Wellness with Vanda
A women's health podcast where we'll be talking about hormones, mindset, motherhood, & everything in between. The host, Vanda, is a functional medicine nurse coach that helps women overcome hormone imbalance so that they can achieve optimal wellness. In her private practice she specializes in HTMA testing and DUTCH testing. Throughout this podcast she shares tips for boosting energy naturally, improve mood, recover from mom burnout, ways to increase fertility, ways to improve sleep quality, tips for pregnancy, tips for navigating postpartum and the fourth trimester, and more!
Wellness with Vanda
What to Expect on a Healing Journey
In this episode I'm discussing what you can expect while you're on a healing journey, and how our expectations for weight loss and change in our body composition, may not come as quickly or in the way we hope for.
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Hey guys, welcome back to this week's episode of the podcast. I'm super excited to be here, and today we're going to be talking about a topic that I have been discussing with a few of my clients over the past week or so, and that is what you can expect while you're on this healing journey, while you're trying to rebalance your hormones, while you're trying to replenish your minerals, your nutrients, your vitamins, and just kind of like what you can expect. This was a question that came up because there are certain things that we want to achieve that go along with, like, our health and sometimes our body image or our body composition, and we get a little frustrated when we're not achieving those results as quickly as we would like to, or even when we've given it what we feel is a sufficient amount of time and we're still not seeing any progress, and that can feel really frustrating and it can cause us to want to fall back into I'm going to call them bad habits like calorie restriction or crash dieting or going on weird detox diets, buying detox teas off the internet, and you know, rationally, we know that those things have not served us in the past. They have not helped us in the past. They've not worked for us in the past or we wouldn't be here. But there is this other side I'm not going to say irrational, but there's just this other side of us that's like but I'd really like to lose this 10 pounds or I'd really like to quit gaining weight, and it's just.
Speaker 1:It's a really hard spot to be in and it's something that I looked for a resource this week to share with a client, to kind of talk about this, this process and how this works and why this happens. And I couldn't find anything. And honestly, I was shocked that I couldn't find anything, because this is something that has been covered in nearly all of my like practitioner courses and trainings, but it's like those are things that I can't share. They're like locked behind a paywall but there's like wasn't a public facing I guess you could call it resource that I could find that's talking about this. So I thought what better, what better thing to talk about on the podcast this week than expectations. So when you get to the point that you want to really heal your body and you really want to get in tune with your body and what it means and be kind to your body and do it more loving action than harm and I kind of hate some of those terms that I just used Like I don't think that anyone goes into a diet with the intention of hating on their body.
Speaker 1:You can choose to do it because you like hate the way that you look, or you don't like the way you look in certain clothes, or it's getting ready to be swimsuit season and you know I get all of that 100%. But what I'm saying is like I don't think that anybody is like I'm gonna go on this diet and intentionally destroy my health, like, no, like people make the choice to go on a diet or try to lose weight by whatever means they choose to do so because they're trying to be healthier. You know, it's like we have the best of intentions. Sometimes we just our execution is not great or we've done it in a way that really, in the long-term, didn't serve us. That's what I see the most. It's like people that didn't realize that eating low calorie for a long period of time was actually going to damage their metabolism and then therefore damage, like other hormonal balances in their body long-term. So when you make this decision that you're like no gosh, I don't wanna do that to my body anymore. I wanna take care of my body, I wanna take care of myself. I wanna be as healthy as I can, because I wanna be healthy when I'm 80. You kinda have to set aside these more vanity metrics and vanity goals, like weight loss and sometimes even the way that we look in clothes or swimsuits or you know, I don't know, I don't know another example. And it's not that you have to give those things up forever, and it's not that you can't still have them on your goal sheet okay, but it can't really be your primary focus and I'm gonna explain why. So what kind of happens when we have been under stress for a long period of time? And I'm just gonna throw this out there. Make this definition now Underfeeding, underfueling our body for a long period of time is a stressor on top of all those other things in life that we know are stressors, like work stress and parenting, stress and lack of sleep, stress and you know, just like all the things and it's like over stimulation that we're in of society right now.
Speaker 1:And anyway, when you've been in this period of stress for a long period of time, your body doesn't feel safe anymore and your body's number one priority is to keep you alive, and when your body feels that there are threats out there, your body starts to go into survival mode and it's gonna hang on to like everything it's got and it starts to depravertize non-life sustaining processes like your sex hormones, fertility, reproduction. You don't have to reproduce for you to live, so it becomes a non-priority for your body. And your body will begin to hang on to fat because it thinks that there's not sufficient resources available and it slows down your metabolism to also compensate for that. It's like well, we can't keep burning off these calories at this same rate because there's not enough food available and we still gotta keep living for the next you know X amount of years. We gotta slow things down. And so it's when you get into this point where you're like I'm doing the same diet that I did a year ago and I was able to lose 5, 10 pounds, and now I'm doing the same thing and it's not working for me anymore and actually I'm gaining weight. So that's kind of like the point that I'm talking about and the point that you get to.
Speaker 1:Your body has to, after that, get to the point again that it does feel safe, that it feels fully nourished, fully supported, fully safe before it will start to like speed those processes back up. This is how you kind of repair your metabolism and it takes a lot of time. We forget that it took a lot of time to get to this point and it's going to take time to get out of this state that we are in and that is. It is a very frustrating process and I get it. I so get it, but you have to keep at the front of your mind what your deeper why behind shifting into this place, of trying to heal and love on your body instead of just I want to lose weight, to look good, because those are two very different things and there's very different motivations there for each of those. Neither one I'm not saying like one is more right than the other. I'm just saying that you have to keep your your why in the front of your mind to keep your motivation or the process to take longer, because typically what will happen is that everyone, it's going to take everyone a different amount of time to heal because everyone has done a different amount of I'm going to call it damage I don't really like that word, but that's what we're going to call it for now a different amount of damage to their body, to their hormones, to their mineral status, to their nutrient status. So it's going to take a different amount of time some people it's three months, some people it's six months, some people it's two years before they get to the point that they are healed enough that their body will start to let go of weight and will start slimming on its own. And sometimes there's a lot of work to be done there to get to that point. Sometimes you know you need mineral testing, then maybe you need hormone testing, then maybe you need gut testing, because maybe there's like some underlying like parasite things or just gut dysbiosis and leaky gut. And I'm not sharing all of this to like make the healing process sound negative and like it's so hard and it's so frustrating. But I wanna be honest about it and I wanna be real about what the expectations are.
Speaker 1:I am not a weight loss coach. I do not help women with weight loss. Do some of my clients see weight loss? Yes, but it is because they have got their bodies to this point of healing and then their body has let go of extra weight that it had been hanging on to, extra fat that it had been hanging on to because it felt like it needed to. It's not because I'm necessarily teaching them strategies to lose weight, because that is not my primary goal. My primary goal for my clients is to feel the best that they can, to wake up every day and feel healthy and feel energized and feel like they are strong enough, powerful enough, confident enough, just able enough to do the things that they wanna do, like play with their kids, pick up something heavy without having to holler at their husband, go for a hike, be active on their vacation, play soccer in the front yard with the kids, like whatever it is that they want to be able to do. That is what I work towards with my clients and, like I said, that's not to say that weight loss doesn't come down the road, because it does for many of them. But the timeline of that is very individualized and, to be honest, can be really lengthy for some of them, and especially if it's something substantial. You know like one, two pounds, three, even five pounds. Here there's not, you know, that big of a deal and happens quicker for some than others. But people that have you know like 10, 15, 20 pounds that they wanna lose.
Speaker 1:Typically it takes time and it's because you have to get to your body to that point of feeling safe. And feeling safe doesn't only come from the calories that you're taking in, the fuel that you're feeding your body, the minerals that you're replenishing. It also comes from a very psychological place of having your stress under control. I think I've shared this before, but I have not worked with a client yet that didn't have burnout on their HTMA test and I think that that is just very it's attributed to the season of life that women are in that I work with. But it also is just like attributed to our current lifestyle in society, the expectations of this like go, go, go, there's something to do all the time. You've constantly gotta be doing something. You're constantly on your phone. If you're not on your phone, you're watching TV, you're going here or going there, like it's just constant things coming at us all the time and there's not a lot of time for just rest and to just be, and that is a big part of our body. Feeling safe too, and that's.
Speaker 1:Changing your diet is a lot of work, implementing new supplements is a lot of work, but the mindset piece, the stress management piece of this healing stuff is what can sometimes really trip people up and kind of be a hurdle for them on their journey, because, again, it's something that's different for everyone. Even figuring out, like, what your stressors are. Because a lot of us are like, if we were asked on a normal day, are you stressed? We would probably say no, but we still have stressors that we're getting exposed to on the regular that are stressing our body and it's figuring out what those things are. Can we change any of those and, if not, how do we deal with it? How do we work more quiet time, more time of doing literally nothing into our day and our life? And that's really hard because we're so busy already that we're like, no, I don't have time to go sit outside for 10 minutes and do nothing, but it's oftentimes the missing piece that's keeping you from healing and getting to the goals that you really want to accomplish.
Speaker 1:So that was really that was what was on my mind today. It's been a hot topic with my clients and just people in my community over the past two weeks and I wanted to share about it Cause, like I said, I didn't find really a resource on it or a podcast episode or I don't know anything that was talking about the expectations that you should have and can't have on a healing journey. So I'm gonna leave that, leave you guys with that this week, and I hope that you take some time to have downtime this week, give yourself some rest and some grace and some time to do just like literally nothing and kind of honor your body in that way.
