Gutsy Chick Podcast

Your Guide to Thriving (Not Just Surviving) During Perimenopause

• Amanda Smith • Episode 70

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In this episode of the Gutsy Chick podcast, I’m joined by the amazing Dr. Erika Schultz for a real, no-fluff conversation about women’s health—especially what starts to shift for us around age 40. We’re talking perimenopause, hormone replacement therapy, and busting some of the biggest myths that leave women feeling confused and unsupported. You’ll hear why healing isn’t a one-size-fits-all fix, why your thymus gland deserves more attention, and how your endocrine system and brain are way more connected than we’re often told.  

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”—this episode is for you. 


Here’s how to connect with Dr. Erika Schultz: 

To book a Discovery Call with Dr. Erika go here https://www.drerikaonline.com/discovery 

To learn more about Dr. Erika’s Resiliency Method of Healing go here.  

https://www.drerikaonline.com/rmphaseone 

If you are someone who has difficulty with healing or have tried multiple things to heal but are slow to respond, found yourself getting worse at times, download Dr. Erika’s Free Report “The Five Reasons Your Health is Struggling to Improve” https://drerikaonline.com/freereport 

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LINK TREE: https://linktr.ee/drerikaonline 

LINKED IN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-erika-schultz-lac-dacm-acn-9167bb4/ 

IG: https://www.instagram.com/dr.erika_online/ 

FB: https://www.facebook.com/ParamountWellness/ 

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Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
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LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your type A, high achieving mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com





Welcome back to the Gutsy Chick podcast. I have Dr. Erica on for a second time. So excited. So happy to be able to one do this in person, but also to have you back. Last time episode 50, when it was Spirit of an Athlete, we talked about resilience and adaptability for high performers. And probably one of my favorite takeaways from that episode was how If you do things in the right order and you allow the body to heal, you don't have to do food restriction or have to avoid certain environmental allergies and things like that. So, yeah. you increase your resilience to the world around you and that plus good choices equals great adaptability and great performance. Good choices. Good choices aren't always that easy. Yeah. But when you, when you heal your body properly, you get. more wavelength in that respect. You don't have to, get more breadth, more ability to broaden the scope of that, right? I mean, that's a huge piece of the conversation right now in the world of health, right? It's like, I think some people look at people that are quote unquote healthy and they opt out before they ever get started because it looks too intimidating. It looks like too restrictive, too controlled. You know, and I would say that's probably one of the biggest things I see is, is people blocking from a psychological perspective on their healing process because they're just like, that's going to be too much for me, or I'm going to go all in and restrict everything and then collapse afterward. And I just had a client who did that to herself and I was just going, why, why did you, why? Okay. Yeah. That was the process that you needed to learn. eh Here we go. Well, and when we start out coaching people, always, we always like check that. Right. So I'm like, you can do anything for 30 or 60 days, sometimes 90, you know, but ultimately you need to find more flexibility in your diet, in your choices, because if you don't, it's just impossible to maintain that. Right. Yes. And it's no fun. so how being healthy should also be living life, having fun and all in balance. You know, and, uh, making good choices, know, not necessarily perfect choices. Oh my gosh. Good choices. Yes. Right. 80 20, right. Pareto's law. It's always, that's, I preach that all the time with my clients. If you can get it 80 % of the time, right. You're doing great. The other 20 % will take care of itself. Yeah. Yeah. So I call my people out in the beginning. If they do that, if they're doing 20, they're being perfect. if they're going a hundred, if they're being perfect, I'm like, Hey, you're doing some great things here. Slow down. That word. So the bruiser archetype in Gatsy chick quiz, they are 100 % no matter what all the time. And what's crazy is so are the sticklers. Different ways of doing it though. The, the bruisers are like gung ho have to do it. Gonna press through no matter what, gonna do it 100%. And the sticklers are always the ones who are like, okay. give me the rules, I will follow them. Yeah. And sometimes waiver, sometimes. So those are the two I've noticed that are just like a hundred percent. Yeah. getting healthy, being healthy, staying healthy is a journey. Right. It's like a lifelong thing. It's a lifelong practice. People ask me sometimes, when am I going to be done getting healthy? I'm like, probably never. Right. Right. I mean, you don't, get to the gym, get your ideal tone level or cardiovascular function or weight or BMI and then go, well, I guess I've made it. I'll stop when I get to the gym. It's time to quit. Yeah. And truthfully, we're dealing with, know, degeneration. You know, we've had exposure to toxins and some of these things in our environment and we're breeding with some of them. And, you know, we've got now multiple generations that have been impacted. by some of these exposures. And so we're at a point where it does take time. And you'll even notice in the population that people start to express their symptoms like even a decade earlier. So if you even look at your own family history, you can see that whatever mom and dad started expressing in their 60s, you're likely to potentially start expressing in your 40s or 50s. You know, and then your kiddo is going to start to express things sooner than you even did. And that's, we've got like multiple generations now of feeling the impact of some of these things, you know, and, uh, and it, and it takes time, you know, to turn that ship around. Um, so healing is not for the weary, you know, uh, It's fun though. It takes commitment getting wins along the way. Exactly. It takes commitment. It takes someone to be able to guide you in just the right fashion for you. Right. And that I can't stress that one enough. Some people are going to come to me and they're going to be like, Oh, this is going to be amazing. And I'm going, you should go work with Erica. You guys would be a better fit or vice versa. You know, some people will, will come to me and I'll be like, yeah, this is going to work out beautifully because We just gel together, everything's gonna click and it's not gonna be a torturous ride. Like you've experienced potentially in the past. Speaking of torturous rides, let's talk about perimenopause. Because perimenopause has become this, everybody thinks it's this torturous ride. Is it really? Well, I mean, that's the story, right? That is the story. And we could sit here and probably talk about all the stories. We should probably do that another time, like another podcast about all the myths and the things that were told that we almost accept as truth. You know, like, yeah, well, just even like everything you see on Instagram, right? We could just probably come up with a list of all the things that are out there. Harry menopause is a good one. So is PMS quite frankly. Because we as women are basically taught from a very young age that, you ended up in a female body this time, but you you're just gonna have to suffer for it, right? And it's like, well, yes, if you accept that story. But it's pretty very ingrained in us. And it's almost accepted as normal to have PMS. Yes, and it's certainly accepted as normal or some strange rite of passage that when you get to perimenopause and menopause, sorry, you you're gonna you're gonna have hot flashes and you're going to feel like all the time and you are not gonna sleep and your body's gonna ache. These are like all the gonna turn on you. It's gonna be like, you're not gonna enjoy sex anymore. What? My daughter just had the growing and changing talk at school. And apparently this is like nationwide. All schools are required to do this kind of thing. And I was floored that the company always, the ones that make the pads and the tampons are the company that sponsors that conversation. And I was like, well, what about Diva Cup? What about, you know, the, uh, what is the underwear brand out of Australia? That's really good. Bamboo. uh They actually talked about all those things because I checked in with her because that first introductory conversation was about like, okay, you're going to get a period. And she was dreading having this talk at school, dreading it. And I was just like, well, you know, you need to learn about it. And she was like, yeah, but like, this is personal, mom. It is. Isn't it a personal conversation? Even even when it comes to perimenopause, but we have What I love is that it's become very public. I don't ever remember as a kid having those kinds of conversations, learning about how to use a pad, how to put it on my panties. Right? That was not some conversation that we had in a classroom with a bunch of girls. And it was only girls in her class that had this conversation. The boys had a different conversation and they got packets after to learn about both, which I loved. I was like, what do you know about the boys? But it was all those external things that you're gonna notice. And it's funny because they didn't go into the nitty gritties about it, because that's too much for a kid. But when we get to adulthood, when we get to fairy menopause, nobody was talking about it. Now everybody's talking about it. And everybody's talking about it in this light that just paints it as this horrific. journey we're about to embark on. Right, right. Barf. Who wants to do that? Why would I want to stick around for something like that? Yeah. And I think it goes along with not to sound too skeptical, but ultimately a lot of our conversations about health are driven by our advertising, driven by our pharmaceutical drugs that are available. I mean, I think we've talked a little bit about autoimmune conditions and there's really a potential for autoimmune conditions to express inside any tissue or again, in the body gland, um in the body. you know, ultimately when you are uh hearing a message over and over again, there's usually some kind of product to be sold behind that message. That's in the natural medicine and supplement world too. Yes. Right. There's usually a conversation that precedes a solution. that can be had for uh a particular product that just is the end all be all. And when we're talking about perimenopause, today, the conversation's very much centered around HRT. Yes. Hormone replacement therapies. And, uh you know, a lot of people that I know are citing studies that are saying, oh, HRT is shown to not be linked to breast cancer, ovarian cancer, things like that. And, you know, it's the same conversation that we've seen over and over again in the world of health. is that all of these things are safe and the studies always look really good to make the case for what it is that, yeah, the product that's behind it all. Yeah, but we don't have longevity in any of the newer products. And that's one of the things I know I'm leery about when it comes to picking a newer product. going, oh, like the science shows us this, but we only have like three years of data. That's not enough in my humble opinion to be able to know how is that. actually going to affect my body when I get past perimenopause and I'm in menopause or I'm beyond menopause in my wise years. Yeah. And we just need to talk about the conversation of hormones, you know, in general, how do they, how does that all come together inside your body? Well, HRT is very much based off of looking at, you know, blood serum levels of hormone levels. And that gives you some data, but what we've seen in the world of functional medicine is your analysis is actually more effective for measuring hormone status and getting enough. a clear, more accurate functional expression of the hormones inside the body. Like a Dutch test. Yeah, like a Dutch test or yeah, we use different, we use a different lab for that as well. That, you know, gives us a little bit more clear depiction in our, in our practice. But ultimately there's this interconnectedness of the endocrine system or all of those organs, tissues and glands that come together to talk to each other. They're all connected. so I always explain it to folks that like, know, if you're looking at your hormone bucket as a bucket, right? If you're looking at blood um alone, you can see that there's probably some kind of hole in your bucket potentially. And so the goal with HRT is to see that on a blood analysis and then be able to correlate to it the hormone that we would use to plug the hole, right? But anytime you plug a hole in a leaky bucket, what do you have in the other holes? build up. Yeah, increased pressure, a change in water flow, more impact. There's an impact there, right? So plugging one hole isn't necessarily going to be. Get your food just your own cream. Yeah, exactly. And now all of a sudden your estrogen is going, what the fuck do fucking do with this? Right. So, you know, you've got to, it's, more complex than just a simple see the hole, plug the hole and then you know, hope for the best. But you know, the one thing I will say about HRT is, you know, some people are so deficient in hormones that, know, until you can get to the root cause and really unwind that whole picture, you know, I'll encourage some of my clients to use it short term, you know, while we're bringing up a call the bottom, you know, to really address the fundamental and the foundational issues as to why they're not balancing hormones on their own naturally. Right. And that's a function of many things. That's the endocrine glands. It's also important organs such as the kidney. The kidneys are really in charge of ensuring that you have enough of a hormone, right? They make the precursors to hormones, DHEA, pregnenolone, those kinds of things. If you don't have proper kidney function, then you're probably going to have some kind of impact too. hormone production. your cholesterol levels aren't in good ratios and good balance to each other. And I'm not talking about total cholesterol and looking at that isolated number in its own. You've got, it's more dynamic, it's more complex than that. You want to look at these things in relationship to one another. know, and study of epigenetics has taught us that, you know, cholesterol level for you and what makes your body produce and work. properly cognitively as well as hormone wise can be different than the number that I have. So you really want to look at all of these things in correlation. And then certainly on the topic of cholesterol and also hormones is looking at the liver function because the liver is in charge of regulating all of these things coming together, all the water in the bucket, making sure that nobody's flowing too fast and too hard from the holes. It's like there to actually be the regulator of hormones in your body and keeping everything in check. Right. So there's so many things. then on top of that, and I think the one that's probably missed the most, because I think a lot of people focus on the fact that, we can all agree that endocrine system is important. Liver and kidneys are important. Some of these elements like cholesterol. But one of the things that isn't on the conversation or on the topic often is the brain. And the neurology and the signal center, right? The air traffic control tower, I call it at the airport. You know, these organs and tissues and glands can be in good shape. You know, we've got the planes all serviced and the passengers are loaded up and they're happy and they're ready to go. But we've been ignoring the fact that the air traffic control tower down the way here is rotted steps and you can't get up to the top to direct the planes. Right. That's the brain. That's function of the and the signaling center. And my gosh. is that important, right? um And that is probably the essential piece that's missing from a lot of processes and approaches to actually looking from a holistic perspective at the endocrine system at hormone balancing and the importance of really making sure you stop at each of those areas and take a turn on the healing stage, I call it, um where you give the body the opportunity to recover that tissue. and that damage that's been sustained for like we're seeing multiple generations, Right. When it comes to the neuroscience behind this, are we just getting caught up? Because I would say, since COVID, but before COVID, neuroscience really took a boom. We have really seen a lot of information finally coming through that people are actually studying the brain. yeah. And is it Is it because we're playing catch up and we know more now? I don't know. I don't know that I wouldn't be able to say that I've monitored that enough. I mean, one of the things that I noticed, you know, even just in terms of understanding my own disorder with, you know, the seizure history is that when I was diagnosed, when I was, you know, around when my hormones shifted at puberty, right. ah When that started to come into play and it very much had a lot to do with the brain talking to my hormones because my susceptibility always was worse when I was either pre or post cycle. Right. And you hear a lot of women like that are in that pre or post phase, that switch over phase, I call it then a lot of times that's where some of these issues, these neurological issues will surface their head. Yes. Yeah. So, but to answer your question, I don't know if I have an answer, good answer for it other than, you know, it's an interesting component because again, back to what I was saying before, I think we talked the least amount about the brain. people are afraid of it. Neuroscience is a big word. Well, I don't know if it's that as much, just complex. It is, yes. It's complex and I think it's just that we maybe aren't, we haven't put all the pieces to the puzzle together. Yeah. You know, and so it's more simple to just look at the organs. Like for example, I'll take estrogen dominance. You know, a lot of us are familiar with estrogen dominance and how eating your cruciferous vegetables can be really important to clearing the liver and all the things, right? So that's kind of like one of those known situations that, you know, those kinds of leafy greens will help clear estrogen a little bit better. And that's true, bitter greens that help support liver and bitter is the taste of the liver and such. But But then on the flip side of that, because this has been interesting for me because we have a kidney issue in my family and eating leafy greens, particularly spinach, oxalates, throw my kidneys out of whack. finding that out, like I have generational information about that. So I know from that perspective, when people- Well, you're making my point. It's overly simplified, right? And so- That's where, you know, I just had a practitioner, you know, mentioned to me that they were concerned about, you know, the amount of estrogen that they were seeing in a particular client's, thermography report. And so, you know, the rudimentary or baseline advice is, is we should just give this person some more greens, you know, and it's, it's not that simple. I've been working with this patient for a while and really the problem was not her liver as much as it was her brain and the cerebral cortex of her brain that has the most challenge and what we're trying to recover. Because again, it was really, it's starting from the cerebral cortex that the brain is signaling and is not balanced well enough to where it just off puts more estrogen in her body. And the same could be said for, you know, I'll give you another example of the basal ganglia. You know, I chased around adrenal. deficiency and insufficiency for years with my own knowledge myself, but my clients, right? Get your ashwagandha out. Yeah, just ashwagandha all day long. just all day long with ashwagandha. Right? And, and, and de-stress. Yes, you must become completely zen. You to meditate every day. This is what we're back to our original point. It's so it's so complex. It's like, you need, you know, an entire day devoted to meditating. Medi- Just to calm it all down. like doing all your routines. Yes. Getting it all in. Right? is insane. Which is just not realistic. For people, especially people we're talking to. We're talking about high performing females that are busy as all out. Yes. And we, most of us don't have time to add two hours of the gym plus another hour in the morning for our Meditation and our self-care and, um, and then we just feel like, you know. We've checked off a big list. We got to the end of that big list and said, fuck, I'm tired. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But back to the adrenals. yeah, so chase that one around with myself and many clients for many years, and then finally realized that wasn't going far enough. Yeah, it with the basal ganglia of the brain. And that if the basal ganglia, we're having, you know, basically an autoimmune pattern associated to that tissue, then we were having perpetual spurts, you know, of cortisol all the time. Yeah, the retina is a good one to also point out. that actually has an important relationship to melatonin and making sure you turn off melatonin correctly. one of the, and then that balances into cortisol production, right? So estrogen down the line. Yeah. Right. But these were all structures inside the brain and let's not forget the hypothalamus. Okay. Like that's a very, it's a huge one in terms of not only hormones, but it's, it's inside the brain. It's a gland inside the brain, but it also is important. you know, cognitive performance as well. so a lot of it comes back to really making sure you're treating that whole HPA access, but not just that there's been a lot of tension on that too. And it's still not enough. You know, if there's an autoimmune situation going on at the top of your head inside your basal ganglia, you know, you're to have not only hormone issues, but you're going have hormone issues that could relate into other neurological symptoms. Yeah. So, yeah, there you go. Did we just blow your brains? I find it very fascinating that there's not a lot of doctors that want to touch that with a 10-foot pole. Because, newer information, not something that they probably studied when they were in school. And now it's something that we've got access to. We've got the ability to learn these new things. they're like, that's pretty complex. But again, I don't think it's just a complexity. It's more, I'm sure there's doctors doing, you know, incredible discoveries of things out there. I had a conversation with one today, a medical doctor that's looking at long haul COVID and things like that. We could have a conversation about that too. But ultimately, I think it's really just, you know, they're their front lines delivering care. Right. And, and all of our our discoveries, health discoveries are really funded and driven by the source of the solution, which is the pharmaceutical industry. So if there isn't one enough prevalence and understanding of these things and or a potential great revenue opportunity at the end of it, it's not going to get the funding that's needed to study these things and advance things forward. Plus you're talking about a chemical derived solution that's designed to really create a symptom abatement. for an individual what's creeps creeps keeps things comfortable. Yes, but doesn't fix what doesn't fix the root cause right. So you really want to analyze the body and figure out what's interfering here. If this was made perfect in design, and this was made perfect in design, why is it not performing the way it should? And being perfect in design means you're able to heal right? Yes. So it'll fairly quickly and feel fairly quickly. So if you if you are to heal on a regular basis as you're designed to do, then feasibly you wouldn't have all these symptoms, all these imbalances, these hot flashes, these like sweats, these weight gain, the perpetual weight gain. We didn't talk about fat as an organ. And that's a huge one in terms of hormone balancing, right? Because what happens to most of us at perimetopause? Gain in weight. Oh, like just, doot. do do do do. Yeah, like just keeps increasing. Keeps increasing. This one set me off. remember hearing, you know, Oh, 40 everything changes. Not me. Right. not going down. in, know, chain. Right. I was like, not me. And then like, literally, I think it was the day after my 40th birthday, me and my twin sister looked at each other. like, holy cow, what's happening? You know, I was my thinnest. ever in my 30s when I was like restricting my diet. mean, I people thinking that I had an eating disorder because literally I was like so tight on all the control of the diet and such. And I had cut carbs out. I was starving my thyroid gland. You know, it was like, you know, ultimate, I was doing all the right things. All the right things that we, you know, all the right things. And I was super thin, but then to go get hit 40 and then like total uphill battle. Right. Um, yes. again, just as everything is such, you know, that's one of the things that I really am trying to unwind with the hormone picture is understanding why we hold on to that fat. Well, fat is is the holder of estrogen, right? I mean, ultimately, it's our body naturally preparing to not have estrogen production anymore. well, part of it part of that. So but I think also there what's accelerated that because I'm not necessarily certain that we're really supposed to just bind up all of our hormone, you know, in our fat cells. I think that's- that's, I don't necessarily think that's really um the whole story around that. I think what has happened and what we've seen clinically is that toxins that we were exposed to even early on um in our lifetime- In our babyhood. Were stored. in our fat. And that means our brain, that means, you know, the nervous system is made up of all sorts of adipose tissue. And then the peripheral nervous system too, is a big part of that. So all the peripheral nerves go out to, you know, along the back, especially a lot of women, a lot of females were actually gaining where we're getting the acceleration of fat is on the back first. And that's related to the, what I believe is the toxins. being encapsulated from early on and then hormones start to shift. We've had more years inside of a body where some of those organs related to metabolic function, including the brain, are starting to take more wear and tear. So is an aging in this respect of you're in that body and there's more years in that, but then you're also dealing with fluctuations that occur naturally. But that is interacting with some of these fat storages that have been in place. And when the brain signals to the fat cell to get destroyed, the parking lot's full. Yep. It's all bound up. It's all bound up. It's full. It could have some extra estrogen on it, but it also has some of the toxins that we got exposed to earlier in life in the parking lot. so the parking lot's full. We can't destroy those fat cells naturally. And it's just like an uphill battle. Yeah. And I even think that's related to obesity and young children. Yes. Thank you. I was going to say something else, but thanks for bringing that one up. That's where my brain was because we're seeing it more and more. it, know, and we think it's cause they're eating too many potato chips and french fries and sit in front of their, their video games and their, their tablets. No, it is an autoimmune condition of the fat cells. And it's an autoimmune condition of the brain and the brain signaling to the fat cells. starts in, you know, the posterior section of the, of the bait of the brain, where it's, is where a lot of that metabolic signaling is starting from. And so that's a big reason why we're seeing the increase in not only the obesity rates, but then also for, you know, childhood cancers and ADHD, ADD, mental autism, mental. you know, problems, depression, anxiety, increased frontal lobe challenges. Yep. Seizure disorders. For sure. Mm hmm. Yeah. How in the world do we, how do we fix that? How do we fix that? Yeah. Step by step, you know, and, know, in a phased approach is the way we deal with it because you, kind of have to earn the right to get to deeper levels of healing in the body to get to that level where you're where the body will let go of some of the most caustic toxin exposure. Without destroying all the organs. Right. have to funnel that through. Right, exactly. So what we've seen with working with bodies is there's a way to do that in the right order at the right time, right? So that you keep increasing and gaining energy, because you need energy in the healing process too. Absolutely. not just like you can like snap your fingers, take a few supplements and you know, they're there. is better. Right? It's an iterative process that takes time. And I always tell patients, like, you're not going to go like this in the healing path. You're going to have some ups and downs, but your trend line needs to look like this, ultimately. Not a start and then go like this, and then I have to stop. um And that's where most of my patients are when they come in to see me or they're on this trajectory. And we just quickly start putting them on this trajectory. And ultimately over time, you just have to take the body in the right order at the right time. our process has worked out so it's very efficient, but we use supplements differently than a lot of other practitioners do. do you, uh I've noticed, m how do you use supplements differently? Well, most of the time supplements will be used because there's a really good ads, one number one, there's a really good ad strategy behind it. So that's the first probably driver is Somebody saw it on Instagram and it's the answer for every Ashwagandha magnesium, you know, there's always a little bit of truth in all of this stuff, right? I'm poking fun. Like in reality, the person that wrote that book about that one thing that like is so awesome. Yes. It, they had a success with it. They did. other people saw successes. That's why they were like, I'm feeling healthy again. We just never go back and interview that author like five or 10 years later and say, Hey, how's that symptoms still working for you to just take that supplement every day? Right. That's the thing. That's the clincher is that yeah, there is some truth in it. And there is some, it's not like it's deception deceptive, but it's, it's just not necessarily the whole picture. And it certainly doesn't mean that because that worked for you, it's going to work for me. Right. Cause we're different. We're biochemically genetically different. Everybody is different. So anyways, but I think we were on a different trajectory. Remind me of where we were going with this stuff. Supplements and how you use them different. Right. So the simplistic answer to that would be like if you were just even talking to a functional medicine doctor, right? They would run some blood labs, look at the blood work, uh you know, maybe see that you're deficient in vitamin B, example, B is in boy, right? Pretty common, actually. Actually pretty common. Yeah. And that can help. lead to whole host of symptoms, right? When you're B deficient, but we're really asking more of the question interested in, well, why, why would you not be absorbing B vitamin from your food? Right? So there's always certainly an element or an aspect of making sure the diet is, people are educated on what to be feeding themselves with some, you regularity, like we were talking earlier, but, B vitamin can, deficiency can be result of poor spleen function could be as a result of uh poor intrinsic factor production by the brain and the stomach. You know, it could be a lot of different things could be poor function of the nervous system. So you're burning through your bees all the time at a higher rapid rate, right? And that's because there's more autoimmune going on in the brain and the nervous system. So the question really becomes, well, great, we could just simply stay there and say, well, you're having some symptoms. You got to be vitamin deficiency in your blood work. Here's a B vitamin. Right. And so you could do that. You could take that for some time and you probably would actually feel something for a minute, you know, or a few weeks or a few months, right? You might potentially actually respond fine, or you might just quite frankly, piss it out in the toilet, which is what we do with a lot of our supplements is they're not actually absorbed correctly or utilized by the body because it's not ready to take it. Well, it's mostly, I think it's around the fact that when we're talking about nutraceutical products, we're often talking about a single factor or an isolate of that vitamin complex. And the reality is, is vitamins really are best utilized when they come with their cousins or their co-factors. And the only place you really get that dynamic- Food. Whole food, right? And whole food supplements. So, you know, that's really like the most important piece is to ensure that you're bringing along all the other factors for your body to go, ah, yeah, I recognize there's some B vitamin in there. And it's coming with all the other things that I need to actually do something with it. So it doesn't go right out through the urine, right? uh But again, it's kind of coming back to, okay, well, if we just looked at, let's say a B vitamin deficiency is present because there's some challenge going on with the spleen, right? Um, so what we're really assessing is, is what do need to do to fix the spleen? Yep. Right. And what's causing the spleen to not produce enough of that or to prove it to, to be, should say what's causing, what's causing spleen to not function properly. Right. And that's what we want to fix. We want to heal. Right. With supplements. But keep the supplement that you need in play until the spleen decides it wants to work properly. It's kind of more of a, it's kind of more of a, first thing you would do is just see what the challenge or the stress is. Right? So that could be toxins, heavy metals. That could be old exposures from, you know, childhood schedules. That could be, we're talking about vaccines. guys don't say it. We're going to be censored. Censor away. We're going to be called anti-vaxxers. Not an anti-vaxxer. Shut down. Not an anti-vaxxer. Use them properly and you get clean ones, which is really challenging to do nowadays. but it could be those, could be definitely parasites are a big one. see a lot of times, know, practitioners are really focusing on just constantly create cleaning up parasites. And that gets a little bit short sighted because first of all, parasites are very, um, they're very hard, anti-parasite herbs, excuse me, are very harsh to the digestive system, to the body. They're very cold in nature. And most of us are sitting with a pretty good, um, you know, set of deficiencies in our organs and tissues. doing that over and over again and using cold herbs to aggravate what we call a cold situation. And from a Chinese medicine perspective is that, um, you're, really just kind of aggravating the scene. And I did that for many years, like just continual parasite cleanses and things like that. And I would feel a little better. for a little bit of time, but it wasn't until I really figured out the resiliency method was how to stop that cycle of parasite gestation, basically, spend that. And then we saw certain co-infection start to abate, including Lyme. um And it was really a lot of time, it was a parasite problem that was hosting some of these toxicities over and over again and making them come to the surface. So we stopped kind of chasing that and really started to move the body. Well, then that earned us the right to do okay. So more cellular detox. And then finally, once you've taken the body enough to where I call, you know, filling up the dumpster um and you kind of, you know, earn the right to then rebuild and restore from that place. And that's where the magic comes in, because then you just start giving the body what it needs, which is, you know, a little more, you know, boom from the stem cell production. we use a great liquid collagen. product to help increase the supply of stem cells. And then we also use protomorphogen, which are like basically whole food supplements to create a decoy response. So a body continues to instead of attacking itself, it sort of like attacks that the supplement or is used as a distraction and it can get takes vacation and then the organ can heal. Right. So we do those kinds of uh therapies uh over time and we put, we coordinate them because again, You know, your kidneys are weak link for you and somebody else over here may not have the same, you know, degradation to their kidneys, but their spleen is really challenged or their liver is a mess, you know? And so it's just different for each person. And all of that really plays into, you know, holistic health, but I got it. I do have to do one honorable mention inside this conversation that I don't want to leave out. Absolutely. Cause it's really important. actually was just preparing a talk on this for some other healthcare professionals. ah But one of the most important glands in the body that never gets enough credit is the thymus gland. The thymus gland? uh Yeah. And, and, and because it's at, well, why? Good question. We can talk about that one too. For an hour. For an hour probably. But it is an important feature in not only the immune system function and reversing autoimmune situations, but also in finding hormone balance and finding that hormone balance naturally. Again, really the strategy we're talking about for perimenopause and hormone balancing is really taking into consideration when you're deciding how to go about this. One is just checking the story, man. Who said that you had to live with hot flashes and you had to live with all these uncomfortable symptoms? It's really like, I always encourage people like, take a step back for a second. Who wrote that narrative and are you willing to subscribe that or you want to play a different game? You know, and ultimately you're, looking at your strategy as being okay. If I just repair these organs, these glands, this brain, right. If I take that strategy on and I go through that and healing cycle, consecutive healing cycle, um, and, give enough time. Well, now I don't need necessarily the hormone replacement, right? Hallelujah. And not only that, but you're increasing stem cell production on your own by taking, using whole foods. which is the way that you want to do that, right? Because most of those stem cells, just listened to a functional medicine doctor talk about this a couple of weeks ago. She stood on the stage and she said, guys, those stem cells you're using within 24 hours, 80 % of them are gone within 48, 100 % of them are gone. Short shelf life, certain great price tag, kind of insane, but if we can get our body to do that. Now you're playing not only talking about natural alone balancing, but you're talking longevity. Yes. Right. Yes. That's the anti-aging. That's the longevity game. No. A biohacking game. Well, do we dare go there? Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's right. There's like, there's two perspectives of longevity. There's the, approach, which is very masculine oriented, which is we can hack everything and we can biohack our way to longevity. Again, a very, um, very costly and very time intensive. So we know our audience is And knowledge intensive too. That's the other piece of it that I've noticed is you just, you have to understand all the different things. the big conversation most recently that I heard from one of the biggest biohackers that is on the internet is oxalates and how oxalates are going to degrade our longevity. And then you have to go and learn what are all the oxalates. Okay, we got spinach and raspberries, but those are whole foods. Not everybody is going to have a reaction to oxalates. it's confusing. There's a lot of confusion and a lot of knowledge building that you have to have when it comes to biohacking. Yeah. And that might be a little true for some person, for some people. Um, but it may not be true for everyone, you know. And it also may be a problem, like you said earlier, the problem may not actually be the oxalate, it might be your kidneys, right? It might be your thyroid that can't handle the leafy greens, you know, or the cruciferous, you know, it's, it's, one of those. It's upstream. Exactly. It's not always, it's not really about the food, quite frankly. Um, it's really about what's happening here that is making you have an inappropriate response to the food. Yep. And that's where we talk, you know, we've talked about the food sensitivity conversation too, right? like the last episode. Go check that out. Episode 50, you guys. Yeah. because you know, reversing food sensitivities, the only thing that's out there that I know of really is, um, people doing desensitization techniques. Yep. Take it out. Take it out. Gluten's gone. Sugar's gone. That's elimination. then there's also, second tier would be like a desensitization where you do, you kind of trick out the nervous system by doing these procedures and such. can sometimes bring their reaction down to the item. And I did those. I thought it was the tool I had at the time. but I saw that they didn't last as long forever. And, that was frustrating for both me and the client. And then ultimately when we discovered how to stop the endless cycle of parasite cleansing, and we used a patented formula for saline in the gut and a liquid collagen form, lo and behold, all the worst of the food sensitivities, gluten, gluten. It was gone. And then also people didn't, we couldn't find evidence of once they'd started resuming gluten again, we couldn't necessarily find evidence of even glyphosate being problem. Yeah. So we're still unwinding why that's happening. The gut decided it wanted to really heal. Really, really heal. Yeah. So we're still trying to figure out what's, what's the mechanism at that behind that. But, um, it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting to see how, again, and I'm a, I'm a big proponent. think we need to clean up our food system, especially in this country. So I'm a big proponent of continuing down that path. I'm all excited about getting rid of food dyes. And I think those are necessary measures and we have a lot of room for improvement in that. And we also have a lot of bodies that have been milling around with higher cancer rates, higher neurological dysfunction, neurocognitive decline issues, blah, blah, blah, all the things, and autoimmune. And we have a lot of bodies that are kind of broken right now. they're pro-contaminating procreate. And so we have to stop that cycle too. Don't stop procreating. No, stop procreating. you can't. In you might be incentivized to actually have babies. Yes. In any event. sex please. But we do want, know, one of my, have a bunch of clients right now that are wanting to, to, you know, get pregnant and void some of the fertility journeys that they see a lot of their friends. mean, it's costly. It's like, you know, it's a big deal and they know that, you know, that's a short-term fix. So they're really trying to prepare themselves for pregnancy and getting their hormones balanced naturally. And, you know, when they come to me, that's really their goal. But I'm like, you got to understand that like what you're doing for your offspring is like huge. By doing this now, before you procreate. and cleaning these buys up and both partners doing that is huge. And then now they're going to have offspring. So we got to start to, we got to get to that point where we're fixing the kids so that as they grow and they get older and they produce off, they produce offspring. You know, it's a little late for some of us to produce, but ultimately, you know, uh, you know, all of us can have an opportunity to really play the game of health in a more empowered way, not this fear driven, like we got to be afraid of everything and What are they doing to us all the time? We got to put our attention on expansion and adaptability and resiliency. Okay. In terms of more information about our food system and how jacked it is, go check out any episode by Amy Gallo. She has done a phenomenal job. She's a nutritionist. She's done a phenomenal job of helping us better understand some of the food myths. uh some of the issues in our food system and cleaning that up. So thank you for pointing that one out. I love having you brainiacs on so that we can learn all of these amazing things. Absolutely. The regenerative farming is so interesting too. Like that takes you into the conversation of that, which is huge, but it's almost like we've got to fix our soil. We've got to these bodies too, you know, for that piece to really turn around. We got to really do some things. uh differently and kind of like turn that ship around in a big way over the next couple of generations. And I think we can, I think we can do it. I think we're bringing some of the best minds together now to really like be able to decipher. And I think that's the biggest advantage is just having those minds come together and, you know, ultimately being able to, you know, find out what I've discovered clinically to take that to the next level of research and then to really put the puzzle pieces together. with some of those collaborations is really going to be important too, right? Yes. Yes. agree completely. Erica, any last words you want to share with everyone? Where can they find you? Well, you know, I think Mustapha will be in the show notes. All in the show notes. All in the show notes. She's here in Denver. I'm in Denver, but I do work across the country. have over 50 % of our clients now are, we've never met in person, which is awesome. uh What we do is just so unique. Yeah, you've got a unique process too And it's like the ability to bring that to more people is pretty exciting Yes, but we also know the power and the importance of bringing this to high-performing females. Yes, because let's face it They're the ones that get you know, what done in this world people and uh You know, they're the ones that are gonna be instrumental and when they feel healthy and they have expansion They're the ones that we know are gonna be helping us pioneer the transformation that we want to see uh with our community. So we're really intent on getting them healthy um initially and then letting that be a trickle effect as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Great. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me and let me go on and on and on. Yes. And in person. I love it when we get to be in person. It's It's the best.

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