Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / Overwhelmed by Wellness? How To Get Healthier Without Drowning In Stress | Kerstin Lindquist

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Overwhelmed by Wellness? How To Get Healthier Without Drowning In Stress | Kerstin Lindquist · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  If you start to feel overwhelmed by your supplement stack, your biohacking stack, then you're not doing it right. You need to dial that back. Now women are getting inundated with, try this product, do this, do that. When you have somebody who's a really good salesperson, like I am asked the questions, is this really me? Because we're all bio-individual. People hold us a badge of honor. Oh, I'm so exhausted. I'm so stressed out. Everything should feel simple.
• 0:26
  So as a chef of 20 plus years, I've always been about taste. But it was becoming a father that made me really start to think about function. Because I want my kids to thrive and I want to be around long enough to witness it. And it was when my daughter became ill, my wife and I, we struggled to get the right nutrients in her. It was a true wake-up call.
• 0:44
  That experience is why Pluck was created. So Pluck is a superfood seasoning made with 100% grass-fed beef organ meats blended with organic spices and herbs. The beautiful thing is it doesn't taste like organ meats. It just tastes like the seasoning you're already using, but better because when you add it, you're adding these bioavailable nutrients that your body can actually use. If you can salt it, you can pluck it. Learn more at eatpluck.com and save 15%
• 1:14
  off your first order using code EA15. So many women are trying to get healthier, but the wellness world can start to feel like one more thing to manage.
• 1:27
  It's just another product, another protocol, another routine, another way to feel like you're falling behind. Kirsten has spent years inside television, QVC, health, storytelling, wellness. So today we're asking a bigger question. When does wellness actually help us build resilience and when does it become another source of stress?
• 1:51
  Kirsten, welcome to Everyday Ancestral. So now you have spent years in television, QVC and wellness. What have you learned about the way that health gets sold specifically to women?
• 2:06
  Oh, what a great question. Thanks for having me. I love being here. I love how you teed that up because it's such an important, important topic. Because right now we're bombarded with everything from the Internet, from social media, from television, QVC, which I'm still there as a wellness expert for certain brands from time to time.
• 2:26
  It can be very easy to say, I've got the symptoms. I'm like that. I'm just going to take that. I'm going to do that. And I think that no matter where you are consuming your health and wellness when it comes to what you're buying or what you're looking at or what you're trying to incorporate, you have to listen to your body first. And sometimes all the noise out there prevents you from listening to your own body because we're all bio-individual.
• 2:54
  You know, before we started, you were mentioning perimenopause and that's the new trend right now, right? Perimenopause, let's not only like be able to talk about it, so the freedom to talk about it, because that previously wasn't really talked about, kind of taboo. But now we're talking about it and then now women are getting inundated with try this product, do this, do that. And it's now potentially causing yet stress during an already stressful time.
• 3:20
  Yeah, that's so true. You know, I make my living on supplements and products. Just a little backstory to kind of give your viewer and listener where we're at to level set everything. I was on QVC, which is the number one home shopping channel in the world for 14 years.
• 3:40
  For 10 of those years, I hosted the number one show on the network called Saturday Morning Q. I mean, this was a space in which we could make upwards of $10 million in four hours in retail sales. So it was very, very successful. I was the number one host on the network for a very long period of time. And while I was there...
• 4:00
  I went from focusing on selling everything because the good Lord gave me a gift to be able to, I call it closing doors when it comes to either what you sell or in life, the things that aren't serving you. I started to feel this need to just focus on health, wellness, faith, being of service. So I started to help nurture and develop the wellness space at QVC. We didn't have a big fitness or supplement program.
• 4:28
  category. And I kind of became that girl. And I helped bring in new products and I helped with the buying and develop my own shows like The Balanced Kitchen with Kirsten and Get Fit with Kirsten over time. So that became very, very successful as well. And the way that I would do it is I would always understand that this might not be right for me, but it's always right for somebody else out there. And that's how I would sell and present something on the air. And it's still how I do it today. So when you see me on TV talking about a product, I'm going to
• 4:56
  I will be talking to the person that I think this is perfect for. What is lost there sometimes is that that might not be you.
• 5:05
  And when you have somebody who's a really good salesperson like I am or somebody else, you start to believe it is right for you. So you have to, when you're watching somebody sell something to you, ask the questions, is this really me? Not just, oh, is this a good salesperson and this seems like a great product? Because I'm sure the product's great. But is this specifically right for me? About three years ago, I really felt a calling that I needed to leave QVC full time, not also sell.
• 5:35
  jewelry and wind spinners, but just focus on health and wellness and faith. And that's when I left QVC with a podcast to be a wellness expert. And now I'm back and I just present four products that are all health and wellness based. So that's where I'm coming from now as a sales girl, but also as a health coach and a wellness expert. It's really powerful. I mean,
• 6:00
  What I hear you saying is that you had a journey of, you know, what does it mean to sell? Like you're good at this, you're good at selling, you're good at supporting people's lives with these products, but...
• 6:13
  Do the products represent what you believe and what actually works? Which begs the question, how can a woman tell the difference between a product that supports her health and a product that's just selling her hope? I mean, you mentioned she's got to look inward, but is there a kind of a deeper way for her to assess, is this product legitimate for what it's promising?
• 6:36
  I think you have to do your own research. People are like, oh, the internet and chat GPT is just a scary place. Okay, true. But it also, we have so much more power than we had a decade ago or 20 years ago. And I know you've talked about this a lot on your podcast as well, where it was just like, you just trust the doctor. Whatever the doctor says, that's what you just trust.
• 7:00
  Now we can do our own research. You have the ability to look up PubMed articles. You have the ability to deep dive. You can take a course. You know, you yourself could spend a year and get certified in nutrition just for you. I mean, there's so many resources out there. So you have to be able to, let's say there's a product that you see on the Internet.
• 7:23
  look at it and go, well, this sounds really good. All of the claims that they're making are really good. Let me dive deep a little bit. And it's at your fingertips on the internet, but also cultivating your trust circle, cultivating who you trust. It's what I love about podcasts, finding the people. I'm sure James is one of them. I would hope that my podcast stress would be one of them for you. There's other doctors and people that you trust and
• 7:49
  trusting them that they are going to lead you in the right direction as well. That's what happened at QVC. I still, to this day, QVC has the most stringent
• 8:00
  quality assessment, legal guidelines. I mean, to the extent where I was really trying hard to get melatonin products to be on there, because I think that there are certain people who do need that type of sleep supplement, and I'd rather them taking melatonin than take NyQuil. We couldn't say that melatonin helped with sleep on it.
• 8:21
  QVC. That's how strict the legal guidelines were because they didn't have their own study on it. So if you find the places that you know and that you trust, the brands that you trust, then I think that
• 8:37
  that helps you get to how do I make the decision to buy? If you're just seeing anything and everything, you've never done a background check on the company, you've never looked at their claims, you've never looked at their studies, or you don't know the people behind them, then I say wait a little bit before you make that decision.
• 8:54
  To your point, though, it's challenging because a lot of the natural products don't have testing, right? Well, that's where you do go to the people that you trust, right? Even that word natural scares me a little bit. The only thing that I necessarily 100% consider natural are whole foods from quality soil, like you know where it moved.
• 9:17
  You know, we're talking about meats and organ meats and things like that, animals, eggs, or you know exactly where it grew. You can visualize it. So sometimes when you have a product that comes out and it says natural, but you turn it over and there's more than five ingredients. I don't know if they should actually should be saying natural. Yeah, no, very true. The industry does not regulate that label, that term. It has been co-opted and manipulated in our marketing world.
• 9:45
  But you can do it yourself. So, you know, I have that rule of fives that I use all the time for people. If you're eating from a package or you're eating something that isn't, literally you went and picked the egg, got the side of beef, you know, that type of thing, picked the apple, although we also know that produce can be, oh, yeah.
• 10:06
  these days. But if you didn't do that yourself, when you're looking at the back of a package, you know, that rule of five, five ingredients or less, or five grams of sugar or less, kind of holds true unless you're in, you know, there's certain spaces where you can have more ingredients, but, you know, as long as they're regenerative organic, or organic, or you know where those ingredients grew, or moved, or moved, or,
• 10:31
  then you're pretty safe. Yeah. So you've been open about infertility, adoption, miscarriage, and having two daughters born five months apart. How did that experience change the way you think about control, stress, and healing?
• 10:49
  You know, I wish, I'm 48 years old now, and I wish that I could go back to that 20-something and then 30-something girl and I could share with her what I know now because I'm not
• 11:04
  I don't regret anything. The Lord put me on this path and every single step has been to get me closer to him and to do his work. But there's so many things that I would do differently or that I wish that I knew then. But I think that that for everybody, at least when it comes to the health space, when it comes to stress, when it comes to how we treat our bodies, it's the same story with my mother who died rather young, at least to me, of dementia. She fought it for a very long time.
• 11:33
  She, in what we know now, made every single mistake when it came to how you eat, how you sleep, how you move, all of that. But she didn't know any better. You know, we were fed this low-fat diet. We were fed this diet. Diet is important, right? We were fed the different foods.
• 11:52
  you know, drugs that we took to stay skinny or things that you ingested, then you didn't know any different. You didn't know to regulate stress in the 70s or the 80s, really. From my own health journey and what I went through, I wish that I could go back and talk to that girl and tell her some of the things. And really...
• 12:15
  The root of all of it is control and fear. And while years down, I was considered unexplained infertility. We got pregnant multiple times. We miscarried multiple times. One round of IVF, and actually it was a fertile embryo transfer, worked, kept. And I have one biological child, Georgia. And then I have two beautiful adopted children who are on either side of her. So my first and my last were both adopted.
• 12:45
  But I did end up getting and staying pregnant once, which was a miracle in and of itself. Fast forward 14 years, I was diagnosed with stage four endometriosis.
• 12:58
  Why on earth they couldn't have caught that when I was trying to get pregnant and probably saved me heartache and the loss of children? I have no idea. And I can't control that. But that is what my story is now. But while I did have an actual reason why I couldn't get pregnant, I truly believe that.
• 13:17
  that so much of what was stopping me and which made that season of my life so hard, and I talk about, you know, even going through the adoption, which was really, really hard, kind of having this dark cloud over my head, is that I was trying to control and I was stuck in fear. I was stuck in this fear cycle of never becoming a mom or how this was going to work out and trying to control it all. And if I had been even half as good as I am now about letting it go and surrendering it to
• 13:47
  I can't say that it would have changed the outcome, but the season wouldn't have been so dark. I mean, control and fear are the drivers for so many of us. What would you say to that younger self about control and fear? Maybe it's something that our listeners need now in their lives at the age they're at. Yeah, I don't think you can talk anybody out of being...
• 14:11
  fearful of what's happening next, and especially women, because we are the nurturers. While we're not traditionally the providers, we are in the way in which we manage and control everything so that everybody gets provided for, right? So it's very inherent to us to have that fear and want to control.
• 14:30
  But I think logically you can talk to yourself and say you will not be able to heal when you're stuck in fear. Truly the primal desire to stay healthy because your body tends towards healthy. We know that biologically. Your body wants to be healthy.
• 14:48
  So when you talk to yourself and say, listen, you can't heal and be in fear at the same time, so you have to figure out how to get out of this, that can help you with that control and that fear piece. If you are in a chronic condition, if you are constantly unhappy, if you have the breakouts in your skin, the joint pain, whatever it might be that is keeping you unwell, if you are dealing with fear, right?
• 15:16
  Fear of the future, fear in that I'm going to lose control, fear of, you know, overworking can be fear. Addiction can be fear. Emotional pain can be fear. If you're stuck in any of those things, your body is going to prioritize that as opposed to.
• 15:31
  healing. So understanding that you have to let go of that control and you have to let go of that fear. And for me, what that means is laying it at the feet of Jesus, laying it at the feet of whoever your higher power is. That's what it means for me. That's how I work through it. That can sometimes help you get to that place a little bit more. I can't say that everything's going to work out the way that you want it to. That's not how this works. But understanding
• 16:01
  that you can still have peace even in the heart. That's what can help you get out of that control fear cycle. And I also think time. I mean, I look back at that girl and I go, you know, I was 31 when I had my first baby, finally. And then we went through another really rough time of infertility and trying to adopt until my last son was born when I was 38.
• 16:24
  I had some reps under my belt. I was getting a little bit older. But if you can do the practice of remembering, of remembering when it all worked out, writing that down, it's a practice that I have people do all the time, is tell me about that time when the call came and everything was great. You survived what you thought you weren't gonna survive. Because we often remember the best part