Getting Out Of Pain with Vicky Vlachonis

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, where we'll connect with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus, I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health and your life. Now, today's show is about pain. And I've been like, taking on pain here, not personally on the podcast because I know that this is one of the key things that people come to the community with is, is pain. And actually there's a lot of integrated ways that you can address this. The way we don't want to address it is with pain pills because those don't fit anything and in fact, can create leaky gut, which can make the whole thing worse. We'll talk about that as we go on. But I have a different approach for this today because I have a super cool gal who came to me through a buddy of mine and she is Gwyneth Paltrow's osteopath. And along with a bunch of other people, including, gosh, Katy Perry, Cameron Diaz, Chris Martin, Nicole Richie, whole bunch of people, she has a big celebrity practice out in Beverly Hills. She's traveled all over the world helping people get out of pain. And she has a very different approach to it, probably from her background, which you're going to hear about shortly. She is not from the U.S. although she now lives in California. So let me tell you a little bit about Vicki Vlacones. She is a European osteopath and pain expert, and she was born in Athens, Georgia. Her dad was a tennis coach and her mom was a yoga teacher. So, you know, basically she lucked up there with her upbringing and, and she's going to tell you she moved to London, but how different their approach is to health. I'm like, I was super jealous about that. I'll let her tell you about that. She is the author of the Body Doesn't Lie. She contributes a ton to goop. She's also on the advisory board for Women's Health magazine. And she has this book, again, the Body Doesn't Lie is a great book for you to grab. So with that, I am excited to introduce Vicki Floconis to you. All right, let's do it. Vicki. Now let's see if I can get your name right. Vlaconis. Did I do well? Welcome to the show.

Yay.

I am so glad you're here with me today. And say it. You say it. It sounds so much better when you say your name than me. Vicki.

I'm Vicki Vlaconis, the author of the Body Doesn't Lie.

And see, that sounds so much. Vlaconis. I will work on it. I will work on my Eastern European accent. Okay, so as you all can tell, Vicki's not from California, even though she lives there now. And I am super excited to talk with you today about pain. We've been. We've been taking. Doing pain on the podcast a lot because a lot of my audiences come in through elimination diets, using diet to help get through their pain. So this is always a hot topic, and I know you're going to have a cool take on it. Now. I'd love to. Since you have a very interesting background, love to know about how you got into this and tell everyone a little bit about. About who you are, where you're from.

So I come from Athens, Greece. I'm a European osteopath. I did all my studies in England. My mom a yoga teacher, dad tennis coach, granny a cook.

So you lucked up. You lucked up, Vicki.

Oh, yes. So blessed with all this love.

Yes, love. And great, like, great, great, healthy stuff. Okay, so you had that as a background. Then what?

So I moved to England, studied as a European osteopath, started treating dancers, pregnant women. Everybody in England has an osteopath. So you go and see your md, you get your blood test, and then you go and get an assessment, like a full body assessment about your physical and emotional discomfort.

Wow.

So you can talk to a therapist? Yes. So you talk to the therapist, you see the MD you might see, you know, and then you. You go and see a holistic osteopath, somebody like me. So when you walk in, you have a full case history of understanding is your pain physical or emotional? And let's look at the root of the problem. Let's try and get to the bottom of this.

And now, how did you end up going from England over to here?

A lot of my lovely clients were American in England. And one of them, Gwyneth Paltrow, who wrote the forward of the book, the Body Doesn't Lie and Steal. And she was always, you know, like, you've got to help more people. And then I wrote the book and with Harper Collins, so it's a three step program to end chronic pain. And then I traveled. I was kind of like the traveling osteopath. I'd go and work on movie sets. People would call me from all over the world. And I love traveling. So if they called me in Australia or in New York or in la, I would be there no matter what it was, what time of day. So I always wanted to help people with pain and ended up in California, which, yes, in Greece we don't have palm trees, but we do have a beautiful blue sky and lots of olive trees. So I feel like this is home now.

All right, so can't blame you because I'm a native Californian, although I just went to Greece this last summer and loved it. Oh, wow. And Greece is definitely better food. So someone's in pain, what's your like, number one right out the gate piece of advice for them, even if they've.

Reached out for a pill or even if not. My first piece of advice is to get into water because I feel water is purifying, healing. If you can add some Epsom salts, if you're in pain, any discomfort, I say get in the bath, 10, 15 minutes and just try and be at peace with yourself. You know, just try and be mindful, present to actually be able to sit with your pain.

I love that you brought that up. It was funny. I was doing a podcast with my girlfriend, Ariel Ford the other day, and I asked her, like, what's the big thing you do every day for yourself? She goes, I get in the bath and I go, I do too. Like, we both do Epsom salts baths and we actually do eft tapping in the bath. So I love that you said that. Now you have this book, the Body Doesn't Lie. It's a three step program. So. So what's the three steps?

So step one is reflect, step two is release, and step three is radiate.

Okay, so walk me through those.

The most important thing I feel is again, being mindful, reflecting, taking a step back. And as a holistic osteopath and holistic integrated health consultant, I love to look at the whole picture. So reflect when the pain started, you know, was it just something in, you know, lifting a heavy bag? Like, really try and go back to the history of the pain, what was happening in your life. So become your own pain investigator. Because I think once you identify and you acknowledge, you know, yes, the pain in the neck is because I'm low in vitamin D and my doctor Said I have a thyroid issue. Or actually my boss is the pain in the neck, or my partner is the pain in the neck in my life. So reflect on what is causing pain. And then I give you different tools, which are simple methods. You know, just releasing foods, inflammatory foods, doing exercises. Once you've actually reflected, you need to get in that bath to release. You need to let go of it. Because it's one thing. You face the truth in the mirror. And I always say pain awakens the truth. And pain can be your most powerful teacher because your body's sending you a signal. It's teaching you something. So now once you gain the power to acknowledge it, to be able to release it with either yoga, meditation, mindfulness, Epsom salts, five Tibetan poses, having a little ritual, a routine, I give you all these simple methods in the body doesn't lie. Then you're able to actually radiate that inner and outer beauty. Because I think pain also awakens the truth of finding your passion, your purpose, and being able to give back. Therefore, radiating and being kind to your. To your body and others.

That's an interesting. Say that again. Pain wakens up.

What? I always say pain awakens the truth. Pain is potential because there's a reason your body's trying to give you these signals. Is it God, the universe? Your body's talking to you. So don't ignore your pain. Don't hide it under the carpet. Don't numb it. Don't drink it. Don't smoke it. Face it. See the truth. What is your body trying to tell you? But I always find through years and years of working with so many people, that pain can be your most powerful teacher because it awakens your passion, your purpose about what you really want to do. So. So it kind of my philosophy is, okay, I've sprained my ankle or, you know, I've stabbed my big toe, but because I studied osteopathy and all these different tools with, you know, acupuncture and cupping and working on the body and using the body as a map, I always wanted to know, why is that liver meridian connected to that big toe, that sprained ankle? So I always wanted to know why the patient's pain was on their ankle or their big toe. So I'd always look deep and say, okay, well, this is going through your kidney meridian. This is going through your liver meridian, all these meridians running up and down your body, through your tendons, but this is crossing your right ovary or this is crossing your liver. So let's look at the emotions Connected with your pain. Okay, are you happy in your marriage? Are you happy at work? Why is your body going through this now? Why is the pain there?

So how would.

Because this, this idea of this connecting your emotional pain and your physical discomfort. How would someone. Does your book walk in through them? Like, how would someone be able to do this?

Yes, I think it's very simple methods. There's, you know, there's. In the book you'll. You'll find like a whole body map. You'll find self healing, acupressure points that you could do for yourself. And then you'll see in the book there's reasons behind it. For example, yes, it's my low back pain, but actually the nerve and blood supply to my low back is through my, you know, is to my ovaries. So what is happening in my ovaries? Maybe this is a signal that I need to go back to the gynecologist and check what is happening. Maybe my low back pain is an alarm. Hey, Vicki, your low back is hurting. So this nerve and blood supply to my ovaries. Have I checked my ovaries with my gynecologist? Is something wrong? Or maybe my ovaries need some love and I'm unhappy in my relationship.

So you talk about that we live more in our mind and in our body. Like, and it seems to me what you're working on here is just really getting people to connect the two back together again. Which seems silly that we would have to do. It seems obvious. But how, you know, when you say that, like, why do you think we live more in our minds? Why are we in this disconnection?

I think we're all overloaded with stress. You know, wake up, get the kids to school, pay the bills, go from A to B, drive our car, and we live in this sympathetic nervous system. Fight, fright, go, get up. And I think what happens is we need to rest and digest and live in the parasympathetic nervous system just to reduce disease, to reduce all this disease, inflammation, you know, all this, this mind overload. We're overloaded and we can't make decisions and we, we might get headaches, we might get neck pain because our mind is just disconnected. And once we start doing just 12 minutes of meditation, where, I mean, UCLA now has shown research that if we just sit with ourselves and breathe and feel our body, this is the disconnection. We don't feel our body with too much in our mind and we forgot to feel. Hold on, am I breathing? Is my diaphragm Opening up. Am I actually feeling this now that I'm sitting on this chair? Am I feeling the way my feet are on the floor, my knees are sitting, my pelvis, my bottom is on the. On the chair, the heaviness. Am I actually feeling my body, or am I just too much in my mind and I've disconnected?

So the biggest way you get people to start getting that connection back is to get into some meditation and to really start to pay attention to how their body's feeling and leaning into the pain, if it's there, to. To figure out where this is happening from.

Yes. If people can go and have some bodywork, be a craniosacral osteopath, have some acupuncture, try meditation, try a chiropractor. You know, it's a way of helping the mind and body become one and the same.

I actually think all of this should just be your way of life. It absolutely makes sense. I. You know, I'm a big person of, like, lean into your fear. And so I love the fact that. Because, you know, the worst thing I think someone can do is go take a pain pill, because then you completely ignore what's going on and just exacerbate the whole situation. And I just had a great conversation with a chiropractor the other day who was, like, kind of trying to dismiss the fact that she was a chiropractor. I go, I. You know, I. I'm amazed at how few people see chiropractors, because that's been part of my health routine for decades. You know, just. It's just part of it that when my son was in the hospital with a brain injury, we had acupuncture. Acupressure. First thing I did when he got out was dropped, trotted him over. And amazingly enough, this was a, you know, a kid who was basically dead on the street and had 13 fractures and major brain injuries, and somehow, like, had managed to keep his body aligned. I'm like, how. How did you do that? So. But I. But that message is so powerful of sitting with it, feeling it, and then. And then, you know, putting this all together. I just love that. So I want to throw one at you. I have a feeling I know what this is, but this is about you personally. What is the one thing, Vicki, you do every day that makes the biggest difference in your life?

I think I pray and I meditate every morning as soon as I wake up before having my warm water with lemon. So I think that keeps me. My faith and family, you know, just pray to be so grateful for all my upbringing, all the love I've received and everything my mom, granny, dad, everybody's taught me, believing in, in this beautiful creation and just being so grateful just to the universe, to God, whatever people believe in. For me, it's is the love, the love that I've, everything I've learned, I'm so grateful for.

And gratitude is the biggest way to build resilience. So I love that you brought up the gratitude card. That's, that's one of my, that's my morning ritual too. Get up every morning and I actually pull out a journal and write down what I'm grateful for. So I love that. And I want to send people over. Your book is the Body Doesn't Lie and you can get that anywhere. But I also want to send them to your website. But you've got this name, this rough name, Vicky Flacones. So here's how it's spelled. How'd I do? It's Vicki V I C K Y V l a c h O-N-I s.com it will be in the show notes Vicki Vlaconis. And of course you can just google body doesn't lie or go grab it on Amazon. And I just love the whole perspective of, you know, get, get into your pain, feel where it is, see what it's trying to tell you. Work, you know, don't try to mask and ignore because when you do, things just get worse. So thank you for that. It's awesome and I so appreciate you joining me. Now after the break, I'm going to be answering listeners question. Yes, thank you Vicki. So everybody stay with me and I'll be answering the listeners questions soon. Thanks.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question and again, I always like to make these relevant to the topic at hand. So we're talking pain. Today I'm going to answer a question that comes from from Cameron in Tucson and I pulled this off my Facebook page at facebook.com forward/jjvirginofficial if you've got questions, go ahead and jump on there and put your question on. We, we answer them on Facebook Lives and I answer them on podcasts. And this one again comes from Cameron from Tucson. And Cameron writes, JJ, I don't have any specific area that hurts. My whole body is just achy. What should I do? All right, I'm going to give you a couple steps here. And I really loved how Vicki talked about just kind of sitting with your pain and really feeling your body, you know, intuitively. 25, 30 years ago, I had a knee injury, a severe knee injury in my teens. In fact, it was something that required me finally 30 plus years later to have a knee replacement. But early on I thought, you know, because they said, just take as much Advil as you want. And I thought, you know, that just doesn't sound right because if I don't know that it's hurting, I'll do worse stuff. And I was able to put off knee surgeries for years because I used a lot of antioxidants. But I also just trained. I strengthened that area so much and I did everything I could do just to overall reduce overall inflammation that I was able to hang out for quite a while with it. So let me share with you some of the things that I do. The first thing that you want to do is you want to reduce your overall body inflammation. And the things that are key for that is to remove your hidden food intolerances. That would be the virgin diet and also to control your blood sugar because when you've got higher insulin responses from elevated blood sugar, then guess what, you're going to have more inflammation. So that would be the sugar impact diet. My personal way to do this, and we do have some assessments to say which way should you go? Is if you're really dealing with joint pain, gas and bloating, any autoimmune diseases, any GI issues, go to virgin diet first. Get through that, uncover your hidden food intolerances, then jump over to sugar impact diet. Or if you're dealing with sugar cravings, unstable blood sugar, anything going on there with pre diabetes, diabetes, heart disease, pop to Sugar Impact diet first, then go over to virgin diet. Ultimately, I want you to go through both of them so that you can really customize the perfect diet for you for the long haul. Now that's step one is dial in that diet. Number two, get your omega threes up. So you really want to have a good balance between your inflammatory and pro inflammatory, your anti inflammatory and pro inflammatory fats. It's not about Eating straight anti inflammatory, you still need some of the, you know, the sixes and nines in there but you really want to make sure that you're getting enough of your omega threes in to help keep everything balanced. You can do that by taking an omega 3 fatty index, fatty acid index test. And depending on what's going on, you probably want to have about a 4 to 1 ratio of your sixes to threes. Now when my son was in the hospital we kicked that way up because we wanted him to be in massive anti inflammatory state because he was having so much inflammation. So we dropped that ratio. But for the majority of us use more around a 4 to 1. And so from the majority of us we're more around 20 to one reading way too many of the pro inflammatory fats, nowhere near enough of the anti inflammatories. And it's amazing because omega 3 fatty acids, specifically the ones from fish and algae, can help reduce inflammation. So you want to reduce your overall information inflammation as well. And then the other thing to look at are things like curcumin. I'm a big fan of curcumin. That was one I had my son on right away. And again this is just to reduce overall inflammation. We want to look at where that's coming from. If you have a specific area that's hurting, which wasn't the question, but if you do, then that's where I go and work with a healthcare professional, especially a chiropractor, figure out what it is, where the imbalances are and what I need to do to support it. Like I have an old shoulder injury from carrying around two babies at once that flares every once in a while, just. And I know that I have to rework things and get things back in balance. Now. One other thing I just want to throw out to consider is specifically for women, if your estrogen's going down due to menopause and your thyroid levels or you have thyroid issues, those two can create some inflammatory response. And it was interesting. One of the ways I knew my estrogen was going down is I just got achy and couldn't recover from the gym. So check that one out too. That's another issue to look at. But again I'm going to go back and love what Vicki said about just first kind of sitting with it all and getting aware of what your body really feels like so that you can tell if like, well all of a sudden I make you where I didn't used to be, what's changed and you can figure that out and you can become your own personal health detective, which is what I've put into all my programs. That ability for you to really understand and know your body so that you can fine tune it. All right, if you'd like to submit a question again, head over to my Facebook page and I have a favor to ask. I would so appreciate it if you could jump over to iTunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch of and while you're there, subscribe and share the show with your friends. All righty. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you to live courageously. Show up, step up. You are stronger than you think.

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