EP. 119 When Chronic Pain Slows Down Weight Loss: An Interview with Heather Hammell

It's not MFR massage, which I mistakenly called it before we hit record. It is MFR therapy. So we're going to talk about what that is, how that can help with longevity, how that boosts and supports your health, and how that could potentially help you lose some weight. You're listening to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast with Jennifer Dent-Brown, episode 119. What if it were possible to achieve your goal weight and stay there permanently without dieting? Welcome to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast, where you will discover the key components that most diets won't tell you because they want you to keep coming back. Not here. This is your last stop on the weight loss struggle bus. I am your host, Jennifer Dent-Brown, life and weight loss coach, and I am going to show you how to stop dieting Dieting Forever. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey, LuxeLifer, before I introduce you to today's guest, I just want to make sure that you've been out to visit my website at jenniferdent.com. You know, a few weeks ago, the rebrand and the relaunching of the website happened, so if you haven't been out there to check it out Take some time today to go to JenniferDent.com and check it out. I have a blog out there, so you can go out and read some of my past blog articles. You can access the podcast recordings from there, and you can read all about Stop Dieting Forever, which is the lifestyle membership where I teach you how to lose weight without dieting. And by doing that, you begin to create your healthiest life. Style. So bookmark, make a note, put it on your to-do list, check out jenniferdent.com. All right, LuxeLifer, if you suffer from chronic pain, you'll want to make sure that you listen to the entire episode today. And if you know someone who suffers from chronic pain, be sure to text them a link to this episode because I think you're gonna find it Fascinating. We all know losing weight is undoubtedly one way to improve pain because you relieve the stress on your joints. But today with my guest, we are exploring another way to potentially improve physical pain that you may not even be aware of, in fact, and it's called MFR therapy. In this episode, You're going to learn all about MFR therapy from one of the industry's leading John Barnes trained experts, Heather Hommel, who happens to be a friend of mine. She's a LuxeLifer, she's coached inside Stop Dieting Forever, and she's been a previous guest on the podcast where she shared her experience of losing weight following the Stop Dieting Forever process. But in today's podcast, you're not going to hear how Heather learned from me. I am learning from her as an expert in MFR therapy. We're going to talk about how this specific type of therapy can help you physically and emotionally. It is— I mean, I can't think of any other words to describe it but fascinating. And as you listen to this episode, you're going to hear stories of seemingly miraculous healing that took place after MFR therapy. Now, I have to put this disclaimer out. The information that you will hear is not intended or implied to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. I was just, again, fascinated by this conversation as it relates to improving the physical and emotional body. So as you listen to it, I know you're going to learn something new about this mind-body connection that is so amazing. Allow this conversation to just expand your mind, expand your vision as to what is possible when it comes to ways you can improve your physical and emotional health at the same time. All right, get ready for this conversation with Heather Hommel. Live Luxe, and I will see you in the next episode. All right. So today we've got Heather Hommel, who is not new to the podcast. I'm welcoming her back. First of all, she's a good friend of mine. And I'm so happy she agreed to be on the podcast, which is talking about her specialty, which is MFR and how it relates to health and wellness. So Heather, for those of you who are new to the podcast, you may not have heard Heather's name before. Heather was a client. She's been on the podcast before talking about her experience following the Stop Dieting Forever process and losing a bunch of weight. Heather's got abs, y'all. I don't know if you've seen her before and after pictures on my website. Go check her out. She's got a nice little six-pack happening. But she's also a coach, and she helps a very specific type of client for her. And so I wanted to get her on the podcast today because when I first met her And she told me what she did. I was like, oh, what is that? I've never heard of that before. So I'm introducing my audience to Heather and the world of MFR therapy.

Awesome.

Let's get it straight. It's not MFR massage, which I mistakenly called it before we hit record. It is MFR therapy. So we're going to talk about what that is. How that can help with longevity, how that boosts and supports your health, and how that could potentially help you lose some weight. So Heather, let's introduce yourself first, and then you can tell us exactly what MFR is.

Okay, awesome. Well, I'm so happy to be here because I love talking about MFR. MFR stands for myofascial release. But before I get into talking about what that is and why we're going to talk about it today, I'm going to talk about myself for a second. So I am a life and business coach for John Barnes trained myofascial release therapists. I was a myofascial release therapist for over a decade, and before that I was a massage therapist, and before that I was a social worker. So I have been around the block doing different things.

I don't think I knew you were a social worker. Oh yeah.

Let's see. Stick around long enough. I'll divulge one other thing. I was also the vice president of the student body when I was at school at Eastern Washington University.

Of course you were. I'm not surprised at that.

Oh gosh, so funny. Like some of the things I forget that I've done. So I work with this very niche group of people. They have to have been trained by John Barnes. He is the creator of this form of myofascial release. Now, myofascial release or MFR is not really a trademarked name and it's becoming very, very popular and it's becoming much more mainstream than it was like 10 years ago when I first heard of it. When I first heard of it, I had never heard of it before. I was at a John Barnes seminar, really just trying to have a vacation from my life. I had never, you know, this is like a side note, but if you have a massage therapist or another therapist that you're seeing that actually goes and does in-person continuing ed training, then like that person is next level because I had never done in-person training because I thought I knew it all. 'Cause they really do train you in massage school that you, you just know it all. Like that's kind of the, the vibe I was vibing on. So side note, you don't know it all and there's always something new you can learn and it is always good to go and do hands-on things. So I just stumbled into this modality. My husband had an injury while he was in the Navy. Ended up having to have surgery. They operated in the wrong area. It mutilated his entire lumbar spine. Like, he was, I think, under— how old was he? He was in his late 20s when he went under the knife, and he left that hospital, like, needing a walker, a wheelchair, and a cane. It was a shit show. It was terrible. And life just kept going on. He was on a lot of medications. This was, like, at the beginning of the end of the opiate awareness that there was a crisis going on. And that was like really his only coping mechanism was fentanyl patches, opioids. It was getting really bad. And, you know, we had young kids and life just keeps going on. You just keep going forward doing the best you can with what you have. You don't know what you don't know. And I ended up in this seminar and I'm sitting there and I'm like, oh, so you mean I could have hope? Like the things that John Barnes was talking about and the ways that this modality was different than traditional things, traditional PT, traditional OT, traditional massage, and the way that this could potentially affect my husband, like, I just burst into tears while in the audience because I finally had that hope that my life could be better than it was, that we could start to just have a change.

So your husband had this serious injury. Are people who seek out MFR therapy, are they injured, or can anyone— is anyone a good candidate for MFR?

If you are alive, you are a candidate for MFR. So that's like from birth to death.

All right, let's go back to your husband.

Yeah.

How did MFR help him?

Well, not only did it help him, but it completely changed my career path. So I like ended up getting all of the training and I was like, I'll just go back and I'll work on him. Turned out that wasn't my jam. Like I didn't really enjoy working on him. So we sent him away to John Barnes's like mothership. Clinic Therapy on the Rocks in Sedona, Arizona, and he spent 2 weeks there getting 3 hours of therapy a day for the 2 weeks.

Therapy on the Rocks?

Mm-hmm. In Sedona, Arizona. It's all like red rocks in Sedona. So, oh yeah.

So that's cool.

You're actually on the rocks, like, actually like the clinic there is a cliff house that overlooks the red rocks on Oak Creek. It's really pretty. It's really cool.

I'll have to Google it.

But before we sent him to that intensive, we went to Sedona and he just got like a sprinkling of, of sessions while I was taking another seminar. I became addicted to taking those seminars and getting the training. So while I was in a training, he went and he got treated by the therapist at Therapy on the Rocks. When we entered Sedona at that visit, it was our 10-year wedding anniversary. I have a video of him. He could barely walk. He could barely bend forward. He was so pale and just sickly looking. And after 3 treatments, I have another video of him in the after. He was walking, standing tall, like could stretch his whole body out, could bend forward to touch his toes. And he climbed Cathedral Rock, which is pretty massive. Like, I was too afraid to climb it.

But he like went rock climbing.

Yeah, he went rock climbing.

He went from a walker, cane, wheelchair to rock climbing after 3 sessions of MFR therapy.

Yeah. Without any pain medicine.

Amazing.

Yeah, it was like crazy. And not everybody has to have this kind of experience, right? Like, I understand this is kind of like, whoa.

Yeah. So I'm so curious now. I don't know much about MFR besides what you have told me. So what is it? What happens? You get on the table. What happens?

Ah, so basically what happens is you have a highly trained therapist, right? They've gone through the John Barnes seminars. They are looking at your body in a completely different way than any other modality out there. Yes, there is crossover. Yes, there is similarities to lots of modalities that are available, but the main difference is, is that they consider your entire being, your entire essence, your entire body. What it's doing in gravity and what it's doing out of gravity and how that is contributing to the symptoms that you have. So they consider your symptoms, but they are looking for the cause of your pain, the cause of your dysfunction. And they're not just rubbing or manipulating the symptoms. And most places, most modalities you go to, you say, I have a sore shoulder. They rub your sore shoulder. They stick needles in your sore shoulder. They tape your sore shoulder. They're not considering Well, is your pelvis rotated? Do you have a jam? Do you have a scar somewhere else? Do you have something random that could be contributing to this? That's actually not random.

Oh, I get it. So when you say they're looking at your whole body, they're looking at the balance and are you overcompensating on one side more so than the other, which could be causing pain in some other place in your body. Yeah.

Most people are walking around with a big upslip in their pelvis somewhere. Like, so your pelvis should be balanced and some people's is really jammed up. So then that presents maybe as they have jaw pain or maybe they have foot or ankle pain that doesn't make any sense.

Hmm. Interesting.

Or migraines. Like a lot of these things can be coming from your pelvis, but most people only ever treat your symptoms. If you have jaw pain and you only ever rub your jaw, but you don't look elsewhere in the body for what's causing that, it's probably only ever gonna get temporarily better. If it gets better at all.

Okay, so that's perfect scenario, perfect example of someone who is in chronic pain, right? So if you're in chronic pain and you go see an MFR therapist, they're going to, like, try to figure out, looking at your whole body, where that pain is emanating from, and then work on that point.

All the areas that are, like, contributing, connected.

Okay. Connected in our body, in the human body.

I'm going to do you one more solid on that.

Okay.

It's actually not a solid because we're going to talk about like, what is fascia? I'm just going to take over.

Go, go. You're the expert. I'm just asking the silly, the dumb questions.

No, you're not. Okay. So fascia is an organ in your body. It's the only organ system in your body that touches, penetrates, and communicates with every single system. In your body, and it goes from superficial, like on the surface, to very, very deep.

Can you spell it? Fascia.

Fascia. F-A-S-C-I-A.

Okay.

And it is only studyable or treatable in living creatures. So most research that's been done on it and the most of the ways that like doctors and other therapists are trained, they're trained on dead people. Cadavers. When you are studying dead people, they are brittle. And fascia is this luminous crystalline matrix that runs from like surface level of your skin. Like you, if you really look at your skin under a magnifying glass, you can see the matrix of your skin. You can see all of the lines and that translates all the way down into your cells. The nucleus of your cells, the outer layer of your cell where your cell gets all of its information is coming from fascia. So it is the biggest communication system of your body.

Is it a nervous system?

Your nervous system is encased in fascia. So most people think like your central nervous system or your nervous system is the communication system and it is, but it would take us years to send signals through the body the way that works. And so it flings all of the messages through the body using fascia. If you just ripped all the fascia out of your body, like, your body would collapse on the ground.

Interesting.

It's like the scaffolding of your body and also the scaffolding of your communication and like the reinforcement too. And the reinforcement. Yeah. It provides protection. So this is the other thing that happens. Injuries to fascia does not show up on any current testing device available that the medical field uses. Okay. So when you have damage to fascia, it acts like a seatbelt. It will tighten down 2,000 pounds per square inch anywhere in the body. It doesn't have to make any sense. Doesn't have to look like it's related to where the injury occurred, but it will tighten down like that to protect. It keeps you from spilling out of your body, basically.

Hmm.

And because there's no way to look under an EKG or a CT scan or an MRI to see the damage, people are gonna say, oh, you're fine. You just had a whiplash. Oh, you're fine. Nothing's broken.

You just had whiplash. Mm-hmm. Oh, you just had a brain nick. Yeah.

I can't really see it, so you're fine.

Yeah. Cuz they don't know exactly what it is.

Right.

Interesting. But you have whiplash, you know that you're not fine.

Exactly. And if you have hands and you're a John Barnes-trained myofascial release therapist, you're going to be able to palpate these injuries and also with your eyes observe the patterns of strain in the body.

Okay. Palpate means?

Use your hands. So you're going to use all of your senses when you are like working with someone. To observe what's going on, where you can see fascial strain patterns, where you can see where you're tightly pulled forward or off in any sort of way. So like when I see people, it's hard for me not to see where they're hurting, not to see where they're holding things because I'm so good at spotting it and looking for it in my patients. When I go to the airport, I'm just like, oh my gosh, I need to help that person. Oh my gosh, I need to help that person. Right? It's just like constant.

Yeah. That's fascinating. Mm-hmm. Okay. So now I understand very clearly why it's not massage and it really is therapy.

Yeah. And massage is therapy too, right? But it creates a temporary result.

Yeah.

Massage is much more acceptable now than it was 5 or 10 years ago. People are doing this as their self-care, right? But they're not really understanding what else is available. And when that's the only therapy you allow yourself to get, you're just selling yourself a little bit short, especially if, if you've got some chronic or acute condition going on and you aren't just doing it. If you're just going there for self-care, maybe you don't have migraines, you don't have jaw pain, you don't have hip pain, you don't have chronic low back pain, you aren't having any shin pain, your knees don't hurt, you literally don't have any problems and you're just going there to feel good, to be rubbed.

Okay. So let's talk about the person who doesn't have chronic pain, like you just said, doesn't have any issues physically.

Yeah.

How can MFR therapy help them?

So we all have tissue memory. This is the other thing that's cool about fascia. Fascia is your container of consciousness. It remembers everything that has ever happened to you emotionally or physically. So, so when you can access the fascial system through time and pressure, yeah, your body will release memories like tissue memory. It will release things that you aren't even aware that are there. And sometimes that feels good and sometimes it doesn't feel good. So you can have a healing crisis where like it will feel like the therapist literally did nothing to you, but the next day you'll feel like a bus hit you, backed up and hit you again.

Mm-hmm. And that's your fascia releasing. Mm-hmm.

Basically what's happening is your body has now allowed itself to go through the inflammatory process that wasn't allowed to happen before because you either took an anti-inflammatory or you were told to just suck it up or you weren't allowed to process whatever thing happened at the time.

Oh, that's fascinating. I did not know that.

Yeah.

Do you know anything about the effects of, like, intergenerational trauma?

Well, I'm sure that that could show up too, right? Because it's, it's your DNA. Your DNA is also surrounded and from the fascia.

Fascinating.

Okay. Yeah.

All right. So someone who's feeling perfectly fine, they decide they want to experience MFR therapy, they go in and they could potentially feel worse the next day. But with the understanding that it will pass and you will eventually feel much better.

Yeah. And you're getting rid of something that actually you've been experiencing all day long, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You're just not aware of it.

Yeah.

Brings it into your awareness. You allow that inflammation, like the body to take care of it and then let it process through. It's kind of like feeling your feelings, but this is like feeling your injuries, both mental and physical.

Yeah. I sometimes say, not sometimes, but I know when you eat really clean, it's like you thought you were feeling okay before, but then you like eat really clean and your body is like, whoop. When it feels like wonderful and you didn't realize like, dang, I wasn't feeling so great before. I feel so much better now.

Yeah. It's amazing how much we can compensate and how much we can put up with when we don't know what we don't know. Right. Sometimes I'll go off gluten and I'll be like, oh my gosh, I do feel so good. And then I forget that I feel better when I'm off of that.

Right.

Because it's so easy to forget.

Yeah. Like, oh, I haven't had a cookie in a while. So that's so interesting. So why don't we know more about MFR therapy? Why haven't I heard it anywhere else besides when I met Heather Hommel and she was like, "Oh, I study MFR," and I was like, "What is that?" Well, I think because it's different and also because it isn't covered by insurance.

Right? And so it's like not necessarily mainstream. It's becoming more and more mainstream. That's one of my goals with being the MFR Coach and coaching MFR therapists to not under-earn and overwork so that they are creating businesses faster and popping up on every street corner, just like massage therapy is. But if you remember back 5, 10, 15 years ago, it was not as common to get a massage.

Right.

And people needed it to be covered by insurance in order for it to be an okay, acceptable thing to do.

Mm-hmm.

So it's kind of like that. Now, John Barnes has been around for a long time. I think he's been training therapists now for 40 or 50 years. He's in his 80s now. He still live trains all of the therapists.

Wow.

Yeah, it's incredible.

He's a student of his own work.

The student of his own work. And I think too, the struggle is people just don't know what they don't know. And so the larger your exposure field is to different people, the more likely you are to get exposed to things you don't know about, right? People in my world, MFR therapists, get to get exposed to you because you've been on my podcast and because we're friends, right? But what if we never met? That'd be like this whole group of people that don't know about it. So my goal is to expose as many people to just know that this is an option available. Like, what if everybody had MFR MFR before surgery, and maybe they didn't need to have that surgery because they were able to fix whatever was going on. Now, we'll always have the need to have surgery, and thank God we have all this stuff available to us. But what if it just becomes standard practice that you check that out beforehand? It's the same thing as like, what if when someone has some other health condition going on, what if the standard practice is is to help them eat better, help them think better, and help them feel better before we just medicate them.

Yeah. Before we just say, hey, pop a pill, keep it moving. Right.

I mean, like, thank God we have that as an option, but what if it quits being like the go-to solve?

Yeah.

What is the state of our world where people are just feeling better?

Mm-hmm. So if someone is interested in MFR or receiving MFR therapy, Do they go 3 times? It's like a once a month thing. Do they go 3 weeks in a row? Will the therapist explain to them based off of what I see, like, this is how often you need to come? Mm-hmm.

In an ideal world, your therapist would evaluate you, really understand your problem better than you do, and then offer you their solution, which would be either once or a couple of times a week, or sometimes they offer intensives where it's every day for a certain number of weeks. Weeks, and then you reevaluate, see where you're at, see how you've progressed to your goals and space out treatments from there.

Goals like what?

Well, like, do you want to be pain-free? Do you not want to have hip pain? Do you not want to hobble when you walk? Whatever your goal is.

Oh, okay.

I love that.

You don't have goals. What's that?

I know. You're like, how can I set some? So really being clear on what you want out of it. Now people can go and experience it and just have a sample of it, but your results from that are going to be much different than if you had it 6 times in a row.

Okay. So for someone who doesn't have chronic pain and they're just MFR curious, mm-hmm, what would be a goal that they should set?

Good question. Maybe being more aware about how they feel into their bodies, right? Like, we have the processing feelings feel, and then we have, am I intimately aware of where I have pain and/or anywhere where I'm disconnected from my body? Because a lot of times when we have pain, we check out, we disconnect from those areas, and that's how we have no pain because that's how we practice it. That's how we survive.

So you just ignore it.

We ignore it. Or we don't even deal with it. Yeah. We just deal with it. We're like, eh, I took Tylenol. That's fine. Like if you're taking Tylenol multiple times a week, something's going on.

Yeah. That's not normal.

Right. But we normalize it because it's easily accessible and it takes care of the problem. And then when it's not top of mind, you're not thinking about it.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So I would love to meet these people that don't have any kind of body pain. Like, I would love to know what's going on. But if you are very active and you do identify as being very healthy and you don't necessarily identify as someone with chronic or acute pain or even much pain at all, it still would be healthy for you to add this in because fascia, like I said, is the container of your consciousness. It remembers everything that's ever happened to it. Like, why not tap into that and just see if you feel even better after having had the treatment. I would give it like 6 times at least in a row. Like, 6 is what I, as a therapist, would like always offer to my clients. And then we would reevaluate after that. I want my work on someone that's had 6 sessions close together versus like a one-off.

I don't really want my name on that work because it might not have done exactly what it needed to do.

Yeah. Or maybe you walked out of there and had a healing crisis and then you're thinking, this is terrible.

This injured me.

That was a problem.

Yeah.

It never injures you. Non-injurious because it is so gentle and we never force.

Okay. So somebody needs to just MFR curious, go find an MFR therapist.

Mm-hmm.

And buy a package of 6. Yeah.

Or sign up for 6 sessions if they don't offer a package.

And then go once a week, once a month.

Like, I would do it at least once a week or a couple times a week until you get through that initial 6 visits so that you kind of know how your body responds to it and you kind of understand it in a different way than you do after just one treatment.

Okay. Interesting.

And there's a website where people can find John Barnes trained MFR therapists for free. Okay. So it's MFRtherapists with an S.com, and then you just type in your zip code or your state or where you're gonna be visiting, and then anyone who is within those parameters will pop up. That's been trained by John.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So we'll put that in the show notes. But if you find someone who claims they're an MFR therapist and they're not on the John Barnes site, is that a yellow flag?

Kind of, sometimes. So MFR can really mean different things to different people, so you want to be very specific in saying, are you a John Barnes trained MFR therapist? And the answer is really simple, it's either yes or no.

Okay.

And I wouldn't be too worried about the varying levels of are they novice, advanced, expert, whatever, that doesn't necessarily matter because some of the best therapists have only had 1 or 2 seminars and they're like the most diehard, like following the principles the hardest and trying their best, right? So don't make it mean you have to have an expert in order to have a good treatment. Anyone that's had at least 1 of his seminars is going to be able to give you an experience of myofascial release.

Interesting. This is the first time we've ever had like a really in-depth conversation about MFR. I'm curious, can you tell us more about the container of your consciousness?

Yeah. So anything that's ever happened to you, right? So my experience with this has been mainly centered around a traumatic birthing experience that I had with my firstborn. So I was induced and ended up having to have a C-section. The epidural did not work. So I felt a lot of like the cutting and mainly the sewing up of the C-section. It was very traumatic, right? I was 25 years old.

Oh my goodness.

I was in labor previous to this for over almost 2 days. So I was exhausted. I had preeclampsia, so I was on a lot of medications where I was like not in my body, right? And I was in so much pain that I had like checked out and I'd come back and check out. But I remember being on that operating table and not being in my body. And I remember like looking down almost on everything and being like, I can feel everything you're doing. Like, how much longer? It hurt a lot. It was bad. And I had postpartum depression after that. No wonder, right? It was traumatizing. And then on top of that, I had a disabled husband at home. Years go by after that. I'm at that very first MFR seminar and we did a cross-hand release I think I was like on my side. Someone had their hand like above my scar and then on my thigh and like pulling apart like this very gently. And it felt like a hot ring of fire, which instantly threw me back into that memory of that cutting and sewing. And that was like hot fire when that was happening. So it was like my brain remembered and I had not had any attention on that. Scar, and I had had years and years and years of low back pain ever since I had that scar. Like, it's all connected. And just reliving that, and actually, I wasn't retraumatized by reliving that experience. Like, that was happening to me 24 hours a day, whether I was aware of it or not. But really being able to, like, see that scene and tell myself that I survived that and that everything is okay. And shed tears and process that and almost rebirth my son in the way that I would have hoped it would have been through an unwinding process, which is another thing that can happen when you are getting MFR treatment. So you go into an unwinding where you are reliving something that happened to you. Your body goes into the positions that it wasn't allowed to go into before. So for me, I wasn't ever able to push. So I was pushing, like I was rebirthing my son. It was very— I know it sounds like kind of like, woo, the heck, but just a really beautiful experience. And you're in a safe environment where the therapist doesn't think you're a weirdo and you're just allowed to scream and cry and moan and push if you needed to, or whatever it was that, you know, maybe you're in a car accident, you need to reprocess that or whatever it is, but you're reprocessing it from a different part of your brain instead of the checked out part where you left your body in order to survive.

Damn.

I know.

Okay. So when you got down on the table and they started to work on you, did you know that you wanted to work on the—

I had no idea.

C-section?

No idea. This was just like one of the techniques we were learning at the time. This technique created that environment for me to have that experience.

Wow.

And it would be different for everybody. Like if I did that to you, maybe nothing would happen, or maybe you'd remember sometime when your mom yelled at you Or not.

Oh, it's so fascinating. Wow. Our brains are so amazing.

Mm-hmm.

And the way that they're so connected to our bodies, there's just like so much that we don't know. But the more and more that I study, it's just mind-blowing. Yeah. How connected our brains are to our bodies.

Yeah. And the less we part ourselves out like this, like I'm touching my chest right now. This is just the front of your back.

Oh, right.

Like, you're not parted out. There is really no such thing as left or right, front or back. Like, if you're, you're one piece, brain and body, one big piece of Play-Doh.

Yeah.

And it's all connected. But modern science is like so parted out. And when you start talking about emotions and you start talking about the part where you could rebirth your kid. Modern medicine does not like you to talk about that, right? We got to keep it clean and divided and like, let's not talk about emotions, just like in any other thing. And we'll just zip that up and we'll make it pretty. We'll call it physical therapy and we will dry needle you and fix you, which I love a good dry needling here and there, but it takes out the emotional component of what could have happened to that's maybe creating that pain for you too, or the physical, physical and emotional component.

Yeah. That's amazing. So I'm totally fascinated now. I'm like, MFRtherapist.com.

Yeah. Get it.

I will be one of those people. I feel like I don't have any pain. I don't have any chronic pain. Have I like pulled a muscle? Yes, of course. Have I like overworked my shoulders or my shoulders tight because I work at a computer all day?

Yes, of course.

But I don't feel like I'm in chronic pain. But I am very curious to see what my fascia will tell me. Yeah.

You're like, now I want to have an unwinding. I want to have these experiences. You never know when that will happen.

That's interesting.

But there's another— like, John Barnes has a major clinic in Malvern, Pennsylvania, too. So there's that. That one on that side of the country. Yeah. And then there's one in Sedona, Arizona. So if you really wanna go and have like a week or two weeks of an intensive, like what my husband experienced, mm-hmm. Hey, go have that. And then if you want just like your typical neighborhood therapist, then look in the directory and find someone and they can offer you as much therapy as you want to.

So, so the clinic or the center is for people who are chronically, you know, it's like you go to John Barnes Clinic, right?

Like he's, well, he still works there. He treats people. It's his business. So those are his two businesses where you could go and get.

Okay.

Yeah. It's like when we meet Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School, we're a little bit like, hey, that's cool.

Yeah.

It's the same thing, but for MFR people.

I got you. OK. That makes sense. OK, well, this has been really interesting. This has been fascinating. I wanted to just talk to you about this on the podcast because I didn't really know much about it besides, like, our little high-level conversations about it. And when I think about longevity and I think about my mission to help women learn to stop dieting forever and to live their healthiest life in their healthiest body, This just seems like another method to get to living in a very healthy body. And I know there's so many people that do deal with chronic pain and annoying pain in all places, forms, and it shows up all over the place. So this is something— if they're looking for something that is not in a pill form, this is an opportunity to go explore a more holistic Solution. Yeah, potentially. Yeah. To chronic pain.

Right. And I'll say this too, when your body feels better, you're gonna move more. You're probably gonna make better or different choices for yourself, for your physical activity, as well as what you're willing to put into your body. And also the extra step of where you do that thought work that goes with your entire program of How your thoughts create your results and what you're thinking about yourself ultimately creates your weight result. If you are talking about weight loss or maintaining your weight. So I think when you combined myofascial release and the thought model, you have created the ultimate explosion of awesomeness for your life. And I used to think MFR solved all of my problems until I knew about also the model. And the model just took me once even deeper into understanding myself and processing emotions, right? I'm really good at processing when someone puts their fingers into my psoas and that hurts like a biatch. I'm really good at processing where maybe that came from, but not necessarily— I didn't have the tools to process shame and fear and the other things that the model, or even just knowing what those are. Yeah.

So doing the thought work, recognizing, oh, I'm emotionally eating all the time because, oh, this is frustration, this is shame, this is fear, and not necessarily knowing what that is until you start applying and looking at your mindset and recognizing, oh, that's what that is. And then it's like, okay, you go to your MFR therapist, your local neighborhood MFR therapist, and be like, hey man, I'm dealing with a lot of shame. Like, I have one client, and a private client, and every week when we're coaching, whatever her obstacle is, it always— we boil it down and get right back down. She's fear of shame. Yeah, fear of being shamed by other people, shaming herself. And that's like her core belief.

And you know, when you say core, like core belief, as an MFR therapist, I'm thinking Psoas, right in your core, probably super tight. So it's a deep muscle that like 2 finger widths outside from your belly button, you push in, you probably feel tenderness there, and it runs down and connects all the way into your low back. So when you're thinking like core beliefs, I'm thinking core of the body. And like, if you're feeling shame, you're gonna be drawn down and tight and how that's gonna pull down on the back and the neck and that, you know, like all of the things that, that shame feeling, if left unprocessed, is actually creating physical limits, pain, whatever. Could be, could not be. But I'd be like, let me in there. Let me see what's going on.

If y'all could see Heather right now, she's like clawing.

I'm like a dog scratching in the kennel.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Okay, so I'm so glad we had this conversation live on the podcast. Yeah, I think it's going to be super helpful just for people who are MFR curious and for people who are dealing with the physical pain and emotional pain as well. Because sometimes, like, when we're dealing with carrying really heavy emotions, it does feel like physical pain.

Yeah, it is physical. It shows up as physical pain.

It shows up as physical pain. Yeah, I just remember like just feeling very, very, very sad at a point in my life. And I just felt like my whole chest was just like— it just felt heavy and tight and just— it hurt to breathe. Like, it was just like, oh my, I can't hold this pain. Yeah. So yeah, very interesting. Okay, everybody, if this sounds something you want to be like, you're interested in, I'm going to put the links in the show notes, mfrtherapist.com. But if you happen to be a massage therapist and you're interested in MFR therapy, where do they go, Heather?

So anyone that has a license to touch can get trained in this modality. So that's massage therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, nurses, doctors. And I've worked with everybody in that realm as a coach. And John Barnes has trained all of those people. So I would Google John Barnes myofascial release and land on his website. I think it's myofasciarelease.com and sign up for a seminar. Check it out. You have nothing to lose and you get continuing ed credits.

So, hey, I always say when you stop learning, you're stagnant.

Yeah.

Keep learning.

Boring.

Keep learning. And how can people work with you specifically?

So if you are one of those awesome John Barnes trained myofascial release therapists, I run a group coaching program every 12 weeks. So once a quarter. It's a 12-week-long program and we get your business created from the ground up if you need it, or from wherever you are up to creating the foundation to have a 6-figure business. So you can find me at my website, themfrcoach.com, or on any of the socials @themfrcoach. And I also have a podcast, The MFR Coach's Podcast. So even if you're not an MFR therapist and you're just interested in business, I feel like it translates to almost any business listening to me on my podcast.

Yes, podcast is spectacular.

Thank you. You've been a guest.

Yes, I've been a guest on one of the episodes. We'll put that link in the show notes too. Perfect. Good. So people who have the license to touch— I've never heard that phrase before— they can go get licensed or certified or trained.

It's not even a certification, it's just training.

Training. You can go get training, and then if you're like is great, I wanna boost my business, then they go see you.

That's right. I'll help you create that 6-figure business.

I love it. And yeah, Heather is doing it for sure. I've seen the results, your clients or some of my clients, and yeah, they're doing really well. So kudos to you, Heather, for empowering the MFR therapists of the world.

Thanks. And same to you for doing this with your Stop Dieting Forever program because It's changed my life and lots of my friends.

All right, well, thank you so much, Heather, for stopping by on the Stop Dieting Forever podcast, and we'll see you soon. Bye.

Thank you. Bye.

If you like today's episode of the Stop Dieting Forever podcast and you want to learn more about creating a lifestyle instead of following a diet to lose weight permanently, be sure to visit JenniferDent.com. There you'll learn more about my unique weight loss process and how it can work for you. Go to JenniferDent.com to discover what you can do to stop dieting forever.