FINAL Untamed Episode 1 "Let's Get real"

In the first episode of the Unchained Wellness Podcast, the host discusses the importance of whole body healing and the obstacles that can prevent it. She emphasizes the need to trust oneself and prioritize values that support a healthy lifestyle. The speaker shares her personal journey of overcoming chronic illness and explains the role of the epigenome in determining health. She also highlights the significance of mental and emotional health in the body's ability to heal and discusses the impact of stress on the nervous system and organ function. The speaker encourages listeners to let go of negative experiences and choose joy in order to restore balance and promote overall wellness. Welcome to our very first episode with Unchained Wellness Podcast. Today, we're talking all things real when it comes to your health. What are you doing to get in your way? And how do you need to get out of your way when it comes to whole body healing? I'm going to spark a little fire under your ass. So let's get going. Welcome to the Unchained Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Poirier. We're going to dive in each week to chat about health, longevity, and the no BS approach to true healing. I'm a health and wellness coach who is obsessed with helping women gain true education on their body and how it works while driving long lasting results. I am the CEO of Wholesome Life Wellness, where we focus on foundational education around sustainable lifestyle habits. When it comes to health, I see women do three things wrong. They focus heavily on their diet or their movement program. They live in a toxic environment with their spouse, their family, their products, their air, their water, etc. They're not motivated and they're not disciplined. They don't know their values and they don't actually know what they're chasing or why their goals are what they are. And these three things, there's one common denominator, a woman that cannot trust her voice, speak her truth, or inspire herself. This detaches you from your body, and it makes it really hard to recognize the body's cues in seasons that need adjustment. So the common question is, how do I track health? And how do I sustain health? Should I work out all the time? Do I need to cut out gluten and dairy, everything processed? Do I need to go fully non-toxic? The short answer is no, you don't. You need to get your body to trust you. Let's dive into what truly controls your health. But first, I want to start with your values. What are your top three values? For example, mine are my health, my husband, and my family. And I want you to look at your lifestyle and ask yourself, does my lifestyle support these values? So let's say your value is health, but you do not do anything that's remotely healthy. So I would say health is more your goal. It's kind of your end line, what you're working towards. But if health was really your value, then you would have things in life that were a ritual or a habit that would directly affect and improve your health. Now, it's important to understand your values. And if your values seem far-fetched, and maybe you don't have the lifestyle around them, then don't worry, we're going to get there. But know that if it's a value, you have to back it up. So if you need a second, pause the podcast, think of your three values, and come back and let's get started. When it comes to health, we often think our health is determined by our parents or our grandparents, whether it's anxiety, depression, disease, cancer, whatever have you. Our thought process is that it comes from our parents or somewhere in our bloodline. And although for some, this could be the case, like if you had type 1 diabetes, but for most, it's actually not. Why? The epigenome, which is the system in the body that controls DNA sequences, controls a whopping 90% of your health. And this system is activated from what you do and what you don't do, whether it's a lifestyle, movement, sleep, nutrition, mental, emotional health, products, etc. All of these habits work together to make up this system. The other 10% is the body's epigenetics, which is highly affected by the body's state of mental, emotional health, but it can also be the same percentage of disease that are passed down. The good news is, is that this is what controls 90% of your health. And with certain adjustments, you can begin working with your body versus against it. The bad news is, is this controls 90% of your health. So with certain habits, you can consistently work against your body. I wanted to talk about this in my very first episode, because it's so important that I lay it out for you what I believe health to be, both from an educational standpoint, but also from a standpoint of someone who's been sick for 16 years of their life. I had extreme migraines that would cause me to hallucinate. I had chronic pain. I was so dizzy. I would pass out frequently. I went to the ER multiple times and within two years, my blood pressure dropped 40 over 20 and my heartbeat stopped. I suffered from extreme anxiety, depression. I was a medical mystery with no answers, a ton of diagnosis from the holistic world. But really what it boiled down to was my stress and my anxiety. I have lived with a lot of emotional and physical trauma within my life. And I didn't have the tools to release this. And most importantly, I didn't know that I could actually live outside of those events. And because of that trauma, that inflammation within the body, I kept getting diagnosis after diagnosis and my body just consistently failed. Until about a year and a half ago, when I was sitting in the ER, bawling my eyes out because I thought I was having a heart attack. My chest was so tight. My neck was tight. My jaw was tight. I was paralyzed. My blood pressure dropped and they had no answers. I was terrified in this moment. But I also, at this point in life, knew in my heart that all suffering served a purpose. That we are not given events in life unless we are trusted with them. So I pushed through it. I trusted in God in this journey. And I moved past that pain and I moved past that fear, only to lead me into nervous system and lymphatic system care. I had already had an established program at that point, talking about lifestyle products, nutrition and movement, mental, emotional health. But I was neglecting the body's ability to detox emotions, which is that lymphatic system. It detoxes emotions, but it also pushes through toxins. Mine was severely clogged. And my nervous system was so thrown out of whack, it wasn't able to communicate with the other organs inside the body. I came into this line of work because I was hurt from both western and eastern side of medicine. Whether it was medication or constant testing that activated new issues, detox programs that my body was not ready for. If you are not having daily bowel movement, sweaty or have lifestyle factors in place, in my opinion, you should not be doing a detox because your detox channels are closed. Whether you kill it all off, it still can't get out of your body. The one thing that they were all missing was that my body actually knew what to do. And my stress, anxiety lifestyles were getting in the way of that incredible function. I simply did not know what it took to live a healthy life. And I definitely didn't know my emotions or choices outside food and movement actually mattered. So I went to school to first feel my own body. And in all honesty, I had no idea it would ever turn into a career. I just wanted to feel better so that I could be better, be a better mom, be a better wife, have energy again, and just be excited to wake up in the morning. The one thing that kept me going was that I knew that there was purpose in my suffering. And at the end of it all, I was given a gift, not a debilitating journey or a debilitating curse. Now let's dive into how the detoxification system actually works and the importance of mental and emotional health. The reason why I started this emotional side of healing is because a body that does not trust you is not a body that is going to heal you. You have to line things up to get the body in place so that it can actually begin doing the work of healing. Your nervous system plays a huge role in this as it communicates to every organ system in the body. What is the one thing that can really upset it? Stress. Does it mean that you have to live a totally stress-free life? Absolutely not. It means that you have to have the determination and the desire to allow that stress to bounce off of you versus internalizing it and making an identity for it and out of it. The moment you create an identity around it is the moment your body starts to fail. And what am I talking about here? I'm talking about if I were to hold on to the identity of being in a very toxic, abusive relationship for four years, getting beaten every day, cursed at, talked down to, told I wasn't good enough, pretty enough, that I wasn't capable. If I continued to stay in that truth, I would not be here in front of you today. But instead, I chose joy. I chose my purpose. I practically said, fuck you to that person. That that is not true and that does not define me. That I can live outside of it and I am worthy and I am capable of that. But until I had that revelation, I had autoimmune disease, severe GI issues that caused me to lose 35 pounds in one month from weight fluctuations of 120 pounds to 190 pounds. My body was so stressed out because I was holding on to this reality of I am useless. I am not capable. I deserve to be hit. I deserve to be talked down to. And it wasn't until my brother looked me in the eye and said, Trista, choose joy. Choose to live outside your story and choose what is in front of you before you miss it. And I will never forget that moment because that was the first time somebody told me I was allowed to live out of my shitty experiences. And I constantly tell women that whether you have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, cheated on, whatever has happened to you is a part of your story. It is not the whole story and it doesn't deserve to be the whole story. But when it is the whole story, this is what happens. Your nervous system starts to be dysfunctional. It starts to move out of homeostasis and it tries to find its new home. When this happens, all organs begin to not communicate properly. And if you didn't know this, emotions are held within your organs. So let's say, for example, your kidney is sadness and grief. Your liver is anger and resentment. Your stomach is anxiety. If we continuously live in these intense emotions, our organs will become clogged. And then you put poor lifestyle factors, poor food choices, high toxic products on top of that. Your body's ability to detox and function is overfilling. It's overflowing. It's a complete inability. But how do you get that back? The first place, and this is what most women miss. The first thing you do is you address the state of your mental emotional health. You disconnect from that story. It is a part of who you are. It is not who you are. When you make this revelation, it doesn't mean that in a snap of your fingers, everything's going to be really easy and your body's going to start bouncing back. It takes daily work. It takes you telling the epigenetic side of your body that it will heal, that you are capable, that you are worthy, that you are attractive, that you are smart. You say these things to yourself consistently, and your body will start to listen. We're going to get into that a lot deeper in just a second. So let's talk about what needs to be put in place to be a badass and start taking your health back. Whether you have cancer, disease, you're stressed, you're anxious, you feel like shit, you have depression, whatever it is, this is where you need to start. Your ritual is those things that you do on a daily basis that fill your cup. Now, they're not necessarily routines. For me, a routine is like a roadblock. I have three businesses. I have three babies. But we are not bound to that to any degree. I love rituals for this reason, because rituals are things that you just love to do every single day. Getting in the grass first thing in the morning is a great place to start. If you have babies, you can do this with your babies. Eating protein within that first hour is another great place to start. If you are somebody who struggles with metabolism issues, you feel like you're in fight or flight all of the time, or you have a goal of losing weight, eating protein within that first hour will change so much for you. You have a hormone called the gremlin hormone. If you eat within that first hour, then that will activate your gremlin hormone to tell your body that it is safe and that it can use this food as nourishment, that it can be absorbed properly, and that for the rest of the day, the metabolism can work accordingly. If you miss this one-hour window, your hormone will tell the body to stall and slow down everything, which means your metabolism will slow down. It will be harder for you to lose weight because you are sticking your body in a state of fight or flight, or you are crashing your body in rest and digest. Another good place to start is changing your mindset, which is what we just talked about. If you think you're not going to heal, then I am so sorry to tell you that you very simply won't. You need to use the epigenetic side of your body to your advantage and tell your body that it will start moving in the right direction. Obviously, you need to have the habits on the other side to meet that in the middle. If there is something that you hate or despise about your health or your body, you need to look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself something beautiful instead. This will trigger the body to start doing whatever it is you're saying, but you cannot stop there. You need to stay at a bare minimum 20 times a day, whether it's the same thing or a bunch of different things. For example, I have really bad body dysmorphia. No matter the state of my body, I will always pick it apart. When I was in my bathing suit at the lake this summer, I was in a bikini, which I just lose my mind in a bikini. I've had babies. I've breastfed. I have droopy boobs. My vagina's cut in half. I have stretch marks. Tell her it's not going to go away. When I bend over my skin, I mean, if you're a mama, you know what this feels like. And I was sitting on the boat and I was closing my eyes. And that morning before I left, I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, damn, you look sexy. Wow, your stomach looks so good. Your arms look so good. You look light and you look beautiful and radiant. And I told myself, I looked at myself in the mirror and that is what I said. And that is what I do every single morning because if I don't, I won't eat well. I won't move well because I don't give a crap because I hate myself. We have to change that thought process. So when I was on the boat, my eyes were closed and I was saying to myself, you look so sexy in this bikini. You look amazing. You are so bold. You are so brave. You are so capable. Your body has given you two beautiful babies. For those of you who don't know, my third baby is my stepdaughter. She's incredible. I love her dearly. And I would tell myself constantly that I was beautiful. That no matter the body image, I had a great personality and I was smart and I was gifted. And this was not going to hold me back from having a damn good time at the lake. And that is what you need to do, whether it's your body or your acne or your hair or whatever it is for you. You need to change that story. You need to rewrite that so that your body knows that we are moving in a different direction. Now the third thing that needs to be in place is your nutrition. You need to get real and you need to get practical. Food plays a huge role in your healing and a huge role in your mental health. If you want to eat processed, shitty, high sugar, starch foods every day, then that's how you're going to feel. If you're eating high protein, good, healthy fat, lots of vegetable food every day, then that's how you're going to feel. You want to remove those sugars and starches out of your diet because sugar and starch is connected to almost every disease and cancer on earth. They cause so much inflammation. But this is where the get real comes in play. Nutrition is 80-20, which means 80% good, 20% is for your soul. It's that part when you're at a birthday party, you have a cupcake. When you're at a Christmas party, you have a cookie. The only requirement that I have is during that 20%, it's not daily. It's not even weekly. But when you do it, you're sitting your ass down and you're enjoying it. You're using every sense in your body to touch, feel, smell, taste, follow it through your body. You're doing everything. And usually, let's say if you're somebody who struggles with binge eating, you'll notice that when you do this and you take yourself to a safe place and you enjoy your food and you use your senses, you realize that you don't even like it in the first place. So this is where the get real and get practical come into play. If you want to eat like shit, you're going to feel like shit. If you want to eat good, you're going to feel good. Is it fun to eat this way when you see a ton of other people eating Doritos and Cheetos and whatever else sugary snack that they have that comes out of a bag? It takes adjustment. I know that. But I want you to trust me that when you get to a whole foods approach, when you reduce those starch and sugars, you will see dramatic changes in not only your body, but your mental health. Your gut and your brain are directly connected. So you need to take damn good care of your gut and feed it good things. Because if you're struggling from anxiety and depression, but you're cranking out a pot of coffee a day full of sugar, or you're eating everything out of a bag with fried chicken on the side, then honey, your anxiety is not going to get better. And we need to get really real about that. And now we need to talk about movement. Movement is what gets a lot of women. I have come to find in my own practice. I get a lot of mamas, especially that get up at the ass crack of dawn to ride their Peloton bike only to find themselves exhausted at 2pm pounding some energy drinks to keep themselves alive. If that sounds familiar, I've been in that exact same boat. But let's get real for a second. Each phase of your cycle, your four phases to your menstrual cycle is going to require you to activate a different sex hormone. We use nutrition, movement and productivity to help you do this. But if you're in your ovulation phase, for example, this is when you're really trying to peak your testosterone and estrogen, which means that you better be lifting weights and you better be lifting them hard. But if you're in your menstrual cycle, the last thing you need to be doing is lifting weights. And in fact, you need to be walking and doing yoga. And that is it. We will talk more on how to cycle sync your habits to your life and future episodes. But for now, if you're the woman who is up at the crack of dawn doing all of these things, I need you to take your morning back and fill your soul. Get your ass outside. Get your feet in the grass. Ground yourself. Eat your protein before your coffee and read a damn book or sit there in silence. I don't care how old your kids are. I don't care if they're out and about painting murals on the fence. You need to take care of you. And if you can't figure that out, your journey is going to be longer than it needs to be. You need to have your non-negotiables. You do, you ditch and you delegate every single morning. And in your do list, it needs to be things that fill you up, that bring you back to life. Your ditching your delegate is maybe it's telling your husband to help with the laundry or getting somebody to clean your house. Or maybe you don't need to do the damn laundry today. It can wait till tomorrow. Your ditching your delegate is what takes the pressure off of your life. Your do's is what gives you back the excitement, the light within your life. We can easily place your movement somewhere else within your day, whether it's while the kids are napping, or maybe it's a quick break between things. But realistically, what you need to be doing every day for right now at the bare minimum is walking 7 to 10,000 steps a day and stretching or doing yoga. If we look at zones within the world and those blue zones, the things that they are doing that make them live the longest is natural movement. A lot of them are sheepherders going up and down hills. They all have good community. Whether it's somebody in Sardinia who has multi-generational homes or Okinawa, Japan, who have a group of women assigned to them at birth, they have good community. The third thing that they all have in common is stress. They don't live a stress-free life, but they don't internalize stress. So if we're looking at movement and nutrition, specifically in nutrition, that's not even on the list of things that will make you live to 100 years old. Movement is on there, but you're not in the gym lifting weights. You're not running like a psycho. You're not on your Peloton at 4 in the morning. You're walking outside. You're hiking. You're on the hills. You're moving, whatever have you. We need to bring natural movement back, and we need to make that a legitimate form of exercise. Lifting weights is great. Doing cardio workout on your Peloton is great, but don't forget the foundational elements. Now, one thing is when people start to implement all these things, and this is just a snippet. We haven't even gotten into lifestyle, toxins, sleep, your sex life. We haven't even gotten into that, and we will, but I get asked all the time, what am I supposed to do when I hit a roadblock? All of us hit a roadblock. Whether you've perfected your health for five years, there's something that's always going to get in the way of your healing journey. And for me, to be completely honest, I don't get excited every single day about having to meal plan and make these meals and prioritize my health. It's a lot of fucking work, but I love, I love to be healthy. I desire to be healthy. And this is where your desire to be healthy needs to overtake your actions. Self-discipline is critical here, but without desire, your self-discipline is not going to take you very far. You need to remind yourself how shitty it is to feel helpless and lost, how shitty it is to be in pain, to feel like there's no option for you. You need to remind yourself of that. Remind yourself of the bad times and get the fuck up. You need to get up and do it because nobody's going to do it for you. There's no supplement. There's no detox program. There's no medication that is going to do the work for you. Your desire to be healthy needs to be like a ray of sunshine in the morning on a cloudless day, bright and in your face. You need to do it. So let's review a few of the things that we talked about today. Now, the most important thing is getting out of your own way, and that is pertaining to your mental, emotional health. Reminding yourself that you control your health, and that is scary, but that also is an amazing thing to have. We need to get real about your values. What are your top three values? And is your lifestyle actually giving back to those values? We need to remember that the detoxification system and the mental, emotional side of your health is just as important, if not more important, than your nutrition and your movement workout. When it comes to taking it all back, we need to focus on your rituals, making those sustainable and simple. You need to change your mindset. You need to get your nutrition real and practical. In future episodes, I'll talk about what you should be eating if you're trying to lose weight, if you have Hashimoto's, if you have gut issues, things of that nature. We need to get real about movement. If you're getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to get your groove on, we need to change that. You are not a man. You do not run on testosterone. We need to make your mornings peaceful, and we can add your movement in elsewhere. And the last thing is that when you hit that roadblock, sisters, you just get back up, because we all hit them. Life is not fair, but you are capable, you are deserving, and your desire will grow. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune into Wholesome Life Wellness's first ever podcast, where we got to talk about things that I am truly passionate about. I cannot wait to keep this conversation going, and I hope that you enjoyed this new episode. And if you did, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and be sure to share this episode with others who you may think are interested in this topic. If you want to connect further, you can find me on Instagram at WholesomeLifeWellness, or on my website, TristaFoyer.com, where you can find my courses and freebies that I offer. Again, that's WholesomeLifeWellness on Instagram and TristaFoyer.com to check out my latest courses and any freebies that I put out there. Our next episode is going to dive deep into my personal story, what I've experienced in life, how I persevered, how I have failed, and how I got to where I am today. We look forward to connecting with you soon, and we can't wait to see you on the next episode.