fake, but I do definitely tone down certain aspects very consciously because I know that I’m interviewing someone and want to be respectful.

[00:11:54] Renee Bergmen: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, 8s are such lovers. They really are at their core. They have such love for those that are in their inner circle, like you were saying, like so protective.

So, there’s this interesting experience with 8s. Because for you, you feel very loved when people want to challenge and spar with you and fight with you. That’s why it feels really good for you to go and do that as like a physical sport as well, right? There’s almost this encouragement that comes. You’re probably all jacked up after it and feel really excited to do the rest of your day, not just from the endorphins of working out, but because you actually physically fought with someone. That’s just like a core piece of you.

But when you start to get down into people’s core emotions of why they do certain things and what has driven them, a lot of times, childhood messages drive a lot of that. So, for 8s, 8s feel like it’s not okay to trust or be vulnerable with anyone. There’s this fear. There was probably pieces of your childhood that felt…whether or not they were real or just perceived.

We come to our number by perception of what has happened. Now there can be clear lines when people have clearly been abused or harmed or things like that. But I’m talking in a normal family structure where you just had normal family dynamics of things happening.

Mental Health: Perceived Family & Environment

The way that you perceived your family, and your environment is how you came to your number. Because you learned how to defend yourself throughout life. You learned how to fight your way through. Whether it’s, you had lots of siblings, or you had parents that were always like asking you to defend why you were allowed to do certain things. Things like that.

But then there’s also this core fear of vulnerability, of like, what if I’m vulnerable with people and I don’t actually put up a fight, will they actually love me and just accept me for who I am? I’m sure that’s a lot of maybe even how she experiences you because she’s your closest person. You’re most vulnerable with her.

[00:14:01] Detective Ev: Yeah. This is just a wonderful way to describe it. I appreciate you saying the perception too. I mean, listen, my story’s no secret. I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. Childhood was not perfect. But I think that was also the thing too, I realized that the Enneagram was more based in kind of a nurture theory.

I’m like, was it really that bad? The perception of things though was, no, it was terrible in a sense. There was that lack of trust and the disconnect. There were certain things that were hidden to actually protect me to be good. But I perceived this as, why am I being treated this way or whatever. And if I do express myself, people are going to take advantage of me.

The Enneagram Allows for All Different Types & Subtypes

That’s the other thing too, is Maddy has helped me actually realize, I would call them paranoid thoughts. It’s because, again, when it’s so natural to you, I think that’s why it was easier to resonate with the 3. Cause I’m like, Oh yeah. I’m self-conscious. I like being in a crowd, and I’m a speaker. I’m a podcast host too. Of course, I love this, so, sure it must be a 3. But this stuff is so natural that sometimes you miss it.

I automatically assume that every single person I’m interacting with is bad until proven otherwise. It’s not good until proven otherwise. They are out to get me. I cannot trust this person. People are bad. They are going to try to take advantage of me when they can. I mean, it’s just so innate to me that I don’t even think twice about it.

She’s realizing like, hey, just so you know, not everyone when they walk into a room is physically sizing up everyone to see who’s dominant. They’re not focused on these power structures that you’re obsessed with and nor do they not trust everyone. That’s not the rarest thing in the world, but it’s also not everyone else thinking that way.

I’m like, Oh, really?

[00:15:29] Renee Bergmen: Yeah. And you know, I love that you’ve learned a lot about that. It’s probably changed your guys’ dynamic as well. Has she figured out what number she is?

[00:15:37] Detective Ev: She believes, and we believe, that she’s a 9.

[00:15:40] Renee Bergmen: Okay. So, yeah. You know, I think what’s really beautiful about the Enneagram is, number one, it doesn’t pigeonhole you.

Mental Health: What Area of Life Am I Deficient In?

There’s lots of fluidity within every number. There’s different subtypes of every number. The point of it is to help you understand who am I, and how do I navigate within the world so that I can have a better lens to actually integrate into relationships and to be able to move fluidly.

Also recognize that not everybody else manages life the way that I do. I think that was one of the biggest light bulb moments for me, even with my husband being like, wait, you don’t think about it like this? How is that possible? Right? Like, that’s what your mind and your world are every day and all day long.

But then also the Enneagram has this amazing power to really help you tap into more of that mental health component of, what are the areas in my life that I’m just really kind of deficient in? If you’re always feeling like you need to fight, what were some of those wounding messages that were communicated to you and how do you use that to really change your physical health?

As FDNs, we’re always thinking about what are the things that are coming at people that are stressors, that are changing their physical health? I think you talk about this all the time. You’re really articulate in your story and your experience of mental health and how much changing your physical health changed your mental health and how those have to be synonymous.

Is the Enneagram Relevant to Mental Health?

I love that sometimes people feel like they need to go immediately to a counselor and figure out all this childhood trauma. Maybe that’s true, right? Like, I experience that a lot with clients. I’m sure you do too. But maybe they just need to figure out what perceptions in their world made them who they are today, and how do they navigate through that to kind of get to this better understanding so that their mental health can flourish.

[00:17:33] Detective Ev: Well, that brings us to the topic of the day. Now that I’ve just wasted 13 minutes of the audience’s time. I’m kidding. It’s weird though cause normally, I feel like I’m good at, let the guests do their thing. But man, you get me on personality theory, it’s gone. So, I hope they listen regularly because then they’ll know I’m telling the truth.

But with this said though, there actually is a relevance to this, cause we’re talking about mental health today. This is something that you happen to specialize in, and I know that there’s more components with how you approach mental health. But perhaps it’s only fair at this point to ask, how can someone like you who does help people with the mental health side, how is the Enneagram relevant?

We don’t necessarily have to explain the whole thing, cause again, they could listen to the first episode for that. But I’m curious.

Mental Health: Mind Stress

[00:18:11] Renee Bergmen: I think when you first dive in, when FDNs first dive in, we always want data, right? We’re always looking for the data. That’s a big part of being in FDN is running labs, seeing all these labs, seeing the dysfunction of the gut through the GI MAP, and seeing the DUTCH test, seeing all of that information.

What you can’t do with a lab is look at what are the components of someone’s thoughts and the way that they navigate throughout the world that is placing impact on their body, right? Like I can’t give someone a lab that looks at their blood or looks at their gut or looks at any of those things to tell me they feel like they’re small moving throughout the world, and that they have always had to try and swing to fight in every situation.

Or that they feel like if they speak up, they are being too much of a bother to people. Or if they choose to be serious instead of fun, that people won’t actually want to engage with them, right? Those are things that you can’t get from looking at a lab, but that’s such an intricate part of who we are. That’s so much of where our stress comes from.

When we talk about stress being such a huge component of D.R.E.S.S. we have to figure out how do we really help clients get to the nitty gritty of where that stress comes from. There’s the physical stressors of gut infections, hormone imbalances, and job stress. But what about their mind stress?

Mental Health: Understanding How Who You Are Affects Your Body

What about their functionality with how they interpret their spouse talking to them? Or going to their kid’s school and how people receive them. That’s such an invaluable piece of people’s puzzle. I think the Enneagram is such a great tool.

You know, I’m not a licensed counselor, so it’s not my job. There’s a space and a place for people to go and seek out counseling and really deep dive into maybe childhood trauma. But when they’re working with people like us, like FDNs, oftentimes they still have to talk about some of those pieces in order for the puzzle to all come together and see full flourishing.

The Ingram is this really accessible tool. It breaks it down in bitesize pieces for people. It helps people understand, oh, there are more people that function like I do. It helps them see ways that they got there and based on what’s happening in their life, ways they interact, right?

In times of non-stress, they go to a different number than their primary number. I’m a 7, I go to a 5 when I’m healthy. But when I’m stressed, I go to a 1. So as a 7, I’m really low key and chill and I always bring the fun to a party. But put me in a stressful situation and all of a sudden, I am black and white as all get out.

My family, all of a sudden, will be like, what happened? Why is mom freaking out right now? Because I’m being very methodical about, I need you to do it this way. There’s only one right way to do it and I need to control the situation cause that’s what I do in stress. Well, that’s super important for me to know.

Mental Health: The Enneagram Enables Understanding of Others

That informs me so much in what’s going to happen in my body if I’m doing that constantly. What do we know about that? I’m just in fight or flight all the time, right? There’s these direct lines to helping people see when we start explaining vagal nerve work and the importance of really calming down before you eat, all of these tips that we give people.

Sometimes they don’t understand where they’re at in their day. The Enneagram provides these really cool resources for them to have a better picture of how they navigate throughout the world. And that there’s other people that navigate that way too.

[00:21:58] Detective Ev: I think that’s so cool that you’re able to utilize this with clients.

I mean, anyone that’s listening or watching can see how excited I am about it. It could be a good thing to at least, whether it’s with Renee or someone else or just online, like figure this out for yourself. It could be any personality typing system. Cause again, I like Myers Briggs.

Clearly the most scientifically validated as of right now is the Big Five, we know this. But here’s the thing, people know I’m a science-based person. So, they’re like, how are you so attracted to and obsessed with these things that in a certain sense are kind of pseudoscientific? It’s not really about that.

They’re close, you know, they do work. They definitely work to categorize. I’ve seen poster children of each individual type at certain times. What I have found it does for me the most is (I think this does relate to health and mental health because relationships matter), it strengthens my ability to understand other people.

Mental Health: Staying Open to Others

Now there are certain things that I would assume all of us just can’t get behind. If you’re just blatantly hateful, whether that’s something ridiculous, racism, whatever it might be. No, I don’t need to know your type. That’s something I’m going to adamantly disagree with.

But if it’s a political difference, if it’s a difference in lifestyle, if it’s a difference in morality around like sex. Maybe you’re someone, assuming this is all consenting adults, maybe you’re someone that believes it’s no problem to have 50 partners. Maybe you’re someone that believes you should only have sex when you’re married and try to stay together no matter what. Those are wildly different views on life. And I have been able to accept those people even when I disagree with them because I start to understand them.

That’s why, in Myers Briggs, David Keirsey’s book is, Please Understand Me I and II. It’s all about understanding these people. So, where I might have been able, like as when I was younger for sure, it’s not only do I disagree with you, it’s now, I don’t like you because I disagree with you, which is, holy crap, a theme of today’s world and the political climate and religious climate and everything else.

Now it’s, oh, I disagree with you, how fascinating. Let’s see why you came to that conclusion. I’m really interested in that. And I’m open to where my holes might be. When you’re open to someone else’s opinion and then your own holes, not always, almost universally though, it seems like they open up to where they can learn as well. You end up creating this beautiful thing.

Mental Health: We Live in a Confusing World

I know you and I are connected on social. I’m sure we don’t agree on perfectly everything and I feel like you’re very supportive of my stuff. I think that’s amazing. That’s how it should be. That’s cool. And it’s no surprise that you’re someone that studies personality theory. Because if it’s something you disagree with, you probably say, Okay, well this is why Ev might think this way or does this, but he’s still Evan and you know what? I had a great podcast with him, and I like him.

Just like I could say that about Renee even if there was something I disagreed with. I don’t understand why that’s such a concept, but I think this is what these things are very useful for.

[00:24:30] Renee Bergmen: Yeah, I think so too. You know, I think we live in such a confusing world of even how to know what we’re supposed to believe, what we’re supposed to lean into.

There can just be almost an excess of knowledge sometimes and an excess of information overload because of technology and all the things that we have access to, that sometimes I think people need some systems to sort of land themselves in, like this, like these different personality typings, just to kind of understand even how do I take in the world and how do I take in all the information that’s constantly being thrown at me. Because that impacts us so much.

Mental Health: The Enneagram Type 6

You know, on the Enneagram, a Type 6 is someone that can typically be a little bit fearful. They’re also the people that are ones that warn everyone of the good and the bad of all situations of what could happen. A lot of times people are pretty political when they’re 6s.

For a 6, when I’m coaching a 6 and someone is having all this gut dysfunction and they’re just constantly in distress in their stomach, I’m like, Listen. You gotta stop watching the news. You gotta pull back because you’re just in information overload of all these options and fearful things that can happen. Your brain is just constantly going down those roads.

Now, as a 6 that does work and really starts to work on their own issues, they’re able to get healthier with that and to use it to their advantage in positive ways. They are people that usually lead PTAs at schools and say, you know, here’s all the ways that we can make the schools safer. And here’s ways that we can make sure that children are receiving all the things that they need.

Mental Health: Teaching Your Body

There’s a lot of benefit in really seeing the downfalls, you know. But when you’re going through a health journey, it’s super important to know the things that really just destroy you. So, for you as an 8, like in some of your most unhealthy moments, you just constantly arguing with people was probably very, very detrimental to your soul and to your gut and to your hormones.

Whereas as you’ve learned, like you were saying, like I’ve learned when I’m on this podcast, I need to have control and not be as combative because this is a time to just hear from other people. That’s teaching your body to calm down and have the correct pathway so that the body can operate the way that it’s supposed to metabolically, right?

Yeah. It’s just really fascinating.

Commercial Break: Biohacking Congress in Miami

[00:27:04] Detective Ev: Hey there folks, it is Detective Ev popping in here really quick. If you are in the Fort Lauderdale area of Florida, or the Miami area, and you are going to be around October 22nd and 23rd, which is a Saturday and Sunday, Reed Davis, the founder of FDN and myself will be down at a conference.

It is called the Biohacking Congress. There’s really up to date, latest and greatest tools. What’s interesting is this conference is actually kind of smaller because they do it a few times a year. It is a great opportunity to really get to meet these vendors. You can have actual conversations with us and the other people vending there, easily.

You could hit every vendor in one day. If you’re there for both days, that’s even better. There are tons of speakers. It’s going to be a good time. I really like big conferences. I don’t know who doesn’t. It’s fun to have that. It’s almost overwhelming though sometimes because you can’t get to everything. This conference is the opposite.

You could hit every speech; you could hit every vendor and it’s a really good time cause you’re in Florida. So, if you want 50% off to those tickets, I’m going to have those in the show notes. It’s code FDN50. And that is October 22nd and 23rd.

Commercial Break: Try the FDN Course for Free

In addition, if you are listening to this episode and maybe considering doing the FDN course or you’re trying to get into work like Renee and I do, I don’t know if you know this, but the FDN training program actually allows you to try the first part of their course completely for free. No credit card is required.

You go to fdntraining.com/tryfdn to try the course for free. That is fdntraining.com/tryfdn. I will have that in the show notes as well.

All right, now back to today’s episode.

Dealing with Mental Health Issues Requires Emotional Vulnerability

Right, and that was precisely where I was getting this confused. Because I thought, well, look at what I’m doing. I’m kind of changing myself to be this person on here. And it’s like, well, no, I’m doing that because especially out of context. I mean, I fully admit this. I’m like one of those people that you could destroy their entire career by taking something out of context cause naturally, I’m just aggressive and I’m blunt.

Anyone that knows me knows, I’m like the first person that would be there for you at 3:00 AM if your car breaks down. But the way I display things, unfiltered, I can recognize now, oh, okay. I see why other people are turned off by this, even if that’s not how I meant it. It’s just loud, it’s in your face. It’s this, and it’s opinionated on top of it.

So again, it would be like one of those people that you could take the clip from. I mean, I guess you could do this with a lot of people nowadays. But I would be especially prone to being that person that someone could take a clip of and be like, look at what he said. It’s like, well, that’s not actually what he meant at all. And he’s, you know, getting on one of his little “Ev rants”.

But I’ve learned that, if I’m going to do the podcast or, oh my goodness, the mental health speaking to kids, that was one of the toughest ones, right? That first of all, requires emotional vulnerability. I was going in unintentionally, almost lecturing on facts about mental health at first.

Mental Health: Being Aligned with Who You Really Are

One person commented (I’m connecting all these dots now, looking back), she said, she saw my presentation one year and then about a year later I came back again. She said, I just want to be honest. I don’t mean it rudely. This was a lot better the second year.

And I said, I don’t take it rudely. I want to improve, so tell me the why cause I don’t realize what I’m doing. She’s like, well, last time you gave a lot of interesting facts. This time you spoke about the things that you felt. And I’m like, Oh, as a Type 8. You know, I’m kidding. But you know, obviously that’s how you have to do it, especially speaking to kids.

It’s like they don’t, not all of them, care about facts about mental health. They want to know what you’ve experienced too. So that job has been the biggest aspect of the personal development, at least, if I’m assuming that I’m this Type in the context of the Enneagram, that’s been one of my biggest ways to personally develop. Because to be successful at it requires me to do the thing that supposedly my Type fears the most, which is emotional vulnerability.

Oh, by the way, we’re going to talk about the worst parts and most embarrassing parts of my life that ever happened. You know, it still challenges me.

[00:30:50] Renee Bergmen: Yeah. You know, one of the things that is really cool when you really deep dive further is understanding when you’re aligned with your number and who you are when you’re really aligned with yourself and you’re self-aware.

Mental Health: Type 8s Intensity to Plow a Path for Others

One of the things about the 8 when they’re aligned is that you use your intensity and power to plow a path for others that can’t plow a path for themselves.

That is exactly what you have been called to and that’s what you’ve been doing. You have seen your mission as, how do I get out into these schools and help these kids that are having all these mental health issues?

There’s lots of facts for them to understand, like, you know, that’s kind of where you wanted to start. But as soon as you started to bring that vulnerability piece, that one was exactly spot on. You started to use your intensity to plow a path for them to figure out, how do I really realize my vulnerable self and reach out and get help.

[00:31:49] Detective Ev: Absolutely. Very cool. I think that was another thing that Maddy saw. I mean, I recognize it myself. I read those parts where it’s like, well, they’ll stick up for the underdog or use their strength to stick up for those who can’t do it for themselves.

Even in the last year, especially as I become more educated on it, I’m not saying it’s a high number. I’m not able to do that at this time, but it’s just the effort of donating to this nonprofit that does child sex trafficking. I was talking about it so much that Maddy, cause we didn’t know each other that well at the time, she was like, do you have something to tell me?

She thought I was involved in that because of the passion. I’m like, no, but I can see it. And I’m like, how can you do that to a six-year-old?

Mental Health: Type 8s Using Their Alignment for Good

It’s almost like I feel this pull. It’s like, I know you can’t defend yourself so I’m their worst enemy. Cause I’ll come mess them up and will even do that, in some way or another, because that’s unacceptable, the fact that that’s going on in this world. I’m sure you could do this with a million different issues.

But when I read that, I’m like, oh, I don’t do that. I’m like, wait a second. Yes, I do. Like, it energizes me. It’s actually a cool way to use that power in a kind of aggressive way that people can get on board with. They’re like, yes, go be aggressive against that. That’s good. Don’t do it against me, do it against that.

[00:32:54] Renee Bergmen: It takes organizations and all these different types of companies that are in the world that are nonprofits or for profit, there has to be different personality types and different ways that people function, and we’ve experienced it.

Have you ever experienced, when you’re working with someone, they totally are a round peg and their job is a square hole? You’re trying to fit them in and it’s just like a total disaster, right?

For you, when you figure those things out, you’re learning, I know how to do this just effortlessly. I mean, not totally effortlessly. I understand that you’ve had to really grow in who you are and learn a lot about yourself.

But standing up for people in those ways, it just comes so second nature. It takes someone like you to fuel and to help someone who’s the CEO of an organization like that to have funding. They’ve gotta have people that go, no, this is a justice issue that has to be pursued.

Mental Health: Being Who You’re Designed to Be

When you are in alignment in that way, your body functions at a higher level and you have more capacity. That’s the thing that I just am always like blown away by.

When people think that the way that they eat doesn’t impact what they do all throughout the rest of their day. It’s not just like, do you feel like you’re fat or not have energy? Sure, you don’t necessarily want those things, but like are you able to actually go and do the things that you’re super passionate about?

The reason we do what we do as FDNs is to get people to that place, right? It is to get them to a space where they go, I get to just be who I was designed to be and to seek after that with my whole heart and my whole being. So, they don’t also feel like crap while I’m doing it or just not do it.

A lot of people just don’t end up doing the thing that they’re really passionate about if they don’t feel good.

[00:34:44] Detective Ev: That’s so true. It is remarkable that before we got on air, I was like, well listen, if we don’t make it to the 50-minute mark, cause it’s the second episode, no big deal. Here we are at 30 and I’m like, all right, I’m thinking about part three.

No, but seriously, I know we obviously have integrated this with the mental health side today, but there’s other aspects. I would imagine that just about anyone that listens to a podcast like this appreciates what we’ve been saying. But I also want to relate it to some other things too.

Mental Health: Can’t Take Out the Mind-Mental Piece

I know your husband’s been working on stuff and we wanted to talk about that. Especially as the second episode, I’d love for you to take this wherever you want to right now. We’re talking about mental health. What are some other things that you would like to mention today? It could be just about anything that we do as FDNs.

[00:35:21] Renee Bergmen: My husband just recently launched his own company called Metastory Health. He is getting a master’s in counseling. He really is my primary employee for my business, for Megaphone Functional Health.

As he has watched and grown so much, and I have just told him, no, you can’t do that, that’s bad for your gut. Don’t do this, don’t do that. All the things that happen in a marriage when you do what you do as an FDN. He’s learned so much about how much those two worlds are so crossed over and watched how much I’m referring clients out to need mental coaching or counseling.

So, we’ve begun to really look at, how do these two worlds really converge together and not ignore one another?

One of the things we love about functional medicine and the functional approach is we are not zeroed in to one thing. We don’t diagnose. We don’t say that we’re like a specialist in this one, necessarily focused area of the body. We look at the body as a whole.

If we’re really looking at the body as a whole, we can’t take this mind-mental piece out. So as FDNs I’m really passionate to keep pushing on all of us to find referrals. You have great counselors, find someone that you partner with that you’re working with.

Integrating Mental Health Profession with Functional Approaches

That’s a big part of what we’re starting to do is like, what are some programs that we can create for people where they’re doing both worlds? They’re truly pursuing their mental health and getting to some of the deep, dark pieces that need to be dealt with alongside dealing with all the functional diagnostic pieces that we as FDNs do.

How do we combine D.R.E.S.S. with a mental health approach that really helps people to have full flourishing and not feel like they’re being parsed out? That’s a big part of what clients say when they come to us as FDNs. It’s like, I’ve seen this doctor and this doctor, and this doctor didn’t talk to this doctor. My health has just felt confusing. We don’t want that, right? We want people to feel like they have a whole system.

I’m really hoping that the mental health profession continues to see how important it is to integrate in functional approaches for people’s gut health and hormone health, to truly see that change that they’re seeking when they’re dealing with people that have major trauma and needing to deal with past hurts, stuck hurts, or are dealing with major weight issues that they can’t get rid of because of some of the narratives that are going on in their minds. There’s so much that the mind is responsible for. We cannot divorce it from the rest of the body.

I’m really excited about that. I am seeing it more and more. We’re starting to see more and more practices coming out with this saying they have different types of practitioners that you can see and integrate. These practitioners talk about your particular situation in case to really bring you the most flourishing and the most healing.

Recognizing Every Level of Mental Health

[00:38:32] Detective Ev: That’s going to be a heck of a tag team. I love that you guys are doing that. I do believe, especially right now, there is more acceptance than probably ever to this idea of the functional side. It kind of goes both ways. Just like you were saying, a lot of the clients you see coming to you from a functional perspective need the counseling side, the traditional mental health side.

But similarly, when I’m going into schools, I know there are so many kids out there, not all of them relate to me. I mean, some are getting abused at home. It is insulting for me to suggest the idea that, oh yeah, you should eat a little better. That that’ll fix it up for you, Jimmy. No, that’s ridiculous actually.

But at the same time, Renee, I mean, you and I both know well, there are millions of kids out there right now and adults like myself, who, okay, life’s not perfect. I get that. But it is so clear that my mental health stuff and that other physical health stuff came long before any of the traumas of my life. I would go as far as to say the majority of my trauma came from unresolved mental health issues, not the opposite way around. I think there’s more receptivity to this than ever before.

With that, I don’t know if you saw this, you probably did, that whole thing that came out with the SSRIs, which amazingly seemed to just get swept under the rug by the media pretty quickly.

Mental Health and Physical Health Intertwine

It’s like, oh, by the way, yeah, those aren’t nearly as effective as we once thought, and they weren’t really that great to begin with. In case it’s someone’s first time listening, I apologize to sound like a broken record for regular listeners. I’m not against medication at all, in fact, I think there’s people that greatly benefit from it.

I think I actually piss all functional health practitioners sometimes when they hear me one on one, how accepting I am of medication. Cause they’re like, well, do you really think a kid should be doing that? I’m like, maybe not. But I know the worst option is a kid that’s not talking about this at all.

So, I don’t know what their particular treatment plan is, but I know the most dangerous thing is a kid that suffers in silence and is not getting any help of any sort. I’m nearly positive of that. I’m with you on that.

But we saw this come out and it’s like, okay, our first line defense, which really has been these meds for the last few decades, oh, you know, it might not really be as good as we thought.

So as more people become aware that that came out, I think they’re going to seek out these alternative means. I think the toughest part, and you correct me if I’m wrong here, or contribute to this in any way, I think the toughest part is people want to believe it. I say this and it sounds good, but it’s very hard for people to conceptualize the idea that the panic attacks that they experience, or the bipolar episodes can have something to do with their physical health.

Mental Health: Stories Are Crucial

It can be so calculated with labs, and it can become precise with labs, like the treatment options, that they actually have an opportunity to resolve these symptoms. I just say that as someone who’s done it and seen it in others, it’s very hard to get them to conceptualize that.

You find that probably to be the case in your world?

[00:41:10] Renee Bergmen: I do, I think this is where story is so important. I think you’ve probably experienced this. I think people sharing their stories is such a crucial part of helping people come around to it.

I share my personal story of being on antidepressants for years, and then I had to be pulled off in a moment of time because I thought I had Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which is where all your skin peels off and you like burn from the inside out. It’s awful. It can happen.

People can be on a medication for a long time and all of a sudden, your body becomes like allergic to it. But the only way to know if it’s going to fix it is to pull you from whatever medication you’re on. I was petrified. I had been on an antidepressant that was actually for bipolar, so I had been diagnosed bipolar.

Now going back and looking at who diagnosed me with bipolar, I never should have had a bipolar diagnosis. It just was not accurate. I’m not saying that bipolar isn’t real, it absolutely is. But I was not bipolar. So, I was being given the drug that was for even a mental disorder I didn’t have. Then, to be pulled from it and have to figure out what I was going to do.

Mental Health: Stories Help People Change Their Minds

I had struggled with suicidal ideation, such depression, I could barely get out of bed. I mean, I had the deepest, darkest depression you can possibly have. It really is only by the grace of God that I didn’t choose to take my life. And I had lots to live for. I had a wonderful marriage, children, there were beautiful things. But I also had massive things going on internally for me.

I share this with people, especially those that are really afraid to go off medication, of me even saying, I say the same thing that you do. I’m not telling you have to go off your medicine. That would be so dumb of me to just say, you know what? You don’t need that medicine. Because there was a time in my life, I did need the medicine.

I didn’t know any other steps. I didn’t know the other things that I could do that could change what was happening physiologically in me. So, for me, story is such an important piece of the puzzle. And as I have clients that begin to have freedom and maybe step off of a medication or drop down on a medication to share their story, to listen to podcasts like this where people talk about story, it’s just so impactful.

People start to see this is someone that’s not just saying, I know this stuff in theory, right? Like and I’ve learned all this in my training. This was real life experience. This was your real-life experience. That is what changes people’s minds. That’s why it’s so important to be able to be willing to be vulnerable about what you’ve walked through. And be really honest, especially in the mental health field.

The Fear to Open Up About Personal Mental Health Issues

[00:43:56] Detective Ev: You took the words out of my mouth.

[00:43:57] Renee Bergmen: People are really willing to talk about like, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had an autoimmune disease. Those are really vulnerable things as well. But there’s something about the mental health piece, right?

People are really scared to say, I wanted to kill myself. People are really scared to say, I thought that I had absolutely no worth, and I wanted to do nothing all day long. I could have sat in my bed and ate Taco Bell for every meal and watched TV and never moved. That’s a really, really hard, scary thing to talk about because it feels like you’re lazy and like if you would just get out of bed, you’d probably be okay.

It’s all these things that, you know, narratives, maybe people have said them to you. But maybe it’s just narratives we’ve told ourselves, you know? I think the more people speak up about truly what mental health has looked like for them and the darkest parts of it, and the freedom that there can be, it’s going to help more and more people pull out and ask for that help.

[00:44:55] Detective Ev: That was so crazy. I was literally thinking that exact thing. When you have, again, an autoimmune disease, and I’m someone who’s dealt with that myself and my family has, if you found a doctor like an alternative doctor on YouTube that was talking about it, I don’t think I would, nor can I ever imagine someone being like, well, they’ve never dealt with this autoimmune disease. Like, why can they help me? It’s like if they just make logical sense, you kind of follow it.

There’s No Way to Measure Mental Health Issues

Versus if someone starts talking about, again, bipolar, depression, whatever, and they haven’t dealt with it, I think there is a larger audience to that, that would say, well, I don’t care if they’re a doctor (maybe not so consciously), but like, I don’t care that they’re a doctor. You don’t know my story. You don’t know what I’ve been through.

I think there’s a couple aspects there because it’s the unique nature of everyone’s mental health issues. Like psoriasis. I’m sure people experience it uniquely, but generally speaking, psoriasis is psoriasis. It kind of looks the same. We can objectify it and say, oh, that’s what that is.

Versus depression for someone might look like extreme substance abuse. For others, it might look like sitting in bed all day and not being able to get out and eating Taco Bell all the time. For others, it might be extreme suicidal ideations. For others it might be not sleeping at all and possibly even sleeping for 12 hours a day. It’s hard to measure.

Well, there’s technically nothing to measure in a sense. Right? You’re not getting a lab test for this per se. I mean, functional labs could obviously correlate with it, but it’s not diagnostic in the sense that like, something for autoimmune would be. You either have antibodies to your thyroid or you do not have elevated antibodies to your thyroid, period.

So, I think it’s those nuances there that lead to that idea. I mean, there’s a saying, facts tell, story sell. I think it is extraordinarily true here that the stories are really selling and it’s not selling our coaching. I’m saying, selling the idea that, maybe this person can help me.

Mental Health: Medical Doctors are Still Necessary

I mean, I know FDN is a great qualification. The average Joe does not know that. I don’t have any degrees that are relevant to this, and no one asks me, where did you go to college to learn about this?

It is because I can just talk about it, and I have that story mixed in with the information. It’s almost scary that no one asks. But you know, at the same time, it’s remarkable that as a younger man, no one is questioning me and just say, Okay, cool. Can you help me? How do I work with you?

Again, bittersweet, you know, I don’t think people should have to go to someone that doesn’t even have a degree to get this fixed. I’d love it if it was a part of the medical system, but at the same time, it shows the power of these stories.

[00:47:09] Renee Bergmen: It does. Yeah. I also think that is an interesting piece of this world that we’re in. From someone that has experienced going to a lot of doctors and then not being able to give me any answers and feeling really left in the dark, I think people are starting to wake up to that.

This does not negate the fact that doctors aren’t necessary. Like, I’ve had my life saved by a doctor. Without emergency surgery, I would’ve died two different times. So, I’m very grateful for the training that they chose to get.

Looking at Mental Health Through Holistic Lens

But it points to this idea that people think that doctors should solve everything. Right? And that’s just not the truth. That’s not what they were trained to do. They weren’t trained to solve everything that goes wrong in the body. They were trained on a very specific portion of the body that they have quite a bit of knowledge on that they can fix when it has 100% broken.

So as FDNs, I actually love it that more people are going, you know what? I don’t really care where you’ve come from. I want to see that you understand me, that you can navigate in the world that I’ve been in, that you’ve experienced some similar things, and that you yourself have experienced this transformation. Experiencing the transformation yourself is so impactful to lead someone else down that.

Now I think you need some level of training. That’s what FDN does. FDN is so powerful and such an amazing training system. But people aren’t asking, well, tell me what you learned during that process. Because they’ve experienced this so many times of people that can give them all these degree listings and where they went to school for them to not be able to do anything to make the patient sitting in front of them feel any better.

So, it is this. I’m excited to see the tide turn in all these areas. Even in mental health, that we’re no longer going, go see a psychiatrist because they’ll give you medication. Again, you and I have talked about this, like, not all medicine’s bad, but that’s not the answer.

The answer is, let’s figure out how to go deeper than that and wider than looking through a scope like this, you know, this little slither of life.

Mental Health: In-between Two Extremes

[00:49:25] Detective Ev: I would think everyone can agree with this universally. I mean, I know no one’s deficient in Zoloft. So, at the very least we could start there and say, Okay, just cause I’m not deficient in something doesn’t mean it’s not helping me.

But at the same time, if it is true that I can’t be deficient in it, then perhaps there is something else here. You know, there’s extreme situations, outlier situations that I can’t fairly speak on. I had a friend who passed away from a drug overdose and the abuse that was had in his household is so incomprehensible to me that, I don’t know, maybe that person would’ve been better off on a lifelong medication. I’m not sure. I’m open to it.

But usually between the two extremes of, hey (cause there’s a lot of people like this), hey, I feel like I had a good life and I have these symptoms. Versus, you couldn’t even make this crap up in a movie – that other side of the spectrum where it’s so extreme that it’s obvious why this person is dealing with these symptoms. Everyone usually falls in between here, most of those people.

It’s like, all right, medication for a time and then let’s dig deeper. That is where I would confidently call out the Western medicine system. Cause I’ve experienced this myself.

Mental Health: Prescribing Meds Wrongfully

I don’t even have a problem that you offered a 15-year-old, that I was at the time, Xanax. I was having daily panic attacks. It was affecting my life greatly. Fine. I don’t have a problem with the SSRI at 18. I was on house arrest because I was using substances and doing a lot of bad stuff. That probably would’ve been beneficial.

But the idea that there was nothing else offered, there was no other questions asked. I mean benzodiazepines are supposed to be short term. And that this was posed as an indefinite solution, that’s not only wrong, in my opinion, that’s wrong by their training. That was not how benzodiazepine is supposed to be used.

And it’s happening every day where people are on these for years because their primary physician, which, another ridiculous point to this, it’s their primary physician prescribing this stuff a lot. Never told them to get off. So that’s where I go against this.

[00:51:27] Renee Bergmen: My OB-GYN is who was prescribing it to me. When I look back on that, I’m like, you delivered my baby. That is what your role was supposed to be. When I came to you and said that I had postpartum and that I was not okay, that’s not their job.

That’s where there’s this real frustration that I feel. Then just no follow up whatsoever. Left the practice, moved out of state. I moved out of state and just like would continue to call and get prescriptions refilled. 10 years. 10 years, that I did that.

Mental Health: Meds Being Handed Out Like Candy

[00:52:03] Detective Ev: Wow. I remember when I used to tell these stories, like some people, especially on my Facebook, cause I talked about it kind of a little bit when I was younger. A lot of us were like 18, 19 as my friends. Some people didn’t believe this. Now I don’t get those comments as much anymore.

Most people have seen this in a family member or experienced it where, still to this day, these things are handed out like candy. My Type II diabetic grandma, she can go get Oxycontin like it’s nothing. It’s nothing. There’s no severe injury that led to this. I mean, she has knee pain. I’m not lessening the pain of course, but I mean, this has been years.

She is an addict to Oxycontin because of this. I mean, we could go, that’s again, that’s part three.

[00:52:37] Renee Bergmen: We could go all the way down the road of all the medications.

[00:52:39] Detective Ev: Still, I want to be respectful though, because a few extra minutes isn’t going to kill us here.

I took my opportunity to jump on the Enneagram thing and I know it does tie into the mental health thing. But is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talked about today? Did you want to talk about the labs and how they integrate? Especially, I’d love to know where people can find you and just remind them like who you help and stuff.

That’s basically three questions. So, there you go.

Mental Health: Integrate Enneagram Testing in Your Practice

[00:52:59] Renee Bergmen: No, I think we’ve touched a lot on how different labs really help. I mean, the GI MAP is my favorite when it comes to this mental health conversation because the gut is just so integral in really making sure your neurotransmitters are functioning, all of that.

But I’d just love people to know Megaphone Functional Health. That’s where they can contact me.

I also love talking with people about the Enneagram. So, if you’re a fellow practitioner, absolutely reach out. I love the training that I’ve received. I have so many books that are so helpful.

When we were supposed to have a conference last year, I was going to be presenting on how FDNs can integrate this into their practice, but we didn’t have one. So, let’s hope we get another conference going. I’d love to give you more info on how to just really use something like this in your practice and see people really flourish.

[00:53:47] Detective Ev: Renee, I’ve asked you the signature question before, so I’m not going to repeat that. You don’t have to, I could even edit this part out if nothing comes out, but do you feel inspired to give any piece of advice, maybe specifically to those suffering with mental health right now? Maybe some final last words for the podcast today?

Final Words About Mental Health

[00:54:02] Renee Bergmen: I think anyone suffering with mental health issues be willing to be honest about what that looks like. Be honest with someone that you feel safe with and seek out the help with someone alongside you. I think mental health really is something that you’ve gotta have someone that’s going to be your cheerleader in it and going to help you navigate through it.

Because some of it can feel so dark and you can feel so foggy when you’re trying to figure it all out. So, find someone safe, talk to them. Try and find a practitioner that can really get to the root of things and a great counselor that can help you deal with some of the root issues.

Conclusion

[00:54:40] Detective Ev: Okay, friends. That’ll do it for today’s episode with Renee Bergman. I hope you guys enjoyed that one as much as I enjoyed recording it. I love when there is rapport already and you just go back and forth with the guest because sometimes you don’t even need to really understand the topic that the two people are discussing for it to be interesting. Again, I said this in the beginning, there is something, in my opinion, very contagious about passionate people.

I hope you guys like this one. With that all said, if you like the information that we’re sharing, please consider leaving us a five-star review on Apple and or Spotify. If you guys would be so kind as to do that, we would love you even more than we already do.

I will talk to you guys again soon. We’ll be back with another interview, but until then, please take care.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

To hire a coach, go to fdnthrive.com.

For a Free Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.

Introduction

Many thanks to Adrian Wainwright for this week’s topic. Adrian is a UK/South Africa supporter who now lives in San Francisco and is “obsessed with all things carnivore”. Apparently this week’s article is being cited as ‘new science evidence’ that plant-based diets are superior. It turned out to be much fun to unpack, so let’s go.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: What is going on my friends? Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about a booming business.

Our guest today, Christa Lyons, is actually an FDN, but it’s a bit of a different story. She says herself; this isn’t someone that’s coming on with a crazy diagnosis. She did have some symptoms that got, thankfully, addressed by the FDN system itself.

But what’s cooler about her, and I think this resonates with a lot of people that are starting to consider the FDN course and go through it, she was a health coach for years. She went through a very popular certification for that, just like myself. She was doing great work, she had clients.

What ended up happening is she didn’t feel like she had the confidence or tools to actually serve the clients she wanted to serve. You will hear from her own mouth in this episode that she ended up forexing her income. Despite having done this for years, she forexed her income by going to Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and then applying those principles to the work that she was doing within the first year. That is pretty amazing.

A Booming Business: About Christa Lyons

Your results may vary. I can’t make any financial claims on here. But still, I think it goes to show what happens when you feel equipped to help people. She admits herself, it’s not like she wasn’t taking on more clients. She was. Of course, if you’re taking on more clients, you would earn more income. That’s just logical. But her point was, it was her lack of confidence that led her to not taking on those additional clients. That was a problem.

I think it’s kind of cool how, yes, you can charge more when you know the labs. You can do better work, which leads you to have more confidence, which will also make you more income as you attract more clients. It’s kind of cool how that goes full circle.

So, Christa, like I said, FDN practitioner and certified health coach. She helps midlife women boost their nutrition, restore vitality through hormone and gut health, and uncover their hidden blocks to bust through weight gain, fatigue, and stress so that their health is no longer an obstacle to their happiness.

This is a person that has been involved in the business world for quite some time, and in the health world also for some time. I think there’s many lessons to be learned here today in this episode, just from her experience. Not to mention, she’s got a wonderful personality. She’s very fun to listen to and just watch on the video side, which will be available on our YouTube by searching for Functional Diagnostic Nutrition on there.

Without further ado, let’s get to today’s episode.

Commercial – $9 Workshop on October 8th

Hey, it’s me again. Had to pop in one more time before we actually get started here. I wanted to tell you guys about something awesome that’s going on. I don’t know if you saw it on our Instagram, but we have a workshop coming up on October 8th. If you’re listening to this within the first couple of days of it coming out, then you still have an opportunity to get involved with this.

What it is, is a $9 workshop, that is literally it. There’s a Live Q&A. You’re going to get a ton of help for how to actually deal with tricky health challenges. This is for the people who, one, might be considering the FDN course for health challenges. Or maybe you don’t want to do the FDN course. That is totally fine. But you want to learn some of the methodologies that we utilize to get healthy. This is going to help you with that.

No lab testing required, nothing like it. It is $9. Go to fdntraining.com/dress, D R E S S. That’s fdntraining.com/dress. Or if you have questions about it, you can visit us at our Instagram page at FDNtraining. Shoot us a direct message there.

We do not use chatbots. We have real people that actually answer your questions. Just tell them that you heard about the workshop on the podcast, and I said that you can go there to ask questions.

So that’s fdntraining.com/dress to get signed up. Or FDNtraining on Instagram and go to our DMs to ask questions.

All right now, let’s get to the episode.

Proactive Health Care Before the Diagnoses Level

Hello Christa. Thanks so much for being here with us today.

[00:03:40] Christa Lyons: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m really excited to be here today.

[00:03:45] Detective Ev: This is one of those rare occurrences where I’ve been lucky enough to actually talk to this individual in person first. We met at the Biohacking Congress in June of 2022. I know this is going to be a good conversation. We got big personalities and we’re passionate about what we do.

What I’ve really liked is that, as of late, especially, it seems we’re getting a very diverse mix of guests and especially FDNs. We were talking about this before we started recording. I think the type of FDN you are, it’s never going to be exclusively that.

But I think we should aspire to do this as a society where you’re not coming today with some crazy, I almost died from cancer thing. Listen, from a podcast perspective, of course they make for intense and good stories. But I always want people to remember that there’s a human being on the other side of that story.

It’s like the true crime things we listen to. We’re like, that’s so interesting. Guys, that’s someone’s family. Ideally, we would be addressing this stuff before we receive these diagnoses. Thankfully, that was the case for you. But you also learned through the FDN system and other things that, I still had some things to work on. Who knows what would’ve happened if maybe we got down that line.

Body Break-Down but No Real Symptom

I don’t want to be the one talking about it. I’d love to hear this from you. I mean, what do you describe as your story? How did you even get into this work if it wasn’t based on some extreme diagnosis like most people use to get into this work?

[00:05:07] Christa Lyons: I am a mom of two. I have two boys, they’re teenagers. Well, one’s now 21. But when I started this whole process, he was a teenager.

I remember years ago driving them to school. I didn’t feel tired, but I felt foggy. And I remember one day specifically. I’m driving in the car and I’m thinking, oh my gosh, I can’t even see clearly, how can I even react if a squirrel ran out in front of the car? It was on my mind that as I was getting into my forties, I wasn’t feeling as sharp as I used to.

I just thought, well, this is what happens. You know, I’m over 40 now. I have two kids. I’m tired. I’m running a household; I’m growing a business. All the things. So, when I took the FDN course, the beauty of the course is that they let you run all the labs on yourself. So, I get my labs back and my hormones are tanked and I’m in the exhaustive phase. I’ve got no reserve left.

My gut is a mess. I have got dysbiosis. The good bacteria, the bad bacteria is all out of whack. I thought, oh my gosh. I wasn’t even really feeling quote “bad.” Like I would never have gone to a doctor for what I had, quote “had.” But it was an indication that my body was breaking down, right? My body was showing me the symptoms.

Once Autoimmunity is Triggered

Thankfully, now I’m able to preventatively work on all of that.

[00:06:40] Detective Ev: Again, this is what I’d really like to see in the future. I mean, perhaps in a perfect world we would do this before we felt any symptoms, right? Like people would just be doing that preventatively. I think we got quite a few steps to go before we’re there. But this is a good thing. If we can avoid the diagnosis, I think that matters.

Now, whether or not you would’ve met the criteria for a diagnosis, I mean, who knows? Western Medicine could have slapped a label on it. But I’m someone, if you guys listen regularly, you know I’m very passionate about the world of autoimmunity. And I’m not making a claim per se cause I’m not a doctor.

But what I have seen, Christa, is almost that once people activate that autoimmune process, it seems like even if they do all the right things, it stays there, like you can re-trigger it. As opposed to someone who might be aware enough to get this stuff addressed before they activate that process.

Guys, I believe this, I wouldn’t do this myself, but I think you can get back to living a life where, yeah, you can go cheat every other weekend on some like, really crappy food and there’s not a huge detriment to it. I’m not sure if that was the case here for you, but I do believe that that’s possible if people actually addressed the health stuff first.

A Booming Business: We Test, Don’t Guess

I love what you said about the mindset going into this because you believed that this was just normal. That’s a narrative that is sold to us that’s completely false. I mean, I think Reed Davis is the best example of this. We got a guy, he either is 70 now or he is right about to be 70 and no one would think that.

This guy’s got tons of energy, he’s teaching the course, he’s traveling around speaking. He’s the true testament to FDN because he’s been doing it longer than any of us.

The one thing I missed is what did get you into FDN though? Was it the symptoms or were you in the health space before? That’s what I’m missing.

[00:08:17] Christa Lyons: I’ve been a health coach for years. My focus though was helping people with clean eating. So, bringing down the toxin levels in your body, bringing down the toxin levels from your personal care products, from your food, you know, how to live a clean life, basically, the clean mindset.

But I wasn’t getting the results that I wanted with my clients. I had taken Kristin Thomas’s Health and Wellness Business School and people kept talking about FDN. I’m like, what is FDN? Someone texted me one day and they’re like, you can do it. So, I looked into the FDN program, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is the missing piece.

Because now with the lab testing, we can go right in, and we can figure out exactly where the imbalances are. We can figure out exactly what’s going on. Then we can support that.

A Booming Business: Starting as a Health Coach

I came at it as a preventative medicine angle. But the clients that I see, they’re coming at it with 15 to 20 years of symptoms that they’ve just been living with. There’s such a wide range of people that we can help. I love it.

[00:09:25] Detective Ev: I think what you just said is honestly the stereotypical client of an FDN, 15 to 20 years of symptoms. It’s unfortunate cause I think about this from a really big picture perspective. That is a fraction of one’s life where they might have been living with these things. Worse yet they thought, oh, this is just the way it is. This is just something I have, or it’s my genetics or whatever.

I’ll backtrack even farther. You don’t have to say the school or schools unless you want to, but what got you into health coaching? Like, what attracted you to that?

[00:09:53] Christa Lyons: I worked for 20 years for my parents. They had a music publishing company, and I did bookkeeping, copyright licensing, all kinds of business stuff.

My dad sold the company. When he sold the company, I was in my forties. My kids were a little older, they were less dependent on me. And I thought, what am I going to do for the rest of my life? So, one day I happened to be online, and I googled the difference between a nutritionist and a dietician. And up popped IIN.

FDN Teaches Business & What to Do with a Client

You know, once you even talk about something, it’s going to be all over your Facebook feed. It’s going to be all over your emails. You can’t hide once you’ve mentioned something. I started getting all kinds of emails from IIN. So, I stalked it for about six months and then I thought, this is definitely what I want to do.

When I started, I couldn’t absorb the information fast enough. I was like, this is it. I love this. That’s how I got started in 2013. I graduated from IIN. Then I was doing health coaching.

[00:10:54] Detective Ev: That part especially is highly relatable. When I was doing the course enrollment side of things, I’m talking to people who potentially wanted to go through FDN. Christa, it must have been 25% to 30% of the people that I talked to. We could have maybe not gotten to that part of the conversation in the other 70%. But just that I talked to had told me that they went through IIN or whatever.

To be clear, Reed says this himself. (If it’s your first time listening, Reed’s the founder of FDN.) We love IIN because they are so good at the marketing. They bring so many people into this world. That’s how I got into this world. That was the first certification that I did myself. It was actually in 2016, I believe.

What you learned there, I think, is phenomenal coaching skills, and that’s something to note with FDN. FDN, the program itself, I would not say teaches coaching almost at all. It’s very structured. It teaches you the business and what to do with a client, but that’s not necessarily the same of how to coach the client. So, they can be very complimentary.

Imposter Syndrome

For some people I know they’ve taken that to extraordinary levels. Maybe for the niche that they’re serving, that was all they wanted to do.

But I think it’s fair to say that many people that go through that are trying to serve a client at a specific level and they’re not able to do that always. I think your story right here is extremely common in what I was hearing all the time. Where for myself, I knew I wasn’t getting to the bottom of what I wanted to get to the bottom of.

Forget the clients. I wasn’t even taking them yet cause I felt like imposter syndrome. I said, if I can’t even get this myself, how am I supposed to take on these clients? So that’s really cool that you kind of went through Kristin Thomas. Of course, she’s like poster child FDN, right?

[00:12:27] Christa Lyons: Totally! Total rockstar.

[00:12:28] Detective Ev: She’s been on the show before. You guys can find that in Episode 140.

Now, when you’re going through FDN, we talked about you were able to utilize the labs. And just so I have the timeframe, were you going through the course when they were still only giving like two or three labs? Or did you get a bunch of them?

[00:12:43] Christa Lyons: I just graduated in November. So, I signed on right before they redid the course a little bit. I had to wait a couple weeks before jumping in because the new course was coming out. Last July?

[00:12:55] Detective Ev: That sounds about right. My point is you had the GI MAP then. Then, I guess at the time, was what we were using Access for that hormone?

A Booming Business: Functional Lab Result Validation

[00:13:02] Christa Lyons: Yeah, I did all six labs. But it was with Access Labs.

[00:13:08] Detective Ev: Oh, perfect. Then I have plenty to dive into. I know that you already mentioned that you were in the exhaustive phase. I was in the same boat. It was borderline, but I was shocked to find that, but I was also validated.

That’s what I wanted to know about your stuff because you were feeling these symptoms, but you didn’t have a diagnosis, so it could be on the fence. Were you like shocked, scared, validated, mix of everything? What was your initial response to getting those results?

[00:13:31] Christa Lyons: Probably all of it. Part of me was like, oh my gosh, what is wrong with me? And then part of me thought, if I was feeling as good as I thought I was feeling, and all of this came up, imagine the people that are out there walking around like me and worse than me that were feeling okay and had all of this going on.

It was also very reassuring cause I thought, okay, this is not in my head. And I was super excited cause I thought, all right, I’m not feeling terrible. Imagine when I address all of these things, how good I will feel and the opportunity to just feel so much better.

As I felt better along the way, I’m like, I can’t even believe I let myself settle for feeling like that.

[00:14:23] Detective Ev: We have a lot of trainees that listen and people that are considering the FDN course. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that perspective because I think people get caught up in this. And listen, so did I.

Adjusting the Initial Reaction

When I found that, especially as a 21-year-old guy at the time, I’m freaking out. I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m dying. Like what’s going to happen? That was not the case, obviously. No one told me I was dying, that was my own head. I’m not saying it’s not a normal initial reaction, but I was able to shut that off rather quickly.

It seems like you were able to as well. I kind of realized how foolish it was and I’m not putting that on someone else that’s listening but hear me out. It’s foolish because the lab results were the lab results, whether you got the lab or not. Your body was in that state whether or not you had the measurements for it.

So, you could be totally freaked out about something that was already there. Or you could rejoice, like you said, in the fact that, oh, wait a second. I’m going through a training program that knows exactly what they’re doing to help me get these numbers under control if I’m willing to follow the content and I get this stuff in line. I can do the things that they need me to do.

If anything, I understand the initial reaction, but then we should switch that immediately and, Wow! I am so thankful that I found this when I did. If I’m not running these labs and I’m doing the same things I’ve always been doing, I would have to imagine it’s going to get worse.

A Booming Business: The FDN System is Not a Singular Approach

[00:15:34] Christa Lyons: Totally. I watch a lot of summits. I’ll dive into the hormone summit or the gut health summit. I’m just meaning they usually have, you know, 15 or 20 experts that come in and offer their views.

I’ve watched them on stopping cancer or you know, all these things. And I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard, well, you’ve got to work on detoxification. Detoxification is like one of the number one thing. All these tips. I’m like, oh my gosh, thank God I’m already doing that.

[00:16:05] Detective Ev: Not that detoxing is like a therapy in and of itself. I mean, there’s a million ways to detox. They’re great and they work for people. It works a lot better when they’re combined into a system so we could figure out, is this form of detox the best for this individual?

Because, like me, I was highly sensitive to everything. I should actually test this again. At the time, I could not even work up to three singular drops, like 1, 1, 1 of Biocidin every single day without getting flu-like symptoms and just complete malaise. Maybe I got up to that dosage for all of three days before I was feeling something like that, right?

For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, you should in theory be able to work up to 15 if you’re sick, and 30 if you’re healthy. Three for me was just too much. That’s a form of detox. But it would’ve been terrible for me. So, it’s great to have FDN because we don’t have these singular approaches.

A Booming Business: Favorite FDN Functional Labs

We’re looking at it from multiple tools in the toolbox and we know what to do with clients like myself who don’t respond well to those things. Now the other labs, I mean, we already kind of talked about it. I’m sure the emotions were the same. It’s a little bit shocking, but also, hey, cool. I have something to do now.

I’m just curious, since you did run all six tests, what did you find, and this is just personal, what did you find to be the most interesting or insightful when you got the results back? Like was there one that you just absolutely loved, and thought was cool?

[00:17:18] Christa Lyons: Well, can I say two?

Detective Ev: Sure, please.

Christa Lyons: I would say the cortisol reading on the hormone panel. The cortisol being our stress hormone, and that’s the one that will tell you how much vital reserve your body has left. That’s the one that showed me that my reserve was completely tanked, and I was in the exhaustive phase. That was so validating and so helpful.

Then the second one was the GI MAP. Learning about the bacteria and just the bacteria imbalance. That by adding in a probiotic that would help support the good bacteria so that it could crowd out the bad bacteria. You know, such a simple step, but such an essential step.

Expectations of the FDN Course

[00:18:03] Detective Ev: I always love the hormone ones as well because I think it correlates very highly with how the person’s feeling. In my experience, it’s a lot of the other work that ends up directly affecting the hormones.

I still think it’s useful because, I could show the client, hey, I bet in the afternoon you feel your energy tank. They’re like, oh yeah. I’m like, well, I can show you that objectively on the lab, why that might be happening.

We’re not trying to censor anyone here. You are fully allowed to say anything you truly think. Did the course exceed, meet the expectations? Maybe you would’ve wanted something a little different. Like what did you think about the course once you actually went through it versus what your expectation was before you went through it?

[00:18:41] Christa Lyons: I wasn’t really sure what it was going to be like from the outset. I just knew, oh, they’re going to teach me these labs.

I get into the first module and I’m like, oh my gosh, there’s no way I can do this. This is all science. Like, how am I ever going to learn and remember all this stuff? So, I went through it.

As you go through it, the pieces start to pull together and everything starts to make sense based on what you’ve previously learned. I really loved how they started at the basic. Then you can get as in depth into the biochemistry of the body as you want, basically with the course. I mean, it really takes you fully in. It teaches you way more than what you’re going to need to tell a client.

The FDN Course is Very Thorough

But us as practitioners, we get to really learn the “why” of why something is happening. Initially I thought, oh, I don’t know. But then as I got into it, it started to make sense. And everything is repeated so many times in different ways that you start to pick it up.

By the time I graduated and had done the practicals, I was speaking FDN without even trying. Like, you can’t not. You just can’t not cause it’s been so ingrained. You’ve had all the training, you’ve got the science, you’ve got how to interpret the labs. I really wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it. And by the time I got to the practicals, it all made sense.

[00:20:13] Detective Ev: Good. That’s what I was hoping. And I think that’s what happens for a lot of people.

I have a love of that science. So, for me, I was excited when I first saw it. But I was like, wow, this is different. You don’t necessarily expect this level of rigor from an online course, especially considering some of the stuff that we went through before. This has nothing to do with condemning IIN, but they take a different approach. It’s something that I believe just about everyone could rather easily figure out if they’re willing to be consistent.

I do think there are certain people that FDN, certain people (probably if you’re listening, not you), but certain people that this is never going to be for them. They’re like, okay, maybe I could do it, but wow, I just don’t want to get that technical with it.

FDN: The One-stop Shop

This is for people who want to understand the complexities of the major parts of the human body, at least in the sense of it being relative to health. Obviously, we’re not learning as much as MDs. If you want to get someone healthy, you are going to learn that.

And it’s intended to be a standalone course. This is something that, if this is all you ever did, you could go take clients and have a successful business. Obviously, we have the advanced courses, and we always encourage anyone to continue their education, whether it’s with us or some other place.

But I always loved how the FDN course was truly designed as a one-stop shop where you can actually take clients, charge accordingly, they’re happy to pay it, and you’re making a living. I think that really matters.

What’s also cool for you is by the time you went through, I don’t know if you realize this cause this wasn’t a thing like when I went through, you guys have the Facebook trainee group now, the mentors are helping out a lot more. I’m sure you probably felt very supported once you were involved in that.

[00:21:46] Christa Lyons: A hundred percent. The support was outstanding. To have the trainee calls was amazing. And what I didn’t have that they have now are the hot topics. I’m even going through those now as a graduate because Elizabeth just explains everything in such like real time, but in depth.

I’ve found so much wealth of information and just being able to wrap your brain around a complex idea in the hot topics. But between the Facebook group, it was so great.

AFDNP is a Wealth of Information

I find that with the AFDNP, we haven’t talked about that yet. Can I go into that?

Detective Ev: Sure, please.

Christa Lyons: As a newer graduate, the AFDNP group is like worth gold. I probably daily go in there and search a topic. I mean, I could put in psoriasis, and I can guarantee there’s at least 10 threads of people who have already put in information about psoriasis. Or a certain supplement, or I mean, just everything, or what do I do about X, Y, Z? It’s such a wealth of information.

[00:22:53] Detective Ev: If by chance you guys missed it, we just released Episode 173 explaining AFDNP. So, after this one, if you’re on a podcast binge, go back just a few episodes back and we will have that there where we explain kind of what that is. Because AFDNP, to me, that’s one of the biggest no-brainers in my opinion.

For someone that has experienced the things I’ve experienced in life, I considered the access to AFDNP alone is worth the cost of tuition. People just don’t always understand how to use it.

I’m like, do you guys realize that the archives alone, I actually didn’t. I knew it was a lot, but Jennifer Woodward explained that the archived webinars in AFDNP, if you count the business and the health side, and you listen to one webinar a day, including Saturday and Sunday, she said it would take you approximately two years to get through it, spending an hour a day listening to it. And some of the webinars are more than an hour, let’s be honest.

AFDNP is Like a Master’s Degree in FDN

Spending an hour or two a day listening to the webinars, you’re getting extremely advanced business training, extremely advanced health training, and there’s always new events every single week. And everything is saved. It’s amazing to go back. I love listening to the stuff sometimes like five years ago, because I love getting involved with the timeless principles.

Like what was the business stuff that they were teaching back then, because some of it still applies to today. It doesn’t matter what new social media platform comes out, doesn’t matter what new marketing gimmick there is, some aspects of business, as you know from your experience, is just business, period.

Customer service is always going to be a valued thing. Having your finances in order for income and stuff, that’s going to always be a thing. It’s just a gold mine, like you said, it’s worth gold. And it’s fairly cheap to get into it.

[00:24:24] Christa Lyons: It’s unbelievable. It’s like getting a master’s degree in FDN, to be honest.

[00:24:31] Detective Ev: I’ve never heard that, but that’s a good way of putting it.

[00:24:33] Christa Lyons: It is. Like all the Quick and Nerdys, they dive so deep into a topic. I mean, it’s incredible.

[00:24:39] Detective Ev: I think we’ve had to actually get better at specifying what it is and what it isn’t. You know, people come out of the course, and they learned a ton. But if they go immediately into that without us disclaiming it, if Ryan Monahan’s hopping on a Quick and Nerdy and that’s the first thing you see, you’re like, what the heck is going on?

AFDNP Separates Professionals from Hobbyists

This guy’s, you know, like top of the top at FDN in terms of just knowledge. And like you said, it’s stuff that is really cool to know and we love it. It’s stuff you’ll never have to explain to a client. You might not even need to know per se, to actually be effective with the client. But it is cool, it’s interesting. If you do this course, you’re probably a nerd in some way or another. I think I could speak for all of us. It is really cool to just dive deep.

Reed always says AFDNP separates the professionals from the hobbyists. There’s nothing wrong with being a hobbyist, some people want to do that. But if you’re going to go pursue this and say, hey, this is my business now, this is what I want to do part-time or full-time, I recommend AFDNP. It’s a no-brainer.

And there’s always ways to work these on taxes, which is cool cause it’s kind of education. So, it’s a no-brainer to me to be doing something like that.

We don’t have to talk specific numbers, that’s not what I’m asking this for, but I’m curious, how has this impacted your business? Because you’re someone that was doing this, it seems, for quite some time compared to the rest of the health coaches out there that might only have a year or two old business. How has this impacted your business now being an FDN and having access to these labs?

The Confidence to Have a Booming Business

[00:25:58] Christa Lyons: I’ve made, this year, I’ve made probably four times the income that I made in previous years. But I wasn’t taking on clients like I’m taking on clients now. I wasn’t as confident then that I could help people as just teaching clean eating.

Now that I’m able to help people on this level, I’m like, bring it on because the system works. The system works, and the body doesn’t lie, and the body needs us.

[00:26:30] Detective Ev: Well, whether it’s the confidence or the system itself, I mean, to me is almost irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that’s a transformative experience for someone to go four times.

Just so we have the timeline right, how long had you been health coaching? Well, 2013 you said. Right? So, you were active as soon as you graduated, IIN?

[00:26:49] Christa Lyons: I graduated in 2013 and then I left my dad’s company in 2015. So, like five or six years

I was also changing directions. I tried this and then I tried that. Then I was changing my niche. I went in a lot of different directions. But everything that I’ve learned and everything that I’ve done brought me to this point.

[00:27:12] Detective Ev: I appreciate the transparency. Let’s keep it realistic. We don’t want anyone just thinking like, oh, I was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time and all of a sudden four times the income in less than a year basically.

Want a Booming Business? You Just Have to Start.

[00:27:23] Christa Lyons: Well, you know, they talk about people failing forward. Sure, if someone looked at me right now and they’re like, oh my gosh, you have all these clients and you have a process that you like, and you’ve already done all these things. You have all your intake forms; you already have everything.

It’s like, yeah, but I’ve also had them for seven years and changed them a hundred times. I’ve failed forward all this time. You know?

[00:27:46] Detective Ev: I think it’s one of the dilemmas in business, and it’s something we try to instill in all these FDNs now. Because not everyone that is becoming an FDN, as you know, has any business background.

So, if you do, it’s very advantageous. But it’s not advantageous necessarily just because, okay, I know how to run a business. We can help you with that. We have stuff for that. You can’t necessarily teach the mindset and the willingness to take some risks, right? Because a lot of people get very perfectionistic.

I’ve been prone to that in my life for sure. And business, I’ve had to learn to rewrite that narrative on my mind. You just got to start. You got to go out there. You can learn it along the way.

I’m not saying do this so negligently that you’re screwing over clients left and right. That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. But we try to perfect and control things so much that you could stay forever on that. You could never start a business because you’re trying to get it perfectly fixed or whatever.

A Booming Business Takes a Different Mindset

I always tell people; I’m not going to mention names. There are FDNs out there though that only ever did the FDN course, and they are making so much money that if I told people what it was on this podcast, they would think I’m lying.

Then we have others that do the FDN course, and five advanced courses, they’ve got two other certifications from some other place, and they’ve never taken a client yet. To me that is proof that it’s actually more up here. (For those on audio, I’m pointing to our brains, trying to represent our minds even though they’re not the exact same thing.)

But it’s our mindset about this stuff and how we approach it that actually does that. So, anyone can go from employee to business owner. It’s not a bad thing one way or another, but it is a different mindset. You need to be prepared for that.

Failing forward. I love what you said. That’s what it is. Don’t be afraid to go out there and start.

And as someone who has this vast amount of business experience in life, I think this is a good opportunity to ask this. What is your advice maybe to someone that is coming through FDN, they were in the employee mindset forever? They want to start a business, but they’re a little scared. What would your advice to them be?

Start a Booming Business After FDN Graduation

[00:29:44] Christa Lyons: You have to get started. You do. You just have to get going.

To be honest, my first client was my family, couple family members, couple friends, and my husband. I was like, okay, you guys are going to go through all this. I’m not going to charge you. You pay for the labs. Because I wanted the experience.

When I graduated, there was a part of me that was like, you know what? I’m still not sure. I’ve done the labs on myself, but I’m still not sure. I mean, after the practicals, you feel like you’ve had three clients, so you could definitely dive in with a client.

Actually, I did have my first client when I graduated, but I was also working with my husband and a couple friends. I feel like I eased into it, but you got to start. You definitely have to start.

I was thinking back to what you said about Ryan Monahan in the Quick and Nerdys. I jumped into the AFDNP group when I graduated and I was like, oh my gosh. Now I’ve graduated, I’ve done all this, and they’re talking about stuff, I don’t even know what they’re talking about.

But I stuck with it, and I was like, I am not going to quit. I’ve done all this, I’ve gotten this far, and now I use it as a tremendous resource.

Once I started working with clients, I was like, oh, okay. I don’t have to know everything that they know. I just have to know what I’ve learned so far. That’s all I need to get started.

A Booming Business: Continued Education is Advantageous

[00:31:02] Detective Ev: I think this is a great message for people. I almost wish they had a little thing with AFDNP when you’re signing up. You know how that you can have those questions in a Facebook group that you have to like, I agree to do this. I agree not to be spitting profanity or whatever.

I wish one of those agreements was, I understand that to even have joined this group, I know more than enough to have a successful FDN practice.

But we also value, as FDNs, constant learning. I think people need to be able to separate these principles. In a sense, it was the unwillingness of certain health professionals to engage in that continued learning, whether it’s because they just are so busy because these doctors have a heavy load, so I don’t want to make it seem like they’re doing this on purpose, whether it was just that or sheer negligence, that led to us being stuck with our health issues.

I mean, I had a nutritionist, Christa, this was all of seven years ago, that was shocked when I said, dairy and acne are linked together. She was very kind, thankfully. She actually went and looked it up. She looked at the studies and said, okay, you’re right. That is about as good as you’re going to get in that world.

Most of them would just kind of reject that and say, what do you know kid? What are you talking about dairy and acne are linked? I’m the nutritionist. I know better. She was so humble and so open minded that she was willing to listen to me and actually research it. That isn’t normally what this is.

Obligation to Learn Until We Figure It All Out

So, the reason there is continued education at FDN is because as good as this system is, it’s not perfect. If it was perfect, everyone in this world would know about it. No one would have health issues. So, if it is not perfect, it means by definition we are still obligated to learn.

I said this seven years ago, it is the responsibility, in my opinion, of any health professional, whether a Western Medicine MD, an acupuncturist, or an FDN, until we figure out (I think we actually kind of can figure this out as humans. Maybe I’m a little optimistic, but I think it’s possible.), until we figure out how to maintain perfect health in the human body for as long as we are on this earth, we have something to learn.

So, humble ourselves, keep learning. But also know that as an FDN you could still help 98%, 99% of the population immediately.

[00:33:00] Christa Lyons: Totally. And once you dive into the health world, like, I mean, I read nonfiction health books for fun. You’re just continually learning. No two bodies are the same. So, I think when you dive into that and you’re learning all this stuff, you still do.

You probably know 90% more than the average person out there just because you’ve dived in. There’s so much to know. There’s so much to learn. The human body is complex, but the human body is simple.

There Are Not Enough FDNs

[00:33:35] Detective Ev: It’s amazing to me. When I was doing that course enrollment side for a while, Christa, they were serious and I’m not being mean. They thought maybe there’s too many FDNs out there doing this work or whatever. I’m like, why don’t you go to your local CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, someplace that has a pharmacy and just watch the line for an hour.

I’m not saying that we do this in a place of judgment saying, oh my God, look at what they have wrong with them. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying as long as those people are standing in line, you can kind of see when someone’s a little sickly. You don’t really even always need to see it to know that they could use help. I mean, too many FDNs? What? There is a shortage. It’s the exact opposite.

There are plenty of people to help and they have no idea. They don’t even know this exists. That’s why I’m blessed to be able to do the podcast cause I believe this is one of the main things nowadays that is actually bringing people into our world. It’s these stories. You know, maybe someone searching for something, and they click this on Google. They don’t even know, they’re like functional medicine. What is that? Then they listen to this, and they’re inspired to go out and help others.

Now speaking of actually helping others, how have you ended up niching down? Is there a certain type of client that you serve, someone that you like to help the most? How has your business been working like that?

A Booming Business: Christa’s Ideal Client

[00:34:39] Christa Lyons: It’s interesting. You think about a niche and sometimes this happens. You come up with a client that’s yourself, basically. Like, I work with someone who’s just like me, similar to me. I’m not going to say my age, but I just turned a good healthy milestone at midlife.

I just turned 50 and so I’m dealing with perimenopause. I’m dealing with hot flashes. I’m dealing with my kids who are now growing and going off to college. You know, I’m dealing with some of the same things that my clients are dealing with.

I naturally became attracted to and probably attracted to me people that were similar to me. My clients have much different health issues that we’re dealing with, but I can relate to them on a woman-to-woman basis at this age.

[00:35:32] Detective Ev: It’s such an important message that you’re sharing with them too. I feel like so many of them probably laid up when they hear, I’m sure your message is something along the lines of like, hey, just because you’re this age doesn’t mean that you have to feel like crap. We’re not supposed to be capping out here.

I’ll be honest, it’s the only time I’ve ever heard it. But we had a doctor, naturopathic doctor, on named Aumatma Simmons. She had done some research and came across literature showing that there were these tribes. The women in the tribes were almost 60 years old and giving birth to healthy children.

Regressing Health-wise as a Society

Now, I’m not saying go try that. I’m saying, is that what we’re supposed to be doing? We laugh because it’s so unrealistic, we think in today’s world. But that’s how far we have pushed ourselves away from what the actual truth is that we laugh, oh, that can’t even happen.

We call 40 the cutoff age. Yet, possibly 20 years later this could be happening with people who have much less technology than us. We’d think that they are the disadvantaged ones, and yet, ironically it is us because we’ve been sold this false narrative. Oh, this is how you’re supposed to feel. It’s like, I don’t buy that at all.

[00:36:40] Christa Lyons: Well, look at the girls who are getting their periods at age 12. It’s just so early. And yes, we’ve done it to ourselves. We’ve done it to ourselves for sure. I mean, I’m not saying that girl has done it to herself. I’m just saying as a society and as our food manufacturers. I could talk about food manufacturers till the cows come home.

We have done it as a society, and so therefore our bodies are not ready to carry children probably beyond even 45 or 50. But in those regions, for sure, because they’ve taken much better care of their body.

[00:37:15] Detective Ev: It’s an interesting state of the world because our perceived progression, and it is progression in certain ways, has actually become our regression. I can’t argue that it’s complete regression because the fact that you and I can even be talking right now on this podcast and sharing this information, well, that’s progress. That’s cool.

We’re Not Supposed to Feel Like Crap

Yet, if I stay on this until 11:00 PM tonight, staring at the blue light, that, we know, is terrible for me. It’s actually associated with certain cancers, namely prostate and breast cancer. I think it’s associated with a lot more, but I don’t have the science to back that up yet. But the science already shows that it’s associated with those things.

It’s amazing when we look at it like this. So, do we take it away? Do I not want to be able to talk to Christa and do this podcast? I don’t think so.

I feel like we will learn to balance this in a healthy way, but first it starts with enlightening people to the idea that we’re not supposed to feel like crap. And yes, you can have your cake, but we can’t be eating it all the time. That’s really what this is. I use the phone; I use the computer. There’s certain things that we have to learn to moderate to the degree that we’re able, because everyone has different bodies.

You know, I’m amazed by what some of these high-level athletes or politicians can do. That would kill me, I feel like, the stress on their body with the modern world. We got these basketball players starting the game at 11:00 PM. That ain’t going to work for Evan Transue with what I’ve dealt with.

Mine might have to be a little less than them and for someone else, it might even have to be less than me. We just got to learn to balance and moderate it in today’s world, and I think we’ll be okay.

A Booming Business: The FDN D.R.E.S.S. Protocol

But it starts with these messages and letting people know that yes, at 25 years old, you shouldn’t be losing your period. And no, it’s not a good thing because I’ve heard that as well. They’re like, well, I don’t have to deal with the symptoms anymore.

My hand goes to my face. It’s like, when your palm meets face. I’m like, You’re 25. We should not be celebrating a missing period because you don’t have to deal with the symptoms anymore. I’m like, what about if you want kids later or something like that. It’s a whole paradigm shift that we need, I think.

I love that you’re providing that to maybe more middle-aged people that think that this is the end of their life. I think you got decades left of healthy living and enjoying this world.

[00:39:17] Christa Lyons: You know, every time I get a new client, of course I’m excited because I’m really looking forward to working with them on their health journey. But I almost want to cry too. I think, I feel bad for them that they have suffered with these things usually for so long.

Oftentimes, one of the best things about the FDN program is that sure, we learn a lot of science and we learn all about the labs, but it still comes down to the D.R.E.S.S. protocol: the diet, rest, exercise, and stress reduction. We can make so many strides with that.

A Booming Business: Looking at the Whole Big Picture

I tell clients all the time, Sure, we can give you this supplement to support X, Y, or Z, but not long term. I want you to be working on the diet part, removing your food sensitivities, and reducing the dairy and the gluten if they’re sensitive to those, or if their gut is a mess.

I love looking at the whole big picture and how everything is so intertwined. Yet, it can all be fixed if you take out that broccoli, because broccoli came back on your food sensitivity. It can’t all be fixed, but it’s a huge part of it.

[00:40:26] Detective Ev: What’s the main way that you’re attracting these clients? Do you use social media? Is it other forms of stuff? Cause I know we’ve had people that are speaking again, like there’s a lot of things. I mean, the world’s pretty much open, at least in the United States. You can kind of go out and do these speaking engagements and get people like that.

How are you attracting these people that need this work?

[00:40:43] Christa Lyons: Some of my clients have come through referrals. All of the people who have referred, I’ve met at networking groups. Over the last five or six years, I have done a lot of networking. I’m still in a couple networking groups currently. I am out there in that regard.

I do social media, but I have a love-hate relationship with social media. So, I took the summer off from really posting. But I’m not really finding my clients that way. I’m finding my clients through referrals, networking, and human relationships.

A Booming Business: Identify Your Strength and Develop It

[00:41:17] Detective Ev: What a concept.

The referral side is something, I think, any FDN that does this, even moderately if you do it for a year, it’s going to happen. That’s one of the coolest things. A lot of FDNs that have been here for 5, 6, 7 years, their entire practice is waitlisted sometimes where it’s just all referrals coming through. There’s a wait list.

I’m not saying you should ever stop marketing; I think that’s probably a bad idea. But it’s just amazing that they’re getting these clients. Oh, well you worked with so and so and I heard how much you helped them, so now I want to work with you. I think that’s something everyone’s going to experience universally.

The reason I asked you is because there’s different ways that we can do this. There are FDNs that exclusively use social media and that’s how they get clients. I think it’s really identifying your unique strengths and what you’re able to do.

I mean, you have an incredibly welcoming and pleasing personality. Obviously, we met at the Biohacking Congress. I mean, you just get people. We were trying to take a break for a second and you weren’t even working. You just helped us out immediately and are talking to people. So, you guys, it’s self-awareness.

If you have that ability, go out and do that. If you’re more, you know, introverted and kind of a little shy, that’s okay too. Then use social media to your advantage because that can be a great place to find people and do this stuff. I think we should always engage in personal development and try to make our personalities more inviting and stuff. There’s different ways to approach this and that’s why I ask those questions.

A Booming Business: Clients Trying to Push Through Life

For some people it’s a completely different answer and they’re having just as much success with this same work. The system works. You just got to work it in a way that is something that resonates with you.

One of the other things I wanted to ask about your particular clients, especially if some of them are not at a diagnosis type level yet, what are some common themes that you’re seeing on the labs? Are they also in the exhaustive phase? Are you getting people in the compensatory phase? Are there any common patterns you’re seeing?

[00:43:02] Christa Lyons: A lot of my clients are coming to me in the exhaustive phase, yes. They’re busy professionals. They are entrepreneurs, they’re running their own businesses. They have kids. They are in their forties. So, there’s a lot of things that they are just pushing through basically.

Oftentimes we do. The daily schedule, you get through the daily schedule without realizing, I haven’t even taken a minute to breathe. Or I just want to take a shower, something for yourself, let alone 10 minutes to sit and read a book or do a couple stretching exercises.

I’m finding that most people that come to me are exhausted, literally, and their tests are showing it. I’m also finding a lot on the GI MAP too. A lot of people do have imbalance between the good bacteria and the bad bacteria.

I’m finding a lot of people are having trouble digesting protein, which, if you are eating a lot of protein, but you’re not digesting it well, it’s sitting and putrefying in your system and your body’s not able to use it. That’s been common.

And the liver, so the liver congestion. How’s that for a few things?

A Booming Business: Teach Clients to Balance Their Lives

[00:44:17] Detective Ev: That’s one of my favorite questions to ask, especially when the person, I can tell they really do have a niche and they have a certain base that they serve. I just love to know if there’s any patterns with it. And there’s always overlapping stuff in the world of FDN. I mean, there’s very rarely a client that we take on that’s going to have a healthy gut. That’s not really typical in our line of work.

But there’s other things that come up and I’m interested to find that, wow, a lot of these people are in the exhaustive phase, and yet they’re still going. I think, moms and business owners, and then a combination of both, that’s some of the most strong-willed people in the world. You know, they’re going to just keep pushing no matter what. It’s almost unbelievable that they can do it.

But that’s the other side of it. The fact that they think they just need to keep pushing through it. It’s like, no, you can actually really get a lot done and still feel great. I’m still always learning to balance out myself especially during the school year, I get a little crazy with things. I mean, even just this week it’s kind of starting again. But I’ve learned to balance that a little better.

Like in the summer when I have an ability to just kind of do nothing. I’m like, Dude, you don’t need to do something every single second of every day.

A Booming Business: Know Yourself & Adjust Accordingly

I think a lot of this comes from comparison too. Because we’re on social media, we think we need to be doing more, striving for more. Maybe there’s a time and place for some healthy competition, but at the end of the day, I think you’re a hamster on a wheel.

You’re never going to actually get to the destination. The destination is just going to keep moving farther and farther away because you’re going to get worse and worse. We need to recognize that there’s a virtue in just doing the best that you can. For some people, I know them, it’s about four hours a day is what they can do. So, figure out how to make the best out of that four focused hours and then do what you got to do the rest of the time.

I also know people that can do the 12 hours a day and they’re just being lazy, you know. Like they could do phenomenal things and have these huge goals. I know that they could be fine doing that cause they’re super healthy, but they choose not to. Maybe that is not a great thing to be doing either, you know?

It’s just knowing yourself. I feel like self-awareness has come up a few times on this podcast, or at least the concept of it has, and then adjusting accordingly.

Where to Find Christa Lyons

Christa, where can these people find you? If they are listening today and they resonate with the type of client that you take on, they’re like, wow, that’s kind of me. I’d love to work with her.

[00:46:21] Christa Lyons: My website is www.ahealthyoption.com. There’s a link at the top that says, Book a call. It’s a free strategy call. We can talk about where you’re at, where you’d like to be, and some steps to start getting you there. Then I also have a freebie. I think you have a link to the freebie, Three Simple Ways to Boost Your Metabolism.

Facebook is at christalyons31.

[00:46:41] Detective Ev: A hundred percent. Everything will be in the show notes. I just like to hear it verbally too. I feel like I’m actually bad at clicking on the show notes when I listen to podcasts. I know, as a host, I’m terrible at it. But if I hear it, I’ll go type it in really quick. So, I always like to know.

Then just to be clear, one thing, because it’s amazing that people get a little confused with this. Just because that’s the normal client that you take on, you would still help someone that might not be perfectly fit into that mold, right? Because FDNs don’t treat anything specifically. We help everything. So, you would help someone that’s not perfectly in that mold?

[00:47:08] Christa Lyons: Always.

[00:47:11] Christa Lyons: Going back and just saying one other thing to what you were saying, probably two conversations ago. You know, we meet people where they are. Not everybody, like you said, has four hours in the day versus 12 hours in the day. You know, some people have five minutes in the day. We meet people where they are.

The Health Detective Podcast Signature Question

But the system works.

[00:47:32] Detective Ev: My final question for you, which you’ve listened, so you probably already know what it is. Not a trick question, but I’m curious what you have to say.

The signature question on the Health Detective Podcast is, if I could give you, in this case, a magic wand and you could wave it and get every single person in this world to do one thing for their health, whether that’s literally do one thing, or maybe it’s stop doing one thing, either or, what is the one thing that Christa would get them to do?

Christa Lyons: Read ingredient labels.

Detective Ev: All right, my friends. That’ll do it for today’s episode with Christa Lyons. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and kind of the switch up that it took. I think, again, there was a lot of people out there today that are coming into our work, maybe not with the craziest of health stories, but they were health coaches. They need additional tools so that they can increase their income and serve their client base at a better level.

Conclusion

What I also think is cool is the fact that it shows you do not need or require a crazy health story for this to work. As amazing as these stories are, and I love getting to interview these people and share these stories, the one limiting belief that it can create is that I must need a crazy health story to go be a successful FDN.

Well, clearly that was not the case for Christa Lyons and there’s many other people out there that this applies to. But they don’t necessarily end up on the show just because we typically interview one type of person. I’m going to go out of my way to make sure we have that more diverse group that you guys can see this system works if you work it. I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but that’s just the reality of the situation.

If you guys like this information that we’re sharing, please consider leaving us a five-star review on Apple and or Spotify. If you would do that, we’d love you even more than we already do.

I’m looking forward to talking to you guys again soon. I’ll be chatting with my friend Renee Bergman. She was on many, many moons ago. We talked about the Enneagram. So, the first 20 minutes is us basically analyzing our findings from the last time.

I’m looking forward to talking you guys then. Until then, take care.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

If you’d like to hire a coach, go to fdnthrive.com.

For a free Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.

Whether you’re a new or experienced home chef, the process of learning how to cook a whole chicken may seem like a daunting task fraught with potential blunders (or a dry, overcooked bird). If you often reach for chicken breasts or thighs at the grocery store because an entire chicken is too intimidating, we’d like to tempt you into trying a new skill: cooking a whole chicken. It’s easier than you might expect, economical, and there are so many ways you can use the leftovers!

In this guide, along with a step-by-step video, you’ll learn how to cook a whole chicken and what you can do with it all to reduce food waste. 

Why Roast or Cook a Whole Chicken?

Image: iStock

Chicken is an incredibly popular animal protein – and the demand is growing globally. In 2000, there were 14.38 billion chickens across the globe. In 2019, that number rose to 25.9 billion and chicken sales reached $192.3 billion.

Chicken breasts are one of the most beloved cuts, accounting for 57% of chicken sales in 2020 in the United States. During the 2021 Super Bowl, Americans chowed down on an astounding 1.42 billion chicken wings. But when you purchase a 12-pack of chicken wings or a couple of chicken legs, what happens to the rest of the bird? Answer: it goes into other processed foods like nuggets and hot dogs.

We aren’t eating whole chickens anymore. In 1962, whole chickens accounted for 83% of sales. In 2014, only 11% of us were still buying whole birds. 

Sure, roasting a whole chicken can take additional time and skill. But the benefits are many!

A whole chicken is more economical

Chicken breasts are the most popular cuts, but they’re also the most expensive! Chicken costs vary around the world, but the price per pound is typically cheaper for an entire chicken than a package of individual chicken parts. If you’re looking to save on your food costs, a whole chicken is the way to go.

A whole chicken is versatile and great for meal prep

There are so many ways to use a whole chicken (get the full scoop down below!). Roast a whole chicken to use throughout the week in your meals. 

A whole chicken leads to less food waste and packaging waste

When you cook a whole chicken, you can not only use the meat but also save the bones for broth. And if you’re trying to cut down on packaging waste, skipping the styrofoam or plastic trays and opting for a whole bird helps. 

A whole chicken can improve your culinary skills

Learning how to cook a whole chicken is a next-level culinary skill and one you’ll take great pride in once you learn how to do it. Roasting a chicken can build your kitchen confidence, and help you discover your inner recipe developer by adding your own seasoning blends and culinary creativity. 

If you really want to challenge yourself, you can also explore cutting up a whole chicken yourself if you want to use certain parts right away and freeze the rest for later.

You’re using the whole bird, not just its component parts

A whole chicken can make people squeamish because yes, it looks like a chicken. When we break chickens down into their component parts, it can remove us from their origins and create a sense of complacency (especially if we don’t like to think about how that chicken came to be at the grocery store or on our plates). 

Cultures around the world honour the entire animal by using all of it in their cooking. In North America especially, we tend to view certain parts of the chicken, like the breast, leg, thigh or wing, as desirable, while others are erroneously seen as ‘gross’ – such as the organ meats. 

In fact, many of the chicken parts that are considered distasteful, like the liver and heart, are incredibly rich in nutrition. Many whole chickens come with the liver, heart, neck and giblets tucked inside that you can use.

*Tip: You can save the heart and liver for pate, or pulse them and add to recipes along with ground meat (burgers, meatballs, etc.). Necks and giblets are great for broth.

A whole bird helps us recognize and appreciate the entire bird, and be grateful for the nutrition it provides. 

---

culinary nutrition Benefits of Chicken

Chicken is rich in: 

• Protein, which is an important macronutrient for muscle growth, healing and repair, immune health, energy levels, blood sugar balance, and enzyme and hormone production
• B vitamins for energy and stress support, particularly B3, B6 and B12
• Essential fats, including anti-inflammatory omega 3s
• Selenium, an antioxidant that also helps with the thyroid
• Heme iron for energy levels and red blood cell production
• Choline, which supports the brain and nervous system

Chicken is also grain-free and is in line with a number of popular diets including Paleo, AIP and keto.

Dark Meat Vs White Meat

For decades, nutrition experts recommended skinless white meat because it was considered ‘healthier’ than dark meat due to its lower fat content. This lines up, of course, with the general sentiment throughout most of the 20th century that fat is a ‘bad’ food. Now, we know that fat isn’t to be feared.

Dark meat is rich in the vitamins and minerals mentioned above, and recent research shows that dark meat doesn’t elevate cardiovascular disease risk. One study discovered that in women with high cholesterol, taurine – an amino acid in dark meat – is protective, and those with greater taurine levels were 60% less likely to develop or die of cardiovascular disease.  

What Type of Chicken Should I Get?

At the Academy of Culinary Nutrition, we advocate for plant-rich diets and quality matters when choosing animal products. We opt for purchasing meat from farmers that take animal welfare, human health and environmental sustainability into account. 

Whenever possible, we like chickens that are:

• grass fed
• organic
• free range
• pasture raised
• non-GMO
• raised with no added hormones or antibiotics

Evidence indicates that the way chickens are raised – particularly organic and grass-fed practices – can lead to chickens with a higher nutrient value and lower amounts of harmful, antibiotic resistant bacteria and is more beneficial to animal welfare. 

Confused about meat labels? Check out this guide to what all those terms on animal products mean. 

---

Best Cookware for Roasting a Whole Chicken

Safe, healthy cookware is important if you’d like to cook a whole chicken. There are a few different options you can use, including:

• a stainless steel roasting pan
• a sheet pan
• cast iron
• a glass baking dish
• an Instant Pot (then crisp it up in the oven)

No matter which type of cookware you choose, ensure that you use something large so your chicken can cook evenly (and gives you room to add some extra veggies). 

---

Do you like the idea of whole food, from-scratch cooking, but think it’s impossible to achieve with a busy life? The Culinary Nutrition Expert Program can help you build your kitchen confidence and learn to make recipes that support your health, your family’s health or the health of your clients. 

---

 

 

Seasoning Ideas

Chicken has a naturally neutral flavour, making it practically a blank canvas when it comes to seasoning. Any of your favourite seasoning blends, marinades, sauces, or fresh herbs, will work. The key to seasoning your whole chicken is adding your herbs and spices underneath the chicken skin.

Some of our faves to get you started:

• Garlic, rosemary, thyme and lemon
• Turmeric, ginger, cumin and coriander
• Salt and pepper
• Parsley, basil, oregano, lemon and salt
• Smoked paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder and salt
• Ginger, gluten-free tamari, sesame oil, lemon, sea salt
• Sage, marjoram, oregano and thyme

Another fantastic way to flavour chicken is to use a brine, which helps to keep it moist.

low Waste Tips: How to Use Up All That Chicken

You’ve cooked a whole bird – now what? There are endless possibilities for what you can do with the meat.

When the chicken is out of the oven and has rested for a bit, you can certainly slice it and serve alongside your favourite side dish for a tasty family roast dinner. Otherwise, you can chop or shred the meat to add to:

• Soups
• Stews
• Chicken pot pie
• Salads
• Sandwiches
• Wraps
• Tacos or enchiladas
• Stir-fries
• Pasta
• Nachos
• Pizza 
• Casseroles
• Lasagna
• Curries
• Fried rice

Once you’ve finished off the meat, pop your carcass into a large pot, slow cooker or Instant Pot and make chicken broth. Learn the ins and outs of making bone broth here. 

---

how to cook a whole chicken

Our global team of Culinary Nutrition Experts is jam-packed with talent. We asked Amy Stoddart, a trained chef, to show us all how to cook a whole chicken simply. You won’t believe how easy it is to cook a no-fuss, tender chicken that everyone can enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlxMjYpsWVk

Print

You can do this. Give cooking a whole chicken a try!

I recently attended Expo East in Philadelphia, USA. It’s the largest natural foods and product expo on the east coast of America. Each year this show provides at least three major opportunities. First, an opportunity for us to see our favorite healthy brands, to say hi, and see if they have any new products out. Second, to meet new companies that are showcasing their foods or products. Lastly, to meet the people in the food industry, my friends and colleagues, and the amazing people behind the natural health industry. Needless to say, I live for these events and they are all my happy place.

At each event, I’m on the hunt for new and existing products that add to our life for the better. There were 1,167 exhibitors showcasing their products at Expo East this year, and over 29,000 people were in attendance. 
If you want to change your life these products will help you do it. Below I am going to share my Expo East experience which also includes my Top 44 picks from the show. 

Liana’s Top 44 Picks:

1. Good Food For Good

They are known for their epic ketchup and sauces. The entire sauce line especially the butter chicken is epic, but the ketchup is what really stood out to me. Why? Because it’s organic and sweetened with dates. Most organic ketchup is sweetened with agave or cane sugar. I highly recommend upgrading your ketchup!

Learn more about Good Food For Good here: GoodFoodForGood.com

2. Dream Pops

Their products have a coconut milk base and are sweetened with only coconut sugar. If you are looking for a dessert upgrade that you could enjoy daily- dream pops are it!” Not all because some have cane sugar now. Say how my favorite is the berry ice cream bites and the cookie dough ice cream bites. 

Learn more about Dream Pops here: DreamPops.com

3. Stokes Fire Starters

Looking for all-natural fire starters? Get them here! Made with only three ingredients. The brand’s values are to burn for longer, be easy to light, and be healthy for you and the environment. Also, Stokes founder, Adam Liszewski, is only 22 years old and he started the brand in high school – how inspiring! 

Learn more about Stokes Fire Starters here: StokesFireStarters.com

4. Primal Kitchen

They create amazing dressings, marinades, mayos, and any kind of sauce you can think of. These sauces are made with clean and simple ingredients. The newest product they were featuring is their squeezable mayo which included mayo, chipotle mayo, and buffalo mayo. I am looking forward to trying these products out!

Learn more about Primal Kitchen here: PrimalKitchen.com

5. CHi Foods

CHi Foods makes plant-based ground pork! I love that they are using the ancient superfood Sacha Inchi which I call the new “peanuts,” however they are actually a seed, not a nut! Sacha Inchi is such a versatile seed. The benefits of Sacha Inchi include improving cholesterol levels, aiding in weight loss, improve gut health, and they are far more sustainable to grow than nuts. It is divine and the cleanest plant-based “meat” I have seen on the market yet. CHi is available in 4 flavors including, CHi-Rizo, Italian Herb, Maple Sage, and Original.

Learn more about CHi Foods here: ChiFoods.us

6. Food Earth

I discovered Food Earth last year at Expo East, woo! They have ready-made plant-based meals. They are nutrient-dense and delicious! These shelf-stable, organic, pre-packaged meals are amazing for busy days. They are great for life on the go. I have even traveled with them in my carry-on luggage. They have many flavors such as eggplant curry, chickpea curry, split lentil curry, vegetable biryani, and more! I know some of you will say, eating from a microwave is not good, and I agree it is never ideal, however eating hotel food that is cooked with a microwave is worse than eating real food heated in a microwave. Sometimes we have to choose the lesser worst thing when it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle! You can also heat Food Earth on a stove which is what I do when I eat them. 

Learn more about Food Earth here: FoodEarth.com

7. Dr. Bronner’s

Dr. Bronners is one of the OG health brands. They are known for their amazing soap that has 18 uses in 1. And now they make chocolate now! They just launched their new Cool Peppermint Cream Chocolate Bar. This chocolate bar is divine! It is 70% cocoa, all vegan, sweetened with coconut sugar, and perfectly blended! There are lots of different flavors to choose from. Highly recommend!

Learn more about Dr. Bronner’s here: DrBronner.com

8. Remedy Organics

Remedy Organics is a line of 100% plant-based protein beverages using the finest superfoods, Ayurveda, botanical herbs, and probiotics. The drinks are delicious and packed with protein and yes, the drinks come in the large size shown here. I love the Matcha Fuel and Chocolate Keto flavors!

Learn more about Remedy Organics here: RemedyOrganics.com

9. Snow Days 

Snow Days are grain-free pizza bites! They are an amazing, organic upgrade to the traditional pizza bites we all know and love! The bites also come in four other delicious flavors, Buffalo Chicken, Cheese, Sausage, and Veggie. They are excellent to have in the freezer on days when you are super busy and working from home or at the office. HumanCo created Snow Days to help people relive the happiness and joy that snow days created for us during our school years. They are passionate about creating products that help people live healthier lives. Click this link and use the code LIANA10 for 10% offfor first customers. Give Snow Days a try you won’t regret it!

Learn more about Snow Days here: SnowDays.com

10. Sunbutter

SunButter comes from organic roasted sunflower seed butter and has a delicious flavor! SunButter is a much healthier option when compared to peanut butter and almond butter. It has less saturated fat, and more vitamin E, and is also high in zinc, phosphorus, and iron. It is so versatile! You can eat it with dried mangos, apples, or in recipes like Satay Noodles or Chocolate SunButter Cups. Yum! Their booth is always so cheery and vibrant.

Learn more about Sunbutter here: SunButter.com

11. Phresh Greens

Phresh Greens makes raw alkalizing superfoods. Their powder can go in almost anything like a green drink or juice, added to a salad, or smoothies! This powder is so helpful and convenient for getting your green drink in. It is so easy and convenient especially when traveling and on the go. It contains a variety of organic greens including broccoli sprouts, alfalfa grass and sprouts, barley grass, chlorella, kale powder, spirulina, spinach, and more! In my book, Cancer-Free with Food, I share how broccoli sprouts are the #1 anti-cancer food! This is the easiest way to alkalize your body and it’s non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan, free of pesticides or herbicides, and no preservatives.  New at Expo East I tried their greens gummies for the first time! They tasted great and are low in sugar, an epic way to get more greens into your kids’ diets. 

Learn more about Phresh Greens here: PHreshProducts.com

12. Pri Australian Manuka Honey

Pri Manuka sells manuka honey that is 100% sourced from New Zealand and Australia! Aside from jars of honey, they sell other products including chocolate and skincare made with honey. Manuka honey is special in that it’s antibacterial and bacteria resistant. It is great to use on skin for acne and cuts, but also just as great to eat! They also have new honey chocolates sweetened with nothing else but Manuka honey. They come in multiple flavors such as salted caramel, coffee, raspberry, mint, ginger, and orange. So delicious!

Learn more about Pri Manuka Honey here: ShopPri.com

13. Bragg Apple Cider

Bragg, a long-time favorite of mine, and the OG of Apple Cider Vinegar! Aside from Apple Cider Vinegar, Bragg also sells Nutritional Yeast, Olive Oil, and many other amazing, organic, natural products. Their newest products include pre-made apple cider vinegar drinks; a great source of prebiotics and probiotics. These on-the-go ACV drinks do not need to be diluted, you can grab them and go! They are already mixed. They also sell Apple Cider Vinegar capsules if you do not like the taste of apple cider vinegar. So worth it!

Learn more about Bragg here: Bragg.com

14. Suntein

Suntein makes a high-protein, functional plant-based protein flour out of sunflower seeds. Free of the top 8 allergens and made from 100 percent Sunflower kernels. The flour contains 9 essential amino acids and is highly nutrient-dense. They also make a texturized vegan protein that turns into an epic “meat” when soaked in water. 

Learn more about Suntein here: Suntein.us

15. Evolved Chocolate

Evolved Chocolate is gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and organic. Additionally, they have all sorts of flavors and kinds of chocolates; such as spreads or keto peanut butter cup. Epic upgrade for traditional chocolate bars! Their latest product is brownie batter cups, they are so delicious and taste just like brownie batter. An excellent way to curb your sweet tooth. 

Learn more about Evolved here: EatingEvolved.com

16. Milkadamia

Milkadamia is a dairy-free nut milk that comes from high-vibe macadamias grown on free-range trees in Australia! Their products are creamy and delicious. I have enjoyed their products for many years now. Be on the lookout for Milkadamia ice cream debuting in February 2023! It is next-level delicious, tasty and divine – wow

Learn more about Milkadamia here: Milkdamia.com

17. Strong Roots

Strong Roots was a new one for me! They are on a mission to provide plant-based positive food choices for everyone, now. Their marketing is amazing! It is “recycle the past, feed the future!” They provide lots of veggie options to elevate your meals. Strong Roots products are great to have in the freezer for busy days and they can be heated in an air fryer or stove top over the microwave. 

Learn more about Strong Roots here: StrongRoots.com

18. I Eat My Greens

Another new product alert! I Eat My Greens offers plant-powered soups. They are non-GMO, dairy-free, gluten-free, and nutrient dense. They have a variety of soups and they are so tasty! Great for a quick and easy meal that is high in key nutrients. 

Learn more about I Eat My Greens here: IEatmyGreens.com

19. Sovereign Silver

Sovereign Silver is an epic brand! They have been around for years and make a variety of products for healing that contain colloidal silver. They now have products with copper, too! When I was healing I used colloidal silver and I always recommend it to my patients. It’s great for cuts and scrapes too. Sovereign Silver is something everyone needs to keep in their house!

Learn more about Sovereign Silver here: SovereignSilver.com

20. Bon Appesweet

They have zero added sugar and zero sugar alcohol chocolates. Bon Appesweet sweetens their chocolates with dates. I rarely see chocolates sweetened with dates, so legit! They have a variety of chocolate bars to choose from. All are plant-based, vegan, non-GMO, and organic. 

Learn more about Bon Appesweet here: Bonappesweet.com

21. Midday Squares

 Midday Squares is the first functional chocolate bar I have seen. Think chocolate bar and protein bar mixed together. They are epic! Midday Squares are gluten-free, contain non-GMO chocolate, vegan dairy-free, soy free, and are a great choice for glycemic control. Highly recommend these squares to satisfy that chocolate craving and help get more protein in your diet!

Learn more about Midday Squares here: MiddaySquares.com

22. Pur Gum

Pur Gum is all about promoting healthier lifestyle choices by removing artificial sweeteners and flavors from gum! The gum is 100% sweetened with 100% xylitol which is one of the lowest natural sweeteners on the glycemic index. Pur is vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, and nut/peanut free. High-quality gum, yay!

Learn more about Pur Gum here: ThePurCompany.com

23. Siete

Siete is a company I have followed for a while now! They have grain-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, vegan, and non-GMO wraps available. They use simple ingredients like water, Cassava Flour, Tapioca Flour, Avocado Oil, Coconut Flour, Arrowroot Flour, Apple Cider Vinegar, Coconut Sugar, Sea Salt, and yeast, that’s it. Their chips are grain-free and made with simple ingredients as well! Great snacking options! At the show, I got to try their shortbread cookies and refried beans.

Learn more about Siete here: SieteFoods.com

24. Nourish Cold Press Juice

Nourish provides organic beverages that help connect the health of their body to the health of the planet. Nourish’s juices are high quality, cold-pressed, and certified USDA organic. In addition, the juices are gluten-free, contain no artificial flavors, and are not sweetened with cane sugar they are made with straight-up vegetables and fruits. These juices are epic and great for getting in your daily green drink!

Learn more about Nourish Juice here: NourishJuiceBar.com

25. Nuttzo

Nuttzo is a 7 nut and seed butter! There are different varieties and flavors of this epic butter. These butters are 100% organic, non-GMO, and made with only 2 grams of sugar. The sugar is coconut sugar might I add. These are great sources of protein and truly filling! They also now make a protein bar for quick energy on the go. 

Learn more about Nuttzo here: Nuttzo.com

26. Native Forest

I was excited to see organic jackfruit from Native Forest! Jackfruit has a meaty texture that makes an excellent meat replacement. It goes well in many plant-based dishes. Native Forest offers a variety of organic canned goods including coconut milk. Edwards & Sons carries the Native Forest brand and was at the show sharing Native Forest products.  

Learn more about Native Forest here: EdwardsandSons.com

27. Against the Grain

Against the Grain makes EPIC gluten-free pizza crust, bread, and more. They have recently become one of my favorites for gluten-free pizza. New for this year, they took the canola oil out of their products and replaced it with olive oil which is amazing! 

Learn more about Against the Grain here: AgainsttheGrainGourmet.com

28. Cosmic Bliss

Cosmic Bliss formerly known as Coconut Bliss has organic plant-based ice cream and their newest addition, organic, grass-fed dairy ice cream. Sweetened with coconut sugar, they are low glycemic and also gluten-free, with no weird ingredients. They are committed to sustainability, transparency, and to all diet preferences. Cosmic Bliss is so creamy and all of the flavors are decadent and satisfying.

Learn more about Cosmic Bliss here: CosmicBliss.com

29. Lesser Evil

Lesser Evil is a brand that has created amazing, organic & non-GMO upgrades for conventional popcorn, cheese puffs, and cookies! They use minimal ingredients that are all primarily plant-based. The newest product they were showcasing at the Expo is “Space Balls.” These were delicious and are available in a cinnamon flavor as well as a “cheese” flavor. If you love popcorn or cheese puffs, check out Lesser Evil! 

Learn more about Lesser Evil here: LesserEvil.com

30. Caulipower

Caulipower makes a variety of gluten-free products using cauliflower as the main ingredient as an alternative to wheat. Including pizzas, chicken nuggets, tortillas, and more. Caulipower has amazing products that are a great alternative to gluten. They also give you more nutrients in your meal than a lot of other gluten-free products since they are using cauliflower as the base. 

Learn more about Caulipower here: EatCaulipower.com

31. Beessential

A new brand I discovered and am very excited about! Beessential makes lotions, soaps, lip care, and more all from beeswax and honey and a few other natural ingredients like coconut oil. It is hard to find soaps that are made with quality natural ingredients and Beeessential is one of them!

Learn more about Beessential here: Beessential.com

32. Fabalish

I discovered Fabalish for the first time last month at the Plant-Based World Expo and I become hooked! They make AMAZING all organic plant-based and nut-free dips like queso all from chickpeas! They also make gluten-free and organic falafels from chickpeas and added veggies- they are delicious. I have never seen anything like it. This brand is amazing, a must-try if you like falafel!

Learn more about Fabalish here: Fabalish.com

33. Joolies Dates 

This product is amazing! Organic dates straight from California. Dates are a healthy and tasty natural sweetener. I love to use dates in place of refined sugar. Joolies is focused on bringing joy and excitement to snackers everywhere. Their dates are hand-picked and Joolies put sustainability at the forefront. These dates are worth it!

Learn more about Joolies here: Joolies.com

34. Frooze Balls 

Froozeballs are 100% plant-powered snacks that are both good for us and the planet. Frooze Balls are sweetened with dates and made with wholesome ingredients you recognize. They have a variety of flavors, including Peanut Butter & Jelly, Peanut Butter & Chocolate, and Blueberry Crumble to name a few. 

Learn more about Frooze Balls here: FroozeBalls.com

35. Big Picture Foods 

Big Picture Foods is an epic company focused on sustainability and regenerative farming. They use natural fermentation rather than pesticides. They harvest organic olives, peppers, capers, and more. Big Picture has a vision and I fully stand by its mission to change our food system. 

Learn more about Big Picture Food here: BigPictureFoods.com

36. Evive 

Evive makes pre-frozen smoothie packs that you can use to make a smoothie without a blender. So cool! Perfect for busy days on the go or for a daily smoothie to pack fruits, veggies, and superfoods into your diet. They use all organic ingredients and each bag has a variety of different fruits and vegetables. The texture and taste were incredible! 

Learn more about Evive here: EviveNutrition.com

37. Yumy Candy 

Yum Candy is a healthier, plant-based low-sugar candy, with only 3 g of sugar per bag! This candy is a great upgrade from traditional candy. It does not contain toxic ingredients such as refined sugar. I got to try all three gummy bear flavors and they were epic. I highly recommend if you’re looking for candy without the side of guilt or the buzz of refined sugar.

Learn more about Yumy Candy here: YumyBear.com

38. Cappello’s 

They create grain-free/gluten-free pizzas, pasta, and cookie doughs. They use simple ingredients (that you can pronounce) like almond flour, cage-free eggs, coconut milk and oil, cassava flour, arrowroot flour, organic maple syrup, psyllium husk, unfiltered apple cider vinegar, tapioca flour, honey, and sea salt. Capello’s has so many different pizza options, a variety of pasta, and several cookie dough flavors. They just came out with a new low-carb pizza and it was delicious! Great if you are following the keto diet. 

Learn more about Cappello’s here: Cappellos.com

39. Force Of Nature 

Force of Nature meats is epic! They sell ground beef, steaks, bison, and now even boar! They are a step above grass-fed, they raise 100% regenerative grass-fed beef, where their animals are truly pasture-raised and not fed any grains. This is even a step above Organic. They are living in their natural state and are the healthiest meat we could possibly consume. Force of Nature can be found in select groceries throughout the U.S. and online.

Learn more about Force of Nature here: ForceofNature.com

40. That’s It

That’s It is dedicated to making healthy snacks with simple and easy ingredients from plants. Their fruit bars are created with only two ingredients, that’s it! Their products are all non-GMO, vegan, kosher, paleo, whole 30 certified, gluten-free, and free from the top 12 food allergen groups. We got to try their new coffee energy bar. It was epic and a great snacking option!

Learn more about That’s It here: ThatsItFruit.com

41. Meatless Farm

Meatless Farm makes fresh and frozen plant-based “meat” products. This is one of the first plant-based meats I have tried and truly enjoyed. Their chicken nuggets taste just like chicken, they’re awesome! Meatless Farm is soy-free which is a huge upgrade as most plant-based meats contain soy. They are also gluten-free and made with all non-GMO ingredients. If you are looking for plant-based meat to add to your kitchen I highly recommend Meatless Farm, they have a wide variety of meats to choose from. 

Learn more about Meatless Farm here: MeatlessFarm.com

42. Oatly

Oatly makes dairy-free milk from oats! Oat milk can be very controversial however I believe it is still a major upgrade for dairy milk. Their soft serve is so epic! It is the first dairy-free soft serve I have tried that is creamy and has the perfect flavor. I don’t care what people say about oat milk, this soft serve is next level and it’s a major upgrade from conventional. If this was at McDonald’s instead of their soft serve people would be better off! 

Learn more about Oatly here: Oatly.com

43.  Manitoba Harvest

Manitoba Harvest is a company that makes products from hemp! They have a variety of products including hemp hearts, protein powders, protein bars, and more. Hemp is a complete source of plant-based protein and offers amazing benefits for the brain like healthy omega-3s! Manitoba products are all non-GMO and they are also a carbon-neutral company. 

Learn more about Manitoba Harvest here: MantiobaHarvest.com

44. Del Origen

Del Origen makes healthier versions of our favorite foods including cheese sticks, cheese breads, and more! They use gluten-free flour and all-natural ingredients. Originating in Colombia, Del Origen has become a popular brand internationally. Plus, their booth was so fun and vibrant!

Learn more about Origen here: DelOrigen.com

And that’s a wrap! What an epic time in Philly at Expo East! I always look forward to this show and can’t wait for 2023! 

I enjoyed Virginia’s first and only sake brewery last week – North American Sake Brewery! Sake is a historic beverage that remains to be one of the cleanest most curious drinks on the planet. The most important thing to know is that sake is made from rice. Sake is a traditional Japanese brew made by fermenting rice. Rice is also naturally gluten-free, making sake a healthier choice. Rice makes more than a side or part of a lunch or dinner, they can bring about such incredible aromas and flavor as a drink.

Sake is typically sipped and pairs wonderfully with all types of cuisine. North American Brewery has delicious Japanese food, beer, wine, and fun. You know everyone is there to have a good time because the sake culture is made for sharing! 

For dinner, I had the Veggie Love bowl it was very flavorful. They have other clean options on the menu too like the poke bowl, ahi tuna, and miso hummus. They incorporate some non-GMO ingredients. They do hand-make their dumplings, and we might see gluten-free ramen on the menu in the future too.

The dining room is a blend of American and Asian esthetics. The Patio is super cute and open too. Online ordering and curbside are both available.

Sake is best when freshly brewed and is always best when drank as soon as possible. From the North American Sake Brewery website, “It is Japan’s national beverage and is used during formal ceremonies, weddings, special events, and holidays. Sake is deeply tied to the seasons and the rice harvest with the brewing season starting in the winter to allow the tanks to become cold enough to make sake. While the exact origins of sake are unclear with records reaching back at least 2500 years, it is believed to begin in China with the start of rice cultivation. Japan is really where the brewing of sake became an art and koji methods were refined during the Nara Period (710-794). Over the next 500 years, sake was being brewed in Shinto Shrines and Buddhist temples originally to appease God, but by the sixteenth century, breweries began to be established for sake to be drunk by the masses. In the Edo Period (1603-1868) the techniques for sake began to change toward less sweet and lighter flavors. Sake continued to evolve as time progressed and was heavily influenced by the coming world wars. With rice being rationed the sake industry collapsed and many sake breweries were forced to blend with cheaply distilled alcohol and much richer sake became popular. This brings us to the modern period in which new classifications based on rice polish ratios gave birth to the ginjo boom of the 1970s. These new styles refined flavor and aroma as well as pushed toward more artisan sake.

Today, sake is experiencing an international resurgence with America being the highest importer of sake. New craft sake breweries in the US are popping up around the country while the general population is embracing this ancient and beautiful drink.

Take a flight with your friends and enjoy some sake and food pairings. Don’t forget the sake bombs!

Always skipping breakfast? Looking for a way to streamline your morning? These 5 on-the-go breakfast recipes are exactly what you need!

Breakfast is by far the most commonly skipped meal. Sometimes you just need to hit snooze a few more times than usual! On mornings like this, it can be so helpful to have an on-the-go breakfast recipe that you’ve either already prepped ahead of time, or can quickly make and run out the door with. 

Using the Foundational Five to Create On-The-Go Breakfast Recipes

In case you’re new to the NS Community and the Mindful Nutrition Method, the Foundational Five system is part of how we teach you to build balanced meals. It makes it easy for you to give your body the nourishment you need while having the flexibility to enjoy the foods you love without stressing about food.

The Foundational Five is made up of five elements of nutrition including Protein, Fat, Non-starchy Carbohydrates, Starchy & Sugary Carbohydrates, and the Flavor Factor (which brings vibrancy, deliciousness, and enjoyment to your meals). 

You can download our free guide that walks you through our Foundational Five system for creating balanced meals that you can use to meal prep or cook fresh this week!

5 On-The-Go Breakfast Recipes

Test out some of these Nutrition Stripped on-the-go favorites the next time you’re in need of a quick breakfast recipe.

1. Cinnamon Tahini Smoothie Packed with Protein

Smoothies are an awesome way to get all the nourishment you need first thing in the morning, in a compact, speedy way. You have the option to prep these ahead of time and quickly blend the morning of, or you can simply assemble and blend all at once. 

This particular smoothie is such a delicious way to combine the cool, refreshing feel of summer with the savory, comforting flavors of fall. The tahini adds a deliciously creamy mouthfeel while the cinnamon adds a surprisingly satisfying taste. 

2. Peach and Blackberry Yogurt Bowl

A lot of people are surprised when I recommend yogurt bowls as an on-the-go option, but hear me out. It may not be something you’re eating in the car during your morning commute, but you can certainly assemble it in less than 10-minutes and take it with you as you run out the door. 

The night prior, quickly grab your favorite food storage container and toss your yogurt of choice inside. Then the next morning as you’re heading out the door, grab the container, toss in your toppings, close the container and give it a shake. As soon as you get to your destination, you have a delicious, nourishing breakfast waiting for you!

I love this peach and blackberry yogurt bowl because the only work you have to do is chop a peach. Everything else just gets added with ease.

3. Veggie Egg Bake

Grab-and-go options need to be prepared quickly and easy to travel with. This veggie egg bake is just that! You can make it up to a month in advance and store it in the freezer, or two weeks in advance and keep it in the refrigerator. 

It’s a great way to get a protein-packed breakfast without having to scramble up some eggs when you’re rushing around in the morning!

4. Simple Mango Chia Pudding

Just like the egg bake above, this Simple Mango Chia Pudding is a great breakfast option to prep in advance for a busy week ahead. It’s great because you can prepare single servings, that way if you’re only busy on one or two mornings, you can prep the exact amount that you need. 

This chia pudding is so satiating due to the chia seeds! You can prep these in mason jars to make them super travel-friendly. 

5. Cherry Cardamom Bircher Muesli

If you’re not a fan of chia seed pudding or simply don’t enjoy the taste, muesli is a great alternative. It too can be prepped the night before in single-serving amounts, it just has a slightly different taste and texture. 

It’s made with all raw ingredients, which means less prep time in the kitchen. Plus, it’s packed with energizing starchy carbohydrates, and antioxidant-filled cherries. 

Tips For Making On-The-Go Breakfast Recipes

There are a few tips you should keep in mind that will help you out a bit when prepping these 5 on-the-go breakfast recipes. 

Invest in good quality storage containers 

Having quality storage containers can make all the difference when you’re frequently taking your breakfast on the go. It can ensure your prepped meals stay fresh longer, and prevent any leaking or spills while traveling. 

Get into a good planning groove 

Planning is such a key part of making busy mornings stress-free. Pick a day (as well as ideally one backup day) where you’ll take a look at your week ahead and plan out what you’ll need for meals. That way, you can determine how many on-the-go meals you’ll need, and can therefore prep and shop accordingly. 

FAQs About These On-The-Go Breakfast Recipes

Have a few questions? Check out these FAQs! 

What if I don’t like some of these ingredients?

The great part about all of these recipes is that they’re so versatile and flexible. Not a fan of mango? Totally fine! Swap it out for some raspberries or strawberries. Can’t stand asparagus? Feel free to leave it out! Don’t let a few ingredients stop you from enjoying the ease and convenience these recipes can give you. 

Do You Want to Experience More Balance with your Food Choices?

Then find your balanced eating type!

Take this 45-second free quiz to find out which balanced eating archetype you are, and what your unique type needs to maintain balance with the way you nourish yourself. That way, you can finally be free from food and diet obsession, maintain a balanced weight, and cultivate a positive relationship with food and your body. 

Take The Free Quiz Now

There are many places you can get certified as a Health Coach, and each has a slightly different curriculum and/or wellness philosophy. Be sure to read our recent blog post comparing several popular health certification programs here. 

But, regardless of where you choose to get certified, most programs are focused on personalized care and support to help people overcome their symptoms and live healthier lives. 

In some instances, a Health Coach will partner with a physician or medical team, and will be responsible for helping the patient follow through with a treatment plan. For example, they might use a strategy called motivational interviewing to dive into things such as: 

• What the patient’s home lifestyle is like
• What excites and frustrates the patient
• What are the patient’s coping mechanisms 
• What is the patient’s idea of optimal health 

Getting to know their patients on a deeper level allows a Health Coach to serve as a powerful guide throughout the healing journey. 

At Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN), we actually prepare students to go beyond traditional Health Coaching. Graduates of our functional health certification program are equipped to run their own online wellness businesses, without the need to partner with a physician! 

Similar to Health Coaching, we take a personalized approach at FDN, using custom diet & lifestyle protocols to help people improve their health. However, we also teach students how to run & analyze specific functional health tests to pinpoint underlying causes of their symptoms. 

Talk about a game changer. 🙌

Sounds pretty good right?  

So, let’s take a closer look at the difference between these two roles.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about an awesome cancer survivor.

We are talking to someone named Carmen Weir. She is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner, and she has a heck of a story. We are talking about cancer today. It is a part of Carmen’s story, and generally speaking, cancer is a little more serious than some of the things we discuss on this show.

Now, do not get me wrong because I’m not discrediting the things that I’ve been through or the things that many others have been through, but there’s a certain aspect of cancer that can’t be denied. It is the idea that one may pass away in the relatively near future if this is not addressed.

That is sometimes the case with other conditions that we bring on this show, but a lot of the times it’s more that the person suffers for decades and is still hanging in there. They’re suffering very long term as opposed to having this idea of, okay, I could actually die in a year or two if I don’t get this under control.

So, it is completely crappy in a different way when you are dealing with something like cancer. We take a different approach of it with that. We’re not always just going the 100% functional route. This person has a clock over their head to some degree. We don’t know exactly when it is, but we can kind of get a general idea.

An Open-minded Cancer Survivor

If we don’t do something in a certain timeframe, there is going to be a period in the future where that clock will run out, and it’s a lot sooner than most of us would like. That’s just what it is. I’m not trying to get too serious right from the get-go today, but I’m just saying what it is. That’s the fact of the matter.

Because of this, it’s important that we recognize all the sides and all the choices that the person decides to make. This is a serious thing, and we need to respect anyone who makes their own decisions with this or goes through this. Carmen Weir is such a wonderful example of someone who really used their head when dealing with cancer.

She took some functional approaches. She also took the Western approach when necessary. She said “yes” to some Western things and “no” to others. She did some functional things and did not do other functional things. She did what she thought was right, she kept a level head.

I can’t speak for this completely because I’m not someone who’s dealt with cancer thankfully. But I would imagine that people that are dealing with this, especially if you’re newly diagnosed, would greatly benefit from a podcast like this. So this might be something to share with a friend or family member. It might be something to share on your social media if you find that to be appropriate. I don’t know.

I think you’ll really like this one though. I want to read her bio and then we will get into this today.

Hysterectomy, Chemo, & Holistic Practices

Carmen came to FDN after several health crises. I should have specified this before. There’s a lot more than just cancer here, but that is going to be one of the main focuses of the show. I just don’t want to throw a curve ball here with the rest of this bio.

In April 2019, she was diagnosed with RA, otherwise known as rheumatoid arthritis. A follow up DEXA scan showed she also had severe osteoporosis. Given the option of low-dose chemo for the RA and drugs that didn’t truly build bone, she looked to other more holistic approaches and hired a famous functional medicine doctor. I’m not sure who it was, but she labels it as someone who was famous.

These two diagnoses were just the beginning for her though. Later in 2019, she was diagnosed with, yet another autoimmune disease known as Guttate psoriasis, and I had to actually look that one up admittedly. I’m familiar with psoriasis, of course, but I had never heard of the Guttate psoriasis. It seems like the main distinction there is that it is characterized by psoriasis patches that last extremely long periods of time and are very resistant even to Western medicine treatments like certain creams or whatever. It could be very hard to get the flare up down.

Then in March of 2020 (very bad time for this, if you guys remember what was happening in the beginning of March 2020), the big daddy of them all was revealed: Stage III endometrial cancer. Carmen chose a hybrid approach to the cancer, undergoing a radical hysterectomy and chemo alongside many holistic practices.

Using Cancer Experience to Help Others

It was during her cancer journey that she realized her passion and mission in life were to help other people find health outside of the Western medical model of sickness care. On New Year’s Eve of 2020 (what a great day for this), with a body clear of cancer and a heart set on becoming a difference maker, she signed up for the FDN course to set her intentions for life after cancer.

What you guys will appreciate in this episode, and it is an appreciation that will grow stronger and stronger the longer you listen, is the rock-solid mindset this woman developed. I mean, it’s badass, man. It’s something you can’t fake. I’m a huge believer in the self-help books, but I don’t necessarily believe you can just read your way to this type of mindset.

Because of what Carmen has dealt with, and because in many senses she has kind of stared the idea of death in the face, and she approached it in such a positive and incredibly wise way, you’re not stopping this woman. I mean, there’s nothing you can do to her at this point that I think would shake someone like this.

She has taken one of the worst things that could happen to someone and flipped it completely and just said, okay, I’m going to use this for power. I’m going to use this to help other people. I can’t commend her enough. Carmen, thank you so much for coming on this show and sharing your story. Without further ado, let’s get to today’s episode.

All right. Hey there, Carmen. Thanks so much for being here with us today.

[00:05:25] Carmen Weir: Well, thank you for having me. I’m really excited to tell my story and talk to you, Evan.

Analyzing Health History

[00:05:29] Detective Ev: Obviously, the audience just got to hear that bio. That is a heck of a lot of stuff, and I know that there’s more to dive into today. I was saying to you off air too, we get a lot of autoimmune stuff on here, a lot of chronic symptoms. Those are very severe and scary things. I mean, my family’s dealt with the autoimmune stuff directly. I’ve dealt with the autoimmune stuff directly.

But the cancer thing has a weight that comes with it that I don’t think is always there with certain autoimmune diseases. There’s such a threat of the person not being here with us if this progresses too fast. We’ll get into that for sure. I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself.

I want to start with today just when did the health symptoms even start for you? What was life like before that? What were you doing? When did you first notice that some health stuff was going on, Carmen?

[00:06:13] Carmen Weir: Well, I think that I’ve always eaten pretty healthy and always thought that I felt pretty good, but I think that something has always been off.

In 2018, I had a lot of feet problems. The bottom of my feet were really sore. I went to my regular doctor, who, the one that I had at that time was awesome. She said, I’m going to send you to a podiatrist. So, I went through a series of appointments with the podiatrist.

In Constant, Miserable Pain

I had just a fatty tumor on the bottom of my foot, and I had that removed. It wasn’t cancer or anything awful. After that got removed, that particular place on my foot felt better, but the ball of both feet were still sore. I kept going back and going back and going back. I said, why did the bottom of my feet still hurt?

I said, I can deal with the pain, but I don’t know what this is. I don’t know where this is going to leave me in 10 years, you know? I was worried about, what is this? So, I spent the summer and the fall of 2018 with very sore feet. Went through all of these appointments, went through the surgery.

Finally, my, again, regular doctor, I went back to her because the podiatrist was not telling me anything. She said, well, let’s just run some blood work here. She didn’t tell me what it was. So, we ran the blood work, and it was over the charts high for rheumatoid arthritis. Of course, I got referred to a rheumatologist.

I already knew that it was RA and was kind of prepping for that. I did in fact see the rheumatologist who said, yes, you have RA. By that time, it wasn’t just my feet, my whole body ached. It was a chore to get up. I was foggy brained. I needed a half an hour of a hot shower to get my body moving. Life was kind of miserable.

A Cancer Survivor: Going Gluten, Dairy, & Sugar Free

An online friend told me about a book called The Wahls Protocol. She said, you have to get this book. It’s a game changer. So, I got the book. The day that I went to the rheumatologist was the day that I cut out gluten and dairy and sugar.

I know this isn’t normal, I’ve been told this a hundred times. That’s not normal, Carmen. I don’t know who you are, but in five days I felt better.

[00:08:33] Detective Ev: You know what? I mean, if it validates you at all, and I swear to God I’m not just saying this. As someone who gets to talk to all these people all the time, maybe that’s just why, I get to interact with all these individuals. I have heard some very dramatic things where things turn around very quickly with that. I mean, we don’t want to tell our clients that, cause it might give them a false expectation. But I’ve heard this.

That’s actually amazing that it got you there. It’s even more amazing to me that you were lucky enough to have this friend who knew about The Wahls Protocol so early. Were they already into the functional side of things? Were they like, a “natural” person? How did they know about that?

[00:09:03] Carmen Weir: She was an online friend. She has MS.

Detective Ev: Oh, okay. There we go.

Carmen Weir: That’s what Dr. Wahls has, although her protocol works for all autoimmune. She knew that so she knew that it would help. Yeah, she was very holistic in her own health, but she was not a practitioner.

A Cancer Survivor: RA Plus Osteoporosis

[00:09:21] Detective Ev: Obviously with the bio having been said, it’s like, I’m thinking about how much stuff still was to come. My gosh, knowing that you already made some of these changes that can really be quite significant for people and then all this other stuff comes. That’s kind of crazy.

So, you felt better in five days, but obviously there were still multiple diagnoses to come. What happens after five days? Like, what does the next year look like for you?

[00:09:44] Carmen Weir: Well, and I did feel better. It wasn’t that I was completely cured or that everything was fine.

Then in the follow up with the rheumatologist, probably just normal protocol for them, I was sent to do a DEXA scan. I did that about a week after my initial consult with the rheumatologist. That showed that I had severe osteoporosis. So of course, I had another appointment with him.

He wanted to put me on methotrexate for the RA, and he wanted to put me on one of those terrible, quote/unquote “bone building drugs” that also have black labels on them. I was just not into that. I eventually, I saw him a few times during 2019 and fired him at the end of it, because he was very condescending.

In the meantime, in the fall of 2019, I got this terrible rash. They were little red bumps that were not really itchy, most of the time, and I didn’t know what it was. So of course, I was trying different holistic things, essential oils, aloe, and different things. It would not go away. I ended up going to my regular, my pcp (primary care physician). She referred me out to a dermatologist, who gave me some steroid cream.

A Cancer Survivor: Plus, Guttate Psoriasis

When you get this, it’s Guttate psoriasis, and when you get it, it sticks around for about four or five months. I mean, these things just don’t go away. It’s not like, oh, put this cream on for a week and it’s gone. I had tried so many things that wouldn’t make it go away, so I did do the steroid cream. They did eventually go away.

In that same timeframe, I had frozen shoulder. So, it was kind of a mess. But I had done a lot of different holistic things. One of the things that helped absolutely everything was my acupuncturist.

[00:11:41] Detective Ev: What is going through your head as this is all happening?

Because, in the beginning you stated, I’m trying to do what I can, I live a healthy enough life. And in a fairly short period of time, let’s be honest. I mean, we’re only talking about like a year or two here, more or less. You’re getting multiple things going on.

So, was there any thought process in your head of like, this didn’t make sense? Or did you just think, hey, maybe this is something that happens to some people.

I know that you listen to this show, so you kind of know I’m fascinated with figuring out what was going through people’s minds at that time. So, what were you thinking?

[00:12:13] Carmen Weir: Well, I was pissed off. Just let’s be honest about it.

A Cancer Survivor: Tough, Negative Emotions

I had changed so many things. I was working with a functional doctor, and we had done labs. We had done different protocols to fix my gut, fix my hormones, and fix this and fix that. I was just baffled that I was doing so many good things and I had made so many different things different in my life that this was still going on.

I thought maybe this is like the detox. We’ve stirred up some different things and they’re all kind of getting themselves out and manifesting in those ways. But mostly, I was just kind of mad.

At the same time, I wasn’t in a very good marriage. Now that I know what I know, looking back, I can say that emotions and where we’re at in our head have a huge play on how healthy we are physically. I didn’t really realize that at the time how much that would’ve affected what was going on. But I think that did have a large effect.

You know, my attitude and just not understanding, as well, that I thought I eliminated gluten, but I probably didn’t because it’s so insidious in so many different things. Probably the cream I was putting on my face every night was inundating me with some gluten. The labs that I’ve run since do show that I’m pretty gluten sensitive. So, I think there were a lot of underlying things that I wasn’t aware of.

Knowing that the work that I had done with this functional MD, I could see where there were pitfalls and I was working on those things, but I wasn’t completely putting it all together the way that I can do now.

A Cancer Survivor: Negative Emotions’ Effects

[00:14:13] Detective Ev: I appreciate that you brought up the anger thing. I cannot remember who it was, but there was only one other person throughout all these episodes, believe it or not, that admitted to that anger aspect.

I think that is something a lot of people feel. But then when we’re telling the stories, I don’t think that they’re lying, but we don’t even recognize that. It’s not always the socially appropriate thing. It’s like, oh, I was sad, and I was upset. Well, it’s like, of course, but people forget how frustrated. I was angry too.

I totally get this. It’s unfair. You’re like, how is this happening to me? Or how is this happening to someone else in our life? Of course, now that you and I and other people are able to make the connection that the emotions actually are very linked with this, clearly that’s not a particularly helpful emotion when we’re going through it, but it does matter.

For those listening, it is perfectly normal and perfectly okay to feel a little angry when this stuff’s happening because it’s not fair. You know, we got one life to live and it’s not cool when we’re dealing with these kinds of severe things. So, I just appreciate you recognizing that. I think it’s validating for other people who listen to this show, because I know other people experience that. It’s sometimes hard to talk about.

Now again, I kind of have some insider knowledge here, having the bio, and I know that the audience has this as well. We all know what’s about to come up. Not only do you get these diagnoses and the autoimmune stuff, but we’re about to escalate into a cancer type of diagnosis.

A Cancer Survivor: Losing Too Much Weight

So how did that happen? Did you go somewhere and get like a checkup, or did you have new symptoms? What led to you going to the doctor to getting that diagnosis?

[00:15:42] Carmen Weir: Well, when I started the Walls Protocol, because I was eating so healthy (and I’m not overweight, I weighed about 110 pounds), I immediately lost 10 pounds. So, by early summer I was down 10 pounds from eating better, just getting rid of junk.

Then in the fall I suddenly lost 10 more pounds. And right around Christmas time, because I was kind of peri menopausal and was still bleeding, still having my cycles, I started a weird cycle, and it didn’t stop.

I was working with my functional MD; I saw her in February. I had gotten all my blood work done again because we were close to a year out from the RA blood work, and I wanted to see where it was without medication. I had all that done, and my numbers dropped about a hundred points with no medicine. So, we were cheering that, and we were so excited.

She was still worried about my weight. I told her that I had been bleeding nonstop since Christmas. She said, you need to get in and have an ultrasound. You need to get the ultrasound because you’re at that age. She said, and you also need to gain some weight. She said, it’s just amazing how quickly things can go sideways if you don’t have any padding. I mean, I weighed like 90 pounds. She was very worried about that.

So, I went in and had the ultrasound. I could tell that something was going on because she was very casual about it, but she kept going to one spot.

A Cancer Survivor: A Difficult Cervical Biopsy

I thought, oh, something’s going on, she keeps getting pictures over on that side. They just thought it was a fibroid. I was referred to a gynecologist who said, okay, we’re going to do this and if it’s just a fibroid that I can see, I can just take care of it right here in the office.

I thought, well, this is going to be great. This will be nothing to it, you know? It didn’t turn out that way.

[00:17:50] Detective Ev: Obviously, I’m guessing then, the diagnosis came pretty soon after.

[00:17:55] Carmen Weir: Yeah. It wasn’t a fibroid. She had tried to do a pap smear, which was kind of crazy. Well, she scheduled me for a cervical biopsy. I looked online of course, and it said that it’s nothing to that procedure, it’s just a little biopsy. I can assure you that it’s not nothing.

It’s amazing because I actually did have a fibroid right near my cervix, and that was making the cervical biopsy almost impossible. The best way that I can explain it is like, if you’re trying to open a door that has a brick behind it, the door won’t open.

It was very painful, and it was very bloody. I don’t know how she got enough tissue to be able to get some cancer tissue, but luckily, she did. So, I went in after the cervical biopsy, about a week later, I had an appointment with her to discuss. That’s when I got the cancer diagnosis.

A Cancer Survivor: The Diagnosis Response

She was shocked. She was a wonderful doctor. Lucky me, I always seem to get the doctors that have the interns following them. There was an intern watching me get my cancer diagnosis.

You know, it’s what everybody says. It’s complete shock, you just freeze. You can’t believe what you just heard.

I came home and I got in my sauna.

[00:19:23] Detective Ev: I’m guessing even though you went into the sauna, that the thoughts were not as relaxing as one might typically experience in there.

Carmen Weir: No. No.

Detective Ev: Listen, I’m sorry to dissect this too much, but even when you and I were talking off air, you just strike me as like a very real person. So, if it’s ever too much, let me know. But I mean, what is that like? Because I know that people say these certain things, but you already are going through the ringer with these other health issues. It probably seems like they’re getting better, and we even have blood work to show that some things are moving in the right direction.

And now this. I mean, what the heck’s the thought process for you when all this happens now?

[00:19:57] Carmen Weir: Yeah, I didn’t know what to think. You know, It’s scary. Nobody wants to hear the C word. There’s a reason we call it the C word. It’s the big scary guy in the corner that nobody wants to talk to.

Yeah, I was frozen for a couple of days. I just didn’t know what to think. Once I got through that initial, Oh my God, what? I have cancer? This is like the one thing that doesn’t go through my family, you know? I’m like, Okay, okay. What?

A Cancer Survivor: A Correlating Family History

Then, when you get the cancer, they want to do some genetic testing. Because they thought there was something they thought that I might have that would make it more hard for some of my other family, that they should have regular testing. I didn’t have that. But they wanted to do this genetic testing and they had to have the whole history of my family with cancer.

When I talked to my mom about it and when I started putting it all together, like all the pieces of the cancer that have been in our family, I was like, oh, we kind of really do. I was like, Wow! So, I kind of worked through all of that.

Of course, when you get a cancer diagnosis, you start getting a lot of phone calls and a lot of appointments. Here’s the extra little bonus because it’s just how I roll, the pandemic started in March. So, everything that I did, I had to do alone because nobody could come in with me.

That was at the very beginning when everything, like normal appointments, weren’t being made. Nobody got to go to see their doctor. You had to be emergency level to get a doctor appointment at the end of March 2020. They laid out the red carpet for me and welcomed me in.

Yeah, there’s just this kind of, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s kind of a floating place where you’re just like floating in this little spinny place where you’re like, wait, what? You’re trying to figure out what actually just got told to you, you know?

A Cancer Survivor: Cancer Treatment Rush & Stress

[00:22:17] Detective Ev: Yeah. We had an aunt of mine several years back now at this point, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Unfortunately, we did end up losing her from this. To watch this process, because again, I had seen a lot of illness in my family, especially in the autoimmune realm. I had really seen no cancer. I didn’t know anyone who dealt with that.

You’ve heard of it a million times, of course. But I didn’t get affected by this indirectly or directly. When this happened, I was just shocked by the differences in how it is addressed. Where like, my mom had these symptoms for years. It took her seven years to even get a diagnosis of the autoimmune disease she had, which was Graves’ disease.

Whereas my aunt, I saw her on Christmas. It was normal as can be, she’s happy. She’s hosting it at her house with my uncle. Everyone’s eating, having a good time. And all I hear, literally five or six days later, is that Aunt Karen’s going in for brain surgery. I’m like, What? Like, she was fine. Apparently, she had been having these headaches, Carmen. Then she went to the doctor, and she found out about this.

Listen, I know a lot about health stuff. I don’t want anyone to think I’m pretending that I know all about cancer here. I do not know about that. But I know that I saw a woman in my life that was totally seemingly normal and, in my opinion, did not look like she was in dire need of such a serious surgery. I mean obviously the tumor’s gotta go. I understand that.

A Cancer Survivor: Cancer Treatment Stress Effects

But at the same time, is that rushed process or the weight that comes with this diagnosis, is that actually helping the client? Because you just described this, this floating feeling and just being in shock for a few days.

I mean, how does one feel when one day they’re fine in terms of not having a diagnosis and then five days later they’re going in for one of the most invasive surgeries that someone can do? Just the stress that that must put on one’s body. I don’t know how we would ever quantify this. I don’t know how we would measure this exactly, but I feel like that’s gotta be worsening the situation that they’re already dealing with.

I mean, it’s not a situation not to be stressed about. It’s obviously serious. I’m sorry, I’m not actually posing a question here, I guess. But I just wish we could do better for these patients. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Because I cannot imagine that that high level of stress, the rushed aspect of it, the life changing things that happen overnight, I don’t know that that’s a hundred percent benefiting the person.

I mean, you’re the one that’s dealt with it, so maybe I shouldn’t be talking. What do you think about this? Do you think there’s any validity to this?

Commercial Break – Try the FDN Course for Free

Well, I know of at least one way we can do better, and that is by getting more people like you and me out there in the world actually doing this work and helping other people from a functional perspective.

If you’ve been considering the course, and maybe this is something that you want to do. You can go to fdntraining.com/tryfdn, and this will allow you to try the FDN course completely for free, no credit card required. I think it’s going to take more than this, but this can be a good step, and it’s probably the most relevant step for you if you’re listening to a podcast like this.

So that is fdntraining.com/tryfdn to try the course completely for free.

All right, now back to today’s episode.

A Cancer Survivor: Connecting with Other Cancer Patients

[00:25:15] Carmen Weir: I think you’re right though. That’s the thing that just chaps me the most is that you get a cancer diagnosis, and the rush is on. You know, it’s like a black Friday, 6:00 AM door opening. Oh, we gotta get you in and we gotta, we got. It’s like this cancer didn’t come in overnight.

You certainly have weeks, if not months, to do research, talk to people, get some other opinions. It doesn’t have to be rushed, like what they do. That just tworks me because I see it happening all the time. I align myself with cancer people now. I tell people, cancer people are my favorite people.

Because once you’ve been given that diagnosis and you gotta go, whatever path you’re going to take, you are going to become a warrior going through that, you know? It’s scary, it’s hard, and getting to the other side is not a cakewalk. So, I love cancer people. But I hate it when I see that they’re doing that to people.

They did that to me, but they learned pretty early on from me that I wasn’t somebody who was going to get pushed around. I had an entire care team. I had like seven people, I’ll just continue with my story. I didn’t know this at the time, but whatever came back on that sample must have told them that this looked pretty advanced. They never let on to me about that.

A Cancer Survivor: Stage III, C1 Cancer

It did turn out to be endometrial cancer. It was a grade two, which is kind of medium as far as in the grade. When they grade it, they’re saying how fast it’s growing. It was a grade two. They don’t stage it until after surgery and samples. The plan for me was a Da Vinci hysterectomy.

I had two surgeons. I’m a Midwesterner, I live in Wisconsin. So, UW-Madison is highly touted as a great cancer place. I had a UW surgeon for my lymphadenectomy, and my provider did the hysterectomy. So, I had two surgeons. I had just different people from UW and from my provider.

Then I had a care manager. They worked together, but they were telling me even before surgery that chemo was probably going to be recommended and probably radiation. Here’s how the human spirit works, at the beginning of all that, I thought, well, I’ll do radiation, but I am not doing chemo.

Then I got online, and I started searching. I got through all the research after my surgery. It came up as Stage III, C1, that’s not very far from the highest stage. There is no stage five. So, the only reason it wasn’t a stage four was that it had metastasized, what they would call micro metastasized, in every one of my reproductive organs.

My right ovary was nothing but a tumor. It was in my fallopian tubes. It was coming down my cervical canal. It was obviously in my uterus. It was everywhere. If it had spread to other organs, then it would’ve been a stage four. But it hadn’t, so it was a 3C1.

A Cancer Survivor: The Western Medicine Protocol

They took out 10 lymph nodes. There was a little bit of cancer in two of them. There were suspicious cells in the pelvic wash. It was one of the things that they want to look at is the invasion of the uterus wall. That was over 50%, so it was late stage.

Pretty shortly after the surgery, they came up with the six rounds of chemo and they wanted me to do 25 rounds of daily radiation for five weeks.

Then also three brachy therapies, which is the internal therapy. I started researching based on what they wanted to do and the percent of remission or extra years of life that I would’ve got from doing the radiation. It was really minimal.

The repercussions of having the internal radiation were not good. Not to get too explicit, but it turns your vaginal wall into leather. That didn’t sound very fun to me.

[00:29:58] Detective Ev: No, it does not.

[00:29:59] Carmen Weir: I had a chemo oncologist, a main oncologist, a radiation oncologist. I had lots of different doctors trying to talk to me. I didn’t like the radiation oncologist. I flat out asked her in the appointment, I said, I get that you want to get the wind. I said, but when do we get to talk about my quality of life? I just said “no” to that.

About halfway through my chemo, they had called me to ask me what I had decided about the radiation. I said, well, I don’t think I’m going to do it. (I wasn’t a candidate to do them concurrently.) I said, I thought I’d wait till after I had my scan, after chemo, see if there was still any cancer. Then maybe I would do it.

A Cancer Survivor: Saying “No” to Radiation

They said, well, oddly enough that, I know it sounds counterintuitive, but if there is still cancer then we wouldn’t do radiation. I said, well then, I guess I’m not doing it. She said, well, can we call you after chemo? And I said, yeah, you can call me after chemo.

Instead of calling me, they made an appointment, and I got a letter in the mail that had an appointment set up for me. I called the UW and canceled said appointment. When I canceled it, the lady said, do you need to reschedule? And I said, nope. So, I just said “no” to radiation. But at the beginning, that wasn’t my mindset.

I went into chemo very unafraid. Like I said, I had worked with a functional MD, and we had a protocol set up. I was doing a lot of other holistic things. I went into chemo a very happy person every time I went. I looked at it, it was a day for me to get my focus back on what it was, this was my one job that summer. That was my one job. That got me back into focus.

A Cancer Survivor: The Mindset Aspect

My functional MD at the beginning, told me that I was going to have to find a way to be grateful for this. I thought she was out of her ever-loving mind. As I went through the process, I discovered that I am grateful. But she also told me that when I go into chemo, that I should ask that chemo to bless other people who have ailments.

So, when I went into chemo, I would have my list of people who were suffering with different things, and I would ask that chemo to bless them too. It’s a mindset thing. You know, I didn’t go in angry. I didn’t go in thinking; I can’t believe I have to sit here for six hours and take this crap putting poison into me.

You know, I call it the blessed poison. That’s what I called it.

[00:32:36] Detective Ev: I mean, I wouldn’t be the one to say it having not been through it. But since you’ve been through it, you are literally correct. I don’t think anyone could argue that feeling terrible about it and negative about it is going to support the situation. It simply won’t.

My aunt, I couldn’t believe that she transformed in almost a positive way. It was unbelievable, I’ve never seen anything like it, the mental fortitude to get through something like that. And as you’re describing this story, it always gives me an enhanced perspective when I hear from people like you.

A Cancer Survivor: The Blessing of Western Medicine

I mean, what you guys are actually going through is so additionally stressful to the body. And we know how much stress the body has to be under to even get to this place to begin with, especially, you know this as an FDN. It is remarkable that anyone makes it out of this. I mean, it’s actually very hard for me to understand and wrap my head around.

One thing I want to really throw in here, cause I don’t think this happens too often on the show. I just appreciate you guiding us through the journey and not just talking about the natural stuff. Because I always say on this show, Carmen, that we’re not against Western Medicine. There’s a time and place for everything. We just want to be able to make informed decisions as individuals who are getting treatments done or maybe have chronic disease or whatever.

I think what you did makes perfect sense. You have a later stage thing going on. It’s pretty scary, it’s pretty serious. This might not be the time to go do the juice cleanses or whatever. Like, we gotta do a little more than that. Thank God Western Medicine was here for you to help with some of these surgeries.

Now no one’s arguing that’s ideal. Obviously, we would’ve liked to avoid that to begin with. But if we’re already in that position, sometimes we gotta be intelligent with how we’re mixing both things together. I know that you said in the information that you sent to me that you also combined a holistic approach with this.

A Cancer Survivor: Holistic Practice of Gerson Therapy

What were some of the holistic things that you were doing? Was that just a maintaining of the diet you had been on or were you adding in additional therapies, holistic-wise now, as well to this treatment for you?

[00:34:31] Carmen Weir: We added in. We did a little Gerson therapy, which is very complicated, it’s for cancer.

We didn’t do all of the Gerson therapy things, but there’s a mixture of like this cottage cheese and fish oil. We did that. Because I was so thin, we did some, it sounds really gross, but she made me do it. I don’t drink coffee, but I drink chicory root. In my chicory root, I would have to put in ghee, like two tablespoons of ghee in my quote/unquote “coffee.” So, we did that.

I did a lot more juicing instead of my smoothies because the juicing gives you just the nutrients that you can quickly absorb. I had some absorption problems before the cancer. So yeah, some more juicing. You know, I didn’t get a lot of help with my supplementation. I was kind of thrown into finding that out on my own.

Sloan Kettering has a website that tells you drug interactions with certain supplements. The only thing my functional MD told me was no vitamin A, C, or E. Other than that, I was on my own. My oncologist wouldn’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t take.

A Cancer Survivor: Wanting to Feel Capable

You can also do some intermittent fasting. A lot of people will fast during chemo because it makes it more effective. I didn’t do that because I was really thin. I got under 90 pounds at one point, so I didn’t feel like that was something that I would want to do. I do it now, but yeah, so there were some different things.

When I got home from chemo, I went out and walked a mile. You know, I just stayed really active. In fact, the big joke of my chemo was after my fourth chemo, I Blackjacked my driveway because it needed it. I was at a really, really low point and feeling like just a bucket of mud. I wanted to feel good about something and I wanted to feel capable.

It was kind of funny because I kind of had to stay out of the sun and my driveway gets a lot of sun. So, it was a little bit of a struggle with the sun. But I mean, guys in my neighborhood were coming out going, oh, you should come and do mine.

You know, I’m out there with no hair and here I am at 88 pounds out there doing that. And they’re going, you should come and do mine. You know, So, that was kind of fun.

But I didn’t do it for anybody else. I did it for me because I needed to know that I could accomplish a really hard task.

A Cancer Survivor: The Answer to Cancer Recommendation

[00:37:10] Detective Ev: If someone is listening to this today, and I know inevitably it will happen, considering our audience at this point. Let’s say they are in the midst of the cancer stuff. They are working through this.

Maybe they’re listening to this just to even get some advice or get some tips while they’re also doing whatever treatments their doctor is recommending. What would be your advice to an individual who has received that cancer diagnosis and is going through this? Advice, obviously, that would support them in actually getting through this successfully.

[00:37:39] Carmen Weir: Well, one of the things that really got me through, there was a docu-series on (just like talk about Heaven sent, it just dropped into my lap, and I own it now). There was a series called The Answer to Cancer. It was a lot of alternative doctors. That is a series that I would recommend to anybody who has cancer.

You’re going to hear the same thing over and over from all of these different doctors, not because they’re all promoting the same product, but because it’s such a mindset thing. So, that’s one thing is The Answer to Cancer. It’s a Jeff Hayes film. You can pick and choose the modules that you watch. If an interview is not tickling your fancy, you can fast forward and watch a different one.

But that actually changed my life. Kellyann Petrucci was in there because she’s an alternative doctor who had cancer. She said a couple of things in there that flipped my world. That’s how I got started. I don’t know how to describe it. I watch her interview probably every couple of months and I cry every time I watch it. It just resonated with me.

A Cancer Survivor: You Have to Believe

There’s going to be something in there for everybody. And I can tell you that that series specifically has a lot of breast cancer doctors in there. So, especially if somebody has breast cancer, that’s great.

Kelly Turner has a book called Radical Remission, and it’s the most inspirational book you’ll ever read on cancer. She interviews stage four, mostly stage four, some stage three cancer survivors, who did not do a lot, if any, Western Medicine and is surviving like 20 years later.

There’s things that you do and the way that you think, just practices in your daily life that will change your trajectory. It really will. Then the other thing that I tell everybody, and I totally believe this, pick door one, two, or three, doesn’t matter. But you have to believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, that it’s going to cure you, it’s not going to cure you. That’s just my hard and fast rule now.

You know, it doesn’t matter what you pick, but you have to believe in it. I swear it’s like 80% mindset with cancer. You know, the body makes this tumor because things aren’t working right, and your cells aren’t signaling properly. I look back and I don’t know if I would’ve done chemo. I would’ve done the surgery probably; I don’t know if I would’ve done chemo knowing what I know now.

I don’t regret it and I said that at the time. No matter what happens down the road, I’m good with what I’ve chosen.

A Cancer Survivor: Upcoming Checkup

That’s the way you have to approach it. You know, I just think so much of it is mindset. You have to be diligent, and you have to do the reading on what your cancer is. Talk to people and go down these paths before you go in and just follow every doctor’s first recommendation, you know?

[00:40:49] Detective Ev: That’s what stinks. It’s like on one hand I’m so glad that we have the ability in today’s internet age, because it gives us access to the books easier, and we can find this information easier. I’m glad that patients are empowered in that way.

But it’s also sad to me that people dealing with something so serious need to go out of their way, in a sense, to also educate themselves while they’re dealing with something that is highly stressful.

Nonetheless, I appreciate those recommendations. I haven’t actually heard of either of those things. Again, I’m more keep myself in the autoimmune space, but this is amazing. I’m glad that we have this now for the people that listen. And if I’m not mistaken, you are, as of right now, you are cancer free, correct, Carmen?

[00:41:26] Carmen Weir: I am. I have my two-year cancer checkup next week. So, my cancer is known for coming back with a vengeance in two years. When I asked my oncologist, what does that look like? She said, we see it in a lot of places, and it’s considered incurable. She said, but there’s things we can do. Those things would be things like Keytruda, and I’m not interested in that.

A Cancer Survivor: Why is This Happening FOR Me?

But one of the things that I do want to say, I know we’re getting kind of close to the end here, I truly believe that cancer comes for a reason. That’s one of the things you’ll hear in that Answer to Cancer series. It’s God’s way at kicking you in the pants because you’re not living your life right in some way.

I truly believe that because I went into it just going, what is going on with me, and why me? And, you know, doing that floating space going, what? What?

As I went through it, I figured out why. I mean, I was in a toxic relationship that ended during my treatment and that’s why it came. If I would’ve had a cancer that would’ve only required an operation and everything was good, it wouldn’t have been enough to get him out of my life. So, it had to be this severe. That’s one of the reasons I’m grateful for it, you know?

That’s the trick to the whole cancer puzzle, is that you have to scrutinize your life and figure out, what am I supposed to learn from this? You know? If we quit looking at things in our lives as, why is this happening to me? Change that question to, why is this happening for me? Because I truly believe that my cancer happened for me. I know

that probably sounds like, people are going, what? But I’m a better person today. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve grown, I’ve gotten stronger. I was already pretty strong, but I’ve gotten stronger. Life is much better than before cancer.

A Cancer Survivor: Being Led to FDN

[00:43:30] Detective Ev: Wow! This is as much of a motivational talk for me today, Carmen, as it is a health talk. Geez. Seriously, I mean This isn’t a joke.

You know, we get one chance at this life. When something comes in our face like that, that is rather serious. I’m someone who, I mean, I try to be as much mindset oriented as I can. I’m very into personal development. But that’s a true test. You know, you can’t fake that. That’s either real or it’s not.

I think it’s very genuinely inspirational to the people listening today. I appreciate this. I won’t keep you too long, but I’ll keep you for a few extra minutes. When you said that, I looked down at the time. I couldn’t believe we got through this.

But we have to talk about this for sure. The fact that you not only have this great mindset around this now, you actually said that you found your passion, like this life passion because of what you dealt with. That eventually led you to FDN. I just thought that was amazing. I mean, when you were going through the FDN course, were you finding some more healing opportunities in your body?

Were you maybe finding some stuff on the lab tests? Because I feel like this next checkup coming up in a week or two, that’s going to be probably great because you’re doing some of the best health stuff in the world. So, did you find any healing opportunities on the FDN labs?

[00:44:40] Carmen Weir: Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest, I’m due to get some labs run. I just don’t have the money.

A Cancer Survivor: Utilizing FDN for Self-Health Investigations

It was funny because prior to the cancer, I was estrogen dominant and actually had high testosterone. You figure this was a full two years from the first labs that had gotten done almost and, after the hysterectomy, which we know what that does to hormones. When I did that lab, the estrogen dominance was still there although all the numbers were lower, but it was still estrogen dominance and it was like, wow.

Because of the cancer, we can’t do all of the things that we can do with most of our clients. My oncology team did not want me doing any hormones. So, we worked with some other adaptogens.

Yeah, I had some H. Pylori and just all the things that I learned in the process of getting through the course, it helped me be my own health detective. So that was really cool.

I’ve actually had an RA flare going for a while, and I put myself on a gut protocol. I’m getting better. So, it’s good to have that information. Even though I can’t afford to run the lab, I know my body. That’s one of the things that you probably know as an autoimmune patient, but especially with cancer, you get really in tune with your body. And as an FDN you’re already really in tune with your body.

I knew that there’s some gut stuff going on here. So, I ordered up some supplements and started myself on a gut protocol and things are getting better.

A Cancer Survivor: Empowered with FDN Educational Tools

[00:46:19] Detective Ev: That is so true. There are other blessings in this if we look for them, but one of the blessings with chronic diseases is if you do choose this more natural route, yes, you become hyper aware. I don’t mean that in a paranoid sense. I mean that in a very good sense.

I think it’s how human beings were supposed to be designed. We understood our bodies and the world around us. I mean, think about it, What other animal needs a menu and nutrition facts to figure out what to eat? They don’t need that. They just know what to eat naturally.

Yet we are so far away, we’re so domesticated that we can’t even figure that out without doing podcasts like this and doing all this science and stuff. It’s actually, it’s ironic for someone like myself who’s in the space that we literally shouldn’t even need this. Yet, we have to because of how we have chosen to live as human beings.

So yeah, there is something to that for sure. And I’m glad that you are an FDN now and now have these extra tools and that empowerment that comes with, like you said, being a true health detective.

I have a good feeling about a week from now, and I mean that. I would not say that if I did not actually believe that. I think this is going to be good.

Maybe it’s just because of your mindset. Maybe it’s just contagious in that sense, where I think anything could happen in a week and yet Carmen’s still going to figure it out somehow. Maybe that’s the reason I’m saying that. So that’s more of a testament to you than it is my intuition, my friend.

Carmen’s Ideal Client

[00:47:34] Carmen Weir: I like to tell people that cancer came, we danced, we’re done.

[00:47:39] Detective Ev: I like that.

[00:47:44] Detective Ev: Well, Carmen, I know that you graduated in the grand scheme of things, only somewhat recently, right? I graduated five years ago. We have people on that have graduated 10 years ago. I know that you’re still only getting started with your practice and stuff.

But I’m curious, I know for a fact you’re going to resonate with someone that listens to this thing, especially because your story is actually quite unique compared to the other people that we bring on. So, who, in your best ability that you can describe it, who is your ideal client? Like who would you like to work with and serve in this work?

[00:48:14] Carmen Weir: I think most of us that come to FDN, we’re looking for ourselves, you know. So, people with autoimmune, definitely people with cancer. Cancer survivors who want to avoid getting a recurrence and just any autoimmune, because what we do will help it.

We know that getting back into homeostasis will calm any autoimmune. And if we’re healthy, we’re not going to get a recurrence from cancer. So, I feel like I could work with anybody because I know what FDN does.

But yeah, cancer and autoimmune people.

Where to Find Carmen Weir & The Signature Question

[00:48:56] Detective Ev: Fair enough. All right. I will have this in the show notes of course, but where can people find you if they would they’d like to work with you?

[00:49:02] Carmen Weir: I have a Facebook page. My business is named The Wellness Principle. It’s at cs, both capital letters, capital D, u b y a. CSDubya.

And my website is thewellnessprinciple.com.

[00:49:19] Detective Ev: Awesome. And we will finish up today, Carmen, with the signature question on the Health Detective Podcast. That question is, if I could give you, in this case, a magic wand and you could wave it and get every single person in this world to do one thing for their health, whether that’s literally do one thing or stop doing one thing, what is the one thing that Carmen would get them to do?

[00:49:42] Carmen Weir: Well, I scream this from the top of my lungs. I swear this will be on my gravestone. Food is medicine, treat it as such. Food is medicine, and let it be your medicine.

[00:49:56] Detective Ev: All right guys. That’ll do it for today’s episode with Carmen Weir. I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as I enjoyed recording it. Of course, I don’t want to hear someone go through all this stuff, but at the same time, that mindset, it is encouraging, inspiring.

Conclusion

It’s just amazing to be able to hear that from someone. And it’s rock solid. You can’t fake it, you can’t buy it.

There’s nothing you can do other than actually have some type of lived experience or go through some type of challenge. Then on top of it, have the wisdom to actually use it for something good. Cause you can go through that stuff and most people don’t end up with that mindset.

In fact, I would argue that probably the majority end up with the exact opposite mindset, but not Carmen. It’s one thing for people like me to say it, who might not have been through something like cancer, but for these individuals out there that are suffering to get to hear something like this from someone who’s dealt with it, that’s real. That is a hundred percent real. I hope it helps those individuals.

If you guys like the information that we’re sharing, please consider leaving us a five-star review on Apple and or Spotify. If you’d be so kind as to do that, then I would love you even more than I already do. I’m looking forward to talking to you guys again soon with another interview.

But until then, please take care.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

To hire a coach, go to fdnthrive.com.

For a free Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.

Introduction

This week’s note comes from my most prolific paper finder – Dr Peter Brukner from Australia. I don’t manage to do all the papers that Peter sends through, but they’re usually varied and interesting, so I try to cover as many as possible. This one is on a classic topic, which keeps coming up – fibre – or fiber, as it’s spelled in the US.

The paper was published in the BMJ in July 2022 and it was called “Fibre intake for optimal health: how can healthcare professionals support people to reach dietary recommendations?” written by McKeown et al (Ref 1). It was part of the BMJ SwissRe “Food for Thought” collaboration, which disappointed me, as I thought that this collaboration was focused on challenging the status quo, not indulging it (Ref 2). The title tells us the researchers’ beliefs – there’s an optimal intake of fibre; how can we ensure that people consume this?

I’ve been particularly outspoken about fibre. The main reasons for this are 1) the claims made about fibre are not evidence based and I don’t like claims being presented as evidence based when they’re not. 2) I think that fibre is being promoted as the only ‘justification’ left for pushing carbohydrates and 3) fibre health claims are made so often and so stridently that they need countering. I’m by no means the only person countering them. However, collectively, our counters are tiny relative to the relentless fibre public relations campaign.

Have trouble determining what hunger and fullness feel like? Keep reading to learn how to use the Mindful Eating Hunger Scale to determine your hunger cues.

It sounds so simple, right? Eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full. But in reality, this oftentimes can be a lot easier said than done. There are so many day-to-day factors that can complicate these cues. From stress levels to work schedules and emotions, it’s so easy to confuse hunger cues with other cues. 

Getting to know your own hunger and satiety cues can help clear up this confusion. It gives you the power to identify and address other cues accordingly. 

Mindful Eating Hunger Cues

When eating mindfully, hunger cues are utilized to designate not only when to eat, but also how much. Our cues essentially let us know what we’re in need of as well as when.

Food is the body’s primary energy source. It’s what allows us to think clearly, build muscle, pump blood, breathe air, and do so much more. While we’re all performing these human functions on a daily basis, we’re doing so in a slightly different way, we’re all a bit unique. 

This is why hunger cues are so important. If the body is undergoing stress, fighting an infection or disease, performing physical labor, or engaging in more or less movement than normal, your body’s energy needs will differ. Your hunger cues reflect these needs. 

Now that we know what they are, how do we gauge and measure them? This is where the Mindful Eating Hunger Scale comes in. 

How To Use the Mindful Eating Hunger Scale 

This scale helps clarify some of the ambiguity that comes along with measuring hunger cues because it gives you numerical values to refer to. The hunger cues operate on a scale from 1 (so full you may feel unwell) to 10 (starving, weak, dizzy). The middle of the scale, 5, is where you feel content. You’re slightly full so you’re comfortable, you’re not in need of anything. 

 

Check-in With Your Hunger Cues 

The first step to using the scale is to get to know your own body. How does it communicate hunger? What about slight hunger? What does it feel like? And on the flip side, what does fullness feel like? 

In order to understand these cues, we have to really introduce mindfulness. To get started with this, throughout the day (before meals, during meals, and after meals), take note of where you are on the scale. Choose a numerical value that you feel accurately describes the degree to which you’re feeling hunger or satiety. 

The key here is to do this without judgment and with compassion. Will this be super easy the first time you try it? Probably not! But most things we learn to do are not. Remember that you’re quite literally teaching your body a new skill, and a subjective one at that. 

The more you check-in, and the more you pause and reflect, the easier it will be for you to notice your cues without even having to intentionally check in. 

Abide By Your Hunger Cues

After you go through the process of defining your cues, it’s time to start abiding by them. When you hear your body asking for food through hunger, do your best to grab something to eat. If you’re very hungry, make a full meal. If you’re slightly hungry, a snack will do just fine. 

Simply getting into the habit of abiding by your cues will take time as well. You may possibly have to shift some of your preexisting routines, eat a bit more or less than you previously were, but that’s quite alright. This is exactly what mindful eating entails.

When is it Okay to Eat When I’m Not Hungry?

But what happens when you end up wanting to eat something when you’re not feeling physical hunger? Does that mean you’re doing something wrong?

Nope, not in the slightest. You may be surprised to hear this, but there are plenty of reasons to eat even when you aren’t. This may be enjoying dessert after dinner or eating to give your body nourishment even if something like stress is suppressing your hunger.

With mindful eating, it’s all about being mindful and having heightened awareness of why you’re eating. That way, you can choose the best option for you at any given moment. You may say to yourself, “I’m not that hungry, but I would actually enjoy that dessert right now.”

On the other hand, you may say, “I notice that I’m not actually hungry, but I really want a snack.” In this case, we want to pull that mindfulness in to determine why. Is it because you’re mindfully, and intentionally excited to eat said item? Or on the other hand, are you experiencing another emotion that you may previously have used food to cope with?

When our eating choices aren’t mindful or intentional, where they’re used to cope or conceal, we want to try to find alternative, more productive coping mechanisms that directly address the emotion at hand. 

Whatever it may look like for you, this awareness can help you make intentional, mindful choices.

The Takeaway

The mindful eating hunger scale is a great tool that you can use to build your mindful eating skills. If you’re struggling to decipher where satiety starts and hunger stops, give the exercises we discussed a try. And remember! Take it slowly. 

Do You Want to Experience More Balance with your Food Choices?

Body Fusion Nutrition & Dietetics

175 Burns Bay Road, Lane Cove, NSW 2066, Ph: 0422 297 721   6 Ryde Rd, Hunters Hill NSW 2110 Ph: 0422 297 721                     

       579 Darling St, Rozelle NSW 2039, Ph: 0411 474 607         

                                                                    

 

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, AKA Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about anxious kids.

We’re talking to my colleague and fellow FDN practitioner, Jess Sherman. She works primarily with parents to help kids who have anxiety and other mental health things. She’s been doing this for a while. She had started in 2007, I believe it was, became an FDN only a few years back. She was working as a nutritionist since 2007 and a holistic nutritionist at that. I’ll actually give her bio first and I’ll kind of comment on it because her bio does include a lot of what we will discuss today.

She helps kids experiencing anxiety feel better so life can settle down. Along with being a certified teacher, Jess is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner, board certified in practical holistic nutrition. With anxiety in kids now at an all-time high, she’s working to help doctors, therapists, teachers, kids, and parents understand and apply a whole-child, whole-body, trauma-informed nutrition and lifestyle focused approach to helping them from the outside in and the inside out.

Her book, Raising Resilience, take the stress out of feeding your family and love your life, along with her Calm & Clear Kids Program and her Resilience Roadmap have reached families all over the world. I thought this was extremely timely. I mean, honestly there would really not be a bad time for an episode like this.

Seeing the Need to Work with Anxious Kids

But I think what’s happening now is kind of interesting because over the last two years and change since the whole world shifted and we had this pandemic go on, I think in the beginning it was more obvious as to why kids were anxious, depressed, and all this stuff. It’s not that we wrote it off, quite the opposite. But since there was so much understanding with it, it was kind of just like, all right, let’s all go through this together.

Whereas now when I’m back in the schools and stuff, I mean, it’s normal enough in the schools. I don’t know where you live, but in the United States, most places that I go, it’s pretty calmed down. Yet we’re still seeing the aftermath, the effects of what we did to these kids.

They’re nervous, they are anxious, they have behavioral issues. They are not really at the level of maturity that you would expect socially. I always make kind of a joke that’s not supposed to be funny, that an eighth grader kind of acts like a sixth or seventh grader a lot of the times, and you can apply that to pretty much any grade.

Jess is going to talk to us today about what she saw, because she actually doesn’t have a personal health story. That’s very rare on this show. She saw something going on in the kids years and years and years ago that led her into this new world of working with them.

Anxious Kids: Most Everyone Knows One

I’m just so thankful that there are people out there that are able to access Jess. I’m looking back at my own life and thinking, in 2007, how different my life was and how different things were for me. Then what it would’ve been like to have someone like Jess help our family out.

I think you guys will really like this episode. Without further ado, let’s get to it.

All right. Hello there, Jess. Thanks so much for being here with us today.

[00:02:57] Jess Sherman: Thanks so much. This is exciting.

[00:02:59] Detective Ev: I normally have my headphones on. It doesn’t really matter on Riverside, thankfully, cause they have the echo cancellation, but I feel like naked on this podcast right now cause normally I have those big podcaster headphones.

I’m glad to be here with you though. I appreciate you coming on because it’s a long story for anyone that’s listening, but really short notice. I appreciate you hopping on to someone that’s like new, fresh. We’ve never talked to you before.

Jess is in fact, an FDNP, a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner. Not only are we going to dive into her story a little bit today, we’re actually going to talk about anxiety in kids. I know that if you’re a regular listener, you understand the first time I bring someone on, it’s typically just about their story.

I think this topic is so important. I love that you brought it up. I’m in that space, myself, both in the functional space and just mental health space when it’s not related to functional medicine. There’s no way that the people listening right now do not know someone, if not relevant in their own life, that needs this message. Let’s get started with the story.

Working with a Whole Spectrum of Anxious Kids

I’d like to know how did Jess even get into this? What were your first health symptoms? Because I know that in your bio, it says you were a teacher. I’m guessing that came before the FDN. Am I correct?

[00:04:03] Jess Sherman: Yep. That’s how I got here. It’s maybe a little bit of a different story from other folks who have been on here because it really wasn’t about my own health crash at all. It was about what I was seeing going on around me.

Yeah, I was a teacher for a lot of years. I’ve always wanted to work with kids. I’ve always been super interested in like what makes a person tick? What helps a kid grow into their best self? I worked in a variety of capacities in different ways with all kinds of kids. I mean, street kids, upper class kids, private school kids, substance abuse kids, like the whole gamut.

Then that eventually brought me into the classroom where I taught high school for a number of years. It was when I was teaching high school. First of all, I became exhausted. Kudos out there to anyone who is a teacher right now. It is an exhausting job. It is full of passion. At the same time, it’s a difficult environment to live in and to work in.

I was teaching school for a long time and there was this one moment I actually had my first baby and then went back to school in more of an administrative capacity. I was working at a private school at the time, so we had a headmaster, not a principal.

Learning About Toxins & Gut Health to Help Anxious Kids

I was talking to him in his office, and he dropped this casual comment that about 60% of the kids in our school were on some kind of medication. We knew that because it was a boarding school. We had a school nurse, and she was doling out the meds.

I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was like, what? How is that possible that more kids than not needed something? You know, sometimes it was as simple as a laxative cause they couldn’t poo. Or sometimes it was a psyched because they had aggressive tendencies or something like that. So, it ran the gamut.

But more kids than not needed a medication to get through their day. I was stunned by this. I’d always been really interested in health and nutrition and just lifestyle stuff.

I decided like to take a sabbatical cause I was kind of exhausted. I had a new baby, and it was the right time to take a sabbatical. I decided to go back to school to study nutrition. I became a holistic nutritionist, registered holistic nutritionist. That’s when I learned about toxins, gut health, all of the forces that impact how we feel, not only in our bodies, but how we feel in our minds.

I didn’t know any of this as a teacher. I was like, if I had known this as a teacher, that there was like all this stuff going on, this chaos, like what FDN calls, metabolic chaos going on in their bodies, I would think differently about their anxiety, and their ADHD. Literally, I would have kids like throwing themselves against the wall and throwing themselves against the chairs because what I understand now is they needed that pressure.

The Goal to Help Depressed, Suicidal, and Anxious Kids

Anyway, I started understanding kids very differently when I started to understand the insides of them. Then I got really interested in how can we dig further and look in the windows through these functional lab tests. That took me to FDN. That’s my story.

[00:06:47] Detective Ev: Well, this is unique. For those that don’t know, Jess and I have not particularly crossed paths in our careers as FDNs. I’ve seen your name, but this is kind of cool to get to dissect this because that is unique.

Almost universally, I can actually count like two other people who have gotten on this show that didn’t have these very personal health stories of extreme stuff. I actually admire that greatly that you saw pain in someone else’s life and were willing to figure this out for them. That’s kind of cool because you’re fighting for these people that don’t even know you’re fighting for them. That’s kind of an amazing thing to go and choose to do with one’s life.

I see it as well. I don’t know if you know this about me, I speak in schools. That’s my job outside of FDN. I go do these motivational talks for mental health. I don’t necessarily talk about the functional side.

My goal really there is to try to get them to understand that there’s hope. If I’m being blunt about it, I wouldn’t necessarily say this directly in a school, but what I’m really trying to get them to avoid is drug overdoses and suicide attempts. Right? I want the most extreme cases of this to be avoided. How we heal is going to be pretty unique to everyone.

Connecting Eating & Sleeping Habits with Anxious Kids

I mean, there’s people who have been severely abused and might not have ever gotten that trauma resolved. Of course, we both know they’d be better off with a good nutrition plan. But at the same time, if they don’t ever get that addressed properly, all the nutrition in the world is only going to ever do so much. It’s a very complicated topic.

But when 60% of kids in a school are on a medication, it does not take a health professional to use their head and realize something about that doesn’t add up. What I’m curious about is how did you initially make the connection. Why did you go do nutrition?

I mean this seriously; some people have very limited views about what might be causing health issues. Maybe they think it’s kids on social media. Maybe they think it’s kids not exercising. How did you come to the conclusion that I should go study nutrition?

[00:08:30] Jess Sherman: That’s a really good question.

I’ve reflected on this quite a bit. It’s interesting to me that I didn’t go into special education, right? I didn’t want more educational tools. I didn’t want more things to talk about. I wanted to understand their bodies.

I don’t know what it was intuitively. I mean, I’d always been really interested in food, and I saw how these kids were eating and I saw how they were sleeping. I had a particular vantage point because it was a boarding school.

I guess there was just something in there, I was like, this is all connected somehow. I didn’t quite understand how, but, yeah, it’s interesting to me that I went the nutrition route. I’m glad that I did, but it was a hunch, I think. It was a hunch.

Follow Your Intuition: The Natural Route for Anxious Kids

[00:09:06] Detective Ev: Well, this is where your story is not so dissimilar. I kind of asked for that reason, and I didn’t know if it was going to be that answer, but I’m glad it was.

One of the things that I’ve noticed Jess is when I ask people on this show (now they’re dealing with their own personal health issues), I ask them how they ended up going kind of against Western medicine. Because for the average person, it’s so hard to comprehend how tough of a decision this actually is if someone hasn’t been through it like yourself in your own way or another guest on this show.

You are being told by people who are put on top as like the smartest, some of the most educated, highest income earning people that you could possibly be in society – doctors. You have to go against them as probably a lay person and that goes against everything we’ve ever been taught since day one. That doesn’t really make sense to do that. I’m really impressed when people can do that.

But when I ask them, what made you go to a more natural approach? The number one answer by far, 90% plus on this podcast in 180 something episodes is I just felt that it made sense. I had a gut feeling. My intuition told me. And I think there’s something to be said about that, especially in this space, it seems to happen all the time.

I’m not saying don’t listen to your doctors, that’s insane. But if something’s not working or there’s clearly a problem, like Jess noticed, 60% of kids on a medication, that’s an objective way of showing that something’s not working. That’s when we want to follow that intuition.

Providing Educated Options for Anxious Kids and Their Parents

If something’s not working, it must be something else. Where do I go? It’s learning to listen to that inner voice. That took me a while, but now that’s something that kind of guides me within my own life.

[00:10:37] Jess Sherman: As a teacher, we were really frustrated, and we would talk about this in our meetings. I should put the caveat out there that we had a particularly difficult cohort of kids.

The kids that came to our school, they needed something else. So, it was maybe a little bit skewed in terms of demographics and statistics. But we spent a ton of time talking about how do we help these kids feel better, connect, and a lot of emphasis on relationships.

As a teacher, it was really frustrating because when all of our tools weren’t working, our only recourse was medication, to send them into the medical system, either to psychoanalysis or medication or what have you. I felt really frustrated by that because I was like, ah, I think there’s something else happening.

Parents were really frustrated by that too, because every parent that I speak to, they don’t want to put their kid on meds. They will if they have to. They want to do the right thing for their kid, but they all want to know their options.

That’s what’s really driving me is to help parents, teachers, therapists, doctors, anybody who’s interested in the wellbeing of kids, kids themselves, understand what their options are, all the various options that they have so that they can make an educated choice. They can choose something that fits with what they feel is best.

Leveling the Playing Field for Anxious Kids

[00:11:49] Detective Ev: The health show that I was doing before I started doing this for FDN, the tagline was “leveling the playing field around physical and mental health”. I think what you just described should be the mission of all of us.

It’s not being against medication. It’s not being against counselors or anything like that. We just acknowledged already there’s a unique time and place for any of those things, if not a combination of them. But when someone does not even realize that there are alternative options out there, that’s not a level playing field.

I had a good friend that passed away from a drug overdose. He dealt with abuse, some really extreme stuff as a child. If I told him to do what I do, which is, you know, catch sunrise every day, I wear my blue-light glasses. I eat paleo and stuff like that. That’s almost insulting for someone who’s dealt with that.

But similarly, for someone like me who had a pretty decent life to just say, you’re deficient in Zoloft, that’s equally as insulting. We might need a life jacket, initially. Reed Davis talks about that in the course, that is okay. We gotta keep people afloat.

But the fact of the matter is this, Jess, I was offered the Zoloft, I was offered the Xanax, and there was nothing else. It was here’s this life jacket. That’s great. But we’re never going to help pull you outta the water in any other way or tell you anything about this.

It’s usually because these people don’t know, I’m not suggesting that they’re hiding something, but they don’t know it themselves.

Anxious Kids and the Gut-Brain Connection

Most doctors don’t look like they’re sitting on the fountain of youth in their back office. They look just as sick as the rest of us.

When you were learning about this nutrition stuff, initially, you said you learned about gut health and all these different things. Was there anything in particular that was shocking? Did you just, I never even considered this before? Cause I know for me, when I first heard about the gut-brain connection, that was a revolutionary concept to myself at the time.

So, I’m just curious if there was any shocking things that were “ahas” for you, connecting the dots for why 60% of these kids might have been on meds.

[00:13:30] Jess Sherman: Intuitively, I kind of knew, I think there’s something up with the processed foods. That wasn’t a shocker to me that processed foods are bringing literally messages of danger into our bodies and keeping our nervous system all revved up.

The gut-brain connection, I kind of knew a little bit about it, but the extent to which the highway of messages that are going from the gut to the brain, some from the brain to the gut, also. I always have to put that in there that 20% of the messages are going from the brain to the gut, but 80% going from the gut to the brain.

That really helped me because it helped me understand that it’s a bidirectional thing. Helped me understand that these kids are really stuck in a vicious cycle. How you think affects your gut and what’s going on in your gut affects how you think. That was a big one.

I think the biggest one though, was the impact of chemicals and toxicity. That one was massive.

Taking the Big Picture into Account to Help Anxious Kids

The profound effect of this toxic soup that we’re trying to raise our kids in and how it’s impacting our mitochondria, it’s a vicious cycle. The higher your toxic load, the more impaired your detox capacity becomes. So, you get stuck in this vicious cycle.

I think those were two biggies. Really what it helped me understand was that big picture biology, psychology, and environment, they all need to be taken into account if you really want to feel well. To compartmentalize it just doesn’t make any sense.

[00:14:53] Detective Ev: We’ll talk more, a little bit, about the specifics and the toxicity in a bit. I just wanted to know the answer to that question, first.

One thing I want to rewind to cause it’s always an interesting part to me and I think the audience as well, is we talked about the summarized version of how you ended up getting to FDN, but I’m curious about more maybe specifics. When you said you studied nutrition, I’m guessing that was a formal, maybe college thing. How long did it take to get to FDN and what was the appeal to you about this? What resonated with you when you were reading about the course or maybe watching videos?

[00:15:21] Jess Sherman: Well, I started because I was a new mom. I started with nutrition because all of a sudden, I was like, holy cow, I have to keep this kid healthy. I was seeing (I was a teacher also), so I was seeing what was happening to kids. I was like, kids are disintegrating. Now I have this little baby and I gotta do the right thing. How do I do this? I was looking around and I was like, someone guide me.

Using Labs: Looking from Many Perspectives to Help Anxious Kids

That took me to nutrition school, which was a college level thing. That’s when I started to see this whole other perspective for how I could help moms navigate this tricky business of feeding their own families, but then also how we can help kids by bringing this perspective to everybody who’s trying to help them.

That was in 2007. I did that work for, I don’t know, I did it for at least 10 years of just like helping parents understand how to feed their kids, just this purely nutrition. When I was feeding babies, I was teaching about feeding babies. When I was feeding toddlers, I was feed teaching about feeding toddlers.

There was a lot of allergy stuff in there, food sensitivity stuff in there, a lot of elimination, diet type of things. I would work alongside naturopathic doctors often to do the food piece when they were doing the strategy stuff.

Then I’m not sure how I found FDN. I think it was on my radar for quite a while because I was aware of all of the tests because I was working with naturopathic doctors who were doing them. I understood them.

Then I was like, I want to go deeper into this. I was still noticing that people were using the tests as treatment guidelines instead of like how FDN does it, which is like a full package. You can’t just run one test. You talk about this all the time, it’s like your tests are windows into the body.

FDN Helps Parents with Anxious Kids

If you look from one perspective, you’ll see one story of what’s going on in there. Then you need a couple of other perspectives to get a full picture of what’s going on in there. That can really guide your decisions.

For parents who are exhausted, maxed out, and stressed out already dealing with their own hormone issues and all that, we really need to make their plans efficient and dial them into where they’re going to get big bang for their buck in terms of their energy, well, all their resources. That’s what really drew me to FDN was like, I think this is a way that we can really hone in on the quickest, on which leverage points parents can use with their kids.

[00:17:36] Detective Ev: So, you’re a veteran, you’ve been doing this for a while. Again, I want to go back to what I said in the beginning. I think as someone who dealt with this as a kid, I was super anxious, panic attacks, substance abuse. I was struggling. I didn’t end up leaving school until 2013. I didn’t even graduate high school because of this.

To know that in 2007, there’s already people out there like you, that were recognizing these things and actually doing something about it, I just commend you for that. I’m thinking about it now and I feel like this would be a better received message.

People kind of get it now or whatever. That last 15 years, no, there’s a significant social change in how people would’ve looked at something like that, or your willingness to leave teaching and then go do that, that’s pretty impressive.

Community Support for Parents with Anxious Kids

Before we even talk about the specific things maybe that get recommended to these families, what I think everyone is going to be wondering that’s listening cause I know that we have a predominantly female audience, not exclusive, but predominantly female, if they’re moms or soon to be moms, one of the first things they’re going to wonder is how on earth are you navigating this modern world where the kid goes to school and gets the craziest foods in the world, or they go over their friend’s house and they see what their friends are eating.

I feel like with your experience, you’ve probably learned a thing or two about these habit changes that are necessary for the families. Without even talking about the “what” they have to eat or not eat, how do you get a family on board with this and get them to get the kids on board when the entire world is against us for this?

[00:18:57] Jess Sherman: That is a challenge, Evan. I’m not going to pussy foot around it; it is a challenge. One way that I do it is about, I guess it was 2015 or so, I stopped clinical work, where I was working in a brick-and-mortar office, and I went online. By going online, I can now talk to parents all over the world and I can bring them together in groups.

It makes all the difference when you know that you’re not alone and the world’s not against you, even if it’s only a small group. I’ve got a group of people; we do office hours every week in a zoom room. We get together and we talk about implementation struggles, and we talk about what do you do?

Finding a Starting Point for Families with Anxious Kids

What do you do when this happens? What do you do when that happens? Whoever wants to come can come. Sometimes it’s five people, sometimes it’s 10 people. It depends on who’s available. But just to know that there are a couple of people out there who understand what you’re going through, makes all the difference to your own resolve that this is important.

I split it up for the families that I work with to say, we’re going to do an investigative piece. We’re going to learn a lot about your child’s body, that I can promise you. At the end of the time, we are going to know what is going on in their body, through the FDN labs and all that.

Then there’s the implementation piece, which I can make no guarantees about because I don’t know their kids, I don’t know their family. We will absolutely help them. We know we will help them, and we will motivate them. We do implementation challenges, and we get them focused on things.

But sometimes parents tell me, I know this piece is important, but I can’t implement it right now. And I’m like, okay, you can’t do that right now, we’re going to come back to it. We’re going to put it on the shelf, we’re not going to drop it cause this is an important piece of your child’s physiology. We’re going to come back to it and we’re going to start somewhere else.

I think what it comes down to is we have to find a starting point. We have to have the big picture plan and then we have to figure out where the starting point is. It’s different for each family.

Commercial Break – Try the FDN Course for Free

[00:20:44] Detective Ev: It is indeed different for each family and each client. That is why we need to use functional lab testing to figure it out.

If you’ve been considering the FDN training course, like myself and Jess went through and had success with, then go to fdntraining.com/tryfdn. That’ll allow you to try the beginning of the course completely for free, no credit card required.

That’s fdntraining.com/tryfdn.

All right. Now, back to today’s episode.

You’re the Sum of the Five People You Hang with Most

Fair enough. I like that group aspect, cause FDN obviously does this on a large scale, but I think that’s what FDN provides to so many people. If I go out and just walk through the grocery store today, I would feel very isolated in what I do.

Yet, thankfully, I’m lucky enough to live in this bubble where I go on my Facebook or Instagram and because I’m so connected with all of you guys, I feel like all I see is cool health stuff or posts about this or that, or the next thing. Yet, that’s just not everyone’s reality. In fact, it’s not the majority’s reality.

So, that group dynamic and just knowing that other parents are going through it, and maybe tips and tricks that they learn, yeah, that’s very valuable.

[00:21:41] Jess Sherman: I was just going to say, like in the business world, how we talk about, you are the sum of the five people you hang out most with. They rub off on you. I have found to be true.

It’s the same thing with health and wellness. If you can surround yourself with people who have the same values as you, the same motivations, some of the same problems, and the same struggles as you, you are much more likely to have success.

[00:22:04] Detective Ev: Absolutely. I love that you brought that up. That’s one of my favorite, not a quote per se, but like a principle of that. It’s something you have to constantly remind yourself with. If I’m stagnant in one or more areas of my life, I need personal responsibility for that, of course. But I also look at like, what are the five people around me doing?

People are Accepting the Natural Health Route

Shockingly, they’re all doing the same thing, or they’re stuck in the same spot. So, you gotta change the environment and then watch yourself change. We’re slowly pushing that. We have our little core group of health freaks in the functional space, and we’ll slowly infect the rest of them with this good message of health.

[00:22:33] Jess Sherman: I wanted to say that the tides are changing, they really are. People are more interested. I think having 10 years, just going back to the gut brain thing, having like more than 10 years of solid research on that, people are starting to come around. I’m starting to get even some doctors, they’re being like, maybe you should go talk to Jess.

I’m starting to get teachers interested, how can I talk to the parents about this stuff without stepping on people’s toes? I still feel like people want to do right by kids. They want kids to thrive. They want kids to do well. They want information and ears are open.

[00:23:06] Detective Ev: Absolutely. What are some of the most common things, or just themes that you’re seeing on the lab testing that you’re utilizing? I know that we talked about toxicity. I also understand that everyone’s individualized, but I have found that this question has merit. When someone serves 40-year-old women that are dealing with certain conditions, I found that there’s patterns there, or maybe hyper athletic males, there’s patterns there.

Is there something that’s coming up a lot for these kids, with the tests that you’re utilizing?

H.I.D.D.E.N. Stress Patterns for Anxious Kids

[00:23:32] Jess Sherman: Yeah. There’s five main things that are coming up all the time. I kind of boiled it down to that. There’s nutrient imbalances, there’s food reactions, there’s toxicity, which we’ve talked about. Usually the toxicity stuff is paired with compromised detox pathways. Usually there’s a genetic piece going on there. There’s gut imbalances, we’ve already talked about. In some cases there’s infections, whether those are infections in the gut or those are things like strep and staph and things like that that are putting pressure.

All these things, all they’re doing is they’re adding more stress to an already stressed-out body. FDN is all about uncovering hidden stress. I wrote a book called Raising Resilience back in 2016, this was way before I discovered FDN. That was my goal with that book was to help parents go beneath diagnosis and understand their kids through the lens of stress.

What FDN helped me understand more specifically was how stress impacts the body and what I’m most interested in is, how it affects the nervous system. I kind of took the H.I.D.D.E.N. stress acronym that FDN uses and translated it into what I see specifically for anxiety and mood and learning issues in kids.

Those are the things I’m seeing repeatedly, particularly the gut ones. Nutrient imbalances, those are big. I’m seeing a lot of copper toxicity. I’m seeing a lot of zinc deficiency. I’m seeing a lot of mineral imbalances. It becomes so evident when you see it on paper, and a ton of food reactions and gut problems.

Objective Test Results Motivate Implementation

[00:25:03] Detective Ev: I think this is where the labs are very applicable because people need to see these objective things sometimes to get motivated.

I would imagine as a parent, I’m not one, but if I’m seeing my kids’ lab results and I can see these things are really messed up and I know I’m having these behavioral issues or whatever it might be, physical health issues too, then, yeah, I think that’s very motivating.

I love the lab tests for that reason. Implementation might be hard, but there’s something about knowing it objectively that kind of helps you push through tougher times. Maybe you fall off the wagon, but you get on a little quicker than you would’ve had someone just recommended something loosely without any objective proof that that person actually needed that recommendation. It’s easier to fall off.

Cause you’re like, well, I don’t even know about this anyway versus, the food sensitivity is one I would say is one of the biggest motivators. When you can see that you’re reacting to a food, that’s black and white. Either you are, or you aren’t. Either it’s severe or it’s really nonexistent. It’s tough every time to go eat that food or serve your child, that food when you know that this is going to kind of tick them off a little bit.

I’m assuming that you’re working with parents that have kids in public schools as well. I know we already kind of discussed the implementation thing, but I’m trying to think about this. Is it really practical to get kids to change their behavior, even in public schools?

The Importance of Being Informed About Anxious Kids

Is that something that’s happening or is that just really something that’s a huge barrier that you have learned to navigate? I feel like that’d be one of the biggest concerns from the people listening is this idea of, I can control my kid all the time and then they go to school and then that’s it. That surpasses even the other implementation question I asked. That’s just a totally, really tough thing.

[00:26:29] Jess Sherman: It is a really tough thing. We talk about it a lot.

I’d say a couple of things. One is, that just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. I tell parents, you need to know this information because the more information you have about your child, the more you can make constructive decisions on their behalf, the more you can enter into a positive, constructive conversation with other people.

There was a time when talking about ADHD meds in school between a teacher and a parent was a kind of taboo thing, or like, hey, I think you should go to a psychiatrist kind of thing.

Now it’s like, you walk into any school, there’s like noise-canceling headphones, and there’s like quiet spaces. People understand about neurodiversity, and they understand about food allergies. This is just another one of those things. There is a lot of work we need to do.

I love talking to teachers about the stuff, about some of the things. Teachers are in a very awkward position when they are very health-minded and they’re seeing junk come in the lunches. How do you have that conversation with the parent without blaming the parent for whatever they’re choosing? It’s a very tricky situation.

Fighting for Improved Health-focused School Culture

On the flip side, there are some things that teachers can be aware of, bringing any kind of food into schools or having snacks or birthday celebrations, things like that. That could be a little bit more inclusive for kids. It’s changing.

It is definitely changing over the last 10 years. Like gluten sensitivity is almost as common as peanut allergy in the lexicon of teachers. It’s not taken as seriously because it’s not life threatening the way anaphylaxis is, but they’re open to conversations.

But we have a lot of work to do to change the culture of schools to be one that is more health promoting and more conducive to kids taking care of their own health. Doesn’t mean we can’t try.

[00:28:12] Detective Ev: Hey, we wouldn’t be on this podcast today if I didn’t believe in it. It’s a side story, but I have a friend, he’s absolutely brilliant. He’s very aware of a lot of the crazy things going on in the world. He just kind of gets locked up in them and starts thinking about them. We talk about that together.

I still have a pretty optimistic outlook on this world, and he asked me, how the heck are we talking about the same thing and yet you have this optimistic outlook? I asked him one day, I said, don’t gimme a hard time answer me, honestly. Do you think there is at least, bottom line, at least, a 1% chance of us figuring this stuff out? Jess, we’re talking about things from the issues with kids to environmental issues, like all this kind of stuff.

Parents of Anxious Kids Want Healthier School Environments

I said, do you think there’s a 1% chance at least? He’s like, well, yeah, there’s probably more than that. I said, cool, man, then we better get to work. Right? If it’s zero, I’m going to be miserable with you too and then we can just continue to pout all day. But if you give me a 1% chance, Evan Transue is going to run after that. Like, let’s get to work.

It’s shame that sometimes the most brilliant people get disabled by this stuff, cause I’m like, do we need your brain? One person can invent something really cool that helps fix this stuff, especially the more complicated issues in this world.

Now with this, especially since you’ve worked with teachers as someone who was teaching at one point, is there any recommendations for the schools to be able to address these issues? That’s my thing is like I go into these schools, the teachers sometimes, if I do like a parent talk, they’ll be there and they’ll get to hear about my natural stuff.

I talk more to the parents about that side. I might leave it out with the kids a little bit, but the parents I talk to, and they say, oh, this is great. This is awesome. How the heck do we get the school to change and do the stuff that’s necessary?

I don’t know whether it’s like a special food company I can recommend that maybe serve some better stuff for kids or what. But I’m curious about what recommendations you’d like to see implemented in a school or that you’ve seen work in the past.

Commercial Break: Five-star Review

Hey, my friends. It is Detective Ev popping in here really quick. If you’re listening to this episode, perhaps you’re a regular listener and you’re thinking, you know, I like the content that these guys put out. Then please consider leaving us a review on whatever app you are listening on. It can just be the five-star thing. That’s totally fine. If you want to leave a few kind words, that’s even better.

We would greatly appreciate it. It helps us get this information to more people who have no idea that this exists.

All right now, back to today’s episode.

Healthy School Food Policy vs. Healthy School Culture

[00:30:16] Jess Sherman: That is a big, big question, Evan, and I wish I had a straightforward solution.

I would say we have a systemic problem in schools. In public schools there’s so much bureaucracy and big picture stuff that happens that really hampers what individuals can do. But we need some cultural change. I mean, I did work with one school, they hired me, they needed a healthy eating policy, that’s what they wanted.

I was like, listen, you guys, a healthy eating policy is not going to fly if you don’t have a healthy culture in your school. You need a health culture in your school because it’s not just about eating. You can’t tell a parent to stop getting their kids granola bars in their lunch if you’re going to sell cotton candy at the fair. It just doesn’t jive, right?

You need a healthy school policy more than a healthy food policy. So that everybody who comes into that school comes into a culture that is supportive of healthy child development. We’re a long way off of that.

Sadly, it’s really private schools that have the capacity to really create that because they have total control over their community. Public schools is going to take a long time.

I think that’s what everyone wants. Everyone wants health for kids. Everyone wants it to be a healthy environment, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of strategic multifaceted plans to say, here’s everything from social media to technology, to food, to how we talk about kids, to curriculum, like all of that stuff. It’s huge. I mean, we’re going big picture here.

Five Things Anxious Kids Need

The way I do it in my little ecosystem, my little roadmap that I have for families is, I say, listen, we’re going to learn about your child’s body first and foremost, so that we can figure out what the leverage points are that we can help them feel better.

There are five things that every child needs, regardless of whatever we find out in the lab testing. They need real food. They need clean air and clean water. They need restorative sleep. They need movement and play; they need connection and a sense of purpose. So, we work on those things.

We help the parents talk to their kids about which of those do you find interesting, like where can we work there so that they can learn to take care of themselves? Then we figure out all of the H.I.D.D.E.N. stressors and all that stuff through the lab testing.

I would love to see more of that kind of stuff be integrated into school curriculum to be like, hey, what’s your health plan for this year, or this week or this month, depending on the age level of a kid?

[00:32:38] Detective Ev: I appreciate you humoring my big picture questions by the way. I’m always just trying to see it cause I know it can happen, but it’s going to take a little bit. So, any little piece of advice I can get I’ll take cause I hate leaving these teachers with nothing when they ask me, what can we do in the schools?

All Categories of Anxious Kids Need to be Realized

Obviously, let’s start with the healthy habits, but sometimes you don’t even know where to start.

I think the other problem is here too, it’s not even like the schools are just blatantly neglecting these people and not telling them this stuff, it’s that they don’t know it either.

It’s the same issue with the doctors. It’s not like the doctor that was recommending Xanax and Zoloft to me was hiding the real secret behind their desk. They didn’t know either. I’m not saying this in a judgmental way, I’m just saying in a health way, they didn’t look particularly healthy. They were very overweight, very pale. They looked exhausted. They got the bags under their eyes.

I mean, this was not someone that was lying to me and using something in the back. I think that’s the problem. They say the first step in fixing a problem is identifying that there is one and recognizing that there is one. I don’t even know that that’s the obvious recognized problem when we see the behavioral issues in kids nowadays.

A lot of it’s been blamed to COVID. I’m in the schools, I definitely saw the increase due to COVID, but there was a lot going on before guys. I’m like, there’s a ton of stuff happening that had nothing to do with COVID.

So now, unfortunately, as much recognition as being given to the mental health side, there’s the people like myself that actually dealt with this for nutritional reasons or whatever else, which is millions and millions of kids, it’s almost getting swept under the rugs. We think, oh, well, it’s COVID and it’s this time. It’s like, well, no, it doesn’t really have to be this way.

Promising Effects of Gluten-free for Anxious Kids

I think that’s powerful that you mentioned focusing on those five things first. Like, are they getting good sleep? Are they getting clean air and clean water? I’m sure you’ve seen this since you actually work pretty much exclusively with them, kids respond so quickly to when they get the right things.

I mean, adults can respond pretty fast. A kid, it could be a two-day transformation sometimes. They’re not in perfect health, I don’t want to speak ignorantly here, and someone get me wrong that’s listening. But you’d be surprised how fast a kid can change when they are actually given the things that, shockingly, a kid was meant to have.

[00:34:34] Jess Sherman: To bring it down to something really practical, I think the thing with teachers and parents is they want management tools. I tell parents that for every one gluten symptom that is digestive, there are eight that are neurological.

The number one tissue in the body that gluten likes to attack is the brain tissue. That’s like, oh, okay, we’re going to give this a shot. I have literally had people go off gluten, like take their kid off gluten for a while, and teachers think that they’re on medication cause there’s that much of a profound shift.

It doesn’t happen all the time, that’s not always the thing. There’s very rarely one answer to what’s going on. But not a lot of people know that. Even specialists who understand celiac disease don’t understand the extent to which it can affect the brain and the nervous system.

Anxious Kids: Normalizing Food’s Effect on Mental Health

So, I just think it’s about getting this out there. The more people who have success with this, when parents go through my program and they have their kid on the other side, they’re telling everybody. They’re like, oh my gosh, everyone needs to know this.

Yeah, it’s a rocky road to try to figure it out, trying this and trying that. But when you come out the other end of it, the more people who have success with it, the more it’s going to become mainstream. I mean, I imagine a time when talking about someone’s food, when they struggle with something neurological and mental health is just as common as it now is to talk about smoking cessation when you have a chronic cough.

These things take time to become normalized, but that’s the work you and I are doing is to get it more out there so that it becomes normalized.

[00:36:07] Detective Ev: Bingo. That’s why I love the privilege to get to do this. I love the saying, facts tell, stories sell. It’s not that we’re selling anything in particular, but we’re selling an idea, a way of living, a concept.

I could give people all the facts. I actually thought that was fascinating about for every one digestive symptom, there’s eight neurological ones. I did not know that. But some people don’t really resonate with that as much.

When you hear how a life is transformed, that’s something that sticks with people 20, 30 years later sometimes. That leads me to my next question here. As someone who’s been doing this for so long, I can only imagine the stories that you have.

Success Stories of Anxious Kids

If you want to do even two or three, that’s fine, but one’s also okay. It’s up to you. I’m just curious, are there any client testimonials that really stick out? Maybe a totally troubled kid, and then you were able to come in and do this work and just kind of transform things for the family? I’m very curious about that.

[00:36:54] Jess Sherman: Well, it’s always a mix. There’s information and there’s implementation. I’m just going to be straight up and honest and say, I have had people where we find out a lot about a kid, there’s all kinds of things going on. But we work for months and months and months to get the kid to buy in, to take the supplements, and to do the changes. There is that side of thing.

I’ve also had kids, particularly the very sensitive kids who just want to feel better. When there’s even just that little glimmer in them of, I just wish I didn’t fly off the handle all the time. I have one kid in particular I’m thinking of who was very volatile.

He would just lose it and get kind of aggressive. But then he would take himself away and come back and have this remorseful moment of, I just don’t want this anymore. We found out that he was extremely sensitive to gluten. He had a lot of intestinal permeability. Corn and dairy was a big deal too. His digestive system was messed up. He had a lot of dysbiotic growth, a lot of opportunistic bacteria running the show in his gut.

Seeing the Lab Results & Following the Protocol

He had really high pyrroles as well, which is something that I’ve started testing for. These are compounds that come out in the urine, and they leach zinc and B6. So, when you have chronic deficiency of zinc and B6, it’s really hard to create your neurotransmitters, those calming neurochemicals. He had that as well. There was like a perfect storm.

For him, like he was a teenager so what we did was I video reviewed the labs with him in mind because I don’t want any kid to feel like they’re broken or there’s something wrong with them. That’s not what these tests are telling us. They’re just windows into the body and they’re helping us identify the opportunities we can leverage to help them feel better.

So, I did that, and he saw it. He was just wide-eyed. He was like, wow! Then he was on board. He literally said if this can help me be a more productive member of the family, it was something along those lines.

This kid was incredible. He just wanted to do right but he was out of control. He didn’t have control over himself. He was a great success. He took the supplements, he did the things, he started making different choices. He said no to the birthday cakes. He was the model kid.

Now, like I say, it’s not all this cut and dry. But those are the biggest rewards when the kids have an interest, and we always have that conversation, like how interested in this are you? If they are interested even the littlest bit, then we bring them into the process. We explain what’s going on in their body and how it relates to how they’re feeling and thinking. Often that will help buy them in.

Take the Whole Person & Health Concerns into Consideration

[00:39:20] Detective Ev: That’s so cool that he was that interested in it. You know, I’m not particularly surprised.

The reason I don’t talk about the functional stuff always with the kids is because it doesn’t relate to everyone in that audience. I can speak to things that relate to everyone in that audience, typically. But with the things I do recommend, like my little steps at the end that are generic but useful nonetheless, kids want to learn, man. They’re sponges almost.

Sometimes as adults, at least I found in my life, they project their rigidness onto the kids and act like they’re not going to want to do that. It’s like, no, Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, you don’t want to do that. Kids are learning all the time. They’re changing every single day and every single week. I find that they’re some of the most receptive human beings to change with this.

You know, especially with the thing of feeling out of control and ending up in trouble for this, it really brings me back to when I was in middle school and high school. I was getting in trouble for fights. I ended up in a juvenile detention facility. I don’t want to sit here and excuse my actions. I’m not even advocating this for me per se.

But it does beg the question then, if kids are this susceptible to this stuff and they truly feel outta control, how many people are ending up in the quote/unquote “system,” like the juvenile system or something like that, when they’re sensitive to gluten or something similar? Because the adults act like crap when they’re moody or whatever. Kids, they might actually do something that really has some serious consequences for them.

Anxious Kids & Their Stress Cups

I feel like we need to get people thinking about that kind of thing. There’s kids’ lives that are going to be impacted for the rest of their time here because of something that maybe wasn’t even entirely their fault to begin with. I find it hard to believe that I had no role in the things that I did when I was younger. But at a certain point, a six-year old’s pretty hard to blame for most of their actions, in my opinion, especially if they’re sick and neuro inflamed and feeling like crap all the time. That’s a pretty tough way to operate in your life.

[00:41:07] Jess Sherman: I break it apart to be like, there’s their stress cup, right? It’s all about their stress cup. There’s social stressors, there’s environmental stressors, there’s biological stressors. We need to figure out what’s filling up their cup. It’ll be a different weight for each kid.

But we also have to look at their genetic capacity to tolerate stress because that’s a thing. We know epigenetics and we don’t have to get into epigenetics and genetics. But some people, when they are under stress, they are more likely to show symptoms of depression, or symptoms of anxiety, or symptoms of impulsivity because of their genetics.

Then we have to say, okay, so what are your biggest stress triggers? What’s filling your cup and where are our leverage points there? All of those things need to be taken into account.

[00:41:49] Detective Ev: Well, Jess, I think this is a really good opportunity I hope for you and the things that you’re doing. Obviously, you’ve been doing it for a while anyway.

Where to Find Jess Sherman

But I know that many of the people that listen, they’re typically coming on for a personal health story. Believe it or not, it’s actually really not that common that we get someone on that is really focusing on the kids. So, if people are interested in working with you, where can they find you?

[00:42:11] Jess Sherman: Yeah, everything’s at my website, which is my name. So, JessSherman.com. There’s three S’s in a row, sometimes that trips people up. And the program that I bring people through is called The Resilience Roadmap. It’s literally a roadmap to stronger stress response, stronger resilience. So that’s JessSherman.com/resilienceroadmap.

Everything’s on my website. I have a podcast called The Feeding Families Podcast. I have a book called Raising Resilience. But everything can be found from the hub of my website.

[00:42:38] Detective Ev: Excellent. Of course, we’ll have this in the show notes for people, but it’s always good to just hear it verbally.

I can’t believe 50 minutes completely flew by here today. I want to finish by asking you the signature question on the Health Detective Podcast. I guess this is one that’s kind of tough, cause we’re focusing on families today and focusing on parents.

Whether it’s a message to parents, kids, or whatever, you can take this however you’d like. The question normally is in this case, if I could give you, Jess, a magic wand and you could wave it and get every single person in this world to do one thing for their health (so maybe that’s like every single parent or every single kid, it’s up to you), what’s the one thing that Jess would get them to do?

The Health Detective Podcast Signature Question

[00:43:11] Jess Sherman: Oh, there’s so many. I should have done my homework, so I’d know what the question was.

I’ll tell you one thing I would wave my magic wand to erase mom-guilt. Like just erase it from the face of the planet so it does not exist, cause guilt does not serve us. We all think of what we should have done, what we could have done, what we didn’t do, what I wish I had done, and what I wish I had known. So, that would be gone.

Then I think if I can do two, can I do two? If I could do two, one would be to just think, have a good solid conversation with your parenting partner about health and about your vision of health. What does a healthy family look like to you, feel like to you?

What does a healthy child look like and feel like to you? And how close, or how far away from that are you right now? I tell people that I help people course correct. I just course correct. But you have to first identify that there’s something to course correct. We get so busy in our lives and we’re just on a treadmill as parents.

So, just having a stop for a sec, take a breath, and think about what the vision of health you have, what is it that you want for your kids and for your family? From there, if you have that vision, that’s the starting point. You don’t know how to get there because otherwise you would be there by now.

We Need to Give Anxious Kids More Credit

Don’t worry about that, just think about what it is that you want. Then find people who can help. It might not be me but find people who have a plan in place for how you can get closer to that vision of health.

I could do so many more, Evan. There are so many things, but I’ll leave it at that.

[00:44:43] Detective Ev: All right, guys, that’ll do it for today’s episode with Jess Sherman. I hope you liked this one. I think this is well overdue. It’s one that we need in today’s world. Listen, she admitted it herself. It’s tough working with families. You’re trying to get someone else healthy, which is already tough enough to get them on board to do this. And you’re trying to do it through someone else.

Then on top of that, they are a kid. But as you heard from Jess’s client testimonials, I think there’s something to be said about this idea that kids, we gotta give them a little more credit. When they have a problem, and they know there’s a problem (there’s something that they don’t like), and they are presented something that actually makes sense, I find that they’re really open to it.

I think it’s sometimes adults, like we’re projecting onto the kids because we are more solidified in our ways, and we’ve become more closed minded. We think, oh, well they won’t think this way.

I think kids are some of the most open-minded individuals. If they can see a clear connection between what the lab data is showing and the actions needed to get something unfavorable in their life to change, I think it makes sense. We need to give them a little more credit.

Conclusion

Hopefully, if you are out there and your kid is suffering or someone else’s kid is suffering, maybe you send this podcast along to them. Or if you’re an FDN listening, you go and try to give them some help. We need more people working with kids. I feel a little hypocritical because I don’t do it myself as an FDN cause I know how tough it is. But you know, I do my work in the school. So, I try to do my part.

I think if we all did our part in our own ways, whether it’s FDN or something completely different, that would really help change the world and get it back on track. Because how this next generation turns out is really going to have some major implications on what our world will look like 10, 15, 20 years from now.

I hope you guys enjoyed today’s episode. If you like the information that we’re sharing, please consider leaving us a five-star review on Apple and/or Spotify. If you would do that, we would love you even more than we already do.

I’m looking forward to talking to you guys again soon. But until next time, take care.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

To hire a coach, go to fdnthrive.com.

For a free Health Review, go to fdnthrive.com/match/.