Tag: Diet

Rosie+Radio+EP+#004_Monica+Hershaft

Mon, 6/27 4:46AM • 36:53

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, eat, choline, body, vegan, life, sick, happening, blocking, years, healing, paleo, technique, practitioner, health, dad, witnessed, food, supplements, find

SPEAKERS

Misty Williams, Monica Hershaft

Misty Williams  00:01

Hey, sister, this is Misty Williams, founder of healing rosie.com. And I’m so excited to welcome you to Rosie radio, tune in to find clarity, direction and hope for your healing. 

Misty Williams  00:10

New episodes drop every Tuesday, we created this show to empower you to regain control of your life and feel like yourself again. Yes, sister, it is possible. 

Misty Williams  00:21

You guys, this interview that I’m about to have with my friend Monica, Hershaft is going to blow your mind. And that Monica a few years ago, and it’s so exciting to me to see people who struggled with their health like I have. 

Misty Williams  00:32

And like so many of you have, who’ve not only got their health back, which is, you know, kind of the goal for all of us is we want to get our life back. We want our quality of life to come back. 

Misty Williams  00:41

But she has taken everything that she’s been through and she has committed her life to serving others and helping other people get their health back to which just I’m getting chills even as I’m saying it because I feel so inspired by it. And so, so honored by it. 

Misty Williams  00:53

There’s so many people who are in this space who are in it to help other people get their lives back like they have. But Monica has a really unique story because she grew up in what many consider to be a health movement to which is the vegan movement. 

Misty Williams  01:07

And she has a really interesting story about her history with veganism and where she’s at now with food. And I want to talk a little bit about food as medicine during this interview, because all of us are trying to navigate this food landscape and it’s tough. Like when you hear about all these different schools of thought we have keto, carnivore, vegan, Paleo. 

Misty Williams  01:28

A lot is happening on the intermittent fasting front, like how should you eat? What’s the best way to eat for your type like this is such a loaded like landmine conversation. And generally the space that I like to hold for our community, the healing Rosie community, is I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of your conviction around food as much as I want to support you in finding out what’s really right for your body. Right? 

Misty Williams  01:53

Do all of us have the goal of healing? And I also think that the conversation around how we heal, and what we’re eating and how that affects our health is an important one. 

Misty Williams  02:00

And we should all be educated and informed on what is important about food as it relates to long term health and especially as it relates to healing our body you know, so, 

Misty Williams  02:10

Monica Hershaft is a best selling author, motivational speaker and holistic health practitioner and Nutritional Consultant with advanced clinical training certification in Nutrition Response therapy and our team. 

Misty Williams  02:10

After 15 years building one of the top rated holistic health practices in Los Angeles, she moved to Scottsdale Arizona, and is now working one on one with people in the Phoenix area to help them get their health back.  Welcome, Monica!

Monica Hershaft  02:30

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. 

Misty Williams  02:31

I am so happy for you to be here too. And I think it would be awesome for you just to start out telling us a little bit about your story and your background and where you come from. I know that I’m not the only one that’s been intrigued by your story. You’ve told this story of paleo fx. And you’ve been interviewed by Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey and a lot of other people in the natural health space who have really big followings, because what you had to say on this topic is relevant and important. So I’m excited for you to be sharing with us. 

Monica Hershaft  02:55

Thank you, I. Well, I’m happy to share it. Basically, I had been born and raised vegan, because my father is a well known animal rights activist who pretty much was one of the pioneers who started the animal rights movement back in the 70s. 

Monica Hershaft  03:09

In fact, the founders of PETA and my dad kind of came up with their organizations in our living room in the 70s. And, you know, my father had been a chemist, and he had been assigned to assess conditions at a factory farm slaughterhouse. 

Monica Hershaft  03:25

And back in the day, we didn’t know how they treated the animals in factory farms, we had no idea and my father is one of the people that brought that out to the public. And he was just so shocked with the conditions. 

Monica Hershaft  03:34

There was no other aspect of getting animal protein other than these commercial slaughterhouses back then that people had access to. And so he became a vegan and an animal rights activist over that time. 

Monica Hershaft  03:45

And that’s how I was raised. You know that killing animals is bad, that it’s unethical, and the terror that they go through and so forth. So I didn’t know any difference and that’s just how I was born and raised, which means that my body and my organs were developing as a vegan with that nutrition, eating a lot of soy and eating a lot of wheat. 

Monica Hershaft  04:04

And I never had any issues that I was aware of, for most of my life. And, you know, I was a dancer and I had a normal life. And I was very athletic. 

Monica Hershaft  04:08

And then when I was about 34, I was doing a detox program that all my friends were doing in Los Angeles was very hip and trendy. And I got violently sick on this detox, and I never recovered at that time, and no one could figure out what was wrong with me. 

Monica Hershaft  04:28

So I was going from doctor to doctor and every doctor I went to said, Well, your labs are normal. Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s probably just in your head. You’re in your 30s. It’s probably just hormonal. This sounds emotional. 

Monica Hershaft  04:39

You should take antidepressants or anxiety medication, because I was having heart palpitations and I couldn’t sleep and I had the skin coming off my face and bleeding for no reason. 

Monica Hershaft  04:49

I don’t know how I was making that up. You know, and I wasn’t sleeping and I couldn’t eat solid food. It was insane. All of these symptoms came out of nowhere and I had been perfectly fine.

Monica Hershaft  05:00

So I thought prior to that. So basically in my situation, after about five or six years of going to every doctor under the sun, you know, they don’t, there’s a lot of stuff they don’t know to check for. 

Monica Hershaft  05:13

It turned out I had a really severe choline deficiency. And choline is how your Phase II liver function works. So when your body is detoxing the way it’s meant to, meaning that you’re supposed to dump toxins in life, your body works that way. If your phase I is bad enough to trash,  phase II is throwing out the trash if these two are not working right, where do you think the trash goes ,right back in.

Misty Williams  05:38

Many of us have had that exact problem with a trash day. 

Monica Hershaft  05:42

Yes. And so that was compromised. And so then when you have a choline deficiency, in addition to that, that affects gallbladder, which means you can’t digest fats, there’s a lot of food that you won’t be able to digest properly, hence the problem with solid food. 

Monica Hershaft  05:54

And then it also impacts your nervous system because it’s a form of vitamin B. So you can’t calm down, you can’t relax, you can’t sleep, and it makes you nervous. 

Monica Hershaft  06:02

And, it was a very, very severe deficiency. And the detox program had me taking niacin, which makes you more choline deficient. That’s why I had such a bad reaction. And my friends did it because I was already building a choline deficiency over the years with a vegan diet. 

Monica Hershaft  06:18

So that’s basically how I got it. 

Misty Williams  06:19

Where do you get choline? 

Monica Hershaft  06:21

So choline comes from red meat and eggs, as well as other sources. But those were the main areas that I was missing the choline from. 

Monica Hershaft  06:28

And it’s not just choline. I mean, that was what ended up being a key. There’s always if your body is like a giant game of dominoes, there’s always the lead dominoes, right? 

Monica Hershaft  06:36

And so when that thing goes out, and can cause your nervous system to block or switch, which we’ll talk more about later, what happens is, when your body won’t respond to anything properly because it impacts its ability to do its job. So then, as a mammal, as a body, anytime you’re exposed to parasites, bacteria, overgrowth of fungus, viral, your body’s built to fight that stuff off. They’re just opportunists. But in that case for me, my body, the bouncer was on a coffee break. It was like, come on in. Let me show you.

Monica Hershaft  07:08

So that’s one of the reasons I was so sick was not just a choline deficiency, but I was viral, I had parasites, I had bacteria. And another thing about the vegan diet is it encourages fungal overgrowth. 

Monica Hershaft  07:18

So they’re pretty much impossible to be vegan without having fungal overgrowth. 

Misty Williams  07:24

So I imagine uncovering this was really challenging and confronting for you. And for your family, too, I would imagine because this is this, this, your relationship to food wasn’t just about nutrition for my body. This was a spiritual perspective that your family had and sought to embody. So how did you navigate all that? 

Monica Hershaft  07:42

Yeah, that was very tricky for me, because for one thing, it wasn’t being done for health reasons, or for nutrition reasons. It was being done to save the animals. 

Monica Hershaft  07:50

And a little background on where that came from, is my parents are both Holocaust survivors. And so what my father witnessed at the factory farm, and, you know, his experience was kind of shocking, because he describes walking in and body parts everywhere in blood. And that’s what he witnessed in the streets in Warsaw, you know what I mean? And he, this is what he went through, watching his relatives be carted off in cattle cars to be killed. 

Monica Hershaft  08:13

So it was very personal for him, which made it personal for me. And his whole life was devoted to it. He’s very publicly known and speaks all over the world to this day, you know, even in his late 80s now. And so, what happened was, this was the turning point moment. 

Monica Hershaft  08:31

I had never heard of holistic before. I didn’t even know what that was. And, and so a friend of mine who said, Oh, my brother’s an osteopath, you should go see him, he was really far away. But she was like, he’ll find it. And he did find that they’re able to run weird labs that other regular doctors don’t run. 

Monica Hershaft  08:46

So he was able to find a problem with the liver and the phase II liver function, but couldn’t fix it and didn’t know why. And so I was still stuck. But at least I had confirmation that there was a legitimate problem. And then, which is such a relief. I know, oh, it’s a relief just to get any kind of label. 

Monica Hershaft  09:03

And one of the things I want to talk about we can get into more later, is also the fact that when you can’t get a diagnosis, and people don’t believe you, they start to drop off and they pull out of the friendship. 

Monica Hershaft  09:15

If enough time goes by, we can get into that a little later, too. Just to finish on what you were asking about. 

Monica Hershaft  09:20

So what happened was, after going from doctor to doctor, and I was asking, I was like, Is it because I’m a vegan? Is it? Because I had this weird feeling? No, no, no, that’s got nothing to do with it doesn’t matter what you eat. Doesn’t matter what you eat. That’s what I was told over and over. Yeah. 

Monica Hershaft  09:33

And so basically, there’s one person I went to who does the technique and RT that I do? said, Oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t take you as a patient because you’re a vegan. And I was like, Excuse me? Yeah.

Monica Hershaft  09:47

And she was like, Yeah, I can’t, your body won’t heal. And I was like, oh, what’s so? My father was with me at the time because I couldn’t take care of myself. I was so sick. I couldn’t even drive at that point, cuz I kept degrading each week that went by, and so I was quiet 

Misty Williams  10:03

your dad witnessed them saying this to you. 

Monica Hershaft  10:06

Yeah, 

Misty Williams  10:06

interesting. 

Monica Hershaft  10:07

But also let me reiterate. He had been staying with me for almost a month at that point. And he saw he didn’t believe how sick I was till he came and lived with me and saw how bad it was. 

Monica Hershaft  10:15

I mean, because I couldn’t eat solid food. I got so skinny that a size zero was big on me. I literally just was sleeping two or three hours a night, I was freezing all the time. I was shaking. It was crazy. And I couldn’t work. I couldn’t do anything. 

Monica Hershaft  10:30

And my dad would when he witnessed it was like, Oh, wow, okay, this is really a thing. And he was scared, you know, and I thought, I have some weird disease. They’re gonna name after me after I’m dead, like Lou Gehrig. And

Monica Hershaft  11:16

Eat the meat. I don’t eat meat. What can I do? And then I went to my dad, and I said, she agreed to take me as a vegan. Cuz what didn’t know what else to do? Like I tried everything else. Yeah. And I thought like it’s secretly try this. And if it works, then what can you say? And if it doesn’t work, he doesn’t need to know.

Misty Williams  11:39

Yes. 

Monica Hershaft  11:40

So I was just desperate to get my life back and get my health back. And so it worked. And it worked gangbusters. So here, 

Misty Williams  11:49

How long did it take for you to start feeling Okay?

Monica Hershaft  11:51

It went in increments because she was not able to fix me, she didn’t have the same skill set that I currently have in this technique. And she was also mixing techniques. She was doing NRT and QRA. And another technique that she was like mixing through and I’m not a fan of that. I’m a purist, I like to do one thing and do it. 

Monica Hershaft  12:06

Well, you know, like, we don’t need a whole like combo platter in here. And, and especially when you’re dealing with supplementation because a technique with a supplementation program is formulated to work as a balance. 

Monica Hershaft  12:17

So when you bring other stuff in the mix, it’s a too many cooks in the kitchen, in my opinion. So just from changing the diet alone, I noticed I got literally 50% better within weeks, within weeks. And then but I didn’t start eating red meat. Yeah, cuz I was like, I’m drawing the line. I’m not eating the cows and the pigs. It’s not happening. I’ll do birds and fish.

Monica Hershaft  12:38

And so I did. I did that for about a year. And then my dad had gone home by then because I was doing better. And, you know, he thought it was just the supplements that I was taking. And I was like gonna have to tell him at some point, because you know, 

Monica Hershaft  12:50

So after a year of me getting better and better and better. I still wasn’t 100% I was probably between 50 and 75%. And then I went to see another guy who was out in Malibu who charged this back in the early 2000s, I want to say was charging $500 for every 15 minutes, like can you imagine when he charges now? Yeah, and so, but he was like, You need red meat. You’re not gonna get any better without it. So I was like, All right, here we go.

Monica Hershaft  13:17

And I’m like,

Monica Hershaft  13:23

and so I had to make peace with it. So we talked about this in paleo fx. Basically, how I came to the ethical conclusion of how to make peace with it for me was I will not eat conventional animal protein where they abuse the animals, they shoot them up with hormones and antibiotics to keep them in darkened, crowded conditions. 

Monica Hershaft  13:40

They lift them and stab them with pitchforks. They torture them. They’re laying in their own filth, they have sores and growths, and pus, and they’re laying in ammonia from the urine. And it’s a horrible existence. And they know they’re about to be killed, and they can hear all of the torture around them. 

Monica Hershaft  13:56

They don’t get any sun. And it’s a horrible existence. I will never ever, ever, ever, I don’t care if there’s nothing else to eat, I will not eat them. 

Monica Hershaft  14:04

I only eat pasture raised organic, grass fed paleo centric animal protein, or wild caught fish where it is done in the right way. And that’s it and you would be surprised people are like, Oh, that’s impossible. What if you go to a restaurant like guess what restaurants are carrying these now? 

Monica Hershaft  14:19

They may not advertise it, you just got to ask. You know. So that is where I draw the line. So that at least I know that they didn’t suffer. And that’s my ethical conclusion. Because if I want to live and survive, I have to eat animal protein. There is no way around it. So I do it three times a day. 

Misty Williams  14:37

Yeah. All right. So you started eating red meat? How did your journey progress from there? When did you tell your dad? 

Monica Hershaft  14:43

Oh, okay. So this is sort of like, I don’t know what this is okay to say. But this is like when I back in the 80s and 90s when a gay person would come out to their family. That’s what this was like for me. 

Misty Williams  14:55

You’re coming out of the closet.

Monica Hershaft  14:57

Like for me, and so at first, I was like, hey, you know how I’ve gotten so healthy and I now I have my life back and I’m working. And I’m like a good person again, after 10 years of being so sick, and you know, you having to take care of me and give me money because I couldn’t work and because he had to pay for a lot of the health after my money ran out, I was like, I would have been a homeless person. 

Monica Hershaft  15:16

And that’s the scary part is people dealing with illness like they dont have a family to help them out end up homeless and sick, sick and homeless living on the street. And that’s, I seriously was like, I’m either gonna be dead or homeless. Those are my two choices. 

Monica Hershaft  15:26

And so, and he was like, Yeah, that’s great for supplements are working on it. And I was like, I have to start eating meat. And, you know, I kind of blacked out to the memory of how he reacted, because it was so terrifying for me. But um, but my dad’s a stoic person. He’s not an emotional reactor by nature, which is kind of a good thing. 

Monica Hershaft  15:46

It drove me crazy growing up, but then in this case, I was happy. And so he was like, well, can’t you just take choline. I’m like, I do take choline. And I have to take choline because of the level of deficiency, but I also have to eat animal protein. 

Monica Hershaft  15:59

And he was like, well, when will this be over? And I’m like, it’s not going to be over. I’m never going to ever, ever, ever do that again, because I don’t ever want to go back to that. I will never like that again. And so there was a lot of like, bargaining and like, how can we put a cap on this.

Monica Hershaft  16:16

then he just didn’t want me to do it in front of them. And, and I agreed to that for a little while. And then because he’s kind of a big deal in the vegan community, and he runs these huge events every year. 

Monica Hershaft  16:26

Now he’s retired, but he has been since the 70s. He’s been running these annual events or like paleo effects, signs like 1000s of people coming from all over the world. 

Monica Hershaft  16:36

And he’s been on all these talk shows, and I grew up watching him on The Dinah Shore show and Phil Donahue and CNN. And, you know, it was like, he is the face of this, you know, he’s created national holidays about not eating animals and meat out on meatless Mondays. I mean, blah, blah, blah. And so

Monica Hershaft  16:52

Basically, he wanted me to go to the events, but why, and not tell people, but at this point, I was running a practice and I was on social media. 

Monica Hershaft  17:02

So I was like, I don’t think that’s gonna work. Yeah. And, and, and then it got crazy, because people would find me on social media, because of my name and start following me. And they were animal rights activists and vegans, and then they would see that I was posting about Paleo. 

Monica Hershaft  17:18

And they would freak out, you know, how can you do this after everything your father has been through, and I was like, I am on my own journey, I have my own story. And that just so much like, not just ridicule and admonishment, but threats, like, I hope you die the way that what you hope I die, like what’s wrong with you? 

Monica Hershaft  17:39

You know, and, and it was really hard. And I only had to take breaks from social media during that period when it was all coming out, you know? 

Misty Williams  17:46

Yeah. But does your dad know your conviction around the kind of meat you eat? And was that reassures him? 

Monica Hershaft  17:52

He does. I don’t think he gets it. But he does. I think there’s just for him, he just kind of blocks that whole topic out and just chooses not. But we did get to a point where finally I was like, Look, I’m not going to not order it in front of you. Because I feel that I need to eat it at every meal. And if you don’t let me eat it with you at a meal, then that’s hurting me. 

Monica Hershaft  18:10

So I, we got to that point where I was like, I will order whatever I order when we eat and you have to be okay with it, you know, especially when he comes to stay with me, because I used to hide my stuff at the neighbor’s house when you come to visit.

Misty Williams  18:22

I think a lot of people can identify with navigating life into adulthood, all those family dynamics of you know, mom and dad want you to live a certain way, be a certain way, be a certain person, you know, you come into adulthood, and you have your own convictions and your own journey. 

Misty Williams  18:41

And we all have to figure out how to reconcile these two parts of ourselves, you know, I want to, I want my family to know that I love them. And I want them to feel respected and supported by me, and I need to live my truth and I need to be authentic to who I am. And I, I don’t want to live a life where I’m hiding. I don’t want to feel shame for being authentic and being true to myself. 

Monica Hershaft  18:59

Yeah, exactly. And, and especially when it feels life and death and when it becomes your identity and what you do for a living and how you help people. 

Monica Hershaft  19:08

And truth be told, and I don’t know if I’ve even said this publicly on a podcast before but I’ve had some big people in the animal rights industry secretly come to me for help because they’re not doing well and secretly start eating animal protein and taking the supplements that we use in supplements with animal glandulars in them from standard process, shut out standard process. And you know, and I just secretly help them under the radar because I’m not the only one who went through this. 

Misty Williams  19:34

Yeah, help us to understand some of the symptoms. You mentioned a couple of them of those having like, holy like, how does this manifest in the body? If someone’s like, yeah, you know, I have the mystery symptom too, let’s compare notes.

Monica Hershaft  19:45

 Right. I believe everyone’s a unique snowflake because everything depends on your history, your genetics, how you ate growing up, like to just say it’s because I was a vegan is not really accurate because I’m going to be super Frank and I be honest but you know.

Monica Hershaft  20:00

I’m 55 years old, and I grew up in the 70s and 80s. So in the 80s, we did a lot of coke. Not gonna lie. And that’s just what it was, it was like, it was just like drinking alcohol back then. We did birth control pills that would not even be on the market today. You know,

Monica Hershaft  20:16

The types of hormones and the birth control pills in the 80s were insane. And I was on birth control pills for 10 years. None of that had to do with choline deficiency. But in terms of everyone’s unique body journey, I smoked cigarettes for 20 years. And I also drank a lot, because everyone drank a lot back then. And, you know, I never didn’t take anti-depressants, even though they tried to get me to take them because I was like, I’m not depressed. I’m very happy. I’m just sick.

Not telling me I’m depressed. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. But, so I do believe, like, some I’ve had people come in with mystery symptoms who are missing an organ or, you know, maybe how to diagnose disease in the past, that’s no longer there. Or, you know, a lot of times, so many people have leaky gut from overgrowth of fungus. 

So it’s tricky to like, create a profile for it. Because I’ve seen so many weird and different things. I love the weirdos like, I love when people come in, and they have, they’re like, Hey, I know this is gonna sound weird, but my bladder is settling out of my vagina or like, you know, and I’m like, that’s cool. It’s probably muscle integrity, we’ll work on that. 

Monica Hershaft  21:23

Just because everyone’s got something weird, or they think their thing is weird. And maybe it’s not. But generally speaking, it really manifests as a different combo platter for each person. 

Monica Hershaft  21:34

I’m also finding it to be very different generationally speaking, because I only had six vaccines being born in the 60s, but they require 74 vaccine doses now when a baby’s born, and they’re giving them vaccines earlier now like at birth, or before birth, even in utero, or like, you know, the vaccine schedule is a little insane. 

Monica Hershaft  21:50

They’re combining vaccines and never used to do that. So a lot of those people are more compromised in a different way. There’s more neurological issues. 

Monica Hershaft  21:56

We also didn’t have cellphones and computers when I was growing up. So we weren’t dealing with EMF and 5g and all of that stuff. 

Monica Hershaft  22:03

The pesticides being used in this country now were not being used when I was growing up, you know. 

Monica Hershaft  22:07

So it’s a very different world. And depending on when you grew up, and if you’re Gen X, or a boomer or a Gen Z, or a millennial or whatever, it’s different, because you’re growing up while your body was developing environmental toxins, and so forth are different. 

Monica Hershaft  22:21

And that being said, it’s a huge difference when I see somebody who grew up in another country where the European Union protects their people, more so against GMOs and the types of pesticides and toxins being used and beauty and skincare. 

Monica Hershaft  22:34

And they are eating more organ meats, and so forth, and real food, and not as much processed food as we eat here. And then they come to this country and gets sick within a year.

Misty Williams  22:43

Yeah, I mean, this is a really confronting thing that we all have to reckon with, when we start realizing that our bodies aren’t functioning well. And we want to get our lives back. We have to, like, do a full evaluation of our entire lifestyle. 

Misty Williams  22:53

And it’s, it’s confronting, yeah, I remember like, kind of coming to terms with you’ve got to stop eating gluten. And you know, just a lot of these things. When I when I first started out, I did the same thing you did, I went from doctor to doctor I started exhibiting all these symptoms after they took out my left ovary and diagnosed with endometriosis and, and everything was normal after that, 

Misty Williams  23:13

and I’m like, I am definitely not normal, and I am doing worse than I was doing before, you know, and then I ended up having mercury fillings improperly drilled for my mouth. Two years later, most likely I was living in this beautiful Victorian that was built in 1892 in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Misty Williams  23:26

What are the odds of me picking up mold while I was in that house? Oh, just discovered last year. So yeah, so I mean, it’s really confronting but it’s it’s environmental stuff. Like when I look at my whole journey and think like what made me sick, I had a lot of little T trauma. I had big T trauma as a child too. But the little T traumas, I think what did the biggest number on me, right? 

Misty Williams  23:48

So the little T trauma of basically being way overly responsible as a kid and kind of being conditioned to take on way more responsibility that my nervous system really could handle. So I had that. And then we likely lived in some moldy places. When I was growing up. We ate everything out of a box. Yeah.

Misty Williams  24:06

Yep. So when I had my come to Jesus time, and I’m trying to, I found the Paleo social health space before I found the practitioner that could really help me and for me, it’s been practitioners kind of like for you too, because you go to different ones, and they’re helping you in different ways. 

Misty Williams  24:23

But massive, massive lifestyle changes had to happen so that I could do this in this country. Yeah, it’s really confronting and hard in the beginning. But you know, second nature, then. That’s exactly right. I think we should unpack this a little bit for people because I know there’s women in our community that come in, they hear they see the conversations happening in our Facebook group especially. 

Misty Williams  24:43

And see the kind of changes and like, it’s the same thing that came up, came up for me at the time was like, number one. How do I afford this? Number two, it’s so daunting just to figure all of it out, you know, it just feels overwhelming.

Misty Williams  24:55

So how do I afford it? How do I even really know what to do? And then what am I going to do instead? Like, yeah, I take out gluten, like back then gluten was a really big deal for me now it’s like, I mean, it’s been over a decade, you know, who cares? I could go the whole rest of my life and it would be fine. 

Misty Williams  25:10

But yeah, it was big and confronting. And I’m sure that you go through this with your patients to have like we have these changes to make. Yeah, well, yeah. 

Monica Hershaft  25:17

But the thing that’s cool with my patients is that I have an online program that they do. That’s a 12 week long program that covers things in increments. So it’s not overwhelming. 

Monica Hershaft  25:26

It’s on a gradient. It’s like, here’s why we don’t do pesticides, here’s what the pesticides do to you. Here’s the ones that are used in this country. So stop doing that, you know, the next week, you know, there’s lots of tap water here. It’s got chlorine and fluoride. And here’s what that does.

Monica Hershaft  25:38

But also, the other thing that’s cool is when we work with patients is that because I’m muscle testing them every week, then every 90 days, we do a reevaluation visit, where we go through and see their levels through the muscle testing of the toxins like the aluminum with okay, maybe you’re getting aluminum in your daily life kind of cook, where are you using.   

Monica Hershaft  25:55

So they can see oh, this is what’s impacting my body. And this is how I can get rid of it. And this is how I can replace it. So then we’re like, Okay, the next time you buy any purse, right, make sure that you get an aluminum-free or you know what I mean? sure that it’s done in a way that’s manageable. 

Misty Williams  26:08

Yeah. For me, I remember starting to replace things as I ran out. 

Monica Hershaft  26:12

Yeah, exactly. That’s the best way. 

Misty Williams  26:14

Yeah, as I ran out.

Monica Hershaft  26:16

Everything all at once. 

Misty Williams  26:17

That’s right. 

Monica Hershaft  26:18

Actually it shocks your body If you did.

Misty Williams  26:20

Yeah. The elephant doesn’t have to be eaten in one bite. You can eat it one bite at a time. Over time. Yeah. So eventually you become a practitioner. 

Misty Williams  26:29

So you went through your journey, you got your life back, your quality of life back and you became a practitioner. And probably the same thing that drove you to become a practitioner is the same thing that drove me to build the healing Rosie community. I just found out there’s so many people who were struggling like I was and good. 

Misty Williams  26:44

Support was really hard to find, like, how do you navigate all of this? It’s overwhelming. And I felt a drive to make sure that I was doing everything I could to be a contribution to women that I cared about. 

Misty Williams  26:54

So I’d love to kind of hear your practitioner story like, Yeah, how did all of that come about for you? 

Monica Hershaft  26:59

Well, you know, I kind of made a pact at the time, so my dad’s an atheist, and I don’t know what I am. I’m just open to things. I feel like I’m sort of more spiritual. Like, even though we’re Jewish, we didn’t celebrate, like, we weren’t religious in any way. 

Monica Hershaft  27:10

And, and I was like, I don’t know what’s out there. But you know, whether I’ve guides or it’s like, you know, the universe or whatever. But I was like, if you get me out of this, and get me feeling like myself, again, I will do everything in my power to help others avoid us. I mean, they made a pact. So then when it happened, I was like, I made a pact.

Monica Hershaft  27:29

So that drove me but I also was so pissed. I was so pissed that it took so long to find the answers. And I was so pissed at the way I was treated by every doctor I went to, I was made to feel like a hysterical female, like, I was overreacting, like I was being dramatic. And I was like, something needs to be done. 

Monica Hershaft  27:48

This is not okay. And that’s what drove me to do it. I mean, I gave up everything that made me who I thought I was, and took on a completely new identity. And from a place of honesty, anger, motivational anger.

Monica Hershaft  28:02

Goal, you know, and I think the thing that makes this work so fascinating to me, and it was the only thing that worked for me, because I tried everything, I would go to other states and see specialists, I literally did everything a person could do to try to figure out what was wrong with them, I did anything and everything. 

Monica Hershaft  28:17

And I love this technique, and what’s so special and unique about it. And I think the reason why it blew up and got big, so fast. And every time I’ve opened in a new area, or if I, when I first started the practice, it blew up really fast. And then even moving to Arizona. Now we’re really busy. It’s only been a few months that we’ve been here. 

Monica Hershaft  28:34

And I think it’s because we can discover the blocks to healing through this technique. And address that because so many people go to get things done, and it works at first, but then it stops working, or they get better or worse, better, worse, or it doesn’t work at all, or it works, but then it doesn’t last. 

Monica Hershaft  28:50

And this technique addresses all of that because we’re able to determine if the nervous system is blocked or switched, which I have a whole video that explains what that means. 

Monica Hershaft  28:58

But in a nutshell, basically, if you have, it could be any type of a physiological stressor, like bacteria, fungus, parasites, virus doesn’t matter if your labs are normal, or if they find something that’s not even relevant to this. 

Monica Hershaft  29:10

Or if you’re missing an organ, or if you have scar interference in a certain place on a certain meridian, especially the midline of the body, or if you’re eating terribly, or if you have heavy metals, you were talking about the fillings in your teeth chemicals.

Monica Hershaft  29:22

If it’s to a point where your nervous system cannot manage it on its own. And it’s like drops in a bucket, it overflows and the body can’t manage it.  

Monica Hershaft  29:29

The nervous system becomes reversed, meaning your sympathetic and your parasympathetic actually reverse. And that causes switching which means any treatments you try won’t work unless you’re addressing the thing that’s causing the switching. 

Monica Hershaft  29:40

And when that goes unaddressed for too long, it becomes blocking where it’s like you’re pushing on the brakes and the gas at the same time you’re like burn, and then people respond to any treatment. 

Monica Hershaft  29:49

So that’s the phenomenon and so we’re able to determine Trina Felber talks about this publicly, she went everywhere for years and she just kept getting sicker and sicker and it kind of started after she had her twins in her 40s and progressively got worse. 

Monica Hershaft  30:01

She had an old broken tailbone from back in the day that got reactivated when she gave birth. And I had to put her on a bone and joint supplement because that was the midline of her body, it was right at the bottom of her vertebrae, her spinal, and until we got her on high doses of this bone and joint supplement that was a bovine glandular, her body wouldn’t respond to anything else. 

Monica Hershaft  30:19

And she was just constantly sick and couldn’t breathe well or anything. And then as soon as she got that supplement, then her body started to respond to everything properly. So it’s amazing what the blocking and switching phenomenon can do. 

Misty Williams  30:30

Yeah, I’m actually thinking as you’re talking about that, I’m thinking of my mold toxicity and how it gets to the point where the body’s just not responding at all to anything that I’m doing. Especially I had gained about 18 pounds. And I could not, like none of the tricks worked. 

Monica Hershaft  30:42

Absolutely!, 

Misty Williams  30:42

My body was not letting go and identifying that upstream stressor. And like what’s really creating the dis-ease in your body is crucial, you know, 

Misty Williams  30:42

Yeah, yeah. I would love for you to just share with us how people can work with you, I know that you are local in Scottsdale, I would love for you to share how people can work with you. And if I’m excited about people knowing about this modality, because there are practitioners all over the country. So tell us a little bit about both. 

Monica Hershaft  31:10

So absolutely. So it’s so funny, because there are practitioners that do this modality, there are not practitioners that do it to the level that I do it, unfortunately, because there are certain patterns that have developed that I’ve witnessed over the years that made it so that I’m able to get a very high percentage of people to a point where they can actually reach completed and done and, and don’t, and they don’t have to come back once they finished the program their bodies working the way it’s supposed to again. 

Monica Hershaft  31:33

And I’ve had some people approach me about sort of developing a technique from that and taking it to that level and teaching people how to do that. So that is something we’re talking about right now. 

Monica Hershaft  31:42

But in the meantime, people can work with me if they’re local, obviously, in the Phoenix Scottsdale area, by going to my website at monicahershaft.com. We also have a free immune repair food list at monicahershaft.com/food. And you can get started with the way that we recommend people eat there. 

Monica Hershaft  31:57

But there’s also I think it’s under if you go to nutritionresponsetesting.com I believe you can search for a practitioner near you, that does a similar technique, it won’t be exactly what I do, but it’s very similar. And they also don’t do the reverse blocking that I do, meaning finding the hidden hidden stuff, but they can still determine blocking and switching. 

Monica Hershaft  32:18

So they do the muscle testing as well. So it’s definitely worth it. Because just having someone being able to find something wrong with you is half the battle and just getting the legitimate, you know, diagnosis for lack of a better word. I hate the word diagnosis. But you know, I think the hardest part about mystery illness or any type of illness where it’s not like labeled cancer or something like that, you know, you don’t want to go around praying for cancer because you want people to treat you seriously. 

Monica Hershaft  32:42

And it’s like you people tend to drop off, they tend to feel okay, she doesn’t have a diagnosis like When is this gonna just just want attention, and not to sound. I just love the Real Housewives series on bra. And so there was a housewife, Yolanda, who had Lyme disease and disease from her breast implants. And she was really sick and couldn’t get it figured out for the longest time. 

Monica Hershaft  33:03

And there were scenes of all the other housewives talking about how she just wanted attention. It’s Munchausen. She’s, you see her on Instagram, she’s not really sick. And she was legitimately sick. And she ended up finding lyme. And they found this breast implant illness. And you know, it was really hurtful, she pretty much lost most of her friends and her husband left her. 

Monica Hershaft  33:20

Like that’s what happens to people that are going through this who can’t get a real diagnosis. So we need to make a change so that people can get legitimate support from the people in their lives and not feel like a pariah because they don’t have a cancer diagnosis. You know, nothing against people who can get that legitimate diagnosis. 

Monica Hershaft  33:35

But there’s a ton of us out here dealing with real problems that just because we don’t have the label doesn’t mean that they’re not interfering with your life. And so that’s what this is about is really creating a community so that those people get the support they need. 

Misty Williams  33:47

Yeah, I think this is something that women have been dealing with for hundreds of years really in some form or fashion. You look back at women being put in insane asylums, it was easy for them to get committed. All they needed was a husband who said they need to be committed, you know, no rights. No, say I had a man reach out to me after I did fix female hormones.

Misty Williams  34:05

And it was the most beautiful email, I read the email. I remember Roderick and I, my partner, had a new relationship at the time we were out in California riding in his convertible.

Misty Williams  34:15

I’m reading this email, and I’m just bawling in the passenger seat because this man was telling me about his wife who had passed away a couple years prior and she had gone through all the things that you’re describing where she was sick, and she couldn’t get a diagnosis. 

Misty Williams  34:28

And he would go to doctor’s appointments, and the doctors would be like, you know, your labs are normal and things are fine. 

Misty Williams  34:32

And because he as the husband heard a doctor whom he saw as the authority, tell him that his wife was fine. He started basically treating her like why are you being such a hypochondriac, right? Why are you acting this way? And, she ended up dying young and happens in the regret that he felt, you know, like not being able to save his wife and he really, really loved her and he sees in hindsight, that he didn’t support her how she needed to be supported.

Misty Williams  34:33

He lost her. And now he gets to live the rest of his life with the regret of that. So this is very real. I mean, this deeply affects all of our lives. I’m thinking about my cousin, Jan, who passed away a couple years ago from all of her labels and diagnoses. But you know, she basically went to the doctor, and they would treat her symptoms and give her all these drugs, but they never, they never got to the root cause of what was wrong with her. 

Misty Williams  35:21

And there’s a part of me that feels like they killed her, you know, they killed her, because they didn’t care enough to really help her reverse what was happening in her body. 

Misty Williams  35:28

And she heard the same thing about food, it doesn’t matter. I’m seeing the same thing with my parents. And my dad goes, he has like this bird thing that he’s taking. He’s taking the proton pump inhibitors right now because he doesn’t like the acid reflux filling that he gets. And they tell him that diet doesn’t matter in this stuff doesn’t matter. 

Misty Williams  35:44

So it’s very important work that you’re doing Monica. And it’s important work that we’re all doing in this space, trying to help people get to the bottom of what’s going on in their bodies, and really deeply heal. So I’m grateful for you and for the ways that you’ve committed your life to contributing to lifting the boats for all of us. 

Misty Williams  35:58

And I’m grateful that we have a space in the last 10 years that I’ve been journeying with all of this. This didn’t exist 10 years ago, where there were podcasts and people having these conversations and helping me find resources. 

Misty Williams  36:08

So the world is changing. And I’m honored to be part of that change. And I’m so grateful that you’re a part of that change as well. So thank you for joining us. 

Monica Hershaft  36:14

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was such a pleasure. 

Monica Hershaft  36:17

Yes. Well, stay tuned, everybody. We’ve got more coming for you. And we’ll see you later. Bye for now. 

Monica Hershaft  36:22

That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you for listening. I hope you’re feeling more empowered to overcome your flabby, foggy and fatigue and to reclaim your life. If you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button right now so you don’t miss any of our episodes. We have some awesome shows coming right up. I love reading your reviews and comments too. They inspire me and encourage other Rosie’s to hang out with us and learn all these amazing strategies for healing and living our best lives. Till next time sister. Bye