Stop Being Dismissed! The 5 Truths to Reclaim Your Health (Women 35-65 Must Hear)

Welcome to the Being Brigid Show. I am your host, Brigid Tiggemeier and wow, I cannot tell you how good it feels to welcome you to this show, welcome you to a powerful experience of guiding you towards improving your health, improving your relationship with food, improving your mindset, supporting and advocating for, for women's health and the needs that we have as women compared to men. The power of functional medicine, the the strategies and tools and resources in science and clinical experience and experience, teaching future healthcare practitioners and in helping tens of thousands of women. I am bringing it all to this show. We're going to dive so deep into every single episode, looking at different science backed strategies, looking at mindset shifts, looking at limitations, looking at how to structure nutrition and food in a way that actually supports alignment with your overall health, with joy with how you want to live. So many things that are all bundled into this show as a powerful experience to help you reclaim your health, your energy and hope. Using science backed strategies, using transformational stories from real women, from incredibly intelligent experts in the field of nutrition and women's health in functional medicine. We're going to have so many enlightening conversations. I believe that storytelling is such an important element combined with real science. And when I say real science, I mean not watered down science. I mean not a bunch of distractions like you see on social media where one day eggs are unhealthy and then the next day oats are unhealthy and then the next day tomatoes are creating inflammation and then the next day it's the issues with water. Like there is so much confusion, more confusion now than ever before. There is so much information out in the world. So I want this show to be your hub of a place that you can trust with not only the science but also limitations that we have within the science. The nuance around what works best for you is going to work different and look different than the, than what works best for other people. All of this is going to be so fun and I'm so excited to be your guide throughout it. So I thought that today it would be a great opportunity to just start with outlining the most powerful lessons that I have learned in the last 10 years of working as a registered dietitian with a board certification in integrative and functional nutrition. I have worked with tens of thousands of women in my nutrition programs alongside my incredible team of registered dietitians. I have worked at the leading center of functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. I worked under the world renowned functional medicine doctor, Dr. Mark Hyman. And so I've pulled together key insights that I want to share today that I want to go deeper into exploring to help to really outline what you can expect from this show, but also starting it out with these key learning opportunities that will hopefully help to improve your life. Now, if today's episode helps you in any way, I would love and so much appreciate you sharing it with a friend or a family member. This is such a great way for you to support spreading this mission of the importance of women's health, of incorporating nutrition and lifestyle at the forefront of how we're approaching our health. We are on a huge mission to get this message into the hands of as many women as possible and not only get the message into the hands of as many women as possible, but then be able to support as many women in having the right roadmap, the right structure in their routine in order to be not only successful today, but five years from now, ten years from now. Since so many diets are focused on these short, quick fixes where they have big promises for big results in four weeks from now, but not necessarily four years from now. So we are on a big mission to do that. And you being here means so much to me. It makes such a difference. And you sharing this episode with anyone also means so much to me. So I want to thank you in advance. If you are a woman in your mid-30s to mid-60s and you feel tired of being dismissed, of being overwhelmed, of being stuck, of following diets that don't really work long term, of feeling like you wish that you felt as good as you used to, that you've noticed significant changes in your health, that maybe your lab markers have changed in ways that you didn't expect. Searching for answers, searching for better understanding, like why it is that you're waking up every day feeling like you do and not getting a lot of answers, this show is for you. I want to honor you, recognize you, and validate you and let you know that there is so much opportunity for you to rise above the challenges that you're experiencing today, to step into a place of empowerment, to step into a place of inspiration, and to take true ownership of your health. So we are going to dive into that and I'm going to start with lesson number one. Lesson number one, Healing is possible even when you're told that it's not. Twenty years ago, I was falling asleep. Every second of every day, I would fall asleep. When I was eating, I would fall asleep in the two minutes in between sprints, at track practice, I would fall asleep in the bleachers at football games. And simultaneously, I was having about 30 mini seizures per day that would last for a few seconds at a time. And anxiety, acne, so many debilitating GI symptoms, painful periods, a lot of different issues, a lot of different specialists, and pretty much no answers. I did end up getting diagnosed with narcolepsy, with cataplexies, which is a neurological autoimmune disorder or condition. And I'll never forget the day that I was diagnosed at 15 years old, being in that doctor's office and the neurologist essentially rolling out his prescription pad and saying, here's the rest of your life. You're going to take these drugs to mask these symptoms. You'll continue to need more as you age. It will continue to get worse as you age. And then sent us on our way. And my parents sat across the room from him. And we're asking questions like, well, what about the side effects of these drugs? Are there any other options? Can we layer in lifestyle interventions? And we were met with nothing but resistance. We were told, no, there's nothing that you can do outside of this. And my parents, who are not healthcare practitioners, chose not to listen to that. They took me to see a functional medicine doctor. At the time, functional medicine wasn't even a thing. This was back in 2005. But this functional medicine doctor put me on. She ran a bunch of lab tests. She put me on a very strict elimination diet for a period of time. I went on a long list of supplements based on my lab results, and I hated every single second of it. I just wanted to take the drugs. I said to my parents, you are not doctors. We need to listen to the doctor. And I just want to take the drugs to, to feel better. But after about three weeks of following the plan, my mom making all the meals and going to five different grocery stores, there became an undeniable difference in how I was feeling. And several months later, after I was continuing to see changes, we were so excited to go back to the neurologist and to tell them, to tell him about my experience, thinking that, oh, he'd be excited to learn about it and to share it with other people, we went into the neurologist appointment. We told him about the progress, and he said, nutrition has nothing to do with your condition. He repeated it over and over. There is no science to show that nutrition has anything to do with your condition. He would not make eye contact with us. He typed away at his computer the entire time. He was a pediatric neurologist, the only one in the department. He refused to continue seeing me moving forward. So at the age of 15, I had to start seeing an adult neurologist at the time. So I remember at that point, at the age of 16, saying to my mom, there has to be thousands of other people who are just like me who are going into their doctor's office and being told that nutrition has nothing to do with their condition. And I want to help those people. And what I know now, today more than ever before, is that we owe it to the world to take a different approach to our health. Nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, moving your body. These are the most powerful inner interventions that we have to optimize our health, our functionality, and the body's resilience and strength. And it's not that I didn't end up needing some medical management, which I have benefited from over the years. It's that my functionality would not be where it is today without the changes that I have made and continued to tweak over the years with my nutrition and lifestyle and supplements and all of the work that I have done. And it's because of that that I became obsessed with using food as medicine. I did my high school senior project in 2008 on the power of using food as medicine. This was not a popular topic at the time. I read it off of a gluten free cereal box in the morning. I would read the back of the cereal box and it was like a gluten free, basically like rice puff cereal that seemed like it was a healthy option at the time, but it said on the back, food is medicine. And I was like, this makes so much sense. Why is no one talking about this? Why are a lot of people not talking about this? My mom and my dad and my grandpa and like some of our family members were the only ones that we knew that were embracing this way of supporting our health. So it took the next 10 years that I committed to studying nutrition, becoming a dietitian, getting my master's in public health nutrition. And after being told that functional medicine doesn't work, I was brought on to open the center for functional medicine under Dr. Mark Hyman at the same hospital we brought functional medicine to the masses, at the same hospital where the doctor 10 years prior had told me that nutrition has nothing to do with my condition and that functional medicine does not work. My personal story is an example, is a great example of the fact that healing is possible even when you're told that it's not. We brought functional medicine to the masses. We had thousands of patients on Our wait list patients flying in from all over the world and they were all looking for a different approach to their health. And ingrained in me is the fact that I would sit across from woman after woman after woman who would just cry. She would cry. She had just seen the doctor and then was seeing me, the dietician. Because every person that saw a doctor had to see a dietician. And she would say, I feel so seen and heard. I've never been able to ask all these questions about my health. I've never had anyone take the amount of time with me. I've never had anyone ask about my lifestyle and other things, other factors that could be contributing to why I feel the way that I feel. Like I finally feel seen and heard for the first time. And it's such a crazy thing because that should be the norm, but it is not the norm. It is very much the exception. I remember one of the patients, she was in her mid-50s and she was a nurse that was very conventionally trained. She was very skeptical of functional medicine, did not want to be there, but she came as a last resort because she had debilitating joint pain, was hardly able to move and had extreme levels of fatigue and had gone from doctor to doctor who was putting her on a different cocktail of drugs. None of them were working. And she had her initial appointment and a few months later she came in for her follow up appointment and she cried in my office because she said that it was the first time that she was able to swing a golf club in years without pain. That limited her ability to do that. And that was just in a few short months of following the nutrition plan and protocol. We had thousands of patients and women that were just like this who had been told one thing and then experienced something completely different. And when the patients were experiencing such significant improvements, then when you would talk to doctors or dietitians or other healthcare practitioners that worked for the hospital and other areas, they would say things to us like, yeah, we send all the crazy patients to you. Because even though people were seeing results, they still couldn't acknowledge the fact that it was working. Just that we send all the crazy people to you. I went on to co create the first integrative and nutrition curriculum at Case Western Reserve University where I taught in their medical school for eight years. And I wanted to do this because I saw a huge need for educating future dietitians and doctors and other healthcare practitioners on the evidence of these nutrition and lifestyle interventions so we could start to change the conversation and patients experiences and then in the last five years I have built the nutrition business of my dreams being Bridgid Functional Nutrition, where I have the most incredible team of registered dietitians and brilliant women who work with me and are dedicated to helping the tens of thousands of women that we have helped in transforming their overall health, taking ownership of their health, reversing their prediabetes, working alongside their doctor to get off of their cholesterol medication, getting rid of their joint pain, improving their thyroid health, optimizing their through perimenopause and menopause, improving their GI health and reducing their bloating and constipation and loose stools, decreasing their fatigue and brain fog, decreasing their risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, and for the first time in a very long time, feeling good, confident and strong in their bodies. It's with this experience that I am here to tell you. If you have been told in a 15 minute doctor's appointment that you just need medication with no further explanation, with no further conversation, if you've been made to feel like you are crazy and that you are making all these symptoms up in your head, if you have spent hours researching on the Internet only to feel entirely confused and frustrated, if you are sick of jumping from diet to diet and never feeling like you're actually making traction with your health, I want to tell you that you are in the right place. You are not the problem, you are not crazy and healing is possible. I know this from my own story and from from the thousands of stories from the women that go through my two primary programs, the Being Collective and My Food Is Health, where every single day we get emails or messages from our clients sharing such significant transformations when it comes to their symptoms or their labs or their ability to function better, do the things that they love. And I will, I will add the fact that it's not just about getting great lab markers. It's not just about improving your symptoms for the sake of improving your symptoms. Our goal is to help you expand your life so that you can do the things with the people that you love for as long as physically possible. Because that, at the end of the day, is what matters the most. And our health allows for us to have those opportunities. Without our health, we truly have nothing. And so being able to focus on the fact that healing is possible with the right roadmap, with the right support, it is honestly just so incredible to be able to share this message, to be able to do the work that we do every single day and to help the women that we help. And a huge goal of this show is to be able to bring this message to the masses, to be able to take responsibility in needing to share this message with more people, to share this mission with more people whose lives can be opened up in the same exact way that mine was, so that they can live with higher quality of life, more joy, more relationships, more opportunities, more hobbies, more things that light them up and a brighter light. Lesson number two, everything is connected. One of the most powerful realizations that I have had in the last 10 years over and over again, is that everything is connected. There is no such thing as isolated symptoms. Everything in your body is connected. Your hormones, your gut, your blood sugar, your inflammation, your metabolism, they all influence each other. They are all working together. I remember sitting in front of a client who had gained weight in her abdominal area, even though she said over and over again how she had not changed her diet or physical activity and felt extremely frustrated by that. And all of the doctors just told her, just eat less, move more, essentially insinuating the fact that she's just not trying hard enough, try harder, and try not to be so lazy. She was experiencing more cognitive issues, more memory decline that was concerning her. She was feeling more anxious. She wasn't able to sleep through the nights. She was experiencing a lot of cravings, she was having more bloating and a lot of period pain. And the specialist that she saw all dismissed the symptoms that she was experiencing. They said, this is normal. You're just getting older. It might just be your genes, all of these surface level explanations. I mean, they're not even explanations, right? It's like surface level, just like, let me tell you something and then send you on your way. And of course they prescribed Ozempic and an antianxiety medication and through birth control, her way for the period pain and a medication for sleep. But here's what no one asked. No one asked, how can we get to the root of all of these symptoms? How are all of these symptoms connected? Instead of seeing a million different specialists who are just looking at the sleep and are just looking at the anxiety and are just looking at the weight, how are all of these things connected? And how is your nutrition and lifestyle playing a role? How much alcohol are you drinking at night? How much sleep are you getting? What are you eating for breakfast in the morning? None of these questions were asked and no one was trying to connect all these symptoms. But your body is a symphony, right? It, it all works together. When you think about the fact that your blood Sugar levels. When they fluctuate immensely throughout the day, it creates more hormone dysregulation, which is only exacerbated when a woman is going through perimenopause, which leads to the exacerbation of a lot of these symptoms. High blood sugar levels are also a direct contributor to chronic inflammation, one of the leading causes of chronic inflammat. And we know that chronic inflammation is one of the largest contributors to risk of heart disease. It can worsen your period pain. It can exacerbate also, all on its own, those perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms and so much more. So we have to stop treating the body like it just exists in different parts, that everything is connected, and we need to think deeper into what is going on underneath the hood. What are the imbalances? Where is the dysfunction happening? And how can we improve it since everything is connected? Taking a comprehensive approach to nutrition and lifestyle can drastically improve how you feel, but it also helps you age better and decreases your risk of conditions that can lead to a slow and subtle decline over time. So it's about how you feel today, of course, because we all want to wake up feeling good. We all, we all want to wake up with good energy and a stable mood and feeling good about ourselves, feeling confident, feeling confident in our body, in our body composition, feeling strong, feeling like we're gaining strength as we're aging. And we all deserve to feel like this. It's not just about today, though. It's also about how your habits today are setting you up for your health 30 years from now. Many of you know, if you've followed me for a long time, that my grandpa is a huge inspiration in my life and a functional medicine evangelist. And he was always obsessed with living as independently as possible and never wanting to be a burden on others. And I feel like that has translated to a huge personal goal of mine, where me in my 30s. I'm thinking about how can I incorporate the strategies now that will set me up for more independence in my last 10 years of life, because I don't want to end up with frailty and osteoporosis and dementia and chronic pain and depression, and all of these things that are so common as women especially, are aging and going through those last years of life. All of this starts with addressing your symptoms and thinking about how everything is connected, because your symptoms are warning signs. Small imbalances can lead to various symptoms like constipation or congestion or joint pain or other things that then down the road can only get bigger, that then down the road may just get bigger. So if the joint pain is a sign of underlying chronic inflammation that's brewing and you're not addressing it and you're masking it with various drugs, the chronic inflammation that's leading to the joint pain is going to increase your risk of heart disease down the road and other things that become more serious and more significant. So it's our job to think about the body as one interconnected organism and to think about how we can get to the root cause. Lesson number three, Women deserve better. Women deserve better, period. Women are not the same as men. Women's health is not the same as male's health. Even though for decades women's health was built off of the research that we had in males health and the assumptions that whatever worked well for men worked fine for women, Protocols that work really well for men do not translate to working really well for women. As Dr. Stacy Sims has said for years, women are not small men. And it's time for us to advocate for the differences in women's health versus men's health and different approaches that we deserve in order to support our health in the best way possible. So not only has the majority of research been done in males, but the various life stages that a woman goes through. Think of all the life stages that a woman goes through that involve incredible physiological changes. You think about just the changes every month that a woman goes through as far as the hormonal shifts that are happening. But then even on a larger level, like preparing the body for pregnancy, if a woman chooses and becomes pregnant, carrying babies through pregnancy, the postpartum experience, Perimenopause, menopause, like, like so many shifts. Breastfeeding, I didn't even include breastfeeding. All of these involve large shifts in our physiology that we are essentially just told that we have to deal with and push through. And that was especially the case I feel like for women that are, you know, a lot of our clients that are 50 and up, that are just, we're used to like, after having babies, you push through, neglected the fact that it takes two years postpartum in order for your body to even slightly get back to the norm. And the fact that when you're having back to back pregnancies that, you know, makes that even harder. And then you go pretty much directly into perimenopause where you're met with enormous shifts in your hormones. And we wonder why it feels so hard, why it feels so hard to feel good on a regular basis. So we have to account for these major life transitions. And we have to better understand exactly what's happening from a research standpoint and then pairing it with the proper roadmap from a nutrition and lifestyle standpoint, and also at the same time, acknowledging that these hormone shifts impact our risk of disease. So the changes in hormones and hormone levels that happen through menopause, they increase risk of things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease. When we look at metabolic dysfunction, hormone shifts during this time lead to the increased risk of accumulating more visceral fat, because the way that our body stores fat changes, and that directly increases our risk for type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, which are the leading causes of death in postmenopausal women. But if we go even deeper than that, and we look at the fact that 80% of autoimmune diseases happen in women, 2/3 of Alzheimer's disease cases women, thyroid dysfunction, IBS, migraines, all of them are significantly more common in women. When we look at osteoporosis, 80% of osteoporosis cases are happening in women. And one in two female adults above the age of 80 will experience a fracture related to bone loss. Women are more likely to be going to the doctor. They are more likely to be proactive in trying to look for answers to better understand what's going on. And yet women are also more likely to be misdiagnosed or completely dismissed when you go to the doctor and the bloating that you're experiencing is chalked up to anxiety. Those kinds of situations that happen far too often, even when we're actively seeking care, we're often not taken seriously enough. So here's what I realized. Women deserve better. In addition to hearing story after story of women who are struggling and not getting the answers that they need, I've also worked with leading doctors. I've interpreted thousands of labs. I have worked alongside my amazing team of dietitians, taught future healthcare practitioners, and all of this experience has made me more confident than ever before that we can change the future of women's health. One of my clients in our programs, Kathy, had said when I had shared with my community that I was starting a video podcast, she said we need to change generational health for females so that our daughters and our granddaughters don't have to experience the same level of dismissal and lack of answers that we experienced as women. And so I want to share, I want to dive as deep into that as I can in this show to be able to not only shape what women's health looks like today, but what women's health looks like for our daughters and our granddaughters. I'm currently 35 years old, and so I'm embracing this show as an opportunity to give you a sneak peek behind the scenes of what I'm doing in my own life. To be proactive when it comes to my health, to support my bone health, to support my muscle mass, to help to lower inflammation so that I'm going into this next phase of life as strong, resilient, stable as possible, to help to try to mitigate symptoms and decrease risk of preventable conditions. But then I also am going to be embracing this from the standpoint of a lot of our clients. 95% of the clients that have gone through the Being Collective or My Food Is Health are females above the age of 35. And so there's a lot to learn from those opportunities and a lot of differences too, that we'll be covering in this show. A lot of these women in their 50s and 60s will say things like, I would do so many things differently if I could go back 20 years and redo it. I would take my nutrition more seriously. I would actually really focus on strength training instead of just chalking it up to a bunch of bodybuilders being in the gym because they cared about their physical appearance. Since I know that muscle health impacts our overall health, that I would stop counting calories, that I would stop trying to eat as little as possible without even factoring in my protein and my micronutrients, like my vitamins and mineral intake and how much fiber I'm getting in my diet and my polyphenol intake. I would have learned how to meal prep. I would have prioritized meal prep over other things in my life, and I would have really taken seriously my ability to make nutrient dense foods for my family. I want to highlight the fact that regardless of where you're at in life, there is so much that you can do at any time. That's whether you are 45 years old, 55 years old, 65, 75 years old. Two concepts apply simultaneously. One, the sooner you start, the better. The earlier that you start, the better in terms of decreasing risk of chronic disease, improving your symptoms, improving how you feel on a day to day basis. But also, it's never too late. There is no age limit when it comes to these lifestyle interventions. And we have women that are 75 years old that have gone through My Food is Health, the Being Collective who are proactively taking ownership of their health at 75 years old and feeling better than they did 20 years earlier. So all of this is entirely possible. There is nothing wrong with continuing to seek answers when it comes to your health. There is nothing wrong with advocating for yourself. There is nothing wrong with us pushing the narrative forward of saying that women deserve better and that women are not small men. Lesson number four, food is information for your cells. For far too long, the narrative around nutrition was let me count calories and weigh myself to look at the outcomes and the results, and then I'll assess my entire worth based on the number of calories that I have eaten today and the number that I'm looking at on the scale. And that is not nutrition. That is not using food as medicine. That is a very restrictive way of living your life. So when I say food is information for your cells, it means we need to be using food as a powerful leverage in our overall health picture because of its ability to send different chemical messages to our cells that improve the functionality of those cells that actually change our gene expression. So that if you are predisposed to Things like type 2 diabetes or heart disease, that your epigenetics will impact in a positive way, reducing that risk of disease. Because it's not just about your genes, it's about your lifestyle, specifically food that has the ability to change the way that our genes express themselves. They change our cellular function. So it is beyond sad to me that for so long, diet, culture and the messages, the pervasive messages in society were just count food, restrict food, fear food. In such a surface level approach that's like eat the littlest amount possible calories in versus calories out, weighing every meal on the scale, never having dessert, snacking on 100 cal packs, and it just could not be further from what is actually healthy and what our bodies actually need. So what I want to really highlight in this show is factoring in so many different things when it comes to nutrition, Especially because nutrition is not one size fits all. What works best for you will not be the same as what works best for your friend or your neighbor or your mom. And so we need to, to always take that into account. But if you factor in how much protein you're eating, how much fiber you're getting, the polyphenols that you're getting in your diet, the omega 3 fatty acids, you're looking at your nutrient profile, you're identifying foods that might be triggering for you, you're identifying nutrient deficiencies and so many other elements of your health. This can change every single Layer of your health. It's not just about eating healthy. The majority of women that come through our programs, they are reading labels, they are trying to eat clean. They say that they're eating healthy. And so it's not even just about eating healthy. It's about eating intentionally in order to support our underlying physiology. Because nutrition, at the end of the day, there is so much evidence to show that nutrition can support our hormone balance. It can decrease chronic inflammation, an incredibly powerful way to decrease chronic inflammation. I'm just watching a video that said that exercise is one of the top three most important habits for improving overall health and longevity. And I thought to myself, what about all the people that are inflamed because their diet is contributing to more joint pain that then can't exercise? Right. Truly, if we think about our ability to counteract inflammation and support the body's innate ability to do that, that comes down to the food that we're putting on our plate at every single meal. Blood sugar balance. Nutrition directly impacts blood sugar balance, gut health, and our entire gut microbiome and gut ecosystem. Our ability to build muscle, our ability to support bone health, to support fat loss. Since fat accumulation does increase cytokines and inflammatory cytokines that lead to more of this inflammatory cascade, it can support lowering risk of the most preventable diseases. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis. And nutrition can also slow down the rate that we age. It can slow down how fast our cells are aging. So I want to highlight the fact that just because your doctor may not be mentioning this to you or addressing it, and maybe your doctor is, which is wonderful, but if it's not being addressed, if you're still being told that your condition has nothing to do with your nutrition, I want to highlight the fact that doctors receive less than 20 hours of nutrition education in medical school. I would never ask my doctor nutrition related questions, because anytime that I have tried as a little experiment, I'm always disappointed with the result and the advice that's given. So just because it's not being taught in medical school does not mean that there is not an abundance of research that exists. And you don't want to wait until your doctor learns about that evidence in order for you to take control of your health. So just in my experience of working at Case Western Reserve University, it is like blowing my mind in the way that medical schools today are approaching nutrition and identifying the gaps that have been missed. A lot of medical schools, the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University just built a State of the art culinary medicine center. We're going to be going through more information about that soon. I have an interview with Dr. Toby Cosgrove, who's the former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, who, who has talked about that to some extent with me. And so they built a kitchen where they're doing kitchen classes for medical students, Penns, nurses, dietitians, so that they can do different therapeutic nutrition plans and then cook meals according to the therapeutic nutrition plan and then teaching the science behind why it's so beneficial. So times are changing. More practitioners are awake to this than ever before. And I do believe that real change is on the horizon. But you can't wait to wait until your doctor is addressing this in order for you to actually take action. Which leads me to lesson number five. No one is coming to save you at the end of the day that is so important for you to continue to remind yourself of. Had I waited for my doctor to acknowledge the role that nutrition and lifestyle plays, my medical condition would have taken over my life. I would have been robbed of so many years. I would likely be living in my parents parents basement. I certainly would not have the career that I have. I would not have the nutrition business of my dreams. I would not have the husband or the two beautiful children. My body would not have had the capacity to bring these children into the world had I continued to be at the state that I was at 15 years old without taking ownership of my health. Fifteen years after I had that experience with my doctor, I was invited to speak at the International Sleep Disorder Conference to a room filled with neurologists, Paul nurses. And they wanted me to go into the latest science on how nutrition, supplements and lifestyle play a role on various neurological conditions. Like I have had. I waited the 15 years for these doctors in this room to embrace that, think of how different my life would be. And so I want you to apply the same principle to your life that you can't wait for this to become mainstream. For every single person to unequivocally agree that yes, this is the most important way for us to support our health. If you want to feel different, it's up to you to take ownership of your health. If you want to wake up in the morning feeling really good in your body, feeling strong, feeling confident, not having a lot of symptoms that are decreasing your quality of life, having answers, then you need to take your health into your own hands. There is no way around it. Nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress reduction, these are the most powerful ways to change our cellular physiology. Food's ability to change our physiology is so much more effective than any other drug on the market. And that's not to say that drugs do not have a time and a place. They absolutely do. I'm talking about the unnecessary use of prescriptions. I myself have benefited from medical management of my narcolepsy. Although my nutrition and lifestyle directly improved my functionality, it led me to a very small dose of medication. It led me to reversing those cataplexies, the mini seizures that I was having every day. And food is what triggers them. I'm not taking drugs in order to reverse those. And I didn't take drugs to also improve my debilitating GI symptoms and the anxiety and everything else that was happening at the same time because my body was in disarray. There was so much dysfunction happening underneath the surface. So I say this in that food is more powerful in its ability to impact every aspect of our health. It can modulate our gut microbiome, it can decrease chronic inflammation. It can improve our blood sugar stability, it can change our cellular health, it can change our mitochondria. There's no other drug on the planet that can change the body to that extent. So your body has the ability to work for you, to feel good on a daily basis, to build muscle, to reduce inflammation when it's given the proper inputs, when it's given the wrong inputs, it leads to more dysfunction, it leads to more symptoms, it leads to more lab imbalances. But when it's given the right inputs, it does have the ability to heal. And maybe that doesn't mean that you get off of every single medication that's been prescribed to you, but at least you are using it as a first line of intervention in order to improve your overall health. We live in a reactive healthcare system. And if you truly want to optimize your health, you need to be proactive. You need to step outside of that and say, my health is not built in the four walls of the hospital. It starts in my kitchen, it starts in my gym. It starts on the walks that I take with my family in our neighborhood. It starts with the community that I build around me. All of these factors directly impact our overall health. So we don't want to be reactive. We don't want to wait until six years old to get a DEXA scan to show osteoporosis when you could have gotten a DEXA scan in your 30s, which is when peak bone density starts to decline, in order to track that, and then intervene appropriately ahead of time in order to prevent something like an osteoporosis diagnosis at the age of 60 years old. Why are DEXA scans not being recommended when women are in their 30s and 40s? It's like a no brainer to have a baseline and not wait until you're 60. And at an exponentially higher risk of osteoporosis. It makes no sense. When couples three to six months before they conceive have the ability to significantly alter their epigenetics, which genes are turned on and expressing themselves that impact two additional generations after you, you can have a significant impact on your epigenetics. And most physicians are not having this conversation with their patients to say, we need you to start to take a prenatal three to six months before you start to conceive. We need you and your spouse to take that. We're going to dive into that in future episodes because that is an entirely important focus of mine with the work that I do with a company called Wenatal. But my point is, is that we are so reactive when you even look at blood sugar, blood sugar levels. A person, clients of ours that have pre diabetes, they go to their doctor and they ask for their doctor to prescribe a continuous glucose monitor. And their doctor says, we can't prescribe a continuous glucose monitor until you have type 2 diabetes. Continuous glucose monitors are essentially a tool that give you more information and transparency of what's happening in your body. And they're gonna say, we can't give you this information for pre diabetes because we don't want to support you in working on reversing your pre diabetes. We need to wait until it gets worse. We need to wait until you're sick enough in order for me to take seriously your ability to have information about your body. We're going to wait until you have uncontrolled type 2 diabetes, which is when a doctor technically, like in a traditional system, will prescribe a continuous glucose monitor in order to give you access to that kind of information. Medicare has not covered nutrition consults with a registered dietitian. For people with pre diabetes, you have to wait until you get to the point that you have type 2 diabetes in order to be considered qualified, at least according to old standards. In order to be qualified for insurance to pay for a nutrition appointment to address how you can improve your blood sugar balance. One of our clients requested a continuous glucose monitor for her prediabetes from her doctor and he said that requesting a CGM for her prediabetes was similar in nature to requesting chemotherapy or radiation for a pre cancer Polyp. This was an exact quote from him. This is an exaggerated example, but it would be like you having a pre cancer polyp and us jumping to resect a portion of your colon, doing chemotherapy and radiation. Let me just tell you, there are no commonalities between those two analogies. A continuous glucose monitor is like a blood pressure cuff. It gives you more information about what's happening in your body. And he's essentially saying you need to wait until you have uncontrolled type 2 diabetes in order for you to be able to have information like this about how your food and lifestyle is impacting your overall blood sugar for you to take control of your health. So again, no one is coming to save you. It is up to you to take ownership of your health. I want to close this out today by just telling you how incredibly grateful I am for you tuning into this show, for being a part of everything that we are building, and for continuing to be an advocate for your own health. I believe that so much of what is being created right now is a grassroots movement to more and more people who are waking up to their potential to feel good in their body and demanding better. We have to demand better in order for things to continue to change. And this is a largely grassroots movement that's driven by more and more women who are like, what has happened is not acceptable and I deserve better. Women deserve better. Our daughters deserve better. Our granddaughters deserve better. And so I want to just take a moment to thank you. I want to thank my incredible team of dietitians and the women on my team who are dedicate themselves to the mission that we are working towards every day. I want to thank the tens of thousands of women who have trusted us in optimizing their own health, trusted us on your journey. I want to thank my family, who is incredibly supportive of me continuing to spend an immense amount of time and energy in working towards changing the narrative and supporting this mission. And I want to thank you again for tuning in and thank you in advance for sharing this episode with any friends or family or on social media or in what, whatever way feels aligned for you. If you want to feel better, if you want to age well, if you want to reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. The message is, is that it starts with you. You have so much capacity to support your body, to heal your body, and to take back control of your health and your overall life. And I want you to think about stepping into this next phase of your life healthier, stronger, more confident, and with a super healthy relationship with food. I feel like that is not addressed enough, and we will be addressing that more in this show. You 100% are worthy of all the benefits that come with that, and I can't wait to dive into these topics and to guide you through this show, through this movement. To me, it's so much more than a show. It's about the movement and the mission that's behind it. So if you're tired of guessing, if you're tired of not feeling like yourself, if you are tired of feeling so confused when it comes to nutrition, this is your space. I am so excited for us to dive in together. Please subscribe Share this episode with someone who needs it. Let's take back our health together and I will see you in the next episode.