Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #95: Reversing Autoimmune/Chronic Disease: Lessons from Sina's Personal Story (Part One)

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Episode #95: Reversing Autoimmune/Chronic Disease: Lessons from Sina's Personal Story (Part One) · Beyond Labels Premium

0:00
SPEAKER_00: You would never know that just about seven years ago I actually almost died from an autoimmune disease.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: I was diagnosed with an advanced stage of um rheumatoid arthritis.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: I had arsenic poisoning, and I had um leaky gut, of course.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Like who doesn't have that these days, right?
0:21
SPEAKER_00: And I had uh 15 nutrient deficiencies.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we can we'll get into this a little bit more detail in a minute, but the Western medicine test said that I had no nutrient deficiencies, and it wasn't until I switched to a functional test that it showed up with actual 15 different deficiencies, even though I was consuming a multivitamin and mineral every single day.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: And I used to formulate supplements.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: So I knew the best of the best supplements to consume, and my body still wasn't absorbing the nutrients, and I was so severely deficient in 2B vitamins that I was diagnosed as borderline for both Palagra and Berry Berry.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, to another episode of Beyond Labels with yours truly, Joel Salatin, and our favorite researcher, Dr.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Cena McCullough.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is going to uh deviate a little bit from some of the things that we've done.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be, uh we or she is gonna be quite personal here and tell her story.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: We've had a lot of new subscribers uh in the last month or two, many of whom I'm sure are not familiar with Cena's uh story.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I've been blessed all my life growing up on the farm, you know, uh milking cows, doing farm work just with a very robust immune system.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: As you know, I I drink out of cow tanks today to keep it robust and uh and just have not had you know have not had sickness and had uh problems.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: But my my heart breaks.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: I know there are people who are are having everything from you know psoriasis to uh uh uh you know chronic, chronic um pain, um you know, immunological dysfunction, those kinds of things.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: It's it I I know that's real.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm just I'm just being very open that it's hard for me to to understand what that must be like because I've been so healthy uh for so long and and have a lot to be grateful for and very blessed uh for that.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: But because we have so many new uh folks we feel like joining us here um just lately, uh, we thought it'd be good to let Sina share her healing journey um not only as a warning to people, but as an encouragement and inspiration uh that there is hope and there is light at the end of that tunnel.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: So um, so Sina, go ahead and and start wherever you want to, and I'll I'll prompt you when I feel like you're either going too fast or going too slow.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: All right.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Joel.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Yes, so you would look at me today, and I'm completely healthy, right, Joel?
3:10
SPEAKER_00: Like I go hike, I own a company, I homeschool my kids, I hike with my dogs on the weekend.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, two years ago, at the age of 45, I gave birth to a healthy nine-pound baby girl.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, I have no physical limitations today.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: You would never know that just about seven years ago, I actually almost died from an autoimmune disease.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: I was diagnosed with an advanced stage of um rheumatoid arthritis.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: I had arsenic poisoning, and I had uh leaky gut, of course.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Like who doesn't have that these days, right?
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And I had uh 15 nutrient deficiencies.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Um and we can we'll get into this a little bit more detail in a minute, but the Western medicine test said that I had no nutrient deficiencies, and it wasn't until I switched to a functional test that it showed up with actual 15 different deficiencies, even though I was consuming a multivitamin and mineral every single day.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: And I used to formulate supplements.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: So I knew the best of the best supplements to consume, and my body still wasn't absorbing the nutrients, and I was so severely deficient in 2B vitamins that I was diagnosed as borderline for both Pallagra and Berry Berry.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Those are diseases you don't hear about anymore because they were largely eradicated from the US by the mid-1900s, but they they led to death, you know, paralysis in this country and as well as others.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing a resurgence of these types of micronutrient deficiency diseases.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: So Cena as a as a teenager, I want to I want to go back a little bit.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh so seven years ago you were 40.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I mean, and and uh those of you who you know, everybody that sees you now, I mean, you could pass for a for a 20-year-old now.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you're doing you have to say that.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: You're my partner here.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: I might have been born at night, but it wasn't last night.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so um, so uh were were you a vibrant teenager?
5:20
SPEAKER_01: When did you first start sensing that that you the I'll just say that you had limitations, that you that you had issues.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: That's that's a nice way of putting that.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Like so um the the the disease didn't actually develop overnight, right?
5:37
SPEAKER_00: None of these autoimmunochronic diseases develop overnight, they usually take at least a decade or more.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Mine took over 20 years.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: It started with gastrointestinal issues, right, in my early 20s.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, now if you because you asked about my teen years, so if you go back before that, I was not a healthy child.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Now I know that actually in utero, um, I was being set kind of set up to trigger an autoimmune or you know, what you can call a chronic illness.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, my mother was very stressed when um when I was in utero.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, my nervous system was rewired so that I would I was stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: And that resulted in chronic ear infections as a child.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: I was chronically constipated, but I didn't know any different.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was just the norm.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Those that progressively got worse.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Like I got over the ear infections, you know, they had tubes in my ears, whatever.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I eventually did get over, I grew out of the ear infections, but the constipation was chronic.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And then in my early 20s is when the gastrointestinal symptoms really started to ramp up.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: I could eat a food and within 20 minutes, I would look like I was five months pregnant.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't seem to track to any particular food.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: So one day I could eat pizza from my favorite pizza joint and be totally fine.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: I can go there the next week, eat the same pizza, and I was buckled over in pain.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: And from that very beginning, in my early 20s, I did seek help from Western medicine doctors.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: I actually sought help from them for over 20 years.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: But the first doctor I saw prescribed tagamut so that I could, you know, the tagmate was supposed to help me eat food.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: And I, even at the age of like 20, I knew that that wouldn't address the root cause.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: So I asked the doctor, I said, well, instead of just diagnosing me with irritable bowel syndrome, which as you know is a catch-all group, and giving me a prescription drug that I need to consume the rest of my life just so I can eat food, why don't we figure out what's actually causing this problem?
7:53
SPEAKER_00: And he had no idea.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: It was, it was as though I'm the first person ever who asked him to try to figure out the root cause.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: So he just referred me to somebody else, who then referred me to somebody else.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, and over the next 20 years, roughly, I basically bounced from one specialist to the next with nobody having any answers.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: I had three colonoscopies, two sigmatoscopies, breath test, urine test, fecal test, blood test.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: I even had exploratory surgery at one point, and nobody had any answers.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: No one did.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: Now, during this 20-year span, I was going downhill.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: My symptoms were getting worse and they were increasing in number.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: So it moved from just gastrointestinal issues to um severe nausea, brain fog, chronic sinus infections.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: So when I say chronic sinus infections, I mean like every six weeks I was getting a sinus infection, and they would give me, of course, an antibiotic, which I would take.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know any different at the time.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: It would go away, you know, go away in quotes, and then it would come back.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: So I cycled through it every six weeks, roughly, to the point where eventually they said, you know, you need to have surgery.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, you have a deviated septum.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: So I went along and I had the surgery, and it still didn't fix it.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: I also had a susceptibility to colds and flus.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: I was always getting sick, and I always was sick for about at least twice as long as everybody else in my family.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And I had a kidney stone that developed.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: That was actually as I when I was still an undergrad in college, I ended up with kidney stones.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: And this was the craziest thing.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: They would the doctors would say things like, Well, you know, you had kidney stone, that comes from consuming too much caffeine.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: You need to stop consuming caffeine.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't drink caffeine.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, I this has been something for my entire life.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't drink soda, I don't, you know, I don't drink coffee.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't even consuming caffeine.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: So then um the colon, a colonoscopy result would come back and they would say, okay, you have precancerous tumors, you know, in your colon.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: This is the one thing that one of the only things they actually found.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: They found these um these polyps in my um gastrointestinal tract, and they said they were precancerous, you know, conform into tumors.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: And to fix it, I needed to do two things.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: I needed to stop drinking alcohol, and I needed to stop consuming red meats.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I did not consume alcohol, uh, you know, really never, never really have in my life, and um at least, you know, at least not any chronically, and I was vegan at the time, so I wasn't eating any kind of meat.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: So again, the information they were giving me just didn't make any sense, right?
10:52
SPEAKER_00: And then after and then um still being bounced from one doctor to the next, uh my symptoms grew worse again.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: I ended up having a tumor form on the white or the sclera of my eye.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: And nobody knew why it formed, nor do they knew what to do about it.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: But they could tell me with absolute certainty that that tumor would continue to grow, it would grow over my um my cornea and it would blind me.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: All right.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Then after that, my hair started falling out.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: I lost about half my hair.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: And the worst one for me was I ended up having five miscarriages.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: And again, this entire time I was trying to get help from the medical establishment, and nobody knew what was wrong.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: I kept saying, I think this is related to diet, right?
11:50
SPEAKER_00: Because I would eat a food and then I have this gastrointestinal symptoms.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: It seemed pretty obvious to me that there must be a dietary component.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: The medical doctors did not believe me.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: The last doctor I saw actually said that it the symptoms had to be in my head because using their tests, they couldn't find anything wrong.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: All right.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: And that was a real turning point for me.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: That's when I realized that I was I searched for 20 years in this Western system, and all the doctors can tell me is okay, pretty much we think you're crazy.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: We think you're making this up.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: And so that's when I knew that if I couldn't find another path, I was never gonna heal.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: So that's when my husband became my co-detective.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he has a PhD in chemical engineering, so he was perfect for this job.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: So we scoured the scientific literature, and you know, this was like eight or maybe this was like a decade ago.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: So um, so we're looking through the literature, and leaky gut was not common at that time.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, the terminology leaky gut was not in the mainstream, but he found it in the scientific literature.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: And we knew that it was associated with different triggers like gluten, pesticides, GMOs.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: So um I went organic, all organic and gluten-free, or what I thought was gluten-free at that time.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I knew I needed to heal my gut.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: So I also started all different types of dietary protocols, like the GAPS diet, the candida diet.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, you you name a diet, I tried it, right?
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And nothing worked, right?
13:27
SPEAKER_00: And I and I will add to this that it's not as though I didn't know how to implement the diets, because at this point I had a PhD in nutrition, right?
13:38
SPEAKER_00: So that is the ironic part about my whole journey.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: I am declared an expert in nutrition, in food, but it was foods that were in large part making me sick.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: I just didn't know the truth about our food supply.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: So at this point, Cena, grow growing up through, I mean, through your childhood and all this, in your home, uh, you were you were eating the standard American diet, I'm assuming, you know, so you had uh there there was no there was no real discussion in your home growing up.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: And even once you, once you got married initi initially, there was no uh whatever conscious intentionality about we eat that, but we don't eat that because this one has chemicals and this one doesn't.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: It was just uh, you know, whatever's convenient, whatever's there, we we just eat.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: So we did eat the standard American diet.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had taught me about, you know, that organic even existed or what that was, or that there were chemicals on the foods.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, nobody in my family really read the label for contaminants, right?
14:42
SPEAKER_00: For what you and I would call now adulterants in the food supply.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: However, my mother was sick since her early 20s, right?
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Kind of mimicked my pattern.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, and she ended up having um glomerular nephritis.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: This is kidney disease that led to kidney failure.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: And so, from for as long as I can remember, my mother was on a restrictive diet that she got from her nephrologist.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: So we did read labels, but it was only for things like the fat content and the salt content.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: So you could imagine these Western medicine doctors, their their dietary plan for my mother with kidneys, kidney disease was no salt or very, very, very low salts, right?
15:28
SPEAKER_00: So all of our food didn't have salt added to it.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Like never, never was salt added to our food, which you can imagine how gross that tasted.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, and they put on a very extremely low-fat diet.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: So we had no fat.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: So you talk about egg beaters.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, that's what we ate.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh my egg beaters.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's like that.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: It makes me sick to myself.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh processed gunk.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I was raised on.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: I was raised to fear salt and I was raised to fear fat.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: And so what does that lead you with?
16:05
SPEAKER_00: A very high carbohydrate diet, right?
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And because I ate out of convenience and ate the way people ate around me, I ate a lot of processed foods.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: These were conventionally grown processed foods.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: I just didn't know any different.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, but in my healing journey, I had gone all whole foods.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: So at the time when I when we realized I probably had leaky gut, I had taken all the processed foods out and I went to all organic whole foods with some um gluten-free, you know, certified gluten-free foods, which I then I eventually even removed those from my diet.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: So everything was whole.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: But at that point, I was still getting sicker.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: It got to the point where um you were you were you were moving, you were basically moving out out of grains at that point.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you you're you you you you you per pretty much moved out of grains, so you went to vegetables, fruit, and meat.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: Were you were you uh were how about dairy?
17:11
SPEAKER_00: So nope, I didn't have any dairy.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, occasionally, occasionally I would have um like a little bit of butter, maybe, but it was not it was not consistent.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: I predominantly ate um like organic um avocado oil or organic olive oil or coconut oil.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: So it's very rare that I would eat, you know, something with dairy in it.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, but now I will say the the grain that I kept in because I didn't know it was a grain, was occasionally I would eat rice.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: So I just didn't know that was a grain, you know.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: So we're taught in nutrition that that that is a um a a carbohydrate.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: So like like a like a potato, like a potato.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Like like in in uh in dietary class, you're told that a potato and a and rice are interchangeable.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: We look at things and with reductionist thinking as protein, carbs, and fat.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's fit into the carbohydrate category.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: So for me, that's what they were.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: They were carbohydrates.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: So we're still eating the rice.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: But then what happened was um the list of foods I can eat dwindled down to only a half a sheet of paper.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about foods like apples and bananas were making me sick.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, like, and most people wouldn't say an apple is a bad food to eat, right?
18:35
SPEAKER_00: We think of that as healthy, but they were making me sick.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: I was cooking everything from scratch, and again, everything was organic.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: We never went out to eat.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: But a new symptom appeared.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: This was low-grade muscle pain, and it migrated throughout my whole body with really no rhyme or reason, right?
18:54
SPEAKER_00: I would just feel it in different places of my body, and uh I couldn't get it to stop.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: It was accompanied by extreme fatigue, right?
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's when I hit my tipping point.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: All right.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: At this point, this is when I spent most of my time lying on the floor in pain.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: And when I was too weak to even walk up the stairs without getting winded, I couldn't stand up to do to wash a dish.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: I remember my son, who was like five at the time, he would have to bring water over to me as I laid on the floor with the straw in it, just so I could drink some water throughout the day.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: It was awful.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is when I, well, this is when I hit rock bottom because my whole family got the flu and they all cut recovered in a couple days, but I ended up having to go to the ER.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Like they had to give me fluids and everything.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: It was, it was really bad.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, and after that, after that final insult of getting the flu, that's when I just spiraled downhill.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: And that's when we knew that for the first time in you know, over 20 years of searching for an answer, that's when I was actually scared because I started the process of muscle wasting, like a cancer patient would experience.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: I lost, um, I would lose 15 pounds in a month, you know, and I wasn't a big person to start with, you know, I was a um, you know, I was I had a good weight to me, right?
20:28
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't, I wasn't overweight.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: I was hell, I was healthy before I started this.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: So I lost 15 pounds in a month, even though I would eat constantly.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Joel, I would take avocados, sprinkle some real salt on it, and just scoop the avocado and eat it.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't get the weight loss to stop.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And so this was the point.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: And you know, as you think about this, I mean, knowing knowing all we know now, in hindsight, um, you know, your your body was starving.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: It was absolutely starving.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: And so just because you're just because you're ingesting material uh doesn't mean your nutrition is being satiated.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that that's an important point for folks to understand is that that uh just because you're eating does not mean that your body is getting what it needs.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: Um and and there's there's so there's the both the physical and I know you're gonna talk about the emotional component of this as well.
21:27
SPEAKER_01: So take us on to your next step.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up, Joel, because that's absolutely true.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: That's why um my gastrointestinal tract, the lining of it, was so stressed and dysfunctional at that point because of the leaky gut.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: That's why, even though I was taking the multivitamin and mineral like every day, I was still deficient in 15 nutrients because, like you said, I just could not absorb the nutrition.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: All right.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: And this is becoming common.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: So, so this is the point when I was really, really scared.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, once I couldn't get the muscle wasting to stop.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's actually when you know what happened was I credit my cousin, um, technically it's Donnie's cousin, um, named Janet.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: And she um, oh, I'm already starting to tear up here.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: She came over one day, you know.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: So what would happen is um Donnie would go to work, you know, this is when he went into an office to work, uh, Donnie, my husband.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: So before he went to work, what he would do every day is take me downstairs, you know, from the bed, bring me downstairs.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: And he was, I had two kids at the time.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: And he would basically set up food and water for us on the coffee table.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: And I would lay on the floor so that my son could reach me to bring me the water or whatnot.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And um, my job was just to basically lay there and make sure the kids didn't die because that's all I could do was just lay there.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and he would he would um open up the computer laptop and turn on these online health summits for me.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: And this is what I did, you know, day in and day out.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: I probably spent 60 to 80 hours a week, every single week, listening to these free online health summits, trying to figure out the pieces of my puzzle because nobody else could help us at this point.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, we didn't know where else to turn.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: So um, this was months and months of this, Joel.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Months and months and months of trying to find the answer.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: So one day, Janet comes over, and I, you know, I'm on the floor hanging out with the kids.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: And for me, this became my norm, right?
23:38
SPEAKER_00: This is talking about like your what your how how powerful your perception is.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: This was just my norm.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: So she comes over and she looks at me and she comes, sits down on the on the floor with me, and she looks me right in the eye and she says, I am very concerned about you.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Why?
23:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing I'm doing fine, you know.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: And she said, Look at you, you are going to die.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, No, you know, that didn't mean because you know, I was a competitive athlete for most of my life, and in my mind, it was just um one more one physical obstacle that I hadn't figured out how to overcome yet.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was gonna push my way through it and I would get through.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: And she said that to me, and we had a little conversation.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, that's so powerful because I because it's amazing to me as I as I interact with people all over, and and of course, some are very healthy and some are very not, but it's amazing how adaptable our psychosis, our our our psyche, not psychosis.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: It's amazing how adaptable our psyche is to whatever our situation is.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, whatever we have, whatever we look like, whatever we are, uh we just are something about our psyche, uh I guess it's a blessing that that it that it it allows us to adapt so readily and just assume that you know this is the this is the hand I've been dealt and it's cool and you know and we're going on.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Um but but but it it also then makes us so um uh so reluctant to realize our predicament and to then and to then be honest with ourselves that whoa, you know, you got problems and you better make some changes uh before these problems get worse.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: And so there's there's a little bit of there's a little bit of protection in here of okay, so I've got you know this thing.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's cool, you know, uh that's life.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: But there's this there, but the but the tension is that our our subconscious adaptability to whatever our our situation is keeps us from actually um uh mm being aggressive about making the changes we need to make so that our situation changes.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: That's attention.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: So in my case, um it's so I wasn't in denial necessarily um because I knew something was wrong and I was actively trying to fix it.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: Like every day, you know, I still had all those dietary restrictions, I was still doing everything organic, uh you know, I still had my half sheet of paper of food that I could actually eat, and I never deviated from it.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I got to the point where I was like, okay, I've done what I know how to do.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: And so my, you know, I'm gonna keep looking for the answer, but I keep spending, you know, 40 or 60, 60 to 80 hours a week learning.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: But um it was a coping mechanism, right?
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Um I knew, I think I knew instinctively that if I admitted that I was, you know, about to die, that I might fall apart.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: And I needed to remain logical, as logical as possible with the brain fog, right?
27:21
SPEAKER_00: Um I needed to remain logical so I could find the answer because we didn't have anybody else to help us, or so we thought.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: So this is what happened.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: She leaves, my Donnie comes home from work that night, and I I we got the kids in bed, and I just broke down in tears.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Donnie, do you realize I'm about to die?
27:44
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Yes.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I don't want to die.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't want my kids to not have a mother, you know.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't I want to see them graduate from high school, I want to see them get married, and you know, and he was like, he teared up too.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, he's a very stoic guy, right?
28:02
SPEAKER_00: You can imagine he was tearing up too, and he was like, I don't want you to die either.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: And and he goes, Well, what are we gonna do?
28:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, we've tried everything, we've tried all the doctors for 20 years, we've tried all of our resources, you know, put together.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Um, I don't know.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: And so the next morning, the next morning when I woke up, I couldn't move the sheet off my my body.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: I was in too much pain to do it.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: And this is the point where usually Donnie would come up and get me out of the bed and carry me downstairs.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: So I was in too much pain to do it.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: And that day made a difference because I realized because of what Janet said, that this really is the end, you know?
28:48
SPEAKER_00: And I just cried out to I just cried out to God, just completely surrendered to him.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: And I said, please don't let my kids grow up without a mother.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, please save me so that I can be there for my kids.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I don't know how to do it.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: I've tried everything, I've tried all the knowledge that you have given me, I've tried all these doctors, I don't know how to do it by myself.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: I need you.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: Please show me the way.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: And I made him the promise that if he saved me so my kids could have a mother, that I would spend the rest of my life helping his other children find their second chance too.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what he did.
29:45
SPEAKER_00: It was that day he showed me a different path, it was way far off conventional medicine's path.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I dutifully followed.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: I did not ask questions, I was so open-minded.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Whatever he brought to me, I obeyed.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: And that was it.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: That was my turning point.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: Um what did he what did he show you?
30:11
SPEAKER_00: So the first thing that he showed me, this was miraculous, Joel.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: The first thing he showed me was that day when Donnie brought me down to the floor, opened the computer, put on the um online health summit.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Donnie said, um, which one of these speakers do you want to listen to?
30:27
SPEAKER_00: Because there's tons of them each day, you know?
30:29
SPEAKER_00: It's like you have to have no job to listen to all these online health summits, you know.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: Right, right, right.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: I said, This one, for whatever reason, I pointed to this one and I said, Um, okay, go ahead and play it.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: I kid you not, it was like within five seconds of hearing this person's voice, I knew I was supposed to call him.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: He was a um, he was a functional medicine doctor, and he had just launched a best-selling book.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: So he was on this book tour.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: He lived out in Texas, and at that point, you know, telemedicine was not a big thing.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm thinking, well, well, God, why did you lead me to him?
31:07
SPEAKER_00: He's in Texas, he's on a book tour, you know.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I knew it was going to cost a lot of money.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: It would be outside of what, you know, our insurance would cover.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, I told Donnie about it when he got home.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: And my husband was so supportive and gracious, he said, okay, we tried a lot of stuff, right?
31:28
SPEAKER_00: We've spent, I had now, Joel, I had a stack of medical bills at this point.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And he said, We tried a lot of stuff.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
31:35
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I think this guy has the answer.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: And Donnie said, Well, then call him.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: So I called the office and they said they would see me uh remotely, but the wait list was six months.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I'm not gonna be here in six months.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't have that much time.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: And so the lady put me on the wait list.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: I kid you not, Joel, the very next day I get a phone call that um a spot opened up for the next day, and I got it.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: The piece of the puzzle that he showed me was I did not know about the functional testing.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: I was relying on the test that the Western this this is a this is a this is a tele, this is a a uh a teleconference.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: You you didn't fly to Texas the next day.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: Uh you're talking you're talking to him on the telephone.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking on the telephone.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking on the telephone, and within like five minutes, he diagnosed me, right?
32:32
SPEAKER_00: Something that Western medicine couldn't do for over 20 years.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: He diagnosed me in five minutes.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: And uh, based on what he has seen in his clinic, right?
32:40
SPEAKER_00: People with similar symptoms, we did test to confirm all these diagnoses, and that's when he taught me about functional testing.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, the Western test I took for the vitamin mineral nutrient deficiencies showed no deficiencies.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: The functional test showed 15 deficiencies.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, I did a Western test for um toxicities like um heavy metal toxicity, showed nothing.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: The functional test showed I had arsenic poisoning, which by the way was from consuming the processed, quote-unquote certified gluten-free foods, which we all know are not gluten-free.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Um the I had a test done for celiac disease and gluten sensitivity in the Western doctor's office.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: It turned out negative.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: I did um, I, you know, I used the test that a functional medicine doctor would use, and it turned out positive.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: So you can go down the list of all these tests I did, showed nothing in the Western test, in these functional or specialized tests.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: It was positive.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: So that gave me something to work with, obviously.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, okay, let me get the arsenic out.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, so we chelated that to get that out.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, there were a couple final food triggers that I could not identify by doing diet elimination reintroduction, even though I was trained in that, right?
33:57
SPEAKER_00: As a PhD in nutrition, you're trained in how to do that.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: But sometimes food sensitivities can show up three weeks after you've consumed that food.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: So it becomes very difficult to pinpoint them at times.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Now, this was quite remarkable to me.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: A couple of the foods that showed up for me as the most sensitive you could ever be to a food was chicken and bay leaf.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: And why?
34:22
SPEAKER_00: Because what do they tell you to do when you're sick with one of these illnesses?
34:26
SPEAKER_00: They tell you to drink lots and lots of bone broth, right?
34:30
SPEAKER_00: So I'm constantly drinking bone broth.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: And I develop a sensitivity to the chicken, right?
34:36
SPEAKER_00: From drinking chicken, bone broth too much, and from the bay leaf that that's commonly used in making different broths, right?
34:42
SPEAKER_00: So um, so basically I I changed, you know, I removed those foods, the lot the final, the final foods, and just doing that, Joel, just removing those last foods that I had missed, I got off the floor in three days.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Right?
35:00
SPEAKER_00: That's how much the body can, that's how fast the body can heal itself.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: So in three days I'm off the floor.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't out of pain yet completely, but the pain had started to subside, and I could get up, I can sit up.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: And then I did a chelation protocol to remove the arsenic.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: That was very, very daunting and horrific.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, symptoms would come back and whatnot.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: It was just a nightmare.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: But the point is, after about just so everybody understands, I don't want to get people uh get people lost in the whatever, the jargon of all this, because I'm sure we have people who never heard of chelation therapy.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: I I call chelation uh basically a rotor, a rotor rooter for your um, you know, for your for the sludge and your arteries.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: Um you probably probably have a much better uh definition, but uh it's it's a it's a carbon-based, it's a carbon-based toxin attractant.
35:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh correct me if I'm wrong.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh so it's an IV, right?
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, so I took a supplemental form of a chelator.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: There's different types of chelators you can use.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: I did one at home, and uh, so like EDTA would be chelator, but there's also more natural chelators, you know, like chlorella, cilantro, things like that.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: So I did it at home, and the chelator binds to heavy metals.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: So we can pull the heavy metals out of your body.
36:25
unknown: Right.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I did.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: So, so um, you know, it's in some other changes.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: So within three days, I was off the floor.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: In within three months, Joel, I was outside doing yard work again.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: And in less than a year, or roughly around a year, I had no markers at all anymore of disease in the body, even using the functional tests.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: All the markers had been reversed.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my food sensitivity is reversed.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you name it.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, and now it's been it's been like just over six and a half years now, and I'm fully healed.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: And and I want to emphasize this too.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: I am not in remission.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: All right.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: I am not in remission.
37:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm actually fully healed.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: And I know you're spoken you're smiling too, because um, you know, when somebody has an autoimmune disease in particular, they're excited to get it into remission, right?
37:20
SPEAKER_00: That's usually the goal, is let's try to reverse this so we can go into quote unquote remission.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: So what happened with me is I made these physical changes and I went into what Western medicine would categorize as remission initially.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: Now, when you're in remission, you're actually in a state of fear because remission carries with it the stigma that, okay, if I eat the wrong food, right?
37:46
SPEAKER_00: Or if I eat too much of this food, or if I stress too much, the symptoms can come back.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: And that is the definition of remission.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Even the published definition of cancer remission, the cancer can actually come back.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: They don't say it's gone.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: So I decided that remission was a limiting belief and I erased it from my vocabulary.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: I just said I don't believe in that anymore.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm going for full healing.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's when I stumbled upon the emotional component of healing.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: Which so I don't know how we're doing on time.
38:22
SPEAKER_00: Do we have time for that?
38:23
SPEAKER_01: Or should we do we're almost out, but but go ahead.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: I think I think we want to see that we want to see that last.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this this is definitely the last piece of that of that puzzle.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: So go ahead and uh go ahead and put it in place.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: And we, if people are interested, let us know.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: We can do another podcast to expand upon this um concept.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: But um basically what I learned was to fully heal yourself, you have to address the emotional root cause of disease.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: This is the emotional or energetic layer of reversing a disease.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: If you think of disease like an onion, and there's many layers, um, the outside layers, they're going to be your physical layers, right?
39:03
SPEAKER_00: Removing these different toxins, making sure you're not nutrient deficient, you know, things like that.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: And then once you get into the core of the onion, this is what I call the root cause of every disease.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: And it actually is does exist on the emotional or the energetic level.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: And so what I had to do is go back through like childhood traumas, what we call adverse childhood experiences and whatnot.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: And I had to basically learn to forgive.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: So I went through this entire process of forgiving all these people throughout my life that I felt had wronged me.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And then I worked on forgiving myself, which I think is often the hardest person to forgive, right?
39:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, but going through this whole process and helps you you release what we call these stuck emotions.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: And when you release them, it actually makes room for emotions that resonate at a higher vibrational frequency.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: And Joel, you would refer to these as the fruits of the spirit.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: So this and things like gratitude, love, joy, and that heals the body.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: All right.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: So um we, you know, maybe we should maybe we should pin it there, Joel.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: What do you think, and do that as a different podcast?
40:18
SPEAKER_00: Because that's a large topic, and it's very there's a lot to it that people don't understand unless you walk them through step by step.
40:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there there is.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: And and so, yeah, I think as we wrap up here, Cena, I I think the the takeaways in in this story, uh, again, you know, I've been blessed with just really you know, vibrant health, robust health.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I've also been blessed to um to have had very clear purpose and mission in life.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: Um I I I've talked to numerous people who are still struggling to kind of find their place at 30 years old.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: And and it's almost like they say to me, it's not fair, it's not fair that you had such clear direction at 14, you know, like like I had some, you know, special, but I I did.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, I I got uh, you know, by the time I was 13, 14, I mean, I I loved this farm.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: I I love this place, I love farming, I love and and and I mean I didn't know I was gonna do what I'm you know where it's gone, but but I had clear clear mission and purpose and and um and I think that that look nobody grows up in a perfect home.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: You know, everybody's parents get whatever um presumptuous, angry, prejudiced, you know, whatever.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: We all do.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I my parents did.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: I have, you know, and I'm sure you have.
41:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh there's there's no perfect environment, but um, but there's something about mission and purpose that that uh kind of puts up puts a balm or a salve on a lot of that on a lot of that stuff.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's you know part of that journey.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: Um I I I just had I just had lunch.
42:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh we'll close with this and and uh this is this has been a been a powerful and thank you for for uh yeah, I'm I'm kind of tearing up too.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm pretty uh I I watch chick flicks and cry, you know.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: So so uh Teresa and I just sit there and ball with a box of tissue paper, you know.
42:37
SPEAKER_01: We just um so there we are.
42:40
SPEAKER_01: But I I'm not stoic.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: I'm not stoic like Donnie, you know.
42:43
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm just a blubbering uh but I I had lunch the other day with a fellow, a friend um who who had a a very, very wealthy um acquaintance of his.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: They'd had lunch together uh a year or so ago, and a week after they had this lunch, this this wealthy, very, very wealthy friend uh committed suicide.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: And and my my friend told me that that he didn't realize the depths of this guy's depression uh when they had that lunch together.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: He he, you know, he wasn't he wasn't a psychologist and didn't pick up on all the red flags.
43:18
SPEAKER_01: But but here's what I want to share.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: What I want to share is that this this fellow told him, he's a very, very wealthy, successful businessman.
43:24
SPEAKER_01: He said, I know tons of extremely wealthy people.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: He said, not a one of them is happy.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: And he looked at my friend and he said, You're the only happy person I know.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: And I I joked with my friend at lunch the other day.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: I said, You're probably the poorest friend he has.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: And he but but you know, you know, uh when you start looking at you know the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, I mean, those are the three great categories of of of temptation, um, and and and and and what we strive for, when you when you um are caught up in that, um, all this other junk gets gets uh gets gets leveraged, actually gets leveraged in your body, uh, in your in your physical body.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: And um, and so yeah, I I think that uh I think that breaking through there uh emotionally and spiritually, like you did, uh, was certainly as pro powerful as the as the diet.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: And uh so yes, we do do we do go beyond labels, but we also want people to understand if you've been labeled with cancer, if you've been labeled with autoimmune disorder, if you've been labeled with something, one of the first steps of going beyond that label is deep down looking in that mirror and trying to touch the core emotional spiritual junk that has leveraged you into that into that spot.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: And uh and that and that's going beyond the label, beyond the label of leaky gut, beyond the label of cancer, whatever.
45:12
SPEAKER_01: And thanks for sharing, Cena.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: And do you have one final word or are we ready to close out?
45:19
SPEAKER_00: I'll have one final word, I'll pee back on what you said.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: Yes, um, I'm glad you mentioned beyond the label, because that's exactly what you have to do if you want to reverse any of these quote unquote diseases, chronic, autoimmune, you name it.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: You have to go beyond that label.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: And have you as you said, the emotional component is equal as at least as equally as important as the dietary.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: I will actually say the emotional component is more important than anything you can do on the physical level.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I say let's go ahead and do a whole show about that if people are interested, um, because that's what's truly going to set them free.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: That sounds great, Cena.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: Thanks everyone for joining us for another podcast of Beyond Labels, and we look forward to seeing you next week.