Going Back to Our Roots Blog embarks on a journey towards embracing a natural way of living in today’s fast-paced world of convenience and instant gratification. With the alarming surge in illnesses, diseases, and mental health issues, it’s high time we retrace our steps to a simpler, healthier existence.
My personal journey back to my roots began after giving birth to my two sons when my body started experiencing a thyroid hormone imbalance. While hormonal imbalances are relatively common during pregnancy, for some individuals, these hormonal fluctuations persist, refusing to return to the body’s “factory settings” of optimal health.
Despite the discouraging consensus among multiple doctors and specialists that healing my thyroid, autoimmune disease, and getting off of medication was impossible, I resolved that if I could find at least one person who had successfully healed their body and was medication-free, then I could do it too.
After two years of dependence on doctors and medications to remedy my issues, I had a revelation: medications were merely addressing the symptoms, not the underlying problem. It was during this period that I realized doctors aren’t trained to heal people; they’re trained to treat them, and that’s a fundamental distinction. Medical practices are where doctors practice medicine, essentially practicing on us.
As Dr. Mark Hyman aptly puts it, most doctors diagnose and then provide a prescription, often to alleviate symptoms rather than treat the root cause. It’s akin to applying a band-aid to a deeper issue.
Hypothyroidism, one of the most common autoimmune diseases among American women, affects an estimated 60% of them. While hormonal fluctuations are natural during puberty, pregnancy, and menopause, it’s abnormal for the body not to restore a healthy hormonal balance naturally.
In our world of factory farming and lab-generated frankfoods with questionable ingredients, our body’s reset button seems to malfunction at some point.
Over the past six-plus years, I’ve taken control of my health, effectively becoming my own doctor. After three years of research and practical application, I successfully weaned myself off all thyroid medications, all under the supervision of doctors and regular hormone testing. I also shed over 50 pounds of hormonal weight gain.
So, can autoimmune diseases be healed? I firmly believed they could, and so I did. In Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book, “You Are the Placebo,” he chronicles medical cases of individuals who healed themselves from cancer, children highly allergic to poison ivy who experienced no reaction, and his own recovery after being hit by a car while riding his bike.
Such miraculous healing is often attributed to the placebo effect, a term coined during World War II when a nurse, facing a shortage of morphine, injected wounded soldiers with saline (salt water) solution, assuring them they would feel no pain in a few minutes. Astonishingly, over 95% of her patients experienced no pain during the surgeries, despite receiving saline injections instead of pain medication. If you’re seeking natural healing, I highly recommend reading this book, as it will profoundly change your perspective on healing.
The first step toward healing is recognizing that there’s a problem. I sensed something was amiss in my body, although I couldn’t pinpoint it initially. However, my awareness of this feeling grew over time, and with it, my recognition of the associated symptoms.
Despite being told there was no cure by doctors, I decided to explore natural remedies for hormonal imbalances. In hindsight, I can trace back my teenage hormonal imbalances to high school, although I never connected the dots until after my pregnancy.
Like more than half of the women in the United States today, these issues remain untreated and undiagnosed. Shockingly, it’s estimated that one in five women has an autoimmune disorder, hormonal imbalance, or autoimmune disease, yet fewer than half of American women receive diagnoses or treatment.
Hormonal weight gain can feel nearly impossible to shed. I’ve shared numerous blog posts detailing how I reset and healed my hormones, lost over 50 pounds, and maintained my health effectively. It wasn’t just my love for myself and my body that prompted my awareness of these issues; rather, it was my struggle to shed the post-pregnancy weight.
What most women fail to realize is that losing hormonal weight gain isn’t the same as general weight loss (without hormonal imbalances). The process differs significantly, especially after the age of 40.
When it comes to weight loss, the pivotal concept to grasp is that food can either be a potent medicine or a silent poison. The foods we consume either nourish and heal our bodies or slowly poison them.
In the United States, we often follow the Standard American Diet (SAD), an acronym that couldn’t be more fitting. Unfortunately, this dietary approach is wreaking havoc on our health. To top it off there are millions of different voices saying “Eat this not that”, “No, eat that not this” and it is completely overwhelming and confusing. Trust me I spent two years exploring different “diets” with absolutely no changes.
Not only did I not lose any weight at all I seemed to still be gaining weight despite “dieting”! So frustrating!!
Losing weight, especially after the age of 40, becomes more challenging due to various factors. Perimenopausal and early post-menopausal women tend to accumulate fat mass as estrogen levels decline. While women of childbearing age, normally age 25 to 35, tend to store fat in their lower bodies (pear-shaped), both men and women in post-menopausal stages tend to store excess fat in the abdominal region (apple-shaped) called visceral fat, and this my friends is the most dangerous place to store fat.
Hormonal imbalances around menopause, or “man-o-pause” for men (lol), can significantly impact weight gain and the ability to lose weight after 40.
Embarking on a journey to restore hormonal balance through food is the first step. Over the last decade of research and trial and error in my own journey and now helping and coaching many students to the same success and healing I found naturally I discovered there are 5 core areas, pillars of our health, that we have to address in order to see effective and lasting results.
In having so much success one-on-one with students I knew I wanted to scale and be able to help even more people, so Jason and I launched our Fit Over 40 Course to help men, women, and couples over 40 called the Longevity Lifestyle Blueprint.
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