Healing Is In Our Nature with Razi Berry

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I will connect with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus, I give you tips that you can put into fast action to up level your health and your life. Now, today's show is all about all right, Love is medicine. Now that's going to sound woo. But you're going to see at the end of this show how this was the number one thing that came up when I queried my community. I'm not going to tell you any more about it than that. And I'm also going to share with you something that Grant, my son, who is recovering from a traumatic brain injury has been doing intuitively that has been helping him heal. And our guest today, Razzie Berry, explains, you know, why that was and why this is helping him. So let me tell you a little bit about our guest. Razzie Berry is the host of the Natural Cancer Prevention Summit and publisher of the award winning journal Naturopathic Doctor News and Review, the International Journal of Naturopathic Medicine and the Preventive Health research Naturopath. This all happened because of her personal journey, which she's going to talk about today where she got smart sick in her 20s and it was just crazy what happened. But that all led to her finding this career in the field of naturopathic medicine. So she has now spent the last decade educating people to live healthier, more purposeful lives through publications that bring together leaders in natural and preventive medicine as well as empowering millions of people to embrace the philosophy that prevention is the best cure. And I know prevention can be tough to sell, but she's going to give you some simple techniques. I love what she does first thing in the morning. That can just be so easy to make a shift in your life. You know how much I love the little small shifts that make the big changes. Okay. Her next project coming out now is the Heart Revolution. It's a journey to explore the heart body connection and heal your heart physically and emotionally. So today's guest is Razzie Ann Berry. All right, let's do it. Razzie Berry, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here with me today, jj.

Thanks for having me. This is a great opportunity to be able to talk with you, so thank you so much.

You are welcome. You have an interesting career with what you do, which we're going to get into. But first I want to understand how you got into it, like, what's been your journey, because I know at some point here you were struggling with your health. So what happened that led you here?

Yeah, absolutely. So I was in my early mid-20s and, and had a fantastic career with single traveling, just really enjoying life to its fullest. And then I suddenly got sick with what is now called fibromyalgia. But back then, 15 or more years ago, that was a diagnosis that doctors really didn't accept. And this was before I had found natural medicine. But I was, you know, I started going to a well known clinic, the Mayo Clinic, actually. And I was put on so many different medications that I was just getting worse, my hair falling out. I was told I'd never have children, I had to quit my job. And basically a doctor told me, jj, that you're just going to have to go on disability.

Oh my gosh, you're in your 20s.

Yeah. So here I had not married, I had never started a family, which was one of my life's dreams, as it is for many people. And they were basically telling me that you're just going to have to take these prescriptions for the rest of your life and take a government check. And I didn't want that death sentence for myself. So I went on this journey to try to discover how to heal, how to get my health back. And back then we didn't have jjvirgin.com.

We didn't have to say like this was early days. I still remember my first client 25 years ago getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia. And it was like the weirdest thing ever. And you couldn't go like, it was so hard to go find any info on anything.

It was. And you could really even do a Google search. So I had the library books, all clinics, and I found myself actually traveling out of state to meet with different doctors and finally found somebody who would listen to me and who actually took the time to listen to what my symptoms were and not tell me. It was all in my head. Because as probably happened with your client back then too. That's kind of what I was told. The pain is in your head, not in your body. And I'm thinking, really, I have to crawl across my back then living in an apartment Floor, like, go to the bathroom. And this is in my head. I don't think so. So I really just became and learned we weren't really taught in school. Are we JG about how our body functions, about physiology. And we don't really have an author's manual when we're born with how to use it. So I sought out doctors who taught me about our body and how we need to integrate with nature and better understand all of our senses. And that's how I found naturopathic medicine. And that was really the turning point for me.

You had us with you walking across, you know, crawling across the floor of your apartment. And so what did you do to come out of this? You, you know, was finding the doctors and finding naturopathic medicine. You know, what. What eventually did they find as the root cause? And how did you heal yourself?

Yes. So great question. And so, first of all, of course, the diet was the first thing. And right now, you know, it's really popular to talk about our gut. Right. And our microbiome was really talking about it. But this is something that naturopathic doctors have practiced since the mid-1800s. And so to really get my gut healthy through the right types of foods, elimination diets, avoiding sugar, which was a really, you know, caffeine and sugar, as being, you know, busy career woman back then, that was a big part of my diet. And so that was a really major change. But also, she had asked me, you know, have you been exposed to any chemicals? And I thought, no, I don't live in a chemical factory. But it turns out I had chemicals all around me. I was working at one point as a realtor in a new home setting. And there's, like, paint fumes and carpet glue, and there's all sorts of toxins, you know, scented candles. And prior to that, I worked in the cosmetics industry. JJ As a rep for a perfume company.

Oh, my goodness.

So I didn't realize that I had been sort of loading my body up with toxins in the line of work that I did. So to have somebody ask me and test me for these toxic loads and then to do some detoxing, both oral through food and also IV was really what really set me on a trajectory back to health. That and the diet, for sure.

Well, you know, in a way, like, to get this to happen to you in your 20s was actually a huge gift, when you think about it, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, because you are just like, you are the vision of health. You look amazing, vibrant. I mean, no one would ever guess that and it. It means that you didn't figure that out at 40, 50, 60, and then try to undo the damage. So, you know, yay for that. Now, you know, you talk about healing being in our nature, but if that's the case, I mean, it seems. I mean, if you look just at what's going on out there and, you know, healthcare, what is going on? Why is it so difficult for us to heal if it's in our nature?

That is such a great question, jj. Because it's in our nature. Our bodies strive and fights to live, so our body does naturally heal, and we just get in its way. And the reason why it is so difficult for us to obtain healing is because in our culture, we have really blocked ourselves off from our nature, from the clothes that we wear and the, you know, always having shoes on our feet, never touching the bare earth. Waking up in the morning, the first thing you do is slather chemicals on your body and go straight to your computer with the blue light. You know, we kind of live in these technological bubbles that really keep us away from it. And that is really what I see as the problem. We just get in the way. We don't heal in spite of ourselves.

You want to hear something super interesting? That Grant, my son Grant, who had the brain injury, as you know, has been healing for the last four years. You know, we looked at the first four and a half months in the hospital, and everyone's like, oh, my gosh, okay, well, we're through that. I'm like, that actually was the easier part of it. The last four years have been the bigger part of bringing someone through a brain injury. Super challenging. And there's, you know, we've had to dig for information, which I'm going to make sure I get out to the world. But one of the things I've been watching him and what he's been doing intuitively as he's been putting this together, and one of the things that he naturally started to do early on, which he'd never been into before, was gardening. He became obsessed with gardening and getting out the dirt. I mean, my backyard, honestly, is. My backyard is destroyed. It is torn up. There's stuff everywhere. They're building a huge pond for hydroponics. And I just went, you know, who cares? Who cares? Fine. You know, trash the house. But he naturally needed to be out there, hands in the dirt, grounding himself. And we never talk about that.

You're so right. And how beautiful that he intuitively sought that out, that his body, his own self, you know, his higher self, his nature was reaching out for that because, you know, we are so, you know, we're in such an antiseptic world, aren't we? And we're just so afraid of dirt and germs and we just don't touch the earth anymore. And that's so beautiful to me that, that Grant just kind of intuitively wants to go there because that is going to help him heal.

So let's talk about some of the principles of naturopathic medicine. It's. I've always had kind of one of my long term dreams is to go to naturopathic school. Like I would love to go to Best year one of these days. It's just amazing. And of course, we have a bunch of friends who are naturopathic docs. My personal naturopathic, my doc is Dr. Alan Christensen. He's a naturopathic doc. He's genius. So, you know, what's, what's different about it? What are the principles that we can all take to heart whether that's the doctor we're seeing or not?

Well, something so fascinating about naturopathic medicine is really like in the early 1800s when the sort of barbaric new medicine came, when people were like, you know, taking arsenic and mercury and just kind of crazy things. This pharmaceutical age where everybody started looking for a quick fix. And the early naturopaths were actually what were called vitalists who understood these healing traditions from many different cultures, whether Ayurvedic medicine or German herbalism and things like that. So they kind of brought that into this new modern time and merged with chiropractors as well and formed this new field called naturopathic medicine. And the principles are so foundational. The first one is called the healing power of nature. And we talked about that a little bit. It's just that the naturopathic doctors recognize the body's inherent ability to heal itself. Symptoms are not the problem. Symptoms are your body's way of healing itself through, like eliminating, you know, you throw up because your body thinks, I don't, I don't want this in my system anymore. Or diarrhea or a fever. Your body's temperature is raising itself to kill a pathogen. So naturopathic doctors, that's really at the root that they understand that. And then the next, the next tenet is doctor as teacher. Doctors know that the patient doctor relationship is totally crucial to the healing process because it gives the patient responsibility. They have to take responsibility instead of just seeing the doctor as God and saying yes, they have to kind of Discern whether it's true for themselves or not. I say you always need to know more about your body than your doctor does.

Yeah, no kidding. That was like the big tenant that I walked in with with my son was like, all right. You know, I just once we had some hope that. That he could actually. It was 0.25% chance, but that's all we needed. But, you know, it was like, we are taking responsibility for this. Think if in life you took responsibility for your health and then you went out and sought the answers that you were looking for to the right questions. Right? Yeah.

That is important point that you make. The right questions and the right questions. Yeah, yeah, that's a really great point.

Yeah.

And then treating the whole person, and you really embody this too, with what you've gone through that you can't. You know, modern medicine compartmentalizes. You know, you walk into, you know, a gynecologist office and they think about you as from, like the waist down. Right. But they don't look at sometimes how, you know, your brain and your pituitary and your hypothalamus and all of that and your emotional state and your relationships and what your birth story was. There's so many things that come together to make the tapestry of one person. And naturopathic doctors are really the first people to. Or the first medical profession to incorporate this in their medical school program. And then prevention is really probably one of the most important, because if we can prevent disease and move towards prevention instead of waiting till something comes up, and this is why it's so important for us to just understand that healing is in our nature. And, you know, jj, you probably run into this a lot with all of your followers. People sometimes are afraid to say, I'm gonna embody natural living, because they don't want to give up their cute shoes and their cell phones. And they're afraid that that means they're gonna have to eat bark and go live in a yurt or something. But it's not true. As you know and I know it's not true. You can still have yourself.

Yeah, we both have cool shoes.

We can, you know, we can still have all the technology that we love, but we have to just use it smarter, you know, be smart about it.

And I think that's an important part. You know, one of the things it feels like, you know, it's sort of like the vegan versus paleo debate, right? Or the, you know, born again Christian versus the atheist, or the like, what if everything was a continuum and Actually, editor, go back. I'm not going to put the Christian thing. People will freak out. So go back to here. You know, I love that you brought that up, because I look at this and I look at just the debate that happens in our community of vegan versus Paleo. And it's like this war. And I'm like, well, what if everybody's right here, you know, and we really need to go through all of this and understand what's best for ourself. And look at all this. And there is no. You know, one of the things I see is there's, like, natural medicine on one side and traditional medicine on one side and Eastern. And I'm like, what if there's great stuff in all of them? Like, what saved my son's life was everything. Everything. If we had not had that first doctor. Well, the first doctor we overruled, but the second doctor who saved his life, you know, with every modern advance there was, and the next doctor stayed up all night long making sure his kidneys didn't fail. If we hadn't had that, we wouldn't have been able to do the back of, you know, the Tesla coils and the hyperbaric and the neurofeedback and the stem cells. None of that would have happened because he wouldn't been there. So I think we just take the best of all of these things, but you can't do that and forget about the patient. And I saw it in the hospital, Razzie. When he got to. He got through the initial part where, you know, he wasn't going to die. There was an imminent threat of death, and then they didn't know what to do. So he was just sitting in a bed all day long. And he was, you know, that's not going to help his brain heal. That's not going to help his spirit. He was just sitting there. It was awful. That's when I realized I had to keep moving him and doing things. So, you know, it is probably the piece that we tend to forget is that we're all, you know, we're connected. You've got to remember about our spirit, about the fact that we're, you know, relational beings. We need. We need to have social, you know, we can't be isolated. We need to have touch. All of these things are so important. But when you do start to feel, feed the body in all those different ways, man, miracles, miracles. You'll see miracles happen.

And you make a great point when you say we have to. You know, when you talk about that debate between this diet versus that. We really have to listen to ourselves. And one of the ways we have to do that is through all of our senses. And some of the choices we make in our modern society really cut us off from that. One quick example is I was, you know, at the gym recently on my way to a yoga class, and they had just installed, like, this new air freshener system, and it was just choking toxic chemicals out. And I thought to myself, we're here at the gym to heal. Yoga is all about breathing. And your lungs and your breath is a major detoxification pathway. So all these people are here coming into the studio, and yet we're cutting off, listening to our olfactory sense of smell and our breathing, and we're just trading being out of shape for breathing in toxins. It just doesn't make sense.

I know.

You're so right. And we have to listen. Listen to ourselves.

I. I think of the gym I go to, and they do that too. They have this, like, toxic cleaning stuff. And I'm like, okay. It seems like it was perfectly timed. Anytime I walked in, I'm like, what is it? So that is funny that you brought it up. We're up against the time. I want to throw one more thing out because you say love is medicine. So what, you know, what do you mean by that, Razzie?

You know, if you look down through geometry, sacred geometry, quantum physics, quantum mechanics, we look at genetics and go down to the smallest particle, we see these patterns emerge. Sometimes they're called, you know, the golden ratio. And there's these patterns in nature. They're just either dividing or multiplying. And that's how we take it. Take in nutrients, give off toxins. Things break down so other things can build up. And really, to me, at the bottom of that is that's how nature or God or higher selves, really, that's love. It's this constant striving to life, towards healing. And the best way for you to be healthy, for someone to find health, is to make these right choices that come from a place of love. Because you can't eat the wrong foods and love yourself at the same time. You can't make bad decisions and be loving yourself at the same time. You can't do things that, you know, cause harm to the environment and be loving the environment. It's constantly trying to give you life. So for me, the very bottom of that is love is medicine. Because food is medicine, food is nature. Really, to me, it's all about loving ourselves enough to make the right choices.

You're going to love this. When I queried my community as to the number one reason they weren't where they wanted to be with their health, their biggest reason was they didn't feel good enough. They didn't feel worthy. It was all an issue of self love. So, you know, if it doesn't start there, if you don't feel that way, you won't do what you need to do to take responsibility and take care of your. So I'm glad you brought that up and just reiterated that point. And it's like now that, now that it's out there, I just see it everywhere. So that's. That's the top that we start from. And then all of our actions will come off of that. So I'm going to throw one curveball at you. Okay? Ask everybody. And it is. What's the one thing you do every day that makes the biggest difference in your life?

That is such a great question. And it's really kind of something small. But I used to start my day off by going straight to my computer, checking my emails, checking, you know, my Facebook accounts, and it kind of set the wrong tone for the day. So I now, when I wake up, the first thing I do is I go outside, we let the chickens out. We've got a couple chickens, even though we're here in the middle of the city. And I do pull some weeds and I get my hands similar to what your son is doing. I get my hands in the dirt, I get some sunlight on my body, and it's made a big difference for me. Jj, just starting the day off on a healthier tone.

That is fantastic. Chickens.

Okay.

I didn't know they let you have chickens in Scottsdale.

As long as there's no rooster.

I was gonna say you're that neighbor. Now, for everyone listening, I know you have something cool to give away to everybody. Can you tell us what that is? We always give a gift to our listeners.

Yes. So we put together a really fun video series called the Sugar Free Summer. And it was 12 of the top naturopathic physicians from the US and Canada talking about just the newest science of the different ways that sugar really impacts sexual performance, thyroid cancer, memory and attention, fertility, wrinkles, and skin aging. And it's really a great way to kind of, you know, I feel like if you educate yourself and you understand the reason why you need to do something, it takes. It makes the willpower easier. So this is just a series of 12 videos that can really empower you to understand why you need to cut sugar and hidden sugars out of your life.

I'm all about that, so thank you for that. That's awesome. And you can get that@jjvirgin.com Razzie spelled R A Z I. If you could see Razzie, you'd know that this is, like, the perfect name for her. Like, you just embody your name. It's so perfect. And I thank you so much for joining me today. You are so awesome. I so appreciate you.

I can't wait to talk to you again. And I need to get you on. My podcast is launching this spring, so I hope you'll join.

Absolutely. And then we will promote that. All right, after the break, I'll be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Richard in Wake Forest, and he says, jj, I've been diagnosed with osteoarthritis. I get up in the morning, my knees are killing me, and I'm wondering if there's some natural solutions that I can use before I have to go the route of total knee replacements. All right, Richard, I can relate to this. I actually injured my right knee when I was 17, a devastating injury, and I was able to put off having to have a total knee replacement for over 30 years because of some of the things I'm going to tell you now. Unfortunately, at some point, it was total bone on bone with a collapsed joint. So it was throwing off all my body mechanics, which is why I finally had to give in, actually, the pain. So that's the cool thing. So here's some of the things that you want to do. Number one, if you are in any kind of pain, achiness, I want you to first look at going on the virgin diet and uncovering your hidden food intolerances. Because if you are reacting to foods and so often Especially gluten and corn. The gluten and corn can be doing this to you. It's going to create an inflammatory firestorm in your body. So the first thing you're going to do is go on the virgin diet and uncover those hidden food intolerances. I got to tell you, one of the biggest things I hear from people within days of being on the virgin diet is that their pain that they've been suffering with for years is gone. The next thing you got to be careful with are any of the over the counter or prescription pain medications because they'll actually make your gut leakier, make you have more food intolerance, which gives you more pain. So it creates a really bad cycle. Now here's a couple of things that I love to help reduce inflammation and deal with the pain and their nature's natural pain remedies. First, one is fish oil and increasing your omega threes. So both your omega threes from things like flaxseed and chia and hemp, but also the EPA and DHA omega 3s from fish. So fish oil every day, anywhere from 2 to 5 grams of fish oil a day can be enormously helpful here. And then the other thing is to make sure you're eating a beautifully colored plant, plant based diet. So you're going to eat your clean, lean protein, things like wild salmon and grass fed beef. But you want to make sure you're getting in a lot of non starchy vegetables and a little bit of low sugar impact fruit, things like berries and cherries and then broccoli and brussels sprouts and red, all the different red and purple and green vegetables and fruit. Why the antioxidants in those actually can help reduce inflammation as well. They can help lower something called highly sensitive C reactive protein. And then finally start spicing it up with some turmeric, some curcumin. Now ideally I'd like you to take curcumin because curcumin is tough to get enough of in your diet and tough to absorb. So you want to get a curcumin that's been prepared in a way to make it very bioavailable because curcumin needs fat to be absorbed. But curcumin can be amazing for helping to reduce inflammation as well. Alrighty. Start with the virgin diet, add in some fish oil and some curcumin and eat from the rainbow and let me know how that goes. Richard. Now, if you'd like to answer a question or submit a question if you want to answer one, you can do that too. Go over to my Facebook page, but if you'd like to submit a question, head over to my Facebook page at JJ Virgin Official. You'll see the little blue check mark. That's me. You can put your questions there. We monitor them and grab some to put onto the podcast. We also answer them there as well. And I have a favor to ask. I would so appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes or both and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch. And while you're there, subscribe and share it with your friends. Thank you so much. Alrighty. This is JJ Virgin signing off as and reminding you to live courageously. Show up, step up. You are stronger than you think.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.