Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Healing The Mind To Heal The Body- With Katie Wells and Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Welcome to The Resetter Podcast, where Dr. Mindy interviews experts on everything to do with a fasting lifestyle and beyond!Katie Wells of Wellness Mama has built an incredible platform to educate people on how to raise their family with as little environmental toxins as possible.She uses fasting not only for HEALTH reasons, but also for MENTAL reasons. You can't heal a body that's in fight or flight crisis!In this podcast we cover: Hormone fluctuations Mind/body connection being a two-way street Why your body holds on to weight in response to trauma How excess weight is armor When pushing harder doesn't work Different kinds of therapy (talk therapy, tapping, rage therapy, bodywork like myofascial release and rolfing) Learning to magnify what you love about your body instead of what you hate about it Enjoying exercise Using DIY natural products that work BETTER than their synthetic versions Katie Wells can be found at wellnessmama.com/ More resources:The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk MD: https://amzn.to/3afwC1b  The Tapping Solution App: https://www.thetapp

Okay, you guys, Dr. Mindy here, and this Resetter TV episode is awesome. If you have not heard Katie Wells' new healing journey, you are going to want to listen to this woman. She lost, she said over 75 pounds in the last year just by healing her emotional trauma. And she did a ton of fasting, which is really cool. But she talks about her journey and the missing piece of her healing process was to heal some deep, emotional trauma that she had had. She really opens up. She is articulate about the process she went through. So I'm really excited. Katie Wells, she is the founder of wellness mama. If you don't know who she is, she has an amazing website, amazing podcast, and you guys are in for a treat.

This was one of my favorite interviews. Put your whole self in. You take the excuses out. You let a tophagy win while stem cells grow and sprout. You cleanse detox and couple, balance hormones up yourself out. That's what resetting is all. Hey, resetters. I have a treat for you guys today. I have with us Katie Wells, who if you're not familiar with her work, I first wanted just acknowledge what an incredible platform you've created with Wellness

Mama. So let me start off by just welcoming you, Katie. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat today. Yeah. And I think originally you started Wellness Mama because of a deep passion you had about raising your kids with the most minimal toxic influence and in as much of a natural environment as possible. Is that correct?

It is. It lined up actually with my own health crisis. So I, with my first son, had the beginnings of Hashimoto's but didn't know at the time that's what it was. And I read when he was young that for the first time, in centuries, his generation was going to have a shorter life expectancy than ours. And so that really kind of the two of those lit a fire in me. And my background was research and journalism. And so that was what I turned to to figure out hopefully the answers to both of those questions. Yeah. Yeah. And you like you have you have served the world in such a huge way. If you guys haven't

checked out her website, she has so much information. It's incredible. So just again, I just want to acknowledge you for that. But what I want to talk about today is the journey you've been on over the last we are last year. So those of you that are familiar with Katie, you probably know her as the wellness mama, but she's also had her own personal transformation with her own health over the last year. And so why don't you kind of talk about that? And specifically the resetters, we're a fasting group. So I love that you start off every January with a 10-day water fast. So if you can kind of share a little bit about your journey, how you dropped it, what was it, 50 pounds, 55 pounds? I think it's actually probably close to 70 now since.

Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. So tell us how did this come about and where did fasting play a piece? And then I really want to dive into some of the emotional stuff that you did. For sure. It's funny because with the Hashimoto's like weight gain came along with that and with

pregnancy. And that was what I was so focused on for so many years. And I think it's also a good lesson in like mental balance and stoicism. Like that thing you concentrate on so, so much. It's when you shift your gaze and let it go. it's easy, it's so much easier to then actually accomplish that goal. But that was what I thought I was trying to solve for all of these years. It was like, oh, if I can just figure out the weight loss thing, that's, and realizing over the last couple of years that that was actually just a symptom and learning,

I talk about this now quite a bit, but like learning to actually work with our bodies versus against them, I felt like for all of those years, I was actually trying to fight myself to lose weight and kind of realizing now, like, you can't hate yourself skinny and you can't deprive yourself thin, you have to approach it from a much more holistic inner side. And I resisted that side for years because being very type A, I thought I can just power through this. I can just be more consistent. I can be more dialed and I can be more regimented. And it wasn't until I was willing to really face all the aspects of health that I started to see the physical changes happen kind of inadvertently. That wasn't even actually the goal at the time that I started really rapidly losing the weight. So like you mentioned, I start every year with a water fast, which is something I have,

learned about several years ago and have implemented since then really consistently. So every year, we do a 10-day water fast at the beginning of the year. And then I do three to five-day fast really regularly throughout the year. And then even in a given week, I will mix up days of eating like all three meals in a day, days of not eating at all, and days of eating in a shorter window. I'm a big believer in not letting the body ever fully adapt. So I try to throw different fuels at it every day, different timing, different metabolic inputs from exercise, from sunlight, et cetera, even supplements. I don't take supplements every single day. I don't take them on the weekends. So I did. I started last year with a 10-day water fast. And I realized, like, the weight loss had been such a goal for so long.

I was like, I don't want to just start another year saying, I'm going to lose weight. And I realized I had a daughter who was going to be a teenager relatively soon in the next couple of years. And more importantly than the physical aspect of the weight loss, I really, realized that this, this idea of weight loss and the idea of hating my body had become such a prison of my mind for so long. And looking at her and starting to see just the twinges of her judging her own body, I was determined that I was not going to pass that on to my daughters and I have four daughters. And so my vow at the beginning of the year was I am going to figure out whatever it takes to work through body image stuff, through learning to love myself so that I can

be an example of that. Because it's one thing to tell them, you know, your body is an incredible machine and it can do whatever you want it to do and you should use it like a tool to do incredible things. But they needed to see that. They didn't need to hear that and then see mom look in the mirror and like see all the things wrong with her. Amazing. Yeah, you know, they don't, they do what you do. They don't do what you say. Exactly. And that's true, as you know, for all aspects of parenting. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. That's amazing. So I started with the 10-day water fast, which I do for the, of course, the health benefits are really well documented for autophagy and just cellular turnover and gut health and on and on and on. There's so many

studies. But I actually do the 10-day water fast at the beginning of the year, not for the health reasons at all, but for the mental recess. Because I think I've also delved into stoicism quite a bit the last few years. And anytime we deprive ourselves of something that is so much a normal part of life, it I think A shows us a strength inside of us that we don't always remember that we have. But it shows us we can live with less than what we think we need. Ah, so true. So I always do that at the beginning of the year. And I would say the first two days are the physical side when you're most hungry. Those last three days is when I see the mental benefits. And I also during that time will read a book a day of books that reset my mindset. So Victor Frankel's Man Search for Meeting, the Four Agreements, books like that that help refocus because when you take away something that you can rely on as simple as food, I feel like you have a void where you can put another positive input in and it ring different way because you've kind of changed your framework for that time period. So that's how it started. And I didn't know at the time how I was going to figure out how to love my body within the span of a year before I had teenage daughters.

And I just started kind of how I did with health and with writing, just throwing everything at the wall to see what you work. And really I don't think it could be just about the food. Because on paper, and I run everything by spreadsheets. So literally on paper, I had all of that dialed in. And I ate very specific meals that were nutrient dense. And I had them ranked by micronutrients. and macros and doctors had reviewed them. I exercised regularly. It wasn't that I had a deficiency in any of those areas. I knew the science and I had researched it and I had been implementing it for years.

So I knew that there had to be other things that I needed to look at. And I do think, obviously, diet and exercise are very important for body composition. But I think if we are constantly in a state of fight or flight, if we've engaged our sympathetic nervous system, especially as women, our bodies are not going to let go of weight because that's a survival mechanism. And you cannot battle biology. Yep. I say that all the time. I just, I'm in the process of writing a book.

It's on menopause and how women need to address their hormones differently and their lifestyle differently as they go through the menopause experience. And one of my big points is that you can't, you can't heal a body that is in fight or flight. You can't be the rushing woman who is going from thing to thing to thing to thing. and expect your hormones to balance out. It's just not, it just doesn't work. Your body, when it's in crisis, holds on to weight. It shuts down sex hormone production.

It does not thrive in that, in that environment. So that's amazing that you, like, took it head on. Well, and not only that, it creates the worst case scenario for you to try to lose weight because you've got all your hunger hormones out of whack. Your stress hormones are through the roof. So your body is to, for a very important biological reason, is craving sugars and starches and salt. and all of the things that it's trying to get to make your hormones work out again and cats, but you're not usually craving like an avocado.

You're usually craving something fried. Yep. So you're battling literally nature and it trying to keep you alive and keep you safe and thinking that you can just out willpower all these years of biology and it turns out you can't. Yeah. No, not even the strongest most tenacious women like you. You can't.

You can't push through it. This is not a push through moment. Yeah, exactly. But the converse is true as well is if you can support the body and get into a state of calm and a parasympathetic and let the body rest and reset and relax, all of those things get so much easier. And then you can focus on the body actually wanting things that are going to nourish it or being able to fast without messing things up. Because that's the other thing. I think women, sometimes we look at men and how easily fasting works for them. And we're like, oh, I can just do more fasting.

But not if your hormones are messed up. You want to support your body first. and then when you're in a place of calm and in a place of support, then you can experiment with fasting. But if you're already super stressed out and like living on caffeine and sugar and then you try to fast, you are going to be miserable. Yeah. I so hope my resetters are taking notes on this because we see, you know,

we do a fast once a month, five days out of every month. So we have about 150,000 people across all our platforms that are fasting together. And one of the things that we see is that people get so frustrated. Why aren't my blood sugar numbers coming down? Why can't I fast as well as my husband? Why can't? And it's like we got to stop back and sit back and realize that everybody's path with fasting is different. And if you're not handling this fight or flight piece, if you're not handling the stress

piece, you're really making fasting much more difficult for yourself. And you might be doing yourself more harm. Absolutely. And I think for women, especially in the times of not fasting, it's at least for me, I had to really hyper-focus on nourishing my body and shift. that focus because when you are in a phase of trying to lose weight, I feel like the mindset is easy to fall into deprivation and like worrying about food or like guilt tied to food or too much food is bad. But once you start getting those hormones imbalance, food is a lot of women aren't consuming

enough calories. And I was finding that could actually be a reason you have trouble losing weight as well. So the irony is I eat probably much more than I ever did before now. I focus on making sure I'm getting enough protein and enough micronutrients. And especially when I eat in a shorter window, actually making an effort to eat more food to get enough healthy calories and like putting olive oil on stuff just to hit the calories I need to hit. But I feel so much more satisfied and nourished. And there's not that mindset of deprivation. Yeah. Amazing. Again, I hope people are like, I really want to point out that that's so important because we have, you know, what I love about Dr. Jason Fung is he really brought to our attention that weight loss wasn't a calorie in, calorie

out situation. But what happened is we created this whole movement of people that were one meal a day deprivation and they're hitting walls. And I really want to point out what you just said is so powerful. Sometimes you have to step out of that and eat the right foods and eat more of it to be able to drop the weight. So that's such a powerful comment. Okay. So tell us about the, like I want to know about EFT and some of the emotional stuff you did. Take us on that journey as well. Absolutely. So real quick, before we move on, I will say on the weight loss side as well, just a tip for people, if you're in that phase, it was really helpful for me to realize there's like a cyclical nature to weight loss, especially for women. And so I was expecting, because spreadsheets, I was wanting to see linear progress. And that's not how weight loss works for women, especially if you still have a menstrual cycle. So what I would see instead with phases of fasting that lined up with my cycle, I would see, I would go down in weight and then I would stay that way for pretty much the rest of the month. And that was when I would focus on eating. enough protein and kind of resetting my set point so that then in the next phase I would see the weight loss again. So like not getting discouraged when it plateaus for a little while, realizing that

because of hormones, that's completely normal and this is a time to support my body and not deprive. I think we can actually use hormones to our advantage that way. Right. Right. And just to point on that is that think about it right before your cycle. It's not the time to drop weight. That's the time your body wants to hold on to weight. It's physiological. So not pushing against that is so important. So awesome. Yeah. And so then beyond that, like I said, I tried to ignore the emotional side for a really long time because I think it's easy as humans to look at food and see we see an immediate reaction when we eat certain foods that don't make us feel good or we drink caffeine and we notice a little, like we get the association that food creates an input on the body. We get the association that exercise.

I see more muscles. I feel better. We get those associated. I think when it's things like light and emotions and all these, it's easy to discount how powerful they are because we don't see the physical input making an immediate result. And so we have to, it's a little bit more of a long term play. And so I definitely ignored that for years. And I would often write off a lot of stuff that people would talk about as kind of like woo or that's not going to work or that's not important. And I'll just power through. I'm type A. I don't need that. And it wasn't until like I said, I had that motivation of I want to be a good example and an emotionally whole. good parent to my daughters as they go through because I remember the teenage years and I know what I'm coming. I want to make sure that I'm stable and emotionally present and have the emotional capability to guide them through that the best that I can. But that's going to require me getting to that point of balance first. And so I pretty much just started trying anything I could think of to try. And I have tried many, many types of therapy. And I think a lot of them have their place. And before we go further, I'll also say I think this is something that is incredibly personalized.

So I will share what worked for me, but I don't think it's prescriptive. I don't think you can just say, okay, she did these in this order. That's what's going to work for me. I think for me because I was so motivated for the sake of my kids, it was that when the student is willing, the teacher will appear. And likely a lot of different modalities could have been effective. So I think it's being willing and open is the first step and then finding the modalities that work the best with you and with your life and your own personality and your own whatever you're working through. for me it was realizing I had a couple pretty severe traumas in my past that I had pretty much ignored. And talking about that fight or flight response, not only had I ignored them, but when the trauma actually happened,

I like remember making a very conscious, like I'm going to shut down emotionally so that this cannot hurt me and I can never be hurt again. Turns out that's actually really not good for you emotionally. No, my heart hurts for you. I had built like armor that day. And I think over the next like couple of decades, that armor actually expressed itself as excess weight. And again, going back to you can't fight biology, my brain and my emotions were doing exactly what they're designed to do, keeping me safe in the way that I told them to keep me safe. And it wasn't until I was willing to go back there and deal with that and let go of it and be grateful for the job that they did for all those years of keeping me safe, that I could then let them go.

because that's what I realize with emotions. You can't fight your way through it. It's not like training for an exercise thing. You can't just push harder. You have to go through it. The only way through is through. Amazing. Going back to all of the, like going back to the trauma using,

I did talk therapy, which I think was somewhat helpful. But I think when we're dealing with emotions, a lot of those are, a lot of our traumas are stored deep in the subconscious. And with talk therapy, you're able to access what's in your conscious. But if what the root of something is really deep in the subconscious, or if it's childhood trauma and you maybe don't even have a full memory of it, you may not be

able to effectively talk through it. Not to mention that I'm an intensely logical person, but just logically understanding something doesn't mean that you've processed the emotion of it. And that was something I had to realize. And I used to pride myself on like, I don't cry. I don't, I never cry. I'm always emotionally in control. I don't get angry. I don't cry. And when I started doing all of these types of therapy, all of that started to come out. I did, I worked with a tabbing practitioner who also did rage therapy. And he was like, we're going to yell. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I don't yell. I'm always calm. I don't yell. Even at my kids, I don't yell. And she's like, okay, that's funny. And she kept poking at it until finally I yelled. And I, I joked that it was like the Hulk moment.

Like, I felt like my, like, chest cracked open and just like all this anger and rage and everything just came out. And then I felt so much calmer and like cool air had gotten in my soul for the first time ever, you know, like, my gosh. Relief. Wow. Rage therapy. surely you've talked about that now on your podcast a little bit it's not something like again I think it's when the student is willing like it was not something I would have thought to like oh I'm going to sign up for race to you try but I realized I had been just suppressing emotions for all of those years and having an outlet to let them go let me be in a much more balanced place in daily life and I still don't yell at my kids or scream but I feel like I was able to let out emotions that needed to

to come out. And you know, in health, we talk about the mind-body connection. And I think a lot of times, like, we think like, oh, I can just use talk therapy to talk through stuff. And once I fix my mind, my body will catch up. And there is an element of that. But I realized it's also a two-way street. So because my trauma was physical, I was able to actually use physical modalities as well to help release the emotional and mental side. And I think there was actually an aspect of using the physical modalities like bodywork to kind of bubble up some of those things that we're, were in the subconscious and get them to my conscious level so that I could work through them. Because just the way my mind works, once something's in my conscious, I'm like, cool, I have a

plan, I can deal with this, I know what to do. It was getting everything to where I could deal with it. And so I used physical modalities like myofascial release and ralphing and different types of bodywork, which I was at first I was like, well, at the very least, these are going to be relaxing or good for my fascia or good for my posture. So I'm going to try them anyway. But I was shocked how much which the emotional result ended up being, there's a really cool book I mentioned quite a bit called The Body Keeps the Score. And it talks about how we actually physically can store trauma in our bodies, which again is one of those things that I used to look at and go, that's so woo, that's not true, until I actually felt it. And until like in some of those bodywork type things,

I relived the past trauma as if it was like in real time. And like, have you ever seen like National Geographic when an animal almost gets killed? And then once there's safe, they just shake uncontrollably from that adrenaline release. Yep, yep. Yep. So because I had shut down emotions in that moment, I had never processed the adrenaline or the pain or any of it. And so when I reprocessed it, I shook for hours and like felt all those years of like adrenaline and everything just come out. And the next day I was eight pounds lighter, which I was just going to sit. Wow. Dynamics. It's not even possible. And it was. Wow. I was just going to say, you know, each time you

led a huge emotion out like that, I would think you would lose weight, but eight pounds in one day from releasing, you know, stuck emotions, that's incredible. That's incredible. My science brain goes to like, well, physically I probably had a lot of like inflammation that was connected to that stress response. And releasing that, I was able to release water weight and probably lots of other hormone cascades. But, you know, like you mentioned Dr. Fung and it's not just calories and calories out. It's not metabolically possible to burn enough calories in one day to actually lose eight pounds. Yeah. But I think that's where all the rest of hormones and all that comes into play.

Right. Right. Yeah, but if you look at like Bruce Lipton's work, he taught us that the outside of the cell is reacting to your thoughts constantly. And it's not just your conscious thoughts. It's your subconscious thoughts and that you don't even realize you have control over. That can cause cellular inflammation onto itself. So, yeah, amazing.

Okay, so continue on. Again, I'm so hoping my resetters like get light bulbs because we really what I love about your story and why I wanted to highlight it today is that we watch so many people get stuck with their weight loss and then they go into fight or fight more because they beat themselves up thinking that they did something wrong and your journey is like so perfect and it gives women and men both an idea to just address some of these more emotional things that might be holding their health back absolutely and I think especially a case with the guilt and the shame and the cycle that that perpetuates. It's why I'm a huge fan of Bray Brown and her work about

and especially being on a kind of somewhat public-facing platform related to health. I mean, this was something that took up, I would say honestly, the majority of my mental energy most days. And when you talk about the brain and your thoughts being able to influence yourself, when what's going on in your head all the time is that negativity related to your own body because you can't and why can't I just do this and whatever it may be, you're perpetuating that cycle. And I realized it's even those micro questions we ask our and our thoughts when you say things like, why can't I just lose the weight or why am I not good enough? Or why do I keep failing your brain? Again, trying to protect you goes, oh, let me give you

all the reasons why it doesn't work. Let me explain to you. And like, and it perpetuates that cycle. And then it's the story that we keep believing. And over time, I tried to just make little changes to my thoughts. Like instead of when I look in the mirror in the morning, finding all the things wrong with me, which I've had six babies, even now there's stretch marks. And instead of focusing on those things, trying to start finding the little things I could be grateful for. And I think gratitude is an antidote to so many things. Yes. So it wasn't even like I'm trying to love myself. It was baby step. I'm going to find three things about myself that I can appreciate and be grateful for. And that seemed like a much smaller step than like, hi, person that I have presented for 10 years. I love it.

I actually think this is a really good point because as women, men might do it too, but I really think women, we stand in front of the mirror when we're changing our clothes and we will like point out in our mind, ooh, that doesn't look good. That doesn't look good. And we don't even realize we're doing it. Like it's a scan of what I hate about you kind of moment. And what I heard from you, as you just said, I did it opposite. I looked at what I liked and started to magnify that. And it was baby steps because at first it was hard not to just fall right back into that pattern. But as a mom, it helped me to think like what I want my daughter to start talking like, what if what I said? What I? say these things to my daughter, what I want her to say these things to herself in the mirror.

And like, just reframing it in that like, what I say this to my daughter, it like made it such a reaction. You know, like, I noticed it so much more. Like I would never look at my daughter and say like, oh, you have a mold there or you have stretch. Like I look at my girls and I'm like, you're incredible and you can do amazing things. But we don't talk to ourselves like that. No. Have you read untethered soul? I have. Yes. And like that idea of like changing how your thoughts process and feeling the things and letting them flow through versus getting stuck on them. Yeah. powerful.

Such a good book. So, okay, anyways, continue. So then what else did you do? So I wish I could say there was just like a dramatic lightning bolt moment where everything else fell into place. It really was a gradual process. And I think that's also the lesson of so much of health and of stoicism and of everything is those baby steps that add up over time.

And especially as women, we often so much want that change to be immediate. Oh, yeah. It really is that the slow baby steps and the little drops of water that add up to eventually a huge vessel. But for me, it was things like that, like every day just changing the voice in my head and changing being able to deal with emotions in a much better way and changing my, like, interactions with myself because I felt like I was really cognizant of others in my life and of community and of wanting to nurture those relationships. And applying that filter and saying, I also need to nurture a relationship with my own inner voice. And I need to develop a healthy

relationship with myself. So it was a slow process. And certainly it had its ups and downs. But I noticed at some point probably in the summer, so like six, seven months in, that my voice had sounded, my inner voice had changed completely, that I was able to relate to myself differently. And then instead of a voice of like, oh, why can't I lose weight? Why am I always failing at this? The voice had switched to like, I'm at peace with my body and I am losing weight and it's easy. And I wasn't fighting myself anymore. And it's just been a gradual process since then.

And the irony is, like I said, I'm eating more food than I probably ever have as an adult. I actually didn't exercise during the intense weight loss at all, which I know people will react to, but when we exercise, we increase all of our hunger hormones. Yep. And it's more to deal with. And I realized, especially processing emotions and trauma, it takes, like our brain uses the majority of our fuel and our oxygen in our body. And especially when you get emotions involved, that's an extremely intensive process.

Yeah. So I kind of pulled on kid gloves with myself and was like, you know what? I'm not going to push the exercise until I feel like I want to. Yeah. If my body wants to move, I will move. But I'm not going to force myself to go to the gym until I'm calm in my body. And it was just amazing to watch. The thing I had fought so hard for so long fall into place when I just took my like

death grip off of it for a second and just breathe. Yeah. So my undergraduate degree is in exercise physiology. And I was a competitive athlete as a young child. And in my college years, I used to think exercise was the cure for everything until I hit my 40s. And then when I hit my 40s and I wanted to balance my heart, I realize that exercise oftentimes can get in the way of trying to balance your hormones.

And that's a whole other discussion, but I love that that you lost all this weight without even exercising because it is not a function of running a marathon or pounding the pavement. There are other things you can do. So it's beautiful that you discovered that. That's awesome. Totally. Especially with exercise with women. I mean, you could speak to this.

I'm sure better than I could. But I realized the script that we're given, I don't know where it comes from. but is that like cardio and like more is better? And that was absolutely not the case for me. I didn't do any cardio. And now that I am working out, it's weight and high intensity and then just things I love. Like I'll go for walks or I'll swim because it's fun or I'll do cartwheels or pole vaulting because it's fun. But the stuff that's beneficial is like the weights and supporting our muscles.

And there's a lot of science to that of like the more muscle tone we have. It actually burns calories and creates good hormones and all that. But I think that was another lesson was moving away from the idea of cardio being the solution. I love that. I love that. And it sometimes is hurting you not helping you. Okay, talk about tapping because tapping is kind of new to my audience and we haven't had, we haven't discussed it much. So how did you use that tool? Because it's so easy to do. I mean, you don't need to, you just need to know how to do it and then you can do it anywhere, any place. Exactly. And I will say for years, I used to think like, there's no way this could work. I don't even fully understand the science of it. And this last year was also a lesson in like I don't have to

understand everything for it to work. Like sometimes just try things and see what your body needs. But I went through several resources. There's someone named Brittany Watkins who does tapping specific to weight loss. And then there's also a book and an app called The Tapping Solution, which that's a really easy app. And that's mostly what I learned on my phone. And basically the idea of tapping is that you're using what would be like acupressure,

acupuncture points in the body. They explained that you're kind of like moving energy and also lymphatic in blood flow because you're stimulating different points in the body. I was super skeptical that it would work, but I figured it takes 10 minutes a day. It's not going to hurt anything, so I might as well. And so I started doing it regularly. The first change I noticed was actually a really big increase in my heart rate variability. So I track everything with an aura ring.

I use spreadsheets beyond that, and I'm really dialed in with that. And it was the only change I made, and I saw about a 30-point jump in HRV. So we're talking from like between that and just improving my sleep. I went from in the like 30s, 40s to over 100 in HRV. Oh my gosh. I have an aura ring and I've been trying to do everything. The highest I can get to is 77 and it's when I'm fasting. So I'm going to throw tapping in.

That's beautiful. That's why I figured it's free. It's easy. It's like it doesn't, it's not going to, I'm not going to lose anything by trying. No. But I also made a habit of starting to do that when I would feel the stress response building again or if I would get in like a negative mental loop. And I think that's beneficial both probably for the tap.

itself, but just for the pattern interrupt. I think any time we use something physically to interrupt that like mental pattern, it's just a good like way to break the cycle. And so I would use tapping daily during the intensive phase and now I use it most days just to keep HRV up and to keep up with the weight loss. But there's a lot of in the tapping app, there's actually programs for anxiety. There's ones for sleep. Like people who have trouble falling asleep, there's one for releasing anxiety about falling asleep, things like that. So there's some cool benefits. And again, it's one of those things, like even if you're skeptical, you don't really have anything to lose by trying it. No, no. What's the app? We'll make sure we put the link in here.

Yeah, it's called the Tapping Solution. And I just found it at my phone in the app store. Awesome. Amazing. Okay, so and then what I'm dying to know is what did your girls think of this as you were going through the process? Like, do you come home from a session where you've released all this emotion and your drain and then you've got to be a mom? And surely they can visibly see you changing. Like, what is the impact been for them? Yeah, that's a great question. I try not to ever, like, I'm a big believer that we are mostly responsible for our children, and I don't ever want them to feel emotionally responsible for me. So I don't like ever complain about these things or like talk about the really deep stuff with them. If they ask when they're older,

I definitely will share. But I didn't want them to ever feel the emotional burden of this. But as I started improving this, I wanted to make sure they heard the positive stuff. So as I started being able to feel these more positive things, I tried to make sure I said them out loud sometimes too. But part of the lesson in it I actually learned from my girls because at the ages they are, they're all very naturally athletic and they're in gymnastics and they're in pole vaulting and all these things. And to them, their body is this cool machine that they can make do all these amazing things. And all of this stuff we call exercise, they just call play. Yeah.

So I tried to adopt that mindset from them. And I wanted them to see me try things and actually not be good at it at first. I thought that was really important lesson for our kids to see as parents. and then also for them to see me like get stronger and use my body in good ways. So I actually started doing a lot of the activities they do with them. So now I do pole vaulting because they do. I thought I heard you say pole vaulting. I almost stopped you and said pull vaulting.

That has to be so fun. It is fun. My 11 year old is competitive with it. Like she'll compete at the state level this year. And it's so funny because when she was little, she used to tell me like, I would be like, what do you want to be when you grew up? And she's like, I just want to fly. And now she can actually fly much higher than I can.

I will say even though she's shorter. And it's amazing to watch what the kids can do. But it's also an incredible feeling to lift off the ground and like propel yourself through the air. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. Talk about an adrenaline, a good adrenaline rush.

Exactly. And I think that like that's been the fun part of like the play side. I like, I'll push myself harder than I probably ever would have in exercise, but in the name of play. And it's time I can like, like, capture the flag with my kids or do stuff with my kids. So there's that bonding aspect as well.

Yeah. amazing, amazing. And I just want to point out that you've told your whole journey, like all the pieces of it. I listened to it this weekend on your podcast. And it's just incredible. You're really open and raw. And you just, you know, I think it's amazing. We call it pain to purpose, right? Like when we can change our health and then show up on such a public platform like you do and share it with the world is just amazing. So I just honor you for doing that. Thank you. What I think is women, too, it's also because so many of these types of trauma have risen to the forefront of conversation societally, but I feel like a lot of times they got stuck in the like the pain and the trauma and the victim part of it. And I think like where we can all help each other move past that is when we talk about this, the vulnerability and the solutions and what actually moved us past it instead of just getting stuck in this horrible thing that happened, which has happened to so many women.

We can create this amazing support when we work together, focused. on the solutions. So I wanted to be able to be a voice to hopefully start that conversation for women in a way that's not shame-based and not guilt-based, but solution-focused. Yeah. And I can tell you, just knowing my resettor group, that just your story today is going to hit some ahas for people and is going to be a gift that they can now, you know, gives them when you show up and you say, I dealt with it, it gives some stranger somewhere, some strengths to stand up and deal with it as well. So it's just amazing. And surely you're going to get Brunee Brown on. your podcast. Have you reached out to her?

She's on my list. I haven't reached out. Okay. Yeah, but I think, I think you're right. Like, the vulnerability part is, and starting that conversation is huge because after 13 years of being in this health world, like, I had tried literally every diet and I had everything dialed in and I had seen so many doctors and I had access to pretty much every health resource out there. Yeah. And I was ignoring this gigantic, glaring piece of it that made it all come together. Yeah, amazing. So, okay, in the last couple minutes we have, I definitely don't want to not talk about the new products you put out, I do want to say that your DIY books sits on my, on my kitchen table. And it's funny because people come in and they're always like, oh,

why did you choose this book? And I say because I reference it all the time when I'm looking for different DIYs. It is the most amazing natural DIY book I've seen. But you've now created a whole other line of natural products. Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. So I realized a few years ago that, even my most naturally minded friends were still using certain personal care products. And when you asked them about it, it was because they still worked. And they had, there were natural versions and there were versions that worked. And there weren't products that had crossed effectively and that they felt like did a good enough job. So even my friends who ate completely organic and lived

non-toxic lives and there were no harmful chemicals or cleaners in their house, they had regular toothpaste, regular shampoo and like certain other products. And I knew based on all my years of DIY that it was possible to create not just natural products that worked as well, but that actually worked better, but it required kind of like a reframing of how we thought of these products. Because I think a lot of like hair care, for instance, we think of like, basically what we think of as shampoo is actually detergent. And we're stripping away everything that's natural in our hair and then trying to replenish it in the same process with all these other things that are actually synthetic. And so you're talking about products that have plasticizers and endocrine disruptors

and dozens and dozens of chemicals, and they're brilliantly chemically designed to create what they're supposed to create. But the secret is, you can actually, your hairs can actually do 80% of that on its own. And if you kind of support your hair, support your body, and feed it the things it needs, it can do it better than a synthetic product. And so we started with hair care and toothpaste with the idea of basically like hair food and food for your oral microbiome and supporting the body's natural process without taking away any of the stuff that it actually needs. So the toothpaste is a hydroxy-apitite-based one, which is a naturally occurring mineral. It's the mineral that the mineral that's in tooth enamel. There's a lot of studies showing that hydroxyapotite can

strengthen tooth enamel and is even involved in the remineralization process of cavities. And so every ingredient has studies to back it up and was really honed in to support whatever part of the body. So in the mouth, supporting the oral microbiome with things like Neme and green tea, which kill the strep mutin's bacteria, but not the beneficial bacteria that you can start that whole process. Like you know from even with fasting, the microbiome starts in the mouth. So even if you touch your mouth are going to make a huge gut change. So when we start there, we can have a dramatic impact. Same with the hair. What we put on our body goes into our body. So rather than just avoiding the bad stuff, we can actually put the beneficial stuff in the shampoo so that we're

nourishing ourselves from the outside in with things like nettle that increases the growing phase of hair and shortens the falling phase. So less hair falls out, which over time means you have thicker hair because you're losing less in proportion to the ones that are staying. So we just really designed everything extremely intentionally and with only EWG verified ingredients so that, not that it would taste good, but truthfully, like if you ingested it, it would be completely fine and that supports the body's natural process without the need for these chemicals that disrupt your hormones and disrupt your microbiome and other aspects of the body. Yeah, you know, we do a lot of gut repair in my clinic. And the first thing I change in people is their is their

toothpaste because they're doing all this antibacterial toothpaste, toxic toothpaste. They don't even understand that they shut down their pre-digestion, their ability to predigest it. So brilliant. Would the hair work? We get this a lot in the fasting world. Do you find that when you're fasting, a lot of times people's hair will go limp? Have you found that it can thicken hair in those time periods when people are in longer fast? Did you notice a difference when you were in your longer fast? Yeah, especially with the shamp. I think when we're fasting, I think it's like we may not need as much of the conditioner, for instance, during a fasting phase because you have more nutrients, you're not.

But the shampoo, I think, especially can. And I think that's also a cumulative thing over time. So having those minerals and the nutrients in your shampoo over the course of time means they're getting into your scalp and into your hair shaft so that you're more protected during phases of fasting. So you're not going to lose the hair to begin with. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

So, okay, let me finish up on this one last question. And then we'll put links for everybody. So I think is the best place for people to find you is your website? Yeah, wellnessmama.com is a great starting place for everything. And the podcast is there. You can click on shop and get to Wellness, which is the product line. Pretty much everything starts there. Starts there.

Okay. So let's finish up with this question. If you had one message for the world that you could just scream at the top of your lungs and get into everybody's brain, what would that message be? Oh, that's such a great question. and so many things I would want to say. I think I would go back to that your inner voice is the most important voice that you ever have a relationship with. And I used the quote that really like stuck home with me during my transformation the last year, which was, I told my body, I want to be your friend.

And it took a deep breath and said, I've been waiting my whole life for this. And I think that all starts with our inner conversation. And that's something we have complete control over. I also would tie it into the idea of stoicism and something I tell my kids all the time, which is that we have control of very little in this world. We can't control what happens to us. We can't control what other people think of us. We can't control almost anything. But we always have complete control over our inner thoughts and our reactions to what happens to us. And so if we begin there cultivating those things, I feel like it's ripples that move into every area of life. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Well, this was an incredible conversation. And again, you're doing such good work in the world and you just stepped it up a

other level. You have no idea how many people you're going to help with your story. So just so grateful for you and for your willingness to share it with all of us. So thank you so much. Oh, well, thank you for having me on and for letting me chat with all of you guys today. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, and I'll leave everything, you guys. I know you're all going to ask me about all the products and everything. We'll leave notes and links for everything. So thanks, Katie. Toxin's out. That's what it's all about. Fast cycling. Fast type so. You download car manager where your food is all grafted out that's what it's all that's what resetting is all