Have you ever been in a place where you’re doing “all the healing things” and still not seeing results? Maybe you’ve tweaked your diet and supplements endlessly, but you’re still tired, your hormones are out of whack, and you don’t feel good. If so, this episode is for you.

What’s Covered in Episode 2

In today’s episode, I share my personal experience with this type of plateau, and what I had to do to overcome it. You’ll learn:

• Why there are limits to using nutrition to heal yourself
• How to tell if your anxious or depressed moods are linked to nutrition, or whether they’re true emotional or spiritual symptoms
• How your emotions affect your physical health
• The 6-word question that completely changed my healing trajectory
• What I did to feel better when I stalled with nutrition and supplements
• A simple shift that can make a profound difference for you

Relevant Links and Credits

• Download your self-sabotage audio and ebook bundle here.

Podcast Transcript: Episode 2 – When Nutrition and Supplements Aren’t Working

Welcome to episode two.

Thank you so much for your ratings, your reviews, your support, your love, your Instagram tags. It felt so good to me last week when I birthed this baby into the world and it was met with open arms, because I will tell you I had a lot of fear about launching this podcast. Somebody asked me the other day, do you ever deal with imposter syndrome? Like you just seem so confident. I deal with imposter syndrome every single day, but I just choose to ignore it and keep doing things in spite of it. So thank you for your love. I just, I so appreciate it and I want to make sure that you know about the download that I have. This little free goodie. So I put together an ebook, Seven Ways Your Subconscious is Sabotaging Your Health and Happiness, and that’s available for download on my website.

You can go to www.mindspeakpodcast.com/sabotage … and then a couple days after I made the ebook, I was like, why don’t I just record myself reading this and make it into a bonus audio? So now when you download it, you’re not only getting the ebook, but you get this bonus audio file. It’s kind of like a bonus episode of the podcast that you can listen to. And I’m an animated reader. I’ll just put it that way. There might be a surprise in the audio. So if you want to go over to mindspeak.com/sabotage, I’ve got those goodies waiting for you. But onto today’s episode, if you have ever reached a point in your healing journey where you feel like you’re stuck or you feel like you’ve tried all the things… I’m eating the right foods, I’m taking the right supplements, I’m being active, whatever it is in your case, but you’re doing all the things and you still have symptoms or you still feel like you’re stuck.

Today’s episode is for you. And I want to tell you about my story and my experience with this. As I mentioned on the last episode, in 2014 I discovered the immense healing power of food and I was able to completely transform not only my physical health, but my mental health with nutrition, and my mood completely stabilized. I was able to start losing a lot of the weight that I had gained on psych meds. I just felt so great and I made really great progress for about six to eight months. And then I started to hit a plateau with my weight loss. It was stalling and I, I still had a lot more that I wanted to lose, and my depression started creeping back in and my hair started falling out and I had really, really painful periods and I had no energy. I just felt exhausted and I was starting to feel like a wreck again.

And I was like, how can this be? Because you know, for the last several months I found this healing diet and I felt amazing and I just thought if I keep doing these things, I’m going to feel better and better and better. And here’s where I ran into a little bit of trouble because nutrition helped me so much. Again, not just physically, but also mentally with that mood stabilization, I stayed really fixated on nutrition because I was convinced that nutrition was my magic bullet because it helped so much. And I was like, well, anything that’s wrong with me, I can just nutrition harder and I’ll fix it. And I was convinced that I just needed to tweak things. Maybe I needed fewer carbs or I just needed to be on the right supplements or you know, I had recently discovered I had the MTHFR compound heterozygous genetic mutation and I just needed to support that in the right way and then everything would feel better.

You know, I was going down all these little rabbit holes, but I was convinced some sort of nutrition supplementation, dietary thing was going to fix whatever was wrong with me because that was the thing. That was the only thing that had really worked for me up until that point. And so I started seeing a nutritionist. I started seeing somebody who practiced a modality called NRT, or nutrition response testing. And this modality uses kinesiology and muscle testing to determine what supplements you need. And you may have had an experience with muscle testing in the past. I’m actually a very big fan of muscle testing if it’s used in the right way and if you’re asking the right questions. So I started seeing this practitioner and he was amazing and he really knew his stuff. And through kinesiology we determined that it was primarily my adrenal glands and my liver that were testing weak.

So these things are what I needed to support and that made a lot of sense. The adrenals made sense because I was fatigued all the time. And the liver also made sense because I thought maybe my sluggishness was coming from a need for deeper detoxification, especially with that MTHFR mutation that I mentioned that can really impact detoxification for people. So I felt really good about my protocol and I can’t remember everything that I was on specifically, but I do know that I was primarily on adrenal glandulars. I love adrenal glandular support. I recommend it all the time. And Spanish black radish, which is support for liver detoxification. Those were the two primary things he had me on and I was seeing him for about three months and I wasn’t noticing any improvement and I still had all my symptoms, my hair falling out, my periods.

I was sad, I had no energy and I was really hopeful that this was gonna work. And you know, we kept testing me and it kept showing up the same supplements. And he was concerned too because he said, you know, usually by three months people notice improvement. And I just wasn’t seeing that. And I was starting to get really discouraged. And then I was feeling even worse because I was discouraged. And then one day I came into his office and I sat down and he just seemed to have a little bit of a different energy about him than usual. And he looked at me kind of in a serious way, but with love and concern and just deep compassion. And he said to me, Holly, what do you need to heal? And there was a long pause and I felt my throat welling up and I felt the tears coming.

And I had this intuitive and absolute knowing deep within me and I just sort of blurted it out. I need to quit my job. And I burst into tears and I bawled and I bawled and I bawled. And I actually, I had to leave his office because I was so emotional. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this is the part where I say I went and I quit my job and it was hard and it was scary, but I managed and you know, I bootstrapped my way through and then I built my dream life. And you’re thinking, Holly, I can’t do that in my situation with, with my stressful thing, whether it’s your job or your relationship or some thing that you want to do that you feel like you can’t do, you’re thinking, Holly, I have a family, I have bills, I have hardships, I have XYZ situation and I can’t just drop everything and follow my heart.

So how the hell am I supposed to heal? And I hear you and I understand and I totally get it because actually that’s not what happened at all. I didn’t quit my job and follow my dreams after I left his office. My husband and I were in a ton of debt, like crushing debt and I needed that job to stick to our debt repayment plan, which was really, really important to us. So I couldn’t quit. I mean, I could’ve quit, but I honestly think it just would have put even more stress on me, but I did leave my nutritionist’s office that day knowing my root cause and knowing what I needed to do because I was trying to use a dietary hammer for an emotional problem. And again, this was tough because nutrition had helped my emotions so much, and I say to clients now that what nutrition will do for your mood and your mental health is it will give you a really solid baseline and a really solid foundation with your emotional health to make doing the deeper emotional work easier if you don’t have that solid baseline.

If you don’t have things like blood sugar balance and digestive health in check, if those are wonky, it’s really hard to tell the difference between what I call true moods and false moods. So your blood sugar can be all out of whack and you can be super anxious, but you can attribute that to life stuff. Whereas if you get your blood sugar balanced, if you get your digestive health in check, then if you have an emotion come up, you know that it’s a true emotion. And you need to use emotional tools to deal with it. But I was still pretty early in my journey and I didn’t fully understand that yet. And so I just kept wanting to take a nutrition hammer to everything. And so again, I couldn’t leave my job, but I knew I needed to find a way somehow to not be miserable there.

And I decided to stop seeing my nutrition practitioner all together, even though he was an amazing guy. I mean, frankly, the question he asked me, what do you need to heal, was maybe the most poignant thing anybody’s ever asked me on any part of my healing journey. But I decided to stop seeing him because I knew that wasn’t the work that I needed to do anymore. And I was paying attention to my emotions and my thoughts, even though it was uncomfortable, I started noticing what I was telling myself every day about my job. I said things like, they don’t appreciate me. They don’t know what I’m actually capable of. Everything I do here is a waste because my projects always get canceled. I hate the politics in this office. I’m going to be stuck here forever. There is no way I could ever find a better job in this area.

I’m trapped. I’m stuck here, and hearing myself say those thoughts. I mean, no wonder I was miserable. And going back to the kinesiology part, I’m gonna tie this in with emotions. This goes into asking the right questions when you’re using kinesiology. It made sense that my adrenals tested weak because I was under so much stress and it made sense that my liver tested weak and showed a need for detox. And it made sense that my body resonated with supplements that strengthen the energetic field of these organs. So I was, I was resonating with these supports, but I wasn’t getting to the actual root cause. The actual root stressors, what I needed to distress was my life and what I needed to detoxify were my thoughts. If you look at Chinese medicine or energy medicine, the liver is actually the seat of anger and primitive emotions.

And Louise Hay says that the liver is linked to chronic complaining and feeling bad. And I was doing a lot of that. So it wasn’t that I was assessed quote unquote wrong by my practitioner or that those supplements weren’t at all beneficial. It’s that I was using the wrong tool. I was using a supplement bandaid for an emotional problem and I also happened to be working with an amazing life coach at the time. Hi Sara, if you’re out there. She was amazing. I had, I had a few practitioners in my corner at that time because I was, I was in like a hot mess phase where I felt like I needed all the support I could get and I just love working with practitioners and so I was, I was working with a few at that time and I was working with Sara, and I had a big breakthrough moment with her.

I didn’t, I don’t know if I knew it was big at the time, but this tool really, really transformed me and she gave me a little experiment like this little homework to do. She said, I want you to start noticing in your life at your job. I want you to start noticing what’s good and what’s working. And Sara was really smart because she could’ve told me, I want you to write a gratitude list every day, which is kind of the same thing as noticing what’s good and what’s working. But if she would have told me, I want you to write a gratitude list every day, I would have been like, whew, no, that’s stupid. I’m not going write a gratitude list. I was so cynical. I don’t even know if I was like outwardly cynical and people picked that up about me. But inside I was like, Oscar the fricking grouch.

I was just so mad and angry and jaded, so thank goodness Sara did not tell me to write a gratitude list. She said, notice what’s good and what’s working. And so instead of focusing on why I hated my job, I started looking for any little teensy, tiny reason to like it. And that was really hard because I was real bent out of shape about my job at that point. So I just started noticing any little thing I could, I noticed, Hmm, dress code is casual. I can wear jeans to work. That’s pretty cool. Even though there’s a lot of dysfunction here. I actually like my boss and thank God for that. Okay. I’m at a place where I don’t have to work until like nine and I can even leave early if I want to. That’s a plus and I’m paying off my debt and even though I feel trapped here right now, I’m super excited that I’m paying off my debt because one day I know my future self is gonna thank me for all this debt that I paid off and I just kept this little list in the back of my planner.

It was this informal little thing and I just wrote down a few things every day and sometimes I would literally write like there wasn’t an accident on the way to work today or I ate breakfast. Sometimes it was just the dumbest stuff. And after a few days I noticed I was feeling better, and Dr. Wayne Dyer, the late great Dr. Wayne Dyer says, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, and things were changing. And a month later now remember I stopped seeing the practitioner. I actually just decided to like cold turkey, quit all my supplements. I loosened up on my eating. I mean I was still eating clean. I was still eating healthy, but I wasn’t counting my macros and all this other stuff I was doing. I was just eating real food and really all I was doing was working on noticing my thoughts and redirecting them when the little gremlins came out.

So a month later my hair stopped falling out, my period cramps were gone. I started to lose weight again, like a significant amount of weight. Like I dunno, I think I lost like four pounds in a month after a massive plateau, which is a pretty big deal. I had energy again and most of all I wasn’t totally miserable at my job. I felt like a completely different person. And you know what’s funny is by the time I quit my job, which was many, many, many months later, by the time I time it came to put in my notice, I actually liked my job and I was almost sad to quit. And the only thing that changed in that time was how I was thinking about my job. And I share this with you because I see so many people get stuck on the food, especially if food initially gives us really good results.

We think, oh, food is the thing. Food, food is the master key to everything. And we think we just need to protocol harder or tweak things or find the right supplement. And sometimes that’s the case. And sometimes you do need to dig really deep with functional medicine tools and lab testing and all sorts of things. But so often with people, I find we have these elephants in the room. I find we’re missing the forest for the trees on our healing journey. And we know the thing we need to do in our life, the big scary emotional thing we need to do in our life to heal. But it involves a scary decision or it’s not the right timing or we have fear or it would mean we have to put ourselves out there, be vulnerable or I mean there’s a million reasons. It’s unique to your situation.

And so we avoid these things and we dance around these big decisions and these callings and we pretend like we’re not in pain because it feels easier to ignore it, to deal with it, but if you ignore it for long enough, your body’s going to start screaming at you and that’s why we get symptoms. But I want to ask you something. What if you didn’t have to eat the whole elephant at once? What if even if your situation totally sucks, whether it’s a job or a relationship that you feel stuck in or a relationship that you want but you don’t have or there’s something that you really want to do but you feel like for whatever reason you can’t do it. What if even in spite of that situation, you could inch your way one day at a time, one thought at a time toward feeling better.

If you can’t make the major shift that you want to make in your life right now, how can you make a micro shift? Sometimes that starts with noticing the smallest, silliest things that are working that are good and that are working. I like how soft this sweater is. I’m so glad my neighbor moved out. He smelled so weird and now I don’t have to smell him anymore. I love my cat. I have clean socks. I know this stuff sounds so dumb, but we really do take things for granted. And I always get reminded of this when whenever I get a kink in my neck or I have an injury, or I sleep on my pillow funny and then I can’t turn my head the next morning. And I think, Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry neck. I’ve always taken you for granted. I’m never going to take you for granted again.

And it’s true about so many things in our lives we have so much to be grateful for. And if we can just stop and slow down and notice. Your coaching takeaways for this episode… I’m not going to tell you to make a gratitude list or keep a gratitude journal, because if you’re anything like I was in the past, you’re gonna roll your eyes. You’re going to say, I’ve tried to keep a gratitude journal 500 times and it’s dumb, so I’m not going to do that to you, but I do want you to start noticing in the smallest ways you can what’s good and what’s working in your life. Make it into a little game. Keep a list. Do this. When you feel super crummy, do this. When you feel good, just start doing this. I want you to take a second right now. Whether you’re in your car or you’re going for a walk or you’re doing your dishes, I want you to tune into your environment right now.

I want you to notice one thing that’s good and working in your life, is your car driving down the road. Are your feet taking you somewhere? Is your sweater soft? What’s going on? And just keep noticing because what you focus on expands. That’s actually the reticular activating system in your brain. Whatever you train your brain to pay attention to, it’s going to start to find those things. Have you ever bought a new car? Like right now, I drive a Honda Fit and I remember when I bought my Honda Fit, I started seeing Honda Fits everywhere. It’s like, is everybody driving a Honda Fit now? What the heck? It wasn’t that suddenly everybody started driving Honda Fits. It’s just that I started noticing them. So we live in a universe of infinite possibilities and whatever you focus on, you’re going to bring it into your life.

So choose to focus on what’s good and what’s working. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Again, go grab that free double download on my website. You get the ebook and you get the bonus audio recording about self sabotage. So head on over to www.mindspeakpodcast.com/sabotage. Grab your downloads and if you haven’t already, it would mean so much to me if you take a minute, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps me so much. Come find me over on Instagram and hang out with me @hollyfisherhiggins. I do a lot of behind the scenes stuff over there. There’s even more puns and ridiculousness over on Instagram, so come find me. But until next time, go believe in you. I do.

Wait, did I just say double download? That’s, that’s like the KFC value meal thing a couple of years ago. What was that? The KFC double down. No, no. I’m going to call it a bundle. It’s a bundle. It’s not a double download.