352: 10 Midlife Health Lessons I Learned Last Year

Ask for help. Yep, ask for help. We get big egos in midlife and I'll tell you, I had one. I thought, I know everything there is to know about health and fitness and nutrition. That's what I believed.

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill and I help women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond redefine, rebrand and laugh with aging. Welcome to Midlife Conversations. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated information that is relevant in this point of our lives now and break it down simply with actionable steps you can implement to level up your life. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring people living their best midlife years. Now on this show, I cover topics about our shifting hormones, weight struggles, our mood and focus changes, raising teenagers, our relationships, career changes, beauty, and more. If you are new here, I encourage you go back and listen from episode one, when this podcast was previously called Listen up for the Full Transformative Experience.

Midlife Conversations. I'm going to be doing something a little bit different. I've got a solo episode for you here because I've got some stories to share with you. And this leads to the 10 things that I ultimately learned in 2023 that forever has changed how our view, how I'll look at fat loss, how I'll look at health, how I look at toxicity, how I look at pretty much everything that has to do with health and wellness. So I thought by doing this episode, I'll be answering a lot of your questions, but also saving you some time because I've been down quite the journey, quite the. And these things that I picked up could save you a lot of time when it comes to fat loss, health, wellness, feeling good, all the things. So just I'm going to start with a little bit of a background story. So this time last year, I had made a decision that I was going to likely leave the fitness and fat loss space. In fact, many of you met me from that space. You've done my programs, you got fit with me, did all that. And after years and years of doing that, I had decided that I was going to leave it. In fact, I sent an email to my whole list I shared on social. I was very public about it and I said, I'm taking a break from this, I'm gonna leave it for now. And I actually started referring people to a friend's company. Now, what I didn't share at the time is the reason behind the reason behind the reason as to why I did that and paused my programs is I had some things going on with My own health and body that I was perplexed about. And I thought, you know, I really need to get this figured out with myself.

And I didn't feel authentic at the time. I didn't feel authentic leading fitness and fat loss. When I didn't feel good about myself, I thought, some things are changing on me. I don't believe it's just age. I think there's stuff happening and I need some answers. And I just wasn't really feeling confident to be leading that. So I paused that to focus a little bit on other areas of my business and to focus on my own health. What I didn't know is this would be a pivotal year for me, which would bring me back stronger than ever. Wanting to help, help people with their health conversations, wanting to help people age well, wanting to help midlife women. I think I. I believe actually that I needed to walk through a lot of this to come out on the other side and have learned these lessons. And I'm going to share those lessons with you today of what happened. And I. I do want to also share that. Recording this right now, I am back to my peak weight. I am back to feeling amazing. I've been through a lot this year. Some of you have followed on social media, I mean, with my explant and all kinds of things happening and changing with me. But I do feel at my peak health state right now, and I believe this year needed to happen. So I'm going to jump right into these lessons that I learned and I'll explain a little bit where they came from, and you can take notes and do what you want with them. And then I'm going to be sharing at the end of the episode, if this is of interest to you, how you can go a little deeper on these conversations with me. Okay? So, number one, the first thing that I learned and solidified and has become so important and apparent to me is the importance of being our own own health detective. Yep, health detective. Now, we've heard about being your own advocate for health, but let me explain what being a health detective means. Being a health detective means you don't take just one person's word for something. You don't take the doctor's diagnosis. You don't take one opinion of what's going on with you as this is it. And it also means not settling. It means going deeper until you get to the root, root, root, root of things. Now, traditional Western medicine is not trained to go to the root of things. They're treated. They're trained to figure out what your symptom is, give you something to fix the symptom and if you're lucky, you get a good physician that asks some bigger questions and goes deeper. In my experience, though, unfortunately, we don't have that as a standard in our healthcare. We don't have a lot of people that ask the root, root, root. So I'm going to teach you a little bit about what I learned here and how to do that, starting with my story. So at around the same time that I was having these challenges with myself, my naturopathic doctor, which I was fortunate enough to have suggested I start wearing a glucose monitor, a continual glucose monitor. And I did that. And she said by doing that we can see if your blood sugar is contributing to some things. Now, the reason she asked me to wear it is my A1C for the first time ever had been elevated, which really didn't make sense to me. Your A1C is your blood sugar average over about a three month period. And it didn't make sense to me because I eat very low glycemic. I eat unprocessed natural foods. I balance my foods with protein, carbs and fats. I eat very well. It didn't. And I was not, I had gained some weight, but I wouldn't have been considered overweight at all. So it didn't make sense to me. But we put the continual glucose monitor on and could instantly see I had a problem. My blood sugar would go high, it would go low and it was very extreme. In fact, low glycemic foods like strawberries would set it up to a super high blood sugar. So I went down the path that many of you would have gone down. I actually went to see a traditional endocrinologist and their answer in that five minute appointment was, you are likely type 2 diabetic, you need metformin. Now, I share this because many of you listening would have accepted that as an answer and just said, okay, I'm type 2 diabetic, I'm going to be on metformin and would have carried on life with the symptoms and side effects and become that person that just accepts it. That's not who I am. So I didn't like that answer. It didn't feel good to me. And I thought, there's gotta be more to this. So I really didn't shut up about it. I wanted to explore, I wanted to understand, I wanted to ask questions. And through those questions I learned about the impact that things like our gut health and parasites even could have on blood sugar. So I Dug deeper. And many of you followed my journey. I shared it on the podcast, I shared it on social media. But for me, what I learned was the reason my blood sugar had become dysregulated. And this took months to get to this. This was lots of testing, lots of digging, lots of going against what western medicine doctors were telling me. But I did learn that I actually had some parasites. And by clearing those parasites, my blood sugar completely regulated. Now, in clearing that, because some of you are going to go, well, how do I get a parasite test? And that's not what this episode's about here. I want to. The point of this is, how do we become a detective? Because your situation could be very different. But when I cleared those parasites, what I also learned then was that parasites don't actually thrive or live in our bodies unless you've got a source for it, meaning you've got another toxin load, maybe heavy metals, maybe mold, something else going on. But when we have some issues in our gut, when we have an unhealthy gut, and I didn't know I had an unhealthy gut, the reason somebody like me, a parasite would have thrived in me, where maybe somebody else, it would have not lived, is their guts in a different situation. So I learned that there had to been have been toxins or something feeding my gut. So again, in the theme of being a detective, I could have stopped at the parasite cleanse and said, this is. This is it. This is what's happening. My blood sugar is normal. Let's knock out the parasites. And I'm back to normal. And I did feel good after that. I want to when I be really clear. But I kept going. I took that detective conversation to heart and thought, how do I go deeper here? What's fueling this learning that I now also had black mold in my house and learned that I had a ruptured breast implant. So went on the journey to start cleaning these things up. And because I kept going level after level after level, deep, I was able to clean out the root, root, root of things and get back to my healthy self that can thrive. The way that I teach eating, the way that I teach fitness, all of those things, things I share that. Because in your life, in your situations, you've got something that you are looking at at the top level. Maybe it's your hormones, maybe it's your weight, maybe it's your mood, how you feel, maybe it's a diagnosis you've been given, maybe you've been told it's your thyroid or that it's any number of things. What I'm going to encourage you to do is be a detective and not just stop at that top level diagnosis. Go deeper, figure out what's creating that. For example, you have a diagnosis. Instead of just learning how to treat the diagnosis, learn what caused it and figure out where in your life could you make changes so this does not get worse, so that you can nip this and maybe even reverse it. So many of the things that we're diagnosed with in midlife, like type 2 diabetes, can absolutely be reversed. But instead of just tackling it from a food perspective or a workout perspective or even medication, I would encourage you to look at what is creating this. Is it truly coming from my food? Is it coming from something else? Just go deeper. So my number one first thing is be a detective. The next thing I learned, ask for help. Yep, ask for help. We get big egos in midlife. And I'll tell you, I had one. I thought, I know everything there is to know about health and fitness and nutrition. That's what I believed. But that was not serving me. I, instead of asking for help initially I thought I had to know it all. I had to be the one with the answers. And I was quite embarrassed. Like I didn't know what was going on with my body. Why did I feel tired all the time? Why was I feeling foggy headed? Why was I getting bloated after meals again? I'm not eating gluten, I'm eating well. Why couldn't I get through my workouts? Why was I losing strength? Why did I keep getting injured? I had all these questions and I thought I had to figure it all out myself. So the next thing I really learned was the importance of asking for help. And I wasn't shy about it. I asked anyone and everyone for help. That's how I learned about the possibility of the gut or the parasites and deeper levels of things. So I'm going to say ask for help. Don't shy away from someone that might be competition to you or you think you should know something. Vulnerability and being real and asking for help. You'll find people actually want to help you. So the second lesson I really learned this year was the importance of asking for help and really taking that on. You know, I noticed before that there would be fitness and fat loss professionals that would come into my programs. And I always applauded that. And I thought they want to learn and level up. And I give so much credit to that now because I actually believe that's rare. I Think we need to be more about asking for help. No matter what we think we're supposed to know, look like, feel like, be like, whether you're a doctor, whether you're whatever, ask for help. The third thing I learned was the importance of community and connection. And these are my words this year, actually. And where I really figured this out was my big change on Moving Now. I shared earlier about becoming a detective and going down that rabbit hole and what's causing what. One of the things I did learn is we were living in a house with black mold. And rather abruptly, we had to get out of that house with black mold, which brought us. This is a story for another time, but it brought us to leaving San Diego, a place that I've loved and lived in two decades, but moving all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was happening so quick, a lot of reasons, but we ended up here. And leaving that black mold was right for our health. But moving to a brand new place where we knew no one made me feel down. I'm just going to be real. I felt down. I felt a little lonely, I felt a little sad, I felt a little scared. And what kept coming up for me was that it's harder. I had the story that it's harder in midlife to meet other friends, to meet other connections. So I'm of the mindset, if you don't have what you want, create it. So if you don't have what you want, create it. And I've always taught that. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna take my own advice here. So I did a number of things. Like for instance, I moved here and I posted in a Scottsdale Facebook group. I posted a picture of myself and I introduced myself and I said, hey, I'm 52 years old. My name is Natalie. I just moved here. These are the things that I like to do. I'm looking for other girls that would want to hike and consider yourself a girly granola. And I organized a hike I did not knowing anyone, a little scary for me, felt like a stretch. But I did it. I think eight women showed up and two of those women became people that I'm actually friends with. Now I'm hanging out with them a lot. Girls that I would have been friends with for years. So I met them from that hike, which inspired me to do even more. I thought, I'm missing my entrepreneurial friends, I'm missing my business friends. So I thought, I need to create a group of women that are business women like that are entrepreneurial, that Are business that look like people I would be friends with, that are fun, that are girly girls like me. So I created that intention and I just started collecting people. It started with a group of three people. I met two women that I thought would fit into the group. I brought it up to them. We now have, at the time of me recording this, 12 women in this group. We're doing our first dinner end of this month. But I'm feeling really good, like I've met a lot of people out here. And what I realize is that when we have community and connection, we thrive. We need that. Don't be a loner. We need community and connection. We need people, we need other like minded people to help support us, help lift us up. So one of the big lessons I learned was the importance of that. I was a big believer that I was this introvert and had to say no to all these things before. And I have pivoted that. So big lesson number three was the importance of community and connection in midlife to help us thrive. Okay. The next thing I learned the importance of redirecting our focus. So redirecting focus. Let me explain what that means. There are circumstances that come up at any given time in our life. We're all going to go through them, especially in midlife. There's more and more circumstances. I mean, my gosh, there's diagnosis, there's setbacks, there's the loss of friends or family members, there is sadness, it's our kids leaving home, it's a lot of stuff. Losing parents, parents declining, a lot of stuff that happens, A lot of stuff that happens. And a lot of things that we start comparing to others and think, gosh, at this age I should have this, I should be where so and so is. Why aren't I more successful? A lot of things that can come up and what we focus on truly expands. I've always taught and heard what we focus on expands. But what I hadn't really thought about is the power and the importance of redirecting our focus. Meaning you have a bad day, you have a bad situation, you're in a loop in your mind about something that's negative. We cannot grow and evolve and get better from there. So it's critical, it's critical that we redirect our focus. For example, when I learned that my implant was ruptured and I figured out that I needed to remove it because I went down the rabbit hole, that that could be helping to source and fuel what was going on in my gut health, I started going down this sadness path of what I used to have that I wasn't gonna be the same. This has been me for 33 years, and that didn't feel good. I wasn't able to feel positive, create, be healthy from that space. So redirecting my focus meant reaching out and looking for other women that had gone through this and how positive they are on the other side. Another example of this. Let's talk about financial. A lot of people in midlife, especially the last few years, struggling with some financial things, it can get really easy to go down the rabbit hole of what I don't have, what comparing to others, what's not working, and that is not a great place to create from. So how do you redirect that? You listen to audios on generating money. You listen to powerful books, audibles on how to create money or wealth. You redirect your focus to what you want, not what is. Same with a diagnosis. If you're in this rabbit hole of, wow, I have to have this happen to me or this is going on and it means this and it's creating this negative spiral in your mind. Find stories and evidence of the opposite and really dive into listening and learning about that. If you can redirect your focus to those things, everything changes. Another place to redirect your focus is off social media and TV and into intentional things like intentional friend groups, intentional audibles, intentional podcasts, intentional things that you want to follow, listen and let in, but redirect all of that. So you are surrounding the noise coming into you with the positive stuff that's going to help you evolve and be amazing. Number five, turn obstacles into opportunities. Now, I said this over and over again in my life. I said this so many times in my life, but I don't know that I fully grasped it until this year because I had one obstacle after the next, and I thought, okay, Natalie, you've walked through obstacles, setbacks, humble beginnings before. You have had this. But this year takes the cake. So what do we do? How do we change these obstacles and turn them into opportunity? So, for example, learning that I had black mold in my house and knowing that I had to leave the house quickly. Well, if any of you have followed the housing market and what's going on, especially in San Diego, it was not the ideal timing to have to leave a house. Rent is crazy. Buying a house there was crazy. It was not going to be easy for us to make that change and get out of a house so quickly with a dog especially, and find something comparable in San Diego. So we Chose to go to Arizona. Now, I had said publicly that I would never leave San Diego. I thought I never would. I loved it there. I was sad, I was frustrated, I was upset, I was mad. I viewed this totally as an obstacle. I thought, my friends are here, my life is here, the beach is here, everything is here. I'm sad. I remember driving out to Arizona the day that we were moving. Really crying to myself, like, what am I doing? Is this the right decision? Like, why? What? What am I doing? Am I ruining my life here? I was really sad. And then I reminded myself, how can I turn this obstacle into an opportunity? And I started making a list of all the amazing things that I would get to experience, like having a brand new modern house, something I didn't have in San Diego. Meeting new friends and having new possibilities there, new opportunities. Finding a new gym that would be cool. Finding new things to do, things to explore, new beautiful hikes to take up on. Really focusing on what are my opportunities here versus my obstacles shifted my whole mood, my energy, everything, and got me in a much more positive state. Next thing I learned, next thing I learned. This is an important one. Okay, move your body. Now, that might sound really basic and I've talked about moving your body many times, but this year, especially with the challenges, it never hit me more than ever as hard as it did this year. The importance of moving our bodies for mood. When you're sad, when you're feeling down, when you're feeling at all, anything, that energy is just stagnant in our bodies. Getting up and moving, even if it's just a walk around the block, changes everything. Look, I've had so much time of just being sad and sitting and not being in that space of movement, especially post surgery recovery. But what I know for fact is by moving my body, just moving it, just going for a walk, just standing instead of sitting, moving my body changes my physical state, it changes my mood. And I can't encourage this enough. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I've cleaned up my diet, I've done these other things, but it's cold out. I live in a place where it's winter or whatever and you're not physically moving, I'm going to encourage you to shift that, put that warm jacket on and get outside, but start moving your body, it changes so much for us. Next on that list, get outside. Connect with nature. Now, I love nature. Look, I moved to San Diego 20 years ago. I spent almost every day outside somewhere. It's beautiful. There. And I thought, this is it. I made a choice. I came here. Nature is healing. And sometimes people would say, well, I wish I lived someplace warm and pretty like San Diego. I would be outside too. And I don't know that I disagreed. I thought, well, I chose to move here. I love it, it's beautiful. But moving someplace that is not San Diego, moving to the desert where it's very brown, very brown, we'll leave it at that. As soon as I think I have a chlorophyll, a missing chlorophyll, it's very brown. I started not going outside as much, thinking, okay, it's not the same weather here. It's not as pretty. And I realized when I actually could shift that and get outside anyway and start finding the beauty in the brown, finding new places to explore, but actually being outside, getting my feet on the ground, that also shifts our mood. We need the ground, we need sun, we need outside, we need fresh air. Getting ourselves outside, no matter what the temperature, bundle up. If it's cold, you can do it. But get outside, it changes our whole mood. It changes our health, our wellness, we need it. The sun is healing, it's healing. It doesn't have to be hot and sunny out. Just getting outside and having that sunlight on us is healing. So getting outside is important. It will lift your mood, it'll change, and it starts to fix your body. I promise you the next thing. This is not a new lesson to me, but it's one that I really took on this year to another level. I'm going to talk about just nourishing. So one of the things I've always taught in my programs is to focus in on adding more of the good food, which makes less room for the not so amazing. So you see, one thing I don't like about most diet and nutrition programs out there is they're all about deprivation. And I think deprivation sets us up for failure, sets us up for lack. It doesn't feel good. So I've always taught adding in more of the good. However, being in a year of going through all these issues with myself, like having to control the blood sugar at a time, trying to go through the parasite cleanse, moving, then having surgery and recovering. I didn't necessarily want to be focused on adding in more of the good foods. I didn't feel good. I wanted to sit on the couch and recover and just eat a tv. What are they, so called TV dinners? I don't even think so. Wanted to eat a meal that you would heat up that was Already pre made. I didn't want to focus on good, healthy food. I wanted to order doordash, I wanted to order take out. But what I want to tell you is truly when you can focus on how can I get in, even if it's not a lot, some of the good, healthy, nutritious foods that are healing, it changes your physiology, it changes how you feel. Now, I'm personally not a fan of the diets that completely eliminate fruits and vegetables. I think they are critical for us. This is another conversation I can go down a whole road with about oxalates and why some people don't want vegetables and all the things. But I think as a whole, that's not our problem. Our problem is not too many vegetables and too many fruits. I think as a whole, we're not eating enough of those good foods. We're not eating enough of them, and they are healing good for us. Foods. We need fruits and vegetables. They have life in them. They change how we feel, they change how we look. So nourishment became a staple for me this year. I didn't force myself to eat all kinds of complete meals. I didn't force myself to stick to full healthy eating. But I did say, okay, Natalie, every day, how do we get in more of the good? How do I get in some healthy fruits and vegetables? Those do help us feel more attached to nature. They help us heal, they help us get well, they help us with fat loss, they help our mood, they help all the things so nourish with that. Okay, lesson number nine. Lesson number nine was to go back to basics. Now, for me, I was entirely starting over this year. Entirely starting over this year. I had so many setbacks, so many changes, I had to question everything I knew. So back to basics. What does that mean? Well, so many times we want to jump into the latest and the greatest. What's the latest diet plan? What's the latest workout? What's the newest thing? Should it be this kind of drug that I'm taking? And I say that because the pharmaceutical industry is constantly changing. Like right now, there's a popular weight loss drug. People are looking at I got it. Or people say, okay, oh, it's right now. It's I should be only eating meat, or I should be only doing this or I should take that, or it's this. It's, it's, oh, it's my hormones. It's. It's always like this one thing that we think we have to go and change. And what I'm going to encourage you to do is to stop all of that. Stop thinking it's this one thing or it's this advanced thing or it's the latest and the greatest. And I want you to go back to basics and say, am I actually, am I actually doing the things that are common sense that I know would help me thrive? Like, am I actually doing those things? Like, am I eating unprocessed, natural, real foods? Like, are you foods that once grew? Are you drinking enough water? Are you hydrating? Are you moving your body? Are you being intentional with friendships? Are you? Or do you have friends that bring you down and make you feel bad about yourself? Are you being intentional with what you're taking in, like what you're listening to? Podcasts, audibles, tv, phone. Are we being intentional about it? Are we just letting it all happen to us? So going back to basics, same with supplements. I think we've gone overboard with all the supplements we think we need. Let's just use common sense and go back to some basics. What do I actually need? What makes sense for me? So, big lesson for this year was to get back to basics and really, truly ask myself, am I doing these basic things? Like, am I moving every day? Am I drinking the water? Am I doing unprocessed foods? So I'm going to ask you those same things too, before you jump into the advanced stuff. I'm all for hormone testing. I'm all for gut health testing. I'm all for all the, for removing your implants if you want to. I'm all for testing your house for mold. I'm all for all these things. Got it. And are you doing the basic things first? Because my experience of women in midlife is we've stopped doing those basic back to basic things. The last thing I'm going to share, which is so important, and then I'm going to share how we can go a little deeper together is to be a student, truly be a student. I am always a student and this year I've taken it up a notch. In fact, I've always joined, you know, networking groups and masterminds. And this year I made a decision that that's not going to be my focus. And instead I wanted to work with more coaches. I wanted to be a student again. I wanted to learn how to uplevel my knowledge. I wanted to learn how to do, you know, advanced things. So be a student. Everything we know has gotten us to right now, right here today. If we want to advance and get better, we've got to continue to be a student and learn Learn from others. Those are my 10 things this year. I hope they helped you. This is what I want to share if you want to go deeper with me. I am doing a free series on bringing back my fat loss classes with a new perspective. I'm bringing back my fat loss classes. I'm doing a free series of these. These are really cool because I do them. They take about, they're about 90 minutes. And you're on zoom with me with a group. It's in that format that's like a masterclass format, a webinar format. So you I won't actually see you on camera, but you'll be right there with me. You can hear me, you can type your questions in the chat, all the things. But I'm going to be leading a very specific method on how to have fat loss and thrive as we age. And these are not the things that you're expecting to hear. I'm not going deep on nutrition or workouts on this. I'm going to go into a method, the same method I used this year to help change me, to help me get back better than ever. So I'm going to teach you that exact three step process on this class that is totally free. And if you want to be on that, I've got a number of different dates I'm teaching this this month. If you go to Natalie jillclass.com Natalie jillclass.com you can pick one. I believe there's five different dates that we'll be doing. You can pick, pick it, sign up for it, it is free. And then just show up and absorb and let me pour into you and teach you these three things to help you level up and Happy New Year.

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