Tag: Hormones

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. 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  00:22

Ooh boy, I am so excited about the conversation we’re going to have today with my friend Michelle, who I have brought into the healing Rosie community to serve our community at large. Many of you know that I launched healing Rosie and 2018 to support women dealing with flabby, foggy and fatigue, figuring out how to navigate the healing journey and you follow my journey to getting my life back and my quality of life back. 

Misty Williams  00:48

That’s really what I feel like I’ve done as I’ve gotten my quality of life back. And one of the frustrating experiences that I’ve had, as I’ve traversed this new role, really in my life of having a community of women is watching you guys, play whack a mole, working with your practitioners, right? 

Misty Williams  01:05

First of all, finding a practitioner can be challenging and confronting. If you’re working in the conventional medical model of mainstream medicine, getting them to even acknowledge that your symptoms can be helped with something other than pharmaceuticals, can be its own challenge. 

Misty Williams  01:19

But I’ve also watched women working with practitioners and doctors who call themselves functional medicine, or integrative medicine or naturopathic medicine, doctors or practitioners and continue to struggle, though, maybe they’ll see some slight improvement in their symptoms, move it, if on a scale of one to 10, they’re exhaustion. 10 being like I’m dead from exhaustion. Maybe they go from a nine to a seven. Right, so you’re not as exhausted as you were, but you still know that there’s miles to go. 

Misty Williams  01:19

I’m witnessing that a lot. You see it in the healing Rosie Facebook group, if you’re active in our Facebook group, a lot of women coming in meeting support sharing the frustrations they have with their practitioners, and doctors. And so what I wanted to do for this interview today is I want to actually walk you through the framework that we’re going to be using in the accelerator, including the lab tests that we’re running.

Misty Williams  02:09

Because knowledge is power and when you’re working with your doctor, you’re at the mercy of what they tell you needs to be done to help you figure out your situation. And it can be maddening when they do what they tell you they can do. And you’re still not feeling better. And there’s no more answers. I don’t know what else to do. Or you can just tell by the way they’re treating your case that they don’t have another track to take you on. 

Misty Williams  02:32

So if you know what labs are part of a great healing protocol, it puts you in the driver’s seat, right so that you can look for practitioners who have experience with those labs. It’s not enough just to run the lab. That can be hurdle one, right, I don’t need to run these labs. But hurdle two is I don’t only need to run the labs, but I need someone that knows how to interpret these labs. So part of the vetting process really is asking these practitioners if they have experience with certain labs or conditions. 

Misty Williams  03:02

So I remember a Val in I think her name is Val in the healing Rosie Facebook group who was really struggling with gastrointestinal issues. And all year last year, she was going back and forth between her conventional doctor wants her to do this, and her functional doctor wants to do this. And so she would kind of go between and try a little bit of the functional stuff and then go back and try a little bit of the conventional stuff. Nothing was helping, she continued to have new symptoms presenting it was getting really scary for her. 

Misty Williams  03:26

I remember messaging her privately saying you need to find another doctor, whoever you’re working with neither one of these people are helping you, you need to find another doctor. And I really suspected in her case that she was dealing with some deep toxic stressors, maybe some mold, maybe some mouth infections. So she needed to work with someone that actually knew how to identify those conditions. Right? 

Misty Williams  03:49

If you’re a practitioner does not know how to identify mold toxicity. And you have it you will be undiagnosed, untreated. Right? So a big part of the challenge that we’re dealing with trying to find a practitioner is people that actually have the education to go deep enough with us to help us break through. Right, so she reached out to 10 functional medicine doctors in her area. Two of the 10 knew how to run the mold testing and then write a protocol for her if it came back positive. 

Misty Williams  04:23

Two out of 10 functional medicine doctors. So imagine if she would not have vetted her practitioner with, Hey!, are you able to do this kind of testing and write protocols for these kinds of conditions? My experience has been that if a practitioner knows how to deal with deep toxic stressors, that means they’ve gone deeper with their education. And they can typically help you with some of the foundational things and they can help you with the deeper stuff. 

Misty Williams  04:53

If they don’t know how to do the deeper stuff to tell, right then they’ve not really gone very far with their functional training. And I’m not saying they can’t provide some value, but I know what the women in our community are looking for. Right, we want someone that’s going to be able to go the extra mile with us and help us resolve these issues. So I’m going to give you a little sneak peek, we’re going to peel back the curtain, talk to Michelle, about the labs that we’re running for the women who join us in the accelerator. And I just want you to understand what it looks like when someone puts a great protocol together for you, and is able to take you deeper. Okay, so that’s the big takeaway, I want everyone to get clarity. 

Misty Williams  05:32

This whole conversation is meant to empower you, around your own journey to properly advocate for yourself to maybe take this information and compare it to the experience you’re having with your practitioner, maybe give you some insight into what you need to look for, maybe you need to go back to the practitioner, you have and say, Hey, here’s where I want to go. Right? This is what I want to achieve in my journey, and enroll them and taking you deeper, perhaps they can and they’re just not taking very much initiative with you. Right. So this conversation is gonna be fabulous. 

Misty Williams  06:03

So I found Michelle because I decided that what we needed for the accelerator was someone who was trained in by Reed in his Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, if you listen to the podcast, you may remember that podcast episode I did a few weeks ago with Reed. He is the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. And he has built a graduate level program teaching people how to use lab work and protocols to heal the body. 

Misty Williams  06:30

And I know a lot of chiropractors and medical doctors, clinic owners who all have enrolled in Reed’s course because he goes deeper, goes deeper than they do with the Institute of functional medicine. Right? He goes deeper than all of that he’s very holistic in how he views healing the body. And he teaches not only the biology and chemistry that’s important to healing, but he also teaches the reading the labs and putting together protocols that are going to address the body holistically and look for the healing opportunities so that women can heal. 

Misty Williams  07:04

So I know women who have gone to an FTMP, might be the designation, if you’re looking at letters after names, and been able to have get a lot of their life back. And I know that Reed is very, very well respected in our space by the practitioner, health experts, health entrepreneur community. And so I spoke with him in June, I myself have enrolled in his program, I will not be taking care of people in our community one on one, but I wanted the education so that I could be a good leader. 

Misty Williams  07:38

And I wanted to bring in someone who has been through his program and has in the trenches experience working with women, you know, doing these protocols and helping them heal. So I found Michele and she has an awesome background. In fact, Michelle, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about why you decided to become an FDN (Functional Diagnostic Nutrition) and your background in using this framework to help people get their lives back.

Michele Stanford  08:02

Like many of you, my own health journey brought me here. Before this, I was a paralegal for 16 years, I taught high school English for 10 years. But I was really struggling in the medical community failed me utterly just it was an absolute failure. There are good points to it. Right? If emergency, take your arm things right, take me to the hospital. 

Michele Stanford  08:27

But when it comes to preventive chronic conditions, it really is just an utter failure. And if they failed me, and I had a doctor fire me. So it was at that point, I had to write a passage, yes or no, it was excellent. Especially whatever happened really because I was forced at that point to figure it out on my own. And that’s when I as a learner, someone who loves to learn and research as I’d started my journey, going down all of the rabbit holes. So here I am now, once I figured out how to help myself and I fell in love with the work and helping people. And so here I am.

Misty Williams  09:02

Yeah, well, one of the things I loved about Michelle is she not only has a good understanding of the FDN (Functional Diagnostic Nutrition) framework, for healing the body, this great functional nutritional framework, but she’s actually gone really deep with retraining into a variety of different kinds of labs and tests. 

Misty Williams  09:18

Her acumen around reading blood labs and identifying what’s really going on just with your blood Labs is pretty astute. And she and I put our heads together and decided what we wanted to do for the women who are joining us in the accelerator. I want to review the list of labs that we are going to do for every woman that comes with us. But what’s important about this is I want you guys to understand how a comprehensive foundational framework using labs because we really do need the labs you guys, we need to know what’s happening in our bodies. 

Misty Williams  09:48

I’m using the labs, how you can put together a really great framework to help the body heal. And we’re actually going to talk about, we’ll go through the labs and then I’m going to also explain to you what goes into In the healing protocol, so this information is meant to empower you so that you can take a look at what you’re doing and see where you have opportunities to up your game, right work with your practitioner. If you want to apply to join the accelerator, you’re certainly welcome to do that. 

Misty Williams  10:12

But ultimately, I want all of you to know what it looks like. Because we don’t write and that’s why we lose. This is why I lost 10 years of my life not living optimally, because I was working with practitioners who would make a contribution, right, but they couldn’t take me all the way. And I had no idea what it looked like, if I would have known, oh, I’m looking for someone that can do this. Right? Like, how can I make decisions differently? A decade ago, five years ago, so yeah, this is gonna be awesome. 

Misty Williams  10:41

So here’s what we’re doing. Here’s the labs that we’re running, we’re going to run Blood Labs is this big list can go over it. Now, just if you’re interested in learning about labs, we have the healing Rosie lab tracker on the website, go to healing rosie.com, you can download the lab tracker, it’s free. The optimizing labs listed there, and we have their optimal values. So you not only get the labs, but also what are the optimal values? And what might it mean, if they’re high or low? Right? 

Misty Williams  11:03

It’s a tool that you can look for yourself, try to make sense of what you’re seeing in the labs. And then you can take that to your practitioner and say, Hey, here’s what I’m seeing, what do you think about this, get some help, but it’s meant to empower you. So we’re going to do a full blood workup. And we’re also going to run the hair tissue mineral analysis. 

Misty Williams  11:21

So I recently did a podcast with Barton Scott, where we really went into this more, we actually looked at my hair tissue mineral analysis results. Am I saying that right? Am I getting a backwards HTML? That’s right. So we looked at my results, and I shared a lot of what I learned now. I wish to God, I would have known that a foundational part of the healing period, no matter what you’re dealing with, is optimizing your minerals. Now, of course, we talked about how important magnesium is in potassium. So go take it that’s not optimizing your minerals. 

Misty Williams  11:52

Until you actually measure what’s happening in your own body, you will really not know, first of all, if your minerals are low somewhere. If the stuff that you’re taking is actually giving your minerals where they need to be. The next test we’re going to do is the Dutch. You guys know, we’ve talked a lot about the Dutch test in our community. We talked about it in Healing Rosie Facebook group. 

Misty Williams  12:10

I’ve interviewed Dr. Sean, we talked a little bit with Dr. Sean about the Dutch test. If you’ve been in Healing Rosie University, we actually have a lot of training around the Dutch test. But the Dutch test is a a urine test that measures your hormones that gets measured at several points throughout the day. And even overnight, if you wake up to pee in the night, and we learn how your hormones are functioning, we learn how your estrogen is converting if it’s going down toxic pathways or not.

Michele Stanford  12:36

That is beautiful. I love that because when we determine whether or not it’s going down the more carcinogenic pathway, we’re not stuck with that we can actually move it, you know, into the more protective pathway. But you have to know,

Misty Williams  12:51

yeah, that’s really empowering to know. Another thing that I love about the Dutch is it measures your melatonin too. So you can see how do you have enough melatonin in your system to fall asleep and then stay sleep throughout the night. So it’s a good indicator, especially if people are working on their sleep. I think it shows some methylation stuff, there’s lots of good stuff in the Dutch. So we’ll talk a little more about that, as this interview progresses, but we are gonna do the Dutch test, then we’re going to do the GI map.

Misty Williams  13:17

It’s a gut test to see how our guts are doing what we need to do. There’s a few Givens we know that people are probably going to have low good bacteria levels, right. And they probably have leaky gut going on and a few other things. We want to run the Dutch test. And we are going to run the OAT organic acids test. 

Misty Williams  13:37

The OAT test is where we started seeing that I had fungus and mold issues. I was actually had really low neurotransmitters when I did the tests last year before I got my mold diagnosis. There’s lots of great stuff that you can find out about the OAT test. But what we want to do is get a picture of what’s happening holistically in your body, and use all this information to inform that protocol that you initially get put on. Okay. So before we go into that piece, 

Misty Williams  14:04

I want to spend some time with Michele talking about each one of these tests and how she uses them to inform her protocols with the intention of you guys, take some good notes here so that you’ve got a good frame of reference that you can successfully advocate for yourself with your practitioners. Right. So let’s start with blood labs. Start at the beginning. What are the what are the things you’re looking for in blood labs,

Michele Stanford  14:24

I’m looking at cholesterol, that’s really important. And if your cholesterol is high if your LDH (Lactate dehydrogenase) is high, which is the transport and not only is it a liver issue, but it’s probably also a thyroid issue because we need T3 to convert all of that. And so looking at a full thyroid panel and not just TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) or even just TSH and T4, I want to see what your free T3 is in your total T3 and your reverse T3 that tells me a lot about what’s happening inside your cells cholesterol, health. 

Michele Stanford  14:54

It also gives me a good idea of what’s going on in your liver. Because we can we can change that and we can without medication, so a lot of inflammation markers, I’m also looking for when I look at the white blood cell count and all of the different types of white blood cells, so neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, and basophils, I can tell and see, depending on where you are, whether or not you have a bacterial or fungal, viral, or parasitic infection, because a lot, oftentimes parasites will show up on a GI map, but I can tell through those values.

Michele Stanford  15:28

If you’re fighting, if your body’s fighting those types of low grade chronic infections, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be sick, with a fever with all these things, it just means that these are our low level, they’re chronic, your body’s constantly, your immune system is just constantly, stressed by them, grossed out by it. And so we can see, and doctors look at it and they go, Oh, you’re fine, but it’s not, it’s really not fine. We looked at, I notice this week, and you might not realize this, but every year, once a year, labs update their value ranges based on results from the prior year. 

Michele Stanford  15:59

So every year, their reference ranges get more broad. And one marker, I noticed in a test yesterday, it just changed because you know, just a few weeks ago, the test results came back and they were the old value. They’ve updated their value by five points. Five points. That’s a lot. And so we want to again, like Misty said, we want to look at it at a more functional range. 

Michele Stanford  16:20

We have to watch that because doctors aren’t really paying attention to that they’re just okay, well, this is, they probably don’t even notice that the values are increasing over time, definitely want to look at, you know, all your red blood cells, if they’re too high, that indicates, some B, vitamin issues, if they’re too low, obviously, iron issues, just a lot of other different inflammation markers. So there’s just a lot of really good information that we can get from there.

Misty Williams  16:43

Yeah. And I think it’s pretty awesome when you’re working with a great practitioner who can see infections in your bloodwork, because that’s not a linear part of reading labs. Right? There’s not a parasite lab.

Michele Stanford  16:53

Right? I think there actually is a company that’s all they do. From blood work. Not in blood work is a stool test. That is not the jam out.

Misty Williams  17:03

Right? Yeah. But you know, I’m just saying there’s not a there’s not a parasite blood lab. Generally speaking, I mean, you need to have the acumen you need to work with someone that knows how to identify those infections in your blood, because if you can see it in the blood work, then you can do something about it. Part of the challenge that we’re dealing with when we look at the conventional framework is that conventional, first of all, most conventional doctors really don’t know and understand bloodwork. 

Misty Williams  17:27

I remember, the primary care doc that I went to after my surgeries, when I’ve experienced six months of just exhaustion and fatigue, and I was an emotional basket case. So much brain fog, I remember begging her to run labs. And finally, she was so exasperated with me, I can be very persistent, if you can’t feel it in my energy. But she finally said to me misty, even if I did run your labs, I wouldn’t know what they meant, which was stunning. I remember just feeling like stunned, I didn’t even know what to say. Like, what do you mean, 

Misty Williams  17:56

I had this belief, this perception, right that, if I’m going to my doctor, they go through all these years of medical school training, you know, 8, 12, 16 years depending on what their disciplines are. And they don’t know how to read blood labs. So you know, you can’t assume that just because someone has been conventionally trained that they know anything about bloodwork, but even still, a lot of what they learn with blood is looking for advanced states of disease. 

Misty Williams  18:21

It’s a very different lens than looking at your bloodwork and seeing are you optimal, right? Is everything healthy and functioning well. So yeah, blood labs are important. Alright, let’s move on to HTMA hair tissue mineral analysis tests,

Michele Stanford  18:33

like Misty said, minerals are foundational, if we can’t get those balance, then all the rest of what we’re trying to do is not really going to work very well. So it’s very foundational, that htma is a very nuanced test, depending on whether you know what your metabolism rate is. And it’s not necessarily metabolism, that how fast you metabolize food, but your metabolic rate, how do you hold on to things to your body release things? Depends on what your rate is, there are ratios that give us windows into what are your adrenals doing? What is your thyroid doing? How’s the blood sugar affecting your minerals. 

Michele Stanford  19:06

So there are different ratios, we can see if you have an iodine deficiency, we can see if you have copper toxicity, and when we look at there’s not a marker necessarily for copper toxicity. But when we look at it, a number of the different ratios. And if you have these that are elevated or low, then you likely have copper toxicity. And that either means it’s bio unavailable to your body, or you have too much. So there’s a very, very nuanced test. And there’s so much information in it, and we can’t address everything right away. Right? 

Michele Stanford  19:37

So we got to balance those first four primary minerals are calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium. Do you have a calcium shell? You know, do you have too much calcium should be in your bones, not in your tissues? So if you do then we have to work on that we have to break that up. There’s so many it’s just such a beautiful test. And we can gather so many things from it, that it’s hard to even describe it all really

Misty Williams  19:59

Yeah, yeah, I have a whole podcast about this, if this test is interesting to you just go listen to the podcast I did with Barton. But we can also see if you’re excreting metals, there’s several ways to measure metals in the body and how you excrete them through your tissues is one way.

Michele Stanford  20:14

And if you have really high levels, especially for someone who’s a slow oxidizer, then that’s a really good indication that we need to do some further testing to see you know, your metals, because I’ve had that happen, slow oxidizer, but her metals were like literally off the charts. And so it’s like, okay, you have a lot of heavy metals in your body. So it kind of points to whatever, what else do we need to look at? And what else do we need to do? And it’s a process, you know, we can’t fix everything all at one time. Our bodies just won’t handle it. So we have to, it gives us a roadmap.

Misty Williams  20:46

Yeah, the important things about minerals is you can’t, you can’t balance your hormones without balanced minerals, you can’t detoxify Well, without balanced minerals. So this means we can do things to artificially prop up, right, we can do things to force the body. But we are not putting the body in an optimal state, right to get rid of the toxins that are in our system, or to bring our hormones fully into balance. Right. So yeah, that’s the hair tissue mineral analysis. Let’s move on to the Dutch.

Michele Stanford  21:16

Love the Dutch. Again, like I mentioned earlier, one of the beautiful things I love about it is we can see that those estrogen metabolites, what pathways are there going down? Are they going down, there’s 4OH, that’s 2OH, the 16OH and we want to make sure it’s going down the more protective pathway, we can look and see your ratios, the Dutch test, it’s important if you’re cycling, that we test on days, 19 through 21 for 28 day cycle, otherwise, it’s going to give skewed results. So that’s a real important piece to keep in mind when you get ready to test. 

Michele Stanford  21:46

Cortisol, what’s your diurnal pattern doing? What’s your rhythm? Are you sleeping at night? Is it because your cortisol is raising it too high in the night at nighttime? How much are you producing? How much is free in your body to be utilized? If you don’t have enough, then it’s not pretty, you’re not making DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone)? 

Michele Stanford  22:01

And what’s your testosterone doing? Are you more androgenic, we can even between that and some of the bloodwork we can determine whether or not you have things like insulin resistance and PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome) and then be able to deal with those things. And again, it looks at some B vitamin markers, it looks at some neurotransmitter markers, some oxidative stress markers and the melatonin. 

Michele Stanford  22:19

And melatonin is not just for sleep, a lot of the processes in our body require melatonin to work. So it’s a really important hormone melatonin is so we get good measurement on those levels. And it just methylation, how well are you, that’s a big word. Does everyone know what that means? It happens in every cell all the time, all day long. And it really is how well the body is moving things around, and how well you’re able to detoxify. And so if your body is struggling, your cells are dirty, like off your cells are dirty or scepters are dirty from toxins, then your body’s not going to be able to move things around, you’re not gonna be able to get rid of your estrogen. 

Michele Stanford  22:58

Estrogen is I use it then lose it hormone. And estrogen dominance is not about having too much estrogen. It’s not that your ovaries are over producing estrogen, it’s your cells receptor sites are dirty to meet toxins. And when we have too many estrogenic toxins in our body so we can get that from our beauty and skincare we can get that from it’s on our foods and the things we spray around us in the you know all those things, they mimic estrogen and so they get on that receptor cell site. 

Michele Stanford  23:24

And the real estrogen can’t get in to the cell. And because it hasn’t been used, it just continues to circulate in the body and it delivers toxic, and it can’t get rid of it either. So it creates this estrogen dominance where you have too much estrogen circulating in your system gives you all this horrible symptoms. And so we can see all of those things all at that test, which is just beautiful.

Misty Williams  23:44

I want to add a little color commentary to that just to help you guys connect a little bit more with methylation. When I had my mysterious 45 pound weight gain in 2013. I was doing all the things right. I was eating paleo working out with a trainer I had hardwired my house. So no Wi Fi in my house, I had gotten the meters and measured everything. I got rid of all the chemicals, all the things and I gained 45 pounds in three months. And it was super scary. And that’s a lot at five’ two” that’s a lot of weight. 

Misty Williams  24:07

And I did a Genova complete hormone test, which is very similar to the Dutch and measures methylation and methylation was zero. That was not misleading at all. So the weight gain for me happened because I wasn’t methylating. But why wasn’t I methylating. I did not figure that out until 2018, where I connected the dots on that on my own. Nobody ever asked. No one seemed to care, right? Connect the dots on my own and realized that Oh, I had mercury fillings drilled improperly for my teeth. I didn’t know what proper or improper would look like, right. 

Misty Williams  24:37

But I then I learned and the heavy metals in my system. Talk about gunking up your cells and your receptor sites. Yeah, that was trashed and wasn’t methylating at all. And that’s what created the weight gain. So yeah, methylation is very important. Very important. Very, very important. All right. Let’s move on to the GI map.

Michele Stanford  24:58

GI map. So There are three types of bacteria in your gut, there’s beneficial bacteria, opportunistic bacteria, and commensal bacteria which are neutral. And when in a healthy gut when the beneficial bacteria are greater in number than the opportunisti. 

Michele Stanford  25:15

The opportunistic have a job, they need to be there. So things like Ecoli and Cdiff (Clostridioides difficile) and strep, we have a small number of these things in our gut, and they’re important and they’re supposed to be there. But when there’s that number of beneficial bacteria have decreased, then opportunistic bacteria rise, and that’s when we get all of the problems and things that we have, and then candida overgrowth and all these things. 

Michele Stanford  25:35

So we can look at all of the major types of bacteria to see whether or not they’re imbalanced. If we have too much, or not enough, sometimes parasites show up, it does look for parasites. It looks for worms, it looks for Epstein Barr Virus, it looks for cytomegalovirus and a few other things. And it also looks at some intestinal markers. 

Michele Stanford  25:58

So dig look around a day. So is another liver marker, right? How well are you methylating? How well are you detoxifying? Which pathway you know which phase of detoxification is impaired? It looks at some pancreatic markers, how well is your pancreas functioning? Is it struggling as well as your immune system markers? So how well is your immune system working? Is it low as high as and overworked? So has a lot of really it gets a lot of really good information as to what’s going on in the gut.

Misty Williams  26:24

Now, you’ll see things like H. Pylori (Helicobacter pylori), H. Pylori, yes. Like other, you know, significant SIBO I believe in one measure,

Michele Stanford  26:32

you can look at doesn’t measure SIBO on the GMAT jam out that you can look, depending on which markers are out of range, it may indicate that you might have SIBO, you’d have to get a breath test to actually get a positive for that.

Misty Williams  26:45

Yeah, confirm. That’s right. Okay. All right, let’s go to the OAT Test.

Michele Stanford  26:49

OAT Type stands for organic acid test. So, back to those minerals, and vitamins. All of the biochemical processes in our body require vitamins and minerals to do their jobs. And the test is the various again, it’s one of those very nuanced type of tests. And so we can look at the different cycles in the body like the Krebs cycle, and oxalates, and mold, and it gives us a really good picture of if something’s imbalanced, we can look to vitamins and minerals to see which ones are missing. 

Michele Stanford  26:56

If something’s too high, or something is too low, it also looks at what else? Just the Krebs cycle and the carbohydrate cycle. How well are you processing and digesting your carbohydrates? What’s going on? Are you creating all these metabolites from that? And so it just gives us another good window into how well is the body doing its job?

Misty Williams  27:44

Yeah. measures all your neurotransmitters to see what’s happening with you. Yep, see what’s happening with neurotransmitters? Myotis. That’s where we saw the fungus. And

Michele Stanford  27:52

yes, you can oftentimes it doesn’t show up on the geomap. Fungus, Candida is really hard to detect, it often doesn’t show on the geomap that it will show up on the OAT.

Misty Williams  28:03

Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why we want to do both tests. Right? Not just one. The OAT test is where I started feeling, we all the other tests that we were taking. You know, it’s not that there is nothing that my test results were perfect, but they weren’t necessarily indicating what’s really going on at a deeper level. In my case, my insulin resistance went through the roof. And we saw some things on my markers that were new, right, like what’s really happening in the body. But all we knew is that something was off. We got some extra inflammation going on. 

Misty Williams  28:35

But it wasn’t until we did the OAT that we started zeroing in, okay, this is fungus. I’m like the mold that she’s dealing with here. Right? So. And without age, yeah, without knowing then you don’t do the right things for treatment. And I have a lot that I need to get cleared out of my system. I’ve been working on it now for a year, a whole year, clearing this stuff out of my system. And it’s very common for that journey to take two or three years. And I wish I would have started last summer with balancing my hormones because I probably would have had a more successful year for detoxing. I just wanted to be talks more, because it’s such an important part. But I learned that little bit of trivia until earlier this year. 

Misty Williams  29:15

So this is why I want you guys to have this information, right? Because I know what it’s like to be advocating for yourself, and to be looking for a practitioner that can help but if you don’t know what it looks like to put together a good plan and to measure well and to go deep and how do you know if the practitioner you’re working with is really helping you or how do you encourage them to go deeper? The practitioner that I’ve been working with I love her. She’s always been very cooperative and very supportive. And that’s the word. She’s not been a leader. For me, she’s been supportive. 

Misty Williams  29:43

So as I’ve come to the table and said, I want to figure this out and go deeper. Right? We got it we got to figure out why can I lose these 18 pounds, there’s something off something is wrong. So she supported me by saying alright, let’s do some deeper tests. She did not initiate and say, Alright, Misty, I’m looking at this you’ve been struggling with This wait now for a couple of years, we need to figure out what’s going on. I wish, right but it’s just not how it works. So anyway, 

Misty Williams  30:06

So these are the five labs, here’s what’s going to go into the protocols that we create. And I want you guys to understand this piece too. Because then you can start evaluating, if the protocols that you’re on are checking these boxes, right, you can go back to your practitioner doctor and say, Hey, we’re doing enough for my liver and gallbladder. How’s that looking? You know, are we really addressing that I’m concerned about that piece. 

Misty Williams  30:28

So first thing that we’re going to do is rebalance minerals, part of the protocol, we’re gonna rebalance minerals, we’re going to clear out infections. So we’re going to look at all the results here and see what are the infections that we have going on, we’re gonna get those cleared out, we are going to start healing the gut. Right? We are going to open those detox pathways and start preparing the liver and gallbladder to support clearing the infections and getting rid of the other toxins that show up. And then we are going to balance our blood sugar. 

Misty Williams  31:01

I mean, we could probably do a whole podcast episode just on blood sugar, it plays such a significant role and in the whole health picture, but it’s the disease picture really that right? Sugar plays, right? If

Michele Stanford  31:11

you don’t get to sugar balance, you never get to balance your thyroid hormones or your sex hormones, steroid hormones, you’re not

Misty Williams  31:17

all of it. That’s right. That’s right. And then we are going to work on priming the parasympathetic. If we can, if we are stuck in sympathetic all the time, we are screwed. Nothing else is going to work all this time and energy that we’re spending on our protocols, right? It’s being on doctors going and doing the sauna visits and having the sauna put in at your home. If you are not getting out of sympathetic chronic overstressed state all the time moving into parasympathetic, then you’re not going to heal. And then of course, sleep as you guys know how I feel about sleeping. Sleep is the most important thing that we do. That is right. You’re not sleeping, you’re not healing, you’re gonna hear me say it a million times,

Michele Stanford  31:49

Our Liver detoxified at night, and there are a lot of other things that happen while we’re sleeping. And if we’re not sleeping, those things aren’t happening. Yeah, our brain detoxifies at night. It’s called the glymphatic. System. Yes. So if you’re waking up at three o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning, it’s your alert, it’s probably a blood sugar issue, because your liver needs blood sugar to detoxified. So your body’s not doing what the healing work and it’s not repairing itself. You’re not sleeping. So teach.

Misty Williams  32:13

Yeah, yeah. So all of these things are important part of a good health protocol. But anyway, all of this together makes up a complete protocol. Now there is another step after this, right, this is where we start. And it will take at least 90 days, some of this stuff takes six months or more to bring the body back up to a foundational level where we can actually do the deeper healing work, right. But we’ve got to bring a lot of things into balance. 

Misty Williams  32:43

In addition to a good protocol, I encourage everyone to go out there and work with a doctor on your hormones, get that hormonal support that you need right now. So that you’re able to sleep so that your body’s able to use hormones for so much. And if we don’t have hormones, it slows down healing. That’s the simplest way I know to communicate that it slows down healing. So if you are a woman in perimenopause or menopause, you should be working with someone on your hormones. And that’s a different piece to this right. Can you optimize your hormones? Yes. Can you get your hormones back up to the optimal levels? Maybe not, especially if you’re in menopause. Right? So I feel like you have some to say about that. Michelle? Yes.

Michele Stanford  33:29

menopausal, perimenopausal and menopausal women, it’s so this goes back to the sleep piece. Once your ovaries are no longer producing estrogen, your adrenal glands pick up and what little bit of estrogen you have unless you’re taking you know bioidentical hormones, your adrenal glands have to pick up and produce a little bit of estrogen that you do have. And if your adrenals are tanked, and you’re not sleeping and you’re stressed all the time, then they’re not going to be you know, they’re not going to produce any estrogen. So that’s why sleep is important. 

Michele Stanford  33:59

Getting back into that parasympathetic dominant state most of the time is important, not depleted, because that can show up on the HTMA whether or not you’re in that parasympathetic and if you’re so far into it, that your body is just completely depleted and can’t do anything, but really working to take care of your adrenal glands, so that they will serve you well. You know, well into menopause.

Misty Williams  34:19

If you are listening and interested in joining the Healing Rosie University accelerator where we’re going to be diving deep with Michelle to six month program where we’re doing so much cool stuff all these labs we’re also going to all wear continuous glucose monitors for a month together measure blood glucose it’s going to be awesome really see how sleep impacts our blood glucose our diet impacts our blood glucose exercise impacts see what your body is good at processing what it’s not. 

Misty Williams  34:47

There’s a really excellent book by Robb Wolf called Wired to Eat where he really goes into the nitty gritty on how to optimize your own diet based on how your body manages glucose. It’s wonderful And he actually teaches you how to do it with by pricking, getting an ammeter. And just pricking, doing a test strip, which you can definitely do, if you don’t want to get a continuous glucose monitor, we’re going to wear the monitors and see what’s happening, over an extended period of time. But there’s lots of good stuff to learn about your body, just by measuring. 

Misty Williams  35:19

So that’s interesting to you just go to healingrosie.com. Pull up this podcast, and you can click on the application there application link, to apply for the program, and would love to talk to you more about it and see if it’s a fit. And yeah, it’s gonna be awesome. And I feel really excited about being able to bring something to our community that I know is gonna help all of you change your lives. 

Misty Williams  35:19

So we’re gonna do that together, we’re going to do the 21 day, liver cleanse that I talked about during my interview with Dr. Keisha. And we’re going to do that together, it’s also a really great elimination diet in general. So it’ll give us all a nice, reset, and then we can work on re entry, bringing foods back in. And we’re gonna dial in our sleep together and work on our routines, our morning routine mindfulness practices, all the things that are really important part of, of healing. 

Misty Williams  36:07

So we’d love to see, as many of you join us as possible, I believe we have eight slots in this beta. Of course, over the very first one we are, we are launching in a couple of weeks, and then we will be launching new groups to go through maybe every month or two, we’ll put a new group through. So if that speaks to you and resonates, I’d love to have you join us. And regardless of whether you want to join us in the accelerator, I hope going through this framework is helpful to you and serves you on your journey. I do want to speak a little bit about food sensitivity testing, because it’s a hot topic in our space. Alright, 

Misty Williams  36:43

so I just finished the Radical Healing Detox with Stress and Stressors masterclass a couple months ago, interviewed lots of the top dogs in our space. And universally, people said you need to do food sensitivity testing. And it’s also controversial, because you need to do the right kind of food sensitivity testing. 

Misty Williams  36:59

I did an interview with Dr. Peter Osborne. And he said that most of the time, and he’s right, he’s not the only one that I’ve heard say this, most of the time, it’s food sensitivity, we’re measuring IgG (Immunoglobulin G) reactions, which just says that our bodies have some kind of antibody, what we really want to be measuring is this having a negative effect on our system, right on our immune system is this it is causing our body to attack itself in some way, not just the presence of an antibody, but he encouraged lymphocyte testing. Okay, so the company that does lymphocyte testing is Eliza, am I getting that, right? Michelle 

Misty Williams  37:32

Eliza, they have a couple levels of tests that you can do, we are not doing it as a foundational test. Because first of all, there’s a lot because of what we’re doing with elimination and re entry, we’re gonna be able to identify the foods that are our triggers for us. But it can psychologically start messing with people to say, Oh, my body’s reacting to all of these foods that can create, like burn this belief, right that we manifest over and over again, that these foods are bad for us. And the truth is that once you remove the foods for a period of time, a lot of times the body is able to heal, right. 

Misty Williams  38:07

And when you reintroduce attitudes back into your diet, your body’s able to tolerate them, well, you’re not triggered by them. So, food sensitivity testing is something that we will do kind of Phase 2 if the individual is presenting in a way where we feel like food sensitivity testing needs to be a part of what we’re doing. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about this, Michelle, because this is something that you and I talked about together and figuring out what role food sensitivity would play in our core program. I know there’s a lot of people out there who have done food sensitivity tests, or have heard the importance of food sensitivity tests. And I want to make sure that we address that in this conversation.

Michele Stanford  38:44

I’m not a fan. We’re probably in the minority with that. Again, it goes back to the difference between the types of food sensitivity testing, the Eliza is the only one I would use because it does use the lymphocytes. Tell people what that is. So those are white blood cells. Right? And again, we can measure that on the blood chemistry, right? And so how are they reacting, you know what’s going on in your body that’s causing them to be over produced? I’m not sure exactly how they measure that, you know, as far as foods go, I honestly have not researched it. 

Michele Stanford  39:21

But if we do an elimination diet, if we take things out things that are the major offenders, right then would give the the body time to heal to calm, calm that inflammation down. And then we slowly begin to introduce things like in you should be able to tolerate all of these foods. But when you do these tests, like and I won’t call names, but there’s some direct to consumer tests people are doing and your body’s listening to everything you tell it. 

Michele Stanford  39:47

So what are you saying to your body? What are you telling your body? I can’t eat pineapple I can’t have you know, grains, whatever it is that your body is listening and if you tell your body that often enough, then guess what? You’re not gonna be able to eat those things because your body is like I’m gonna react every time I see this. So it’s harder to undo that thinking that it is to just not, not test and have it there to begin with Dr. Kharrazian talks about not eliminating too many things, it creates what’s called oral tolerance, and then you can’t add anything back in, it makes it really, really difficult. 

Michele Stanford  40:21

So if you get this food sensitivity test, and you have all these different foods, that’s telling me you can’t eat and you’ve eliminate all of them for an extended period of time, it’s going to be very difficult to ever add those foods back in. So I think taking out things that are very offensive that we know. So conventional wheat grains, conventional dairy, and we can have the conversation about around the difference between conventional dairy raw dairy and conventional grains and more organic ancient grains and why those are okay for you, and how to prepare them. 

Michele Stanford  40:51

We take out processed sugars and soy, never soy never ever miss soy. And corn, right. So the the major things, if we take out those things, we’re still left with tons of food that we can eat, right? And we’re not, we’re not eliminating so many things and then heal the gut, we’ve got to heal to get her to bring back that balance that beautiful balance that, the body’s created with. And then you can add some of those things back in, but you never want to add back in processed reverse, right? You know, let’s take out the things that actually cause the problem. Okay, organic corn, I mean, non organic corn, I don’t know, if you want to we can have this conversation another time. Podcasts, right, another podcast, 

Michele Stanford  41:36

the things that we’re eliminating this major inflammatory foods, you’re not really going to want to add those back in and what’s left are really helpful, right. And we need our body needs all kinds of different nutrients, and we want to get our nutrients from food as much as possible, rather than from a supplement. At times, supplements are necessary. And, there are will be supplements on the program. 

Michele Stanford  41:59

But we ultimately want to get our bodies to a place where it’s absorbing the vitamins and the nutrients from food because they all act and work synergistically with one another. And if you just supplementing with one vitamin here and one mineral over there, it’s not it doesn’t have all the other cofactors from all of the other vitamins and minerals it needs to actually do its job. So those are my thoughts on food sensitivity testing.

Misty Williams  42:22

So for what it’s worth, our perspective on food sensitivity testing. So visit healingrosie.com. Check out the show notes. If you want links to any of the things that we talked about, we’ll do our best to provide as many links as we can to different tests. And if you are interested in learning about the optimizing labs, you can download the healing Rosie lab tracker, very happy for you guys to all have these resources so that you can advocate for yourself and get the help you need to optimize and get your life back. 

Misty Williams  42:49

Thank you so much, Michelle, for welcome anytime today given this yes, it’s totally exciting, giving us this great download. And if you’re interested in joining us in the accelerator, just pop over to healingrosie.com and click the link to apply and we can have a conversation about that. So I appreciate everyone for joining us tuning in today and we will see you soon. Bye for now. 

Misty Williams  43:08

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 fatigued 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