How Stress Creates Inflammation with Christa Biegler

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Heal with Grace podcast. I have a wonderful guest today who is
[00:00:06] going to really help us break down holistically view how our physical health impacts our mental
[00:00:13] health and vice versa. We have Krista Regler who is a registered dietitian, is an award winning
[00:00:19] dietitian and root cause nutritionist and the owner of less stressed life nutrition. She helps
[00:00:24] people resolve food sensitivities, inflammation and eczema without unnecessary restriction,
[00:00:30] endless supplementation or costly testing. She lives with her unicycling husband and kids in
[00:00:35] the Midwest. And Krista speaks an equal mix of nerd and approachable analogies when educating
[00:00:41] about gut health, eczema, food sensitivities, micronutrients, energy and sleep. I know so
[00:00:47] many of you have gone down the rabbit hole of helping yourself physically in all the different
[00:00:51] things you can do from a functional holistic standpoint. And I really love how Krista comes in
[00:00:57] and helps us take away so much of the fear and just really gives an overview of how to do this
[00:01:03] and a more healthy way that doesn't stress you out. So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump in.
[00:01:10] Hey there and welcome to Heal with Grace. I'm your host Grace Secker and I'm a holistic
[00:01:15] licensed therapist and nervous system coach who believes that the chronic and often unseen
[00:01:20] symptoms you're living with are a sign of something deeper going on. A sign that your nervous system
[00:01:25] needs attention. In each episode I'll share the science behind the most common chronic health
[00:01:30] disorders plus holistic health tips using mental, physical and spiritual practices.
[00:01:35] You'll hear what I've learned in my journey and the true stories from our trusted guests
[00:01:39] so you can feel less alone in your experience and give yourself grace no matter what you're
[00:01:44] going through. So without further ado, settle in and get cozy. It's time to heal with Grace.
[00:01:51] Hello Krista, thank you so so much for coming on the podcast. I'm excited for our conversation
[00:01:57] and very happy that you're here. Thanks for having me Grace. I'm excited to
[00:02:00] get a little bit nerdy with you today. Yes, thank you. That's perfect. I love the language
[00:02:05] around that. As we were talking, my listeners know a lot about the unconscious reasons for
[00:02:11] chronic pain and chronic illness and how that can manifest. I can talk all day long about it,
[00:02:16] but at the same time, I'm really excited to have you and your background come on here and
[00:02:20] really validate some of that, especially with this realm. First and foremost, why don't you just
[00:02:25] tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this place in your career?
[00:02:28] Yeah, I want to make sure we talk about the health triad which really links
[00:02:32] what the work that I and you do together. And I think that's a really good jumping off
[00:02:36] point. And so I'll say that when I got into the work I was doing, I was
[00:02:39] pretty unprepared for all the emotional and energetic interference that was happening with
[00:02:44] the physiological body. My story started in many places, but in about 2015-16, I had my first major
[00:02:52] health crisis, which I woke up one morning and had broken out with a rash all over my eyes and
[00:02:56] neck. Of course, I'm sure my body was whispering all kinds of things long before it was screaming
[00:03:01] at me, but I had two young toddlers. I was switching careers and I was just
[00:03:05] surviving. And I'm an Enneagram III high achiever. Just kind of get the things done.
[00:03:11] So that was the first one that took longer than I would have liked to heal. I had a hard time
[00:03:15] finding people to help me with that. I did what most sane logical people would do,
[00:03:20] which is look for someone else to fix it for me. And then I kind of came up a little bit
[00:03:23] short in a lot of ways. And so I had to dig into the physiology of what was happening in
[00:03:26] the body. And I was able to kind of crawl out of that hole. Fast forward a few years later,
[00:03:30] and I was starting my practice at that time. So maybe something interesting or useful to
[00:03:33] include here was I was doing food. So I'd already been practicing for about five years before this,
[00:03:38] but more on a more intense clinical setting. And so when I went into private practice, I
[00:03:43] was doing food sensitivity work initially. And in my own story of massive skin breakout,
[00:03:49] I actually by doing food sensitivity work, I actually created more issues in myself. Like
[00:03:53] I'd never had known issues, but when you're doing a food sensitivity protocol,
[00:03:58] it can be quite restrictive, which can add more stress to the body,
[00:04:01] which if it's already in a stress state can not always work very well. Essentially,
[00:04:05] you always want to be communicate safety to the body in order for it to heal as much as you
[00:04:09] possibly can. And so I was not doing that. And so when you do a restrictive diet, if you don't
[00:04:14] have a plan, you will be hungry and your body will be more stressed. So even with my
[00:04:18] background, I kind of went into it. This is very human. These are very human experiences
[00:04:23] where you're like excited and you start something and then there's not like a fully
[00:04:27] fleshed out plan on the back end. So I remember at one point I was hungry one day,
[00:04:31] rummaging through the pantry for something that I could have. And I put some pecans in my mouth
[00:04:35] and my eyes swelled up and like I'd never had a reaction to that before. And so
[00:04:40] there's so much to the science of why that would happen. So that was in that first health
[00:04:43] crisis. A few years later, I was working in for a big health influencer in a program
[00:04:48] related to fasting and health at like 2017, 2018. And I created my second health crisis
[00:04:54] where I fried my stress hormones fully and completely. So it was like a full on burnout
[00:04:59] period of exhaustion, etc. And that was probably already brewing before as well. But that kind
[00:05:04] of sent it into more of a spiral. And then I would say my third version was really an emotional
[00:05:08] and energetic like really working on the inner healing piece of that overall. And so
[00:05:14] when we think about kind of the bridge between your work and my work, I still
[00:05:18] first and foremost help people with their physiology symptoms correlate to systems in
[00:05:25] the body. And when you support those systems, you resolve the symptoms from a physiological
[00:05:29] standpoint. Now, where it becomes important with your work as well that just part of the
[00:05:34] health tried for me, it's all it's like there's a triangle. And in one corner,
[00:05:38] you've got the nutrition, chemical stuff. In another corner, you've got the
[00:05:42] structural and environmental and external factors. And then in the third corner,
[00:05:47] you've got the emotional energetic, however you want to say that version, they all relate to
[00:05:51] one another. And depending on how the symptoms are manifesting, I think you I think you said
[00:05:56] you work with a lot of chronic pain, which is an entry and I'm pretty intrigued that you know,
[00:06:01] the emotional energetics of that as well. And so when we're dealing with chronic pain,
[00:06:05] we naturally start with a structural approach, right? Very often. But what we find as we
[00:06:10] dig into this is there's often an emotional energetic piece that's unprocessed. So
[00:06:14] similarly, right, when we've got skin issues, which I work a lot with, we start with like a
[00:06:19] topical or physical or external approach. But my thing as we grow from the inside out, and then
[00:06:24] of course, there's an emotional energetic piece that is kind of a real limiting factor on how
[00:06:29] the nutrition and the chemical actually work. So essentially, depending on what's going on in
[00:06:33] the emotional energetic, it's going to use up resources for the physiology to even work.
[00:06:38] So that's just set the stage for us to get into whatever we want. Love it. Yeah,
[00:06:42] many different directions. I have multiple questions. Okay, so how do you explain,
[00:06:47] you mentioned when we were talking, I want to explain a little bit more about food sensitivities
[00:06:50] before skin? Why is that? What's that connection there? And how do you explain it?
[00:06:54] Food sensitivities and skin or just in general, food sensitivities or what the
[00:06:58] root cause of food sensitivities are more so, I just want to make sure I go in the right
[00:07:02] direction. So when I mentioned, I want to, I want to help our listeners understand a
[00:07:06] little bit more about like what's going on when we have skin issues. And you mentioned
[00:07:10] let's talk about food sensitivities first. Sure. I think it's because I wanted to talk about the
[00:07:15] root causes of inflammation and how we sort of tend to perceive them overall and maybe just in my
[00:07:20] brain it makes more, I feel like sometimes we can get off on different tanges of skin. So I
[00:07:24] want to talk about the root causes of inflammation because very commonly we use this word
[00:07:28] inflammation, which essentially is good and bad, right? In the short term, it is good.
[00:07:33] Our body recruits essentially firemen and police officers or whatever to go to this,
[00:07:38] the location of a challenge, right? And recruits resources to go and heal that place.
[00:07:43] But if there's a systemic issue or if there's an area in this whole organ system,
[00:07:48] it's pretty hard to recruit enough resources. And what happens is you can have a decline in
[00:07:53] those resources as well. Like the immune system can really struggle. I'm trying to
[00:07:57] think about it from a really simple perspective. But anyway, inflammation is the umbrella.
[00:08:00] I always like to say, what are the root causes of inflammation overall? And then I'll kind
[00:08:04] of tie in what happens from there. So what causes of inflammation? There's several,
[00:08:09] but a couple of the biggest buckets include what's going on in stress chemistry,
[00:08:14] and then also what's going on in the gut and the immune system overall. So depending on what
[00:08:18] your familiarity is with different symptoms, you can tie a lot of things back to this. But
[00:08:23] other things that are going to fill that inflammation bucket are going to include what's
[00:08:26] going on in the environment. Like, are you getting environmental toxicants in the
[00:08:31] environment in general? And that's sort of very, also a very human experience. It's just sort of
[00:08:35] the world we live in. It's not meant to be fearful or anything like that. It's just sort of like
[00:08:39] reality. And when you look at the research, it's like, whoa, it's actually quite significant
[00:08:43] actually. And so getting these systems to work optimally helps reduce those symptoms.
[00:08:47] The reason I think I was thinking through these first is because
[00:08:50] if the two big buckets are stress chemistry and immune and gut function,
[00:08:54] in addition to many other things, right, what's going on, toxic burden and blood sugar
[00:08:57] and other things. But if those are the first two, what's going on with the gut and the immune
[00:09:01] system is going to very commonly look like food reactions first. And another reason I
[00:09:06] think I was thinking that is because very often people believe that food is really a
[00:09:11] cause to like, so people will adjust their diet when they've got a skin issue. And I
[00:09:16] am a questioner at heart. And so I always like to challenge everything we believe initially.
[00:09:21] And I would argue that food sensitivities are still a secondary issue. There's still
[00:09:26] a superficial issue. They're not the real root cause. They're sort of the surface level.
[00:09:31] The problem is, is that people will adjust their food intake and see a difference,
[00:09:35] for example, in the skin, which is downstream. So the skin grows from the inside out. And so
[00:09:41] what you are doing, putting in on or what's actually being digested and processed and absorbed
[00:09:46] can affect how things are growing from the inside out. So from a skin example,
[00:09:50] universally, there's a lot of things we don't agree about universally worldwide,
[00:09:54] depending on how, where people are coming from in their background. But universally,
[00:09:57] we agree. So I work a lot with eczema, because there's a little tiny bits of nuance with like
[00:10:02] acne and psoriasis. I don't necessarily become obsessed with the diagnostic. People love the
[00:10:07] diagnostic term, but then they realize like, Oh, there's not a super deep toolbox after we
[00:10:12] learn the diagnostic term. So for me, I like to see like, how is the body acting? How is
[00:10:18] it presenting? What kind of symptoms and what patterns are we looking at? But I'll talk
[00:10:22] about eczema since it's the thing I work most on most often. With eczema, something we do agree
[00:10:27] about universally, I think, is that there's a certain bacterial overgrowth on the skin.
[00:10:31] But if you think about that, the skin grows from the inside out. So that's usually going to mean
[00:10:35] that there's a bacterial overgrowth going on from the inside. The problem is, is if you
[00:10:39] throw antibiotics at it, it's going to, you know, it's like the lawn. And if you kill,
[00:10:44] if you put some weed killer on the lawn, you're going to kill both grass and weeds,
[00:10:49] which is what it is. That's a neutral fact, but you're going to kill grass and weeds. But for
[00:10:52] some reason with antibiotics, the weeds grow right back, right? So if you've seen that, like if there's
[00:10:57] a clear patch of dirt out there in the lawn, like usually weeds are going to grow up, they're
[00:11:01] opportunistic. And so there's lots of ways that this happens in the body. It's just one
[00:11:06] piece of it. There's a huge piece of how stress starts to manifest and cause more
[00:11:09] complex skin manifestations or issues as well. But essentially, if you've got these,
[00:11:14] we're causes of inflammation. So we've got inflammation as an umbrella. We've got
[00:11:17] what's going on with stress, the depletion of minerals, et cetera. And then we've got the
[00:11:20] gut and the immune system. And then we've got toxic burden, et cetera. All of this is going to
[00:11:24] start to look like food reactions and sensitivities, which is very commonly a first place people go
[00:11:29] with skin stuff. Once they get over the fact that it's not just topical, right? And we usually
[00:11:33] have that happen if we try something topical, and it works. And then it comes right back.
[00:11:37] That makes us think, huh, this doesn't actually seem to be working. Well, that makes sense
[00:11:41] because the skin grows from the inside out. And then the other part of this is that
[00:11:45] food reactions, food sensitivities specifically, which are not the same as food allergies,
[00:11:49] are caused by disruption to digestion and immune function and what's going on in the gut
[00:11:56] in general, as well as the other pieces, both the stress chemistry and the other pieces of
[00:12:00] inflammation in general. So it's kind of this whole downstream effect. And depending on what's
[00:12:04] going on with the skin, whether it's looking red and angry, better in the morning, worse in the
[00:12:08] evening, if it's dry in the winter, et cetera, that's where you can get a little more
[00:12:11] nuance in their specific systems that need more support, which is why, unfortunately,
[00:12:15] it's not a one size fits all. And I mean, you know, you're coming from a therapy background.
[00:12:18] So it's like, you might have something like, I'll just throw out like the first thing that
[00:12:22] comes to mind. You might have something come in the door that looks like depression or anxiety,
[00:12:26] but for you, it's probably got subsets, right? You're going to maybe not everyone gets treated
[00:12:30] the same way. And that's probably one of the biggest fallacies, you know,
[00:12:34] medically or why people fall through the cracks or why people do not resolve is we
[00:12:37] cannot treat everything with a surface level diagnostic condition the exact same. Not everyone
[00:12:42] responds the same because sometimes we have different types, right? Or for me, it's like how,
[00:12:48] what else is going on in your body and how do we categorize that to support systems to resolve
[00:12:53] symptoms? So I hope that starts to unpack that question. There's a couple of things I want to
[00:12:57] talk about in terms of stress and inflammation and specifically a bit of a side note, but
[00:13:02] obviously it all goes together. So you mentioned environmental, right? Talks and things that are
[00:13:06] also a very human, normal, worldly thing. Response. We, there's toxins everywhere, things like that,
[00:13:13] right? I've had a couple of different episodes about mold and how nervous system can really
[00:13:18] impact our sensitivity to mold, right? That's a big one in my community and like chronic fatigue
[00:13:23] and chronic illness. Well, it's a big thing up here that is like really fear feared. Yeah.
[00:13:28] How do you explain that? Because when you said, well, that's a human response, I was like,
[00:13:31] ooh, I wonder what she thinks. Like how does she, how do you explain that? Yeah, I think,
[00:13:35] so what I'm thinking about with this is we sort of need to deescalate how we are responding to this
[00:13:43] because when we respond to it with fear and reactivity, we're not really helping ourselves.
[00:13:48] So what this looks like in humans is I can kind of tell, like I've been doing this long
[00:13:52] enough that when I start to see symptoms and like, oh, this looks moldy or this looks like
[00:13:56] super fungal, I would just say mold is a really aggressive fungus that sort of damages every other
[00:14:01] system that it touches as well. Unfortunately, because of the way we have to kind of like start
[00:14:06] to think logically when our stress response is activated, we don't have a really logical brain
[00:14:10] around this. We don't think like this. We just think about like a nervous system reaction,
[00:14:14] like moving, which is not the first step. So we just want to think logically first. It's
[00:14:18] really a conversation of water mitigation. And I just want to talk through this because I'm
[00:14:22] trying to deescalate and like talk about it logically. And why is it such a big issue? I think
[00:14:26] it's become a bigger issue in the last, well, like nervous system issues have become a bigger
[00:14:30] issue. And as the nervous system issues and the stress has gone up in the last five years,
[00:14:34] because it was like the whole culture of the world was like high stress, you know,
[00:14:38] five to six years ago at the beginning of COVID. So it was like, everyone was depleting
[00:14:41] their nutrients and nutrients help your body work. And when you were depleting all of
[00:14:45] that and your body cannot work as optimally, things that you were getting by with before
[00:14:49] you don't get by with anymore, essentially, like you're you just run out of workers to show up at
[00:14:53] work, right? So you're like understaffed and overworked. Because that's what's happening. If we're
[00:14:57] having this toxic burden come in, it's like overworking systems. And some of us are genetically
[00:15:02] a little bit slower at processing certain things anywhere. That's where like the
[00:15:06] predisposition of the genetics pops up. It's like, it's not like a life sentence. It's
[00:15:09] just that you might be at a little bit of a disadvantage than maybe somebody else. And
[00:15:13] we all have our own unique thing. So okay, so what I'm thinking about when it's like,
[00:15:19] hey, we need to sort of, I guess, I'll call it normalized, assessing, understanding. It's
[00:15:24] really, there's lots of things, Grace, I don't want to know about, right? Like this week,
[00:15:29] my husband was replacing something in our one of our vehicles, a brake caliper. And I was,
[00:15:35] and I was like, how did you know this is a problem? He's like, see this rim is all black
[00:15:39] because it was like burning. I was like, this is just stuff. I don't think I want to know
[00:15:42] about, right? You know, I don't think I want to know about home maintenance things, etc.
[00:15:48] But when we stick, you know, sometimes we just have to know like, it's time to change your oil
[00:15:51] every so many miles on the car. And there's certain things to know. So with water mitigation,
[00:15:56] it's like, hey, if you get some water coming into your home somewhere, somehow it happens.
[00:16:02] Like a few years ago, we had a hail storm where I live as a record hail storm. And that
[00:16:06] year I had like more than three water intrusions in my home. So with our current building
[00:16:10] materials, which are made of compressed dust or wood, a lot of stuff is at least where I
[00:16:15] live. When you have that come in and something's wet for more than 24 hours, that's ideal mold food
[00:16:20] and mold will grow. And so we need to remind ourselves of this and it doesn't, it's not like
[00:16:24] so this freak out whatever, but it's like a marriage of different things. It's like,
[00:16:28] this particular toxicant is extremely common. Here's why it's so common. I think we also,
[00:16:33] like we are also lived through this age of like flipping homes, right? And kind of poor
[00:16:38] maybe maintenance practices. I think one real easy thing that people say is like,
[00:16:42] oh, my home is new. And I was like, that doesn't really mean anything. It can be built with that
[00:16:46] as well. I think what's challenging is that it seems scary and it can have quite a bit of a,
[00:16:51] it can have quite a range of symptoms and reactions. But what I'm saying is can we diffuse
[00:16:58] for a moment, like the escalation that we do around molds and think about it logically.
[00:17:03] And if possible, right, we have to start there because the alternative is when we don't
[00:17:07] think about it that way. And we're living in a really reactive mode and our, our capacity plate is
[00:17:12] so over full, we couldn't add something else. What we do is we fight or flight. And this looks
[00:17:18] like in real life. In the last like six months, I had two clients up and move one week, like they
[00:17:23] were like had gotten mold test results and they just like up and moved. And guess what,
[00:17:27] both of them moved into a moldier place because, because that's the reality. Like it is, I'm
[00:17:32] sorry, it just happens, right? It's like, Hey, I wasn't stopping and being logical and being
[00:17:37] like, okay, what are my options in front of me? Right? And all of this plays a role together.
[00:17:42] Cause when we're living in that fight or flight, we're just continually depleting and we're continually
[00:17:47] communicating messaging to our immune system via our stress chemistry. Cause our stress
[00:17:52] literally informs our immune system. And so when we communicate to our immune system,
[00:17:56] I'm not safe. I got a rush out of here. Well, we've got an issue and this is where like
[00:18:00] your work or any kind of nervous system reprogramming is an essential component of
[00:18:05] anything that you've had for a decent amount of time, but especially mold and some of those more
[00:18:09] tricky diagnoses overall. And so in general, one of the other things that makes this whole
[00:18:14] conversation kind of sucky is that typically it's going to look like a ton of inflammatory
[00:18:18] symptoms. And if you go to your regular doctor, you may get gas lit around it because we don't
[00:18:24] have testing. We're not in agreement about testing and identification, all that kind of
[00:18:28] stuff too. So, you know, I just want to like back up and say, let's do some simple
[00:18:31] education and you've done some already here, so I won't keep going on it, right? But what
[00:18:35] does it look like to simply educate ourselves about things we didn't know we needed to care
[00:18:39] about anything? You know, I called a chimney sweep yesterday to clean my wood stove and he's
[00:18:44] like, oh yeah, those should be cleaned all the time, right? And I'm having lots of lessons
[00:18:47] like that this year, like, oh, this should be done all the time. It's like, I guess I better
[00:18:50] make a list of all the things you don't know you need to do, right? During home
[00:18:54] ownership or renting or all these things. And so it's as simple as just looking around
[00:18:59] with a flashlight at first, looking for little signs of, and you may not see them,
[00:19:04] right? But if you go somewhere and within the first one, three, six months later,
[00:19:08] people are getting sick more often in your family or you're having and, you know, again,
[00:19:13] this, we started this conversation a little bit with food sensitivities and skin stuff.
[00:19:16] And by the way, a huge trigger for those is mold. But it's not like severe, I'm going to die
[00:19:21] mold, it's like mild to moderate. And so people can ignore it and keep having these symptoms
[00:19:26] or we can remove it from the body and remove it from the environment. You can live more,
[00:19:31] more vital, amazing life. That's good. But I always, you know, and this is not necessarily
[00:19:35] popular, but it's like, wow, what a gift. It's only showing up like this, right? It could be
[00:19:40] much worse. It could show up in much more severe symptoms that are completely unstable
[00:19:45] that you wouldn't even be able to do anything about because your life would be
[00:19:48] truly, truly, truly out of control, right? It could look like neurological symptoms and
[00:19:53] seizures and all kinds of things that are really, really tough as well. Not saying that
[00:19:57] everyone's issues aren't tough. They're all uniquely tough in their own way. But sometimes
[00:20:00] you've been finding that when we find the gratitude in this space, it's like, this is my body just
[00:20:04] helping me. My body's never trying to attack me, right? It's trying to help me always.
[00:20:08] So when it's presenting this symptom, it's like, Hey, I've been trying to help trying to show
[00:20:12] you something before. But the thing about humans is that we tend to let things get
[00:20:17] bad very often before we do something with them. It's just very human. No blame. I'm not
[00:20:22] different than anyone else really, right? It's like, Hey, when do I have the capacity to take
[00:20:27] something more seriously? Well, when it starts to show up and become a bigger problem, but it's
[00:20:32] way to the front of the line. And that's just the body trying to say like, Hey, I have a set
[00:20:36] of symptoms here. If you could like start to understand me, that would be cool. Yeah.
[00:20:40] When it comes to inflammation, and you mentioned, obviously, information is normal.
[00:20:45] There's, do you use the word good and bad? Do you use just high to high of inflammation? Like,
[00:20:49] what is it? When is it going to impact? Yeah, I would talk about acute versus chronic. So acute,
[00:20:55] and I mean, it's simple-ish, right? Where it's like you stub your toe and that's acute
[00:21:00] inflammation, right? That's when your body is sending resources to like, okay, or you
[00:21:04] do something more significant, you like get a big bruise or you twist something or whatever,
[00:21:08] right? That's a, that is acute inflammation. Some people may define that by anything
[00:21:13] less than a week. Usually when I was in chronic healthcare, we called anything less than a month,
[00:21:16] but it sort of depends on the context. Anytime it's been going on for a long time, that's more
[00:21:20] chronic. And when you've got something more chronic, it becomes more of an issue. It's using
[00:21:25] up more resources in the body, and it completes the body more. And so then you start to get more
[00:21:30] and more problems and symptoms essentially. So the higher it is for the longer, it just
[00:21:34] uses up resources. And that's the easiest way to think about it just is more depleting
[00:21:37] and causes more symptoms. So there's a kind of similar with mold inflammation and my
[00:21:42] community, my areas, this kind of question mark of like, well, are all my symptoms because
[00:21:47] maybe now I found that I have high inflammation. And so now if I change or reduce the inflammation,
[00:21:51] everything's going to go away. And what we end up finding is that's not the case. It's not
[00:21:55] usually just like, so, so inflammation is actually secondary. It's coming from something,
[00:22:00] right? And so inflammation isn't exactly a root cause. It's a signal. So yeah. So when I
[00:22:06] was talking earlier about the root causes of inflammation, what's going on with how
[00:22:10] you are processing stress? So this one's a little bit tricky because you can be unconsciously
[00:22:15] quite stressed in the body because it could be. And so some examples of that that are probably
[00:22:20] really forefront for you. But for me, these are harder to talk about with people is like,
[00:22:24] if you're unhappy where you live or in your relationship or in your job, or in all of those
[00:22:30] things are communicating stress through the body, right? If you wake up and you react,
[00:22:34] I find like I have a real soft spot for women, especially parents, because this can develop
[00:22:40] quickly and slowly and then become long term. Because when you have a baby, for example, you
[00:22:46] are waking up in reactivity mode, understandably, right? It's a phase. But sometimes that phase
[00:22:51] becomes your normal. And so you're in reactivity for not just months, but then years. And so
[00:22:57] anytime we're waking up kind of reactive overall. And that can look like snapping at someone
[00:23:02] just being generally frustrated or whatnot, right? And I say that with a lot of empathy,
[00:23:07] because I like viscerally understand it because it was me as well. It was like, oh,
[00:23:11] where does this come from? Or I don't think I'm stressed or, you know, when I would drink too
[00:23:15] much coffee, my eyelid would twitch, you know, at one point in time when I was doing back
[00:23:19] to back to back, like, you know, a normal load of nine appointments per day or whatever.
[00:23:24] And I will share this sometimes stress is because I'm catching myself doing it now.
[00:23:29] So I grew up in a family of fast talkers. And so I always kind of looked at fast rate of speeches.
[00:23:36] Even when I get excited now, I can still ramp up. You know, I've got a lot of practice. I've got
[00:23:40] years of experience doing it. When I do that, I don't necessarily think of that as, but I'm
[00:23:44] communicating literally my heart rate is speeding up. My stress hormones may be rising.
[00:23:50] Another one that is, I remember from giving speeches in high school and college and whatnot,
[00:23:55] does anyone like pit out, right? It's like your aldosterone is increasing. You're a dumping salt
[00:24:01] right through the armpits, right? And so this is some of the physiology of what that actually
[00:24:06] looks like. So we're talking about the work class of inflammation. I'm talking about
[00:24:09] stress chemistry, but then what's going on in the immune system and the gut,
[00:24:12] what's going on in the liver. And so again, a lot of the work I do is supporting these
[00:24:17] underloved systems, gut and immune system, drainage and detoxification burden,
[00:24:23] burden and then stress hormones systems first, adrenals and thyroid systems. When you bring
[00:24:27] those into balance, a lot of symptoms go away, a lot of symptoms resolve. And when you understand
[00:24:33] how to support those long term, you now have the power and the control to not only resolve
[00:24:39] symptoms now, but in the future. And I think that that's actually a really interesting nuanced
[00:24:44] point, because we've also kind of created a little bit of a society in the last several
[00:24:48] years where we want someone else to fix us. And you heard my story at the very beginning.
[00:24:52] I wanted someone to fix me. Duh. Right. Like I just want someone else to take care of it.
[00:24:56] And then for me to not ever worry about this again. And my plea to you after doing this work
[00:25:00] for a decade with clients in this way is that when you have created the scenario once,
[00:25:05] when the situation has manifested once, there's a possibility it could manifest again
[00:25:09] during a certain period of stress in life where the immune system could get down
[00:25:13] regulated, the digestive enzyme function and all enzymes could get down regulated that
[00:25:18] nutrients could be depleted because things happen in life. Like all kinds of things,
[00:25:23] maybe things we don't always consider stressful at the time. And then we look back and we're like,
[00:25:27] that was causing me more stress than I really thought. Those things can happen again.
[00:25:32] Part of my, I would call it legacy work is trying to help people understand this so that
[00:25:36] they can have autonomy over their own body. I think that the way we change healthcare
[00:25:40] now is we don't rely on someone else to do it for us. We understand ourselves enough.
[00:25:45] Right. We understand ourselves enough to heal because we have to realize like our body
[00:25:49] has the ability to heal if we give it what it means to bring those systems back in a balance.
[00:25:52] I probably got off topic there, Grace. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to make it feel good.
[00:25:58] Perfect. Like 1000%. You can obviously see me nodding emphatically because
[00:26:03] yes, this is what I do when we talk about and like, I always say I want to give you the
[00:26:07] tools to help yourself sustainably. Obviously, like we need support in times of life. Like
[00:26:12] you said, stress happens. We use the tools we know, but yeah, maybe we go get some more support,
[00:26:18] not fix. Please fix me, but that is the medical and honestly, a lot of the mental health society
[00:26:24] we're in too. I have an example of this that was actually a little bit striking to me recently.
[00:26:32] At the very beginning of 2020, right at the very beginning of COVID,
[00:26:36] my mom had an autoimmune crisis and it's not hard for me to understand why it happened.
[00:26:42] There was a lot of stress. She'd carried stress for a long time. She had six children.
[00:26:46] A lot of stress. There was a big trip right before. It was so obvious to me because there's not an
[00:26:51] autoimmune diagnosis that usually happens without a big stressful event that's kind of ongoing
[00:26:57] before. That's pretty much usually the case. I don't know if I've seen an exception.
[00:27:01] So that was a tough thing, but my point is that she's five years into this and she
[00:27:06] is how she is and whatnot. It's really interesting because we all exercise control
[00:27:13] in different ways. We all want to be in control of our lives. It was interesting because growing up,
[00:27:19] my parents were pretty naturally minded in that they were like gardeners and we ate well. My mom
[00:27:25] would pull a homeopathy kit off of her shelf instead of taking it to the doctor. Those are
[00:27:29] lovely things. We all have a different background and different stories. Those are
[00:27:32] nice things. I was visiting my mom recently for the holidays and she said something that made
[00:27:39] me ask her a question. I'll share this just because it was a little striking for me.
[00:27:43] She was talking about some online research she'd been doing about healing her autoimmune condition
[00:27:50] and I said, hey, are you looking for someone else to heal you or are you hoping to heal
[00:27:55] yourself? I think the question may have struck her a little bit too or hurt, but she said,
[00:28:00] essentially the answer was like, I'm looking for someone else to heal me. I was like, okay,
[00:28:04] well, that actually makes a lot of sense. When we start to shift, the fact that we want to heal
[00:28:09] ourselves from someone else to do all the work for us, we get out of victim mode and we get out
[00:28:14] of that victim mentality and we start to realize that we have the power and the tools for making
[00:28:19] massive change. Before we do that, I don't know. You might know better than I do Grace,
[00:28:24] but before that, I was kind of this rule, I don't tell people they have a problem,
[00:28:28] they don't think that they have because it's futile to, you know, to both of us, I think.
[00:28:33] So just to offer that a little bit, it's like, I think that the future of healthcare is wanting
[00:28:39] the best for yourself is understanding your body is wanting autonomy over your body and your
[00:28:44] health. I absolutely love that story. I love that that's a really big part of your work
[00:28:48] because yeah, I talk about that all the time. That's such a big part of mind, body healing
[00:28:53] is understanding it first for yourself, right? Education is huge. Like you've
[00:28:56] done so far here, we have to understand what's going on so that we can grasp it and help ourselves
[00:29:02] and learn the tools and skills. And again, of course, sometimes we all need support,
[00:29:06] we're human, we need connection. How do you do that for your clients and the work that you do?
[00:29:11] How do you instill them? Is it the same like education and tools? But like,
[00:29:14] what do you give them to help them heal themselves? I think it's a little bit of a
[00:29:19] process. So initially when people come in, they want to be told what to do.
[00:29:23] And so we will often tell them what to do to an extent, right? We're going to go through lots of
[00:29:28] assessment pieces. And at first, like when you have a lot, when you're a little overwhelmed by what's
[00:29:32] going on, you may not really like see the value in that. But in time, we're going to revisit
[00:29:36] those assessment pieces and start to draw lines between and as generally as people start to
[00:29:41] feel better, they end up having more capacity for things as well. So at the beginning,
[00:29:45] we're going to indulge them and tell them what to do. And as they start to improve
[00:29:50] and get better, we will challenge them with higher quality questions where we start to unpack those
[00:29:55] answers on their own. Like again, I'm going to still give them answers as needed. But if I catch
[00:29:59] them basically asking a really disempowered question, I'm going to try to give them both
[00:30:05] versions. Like this version makes it look like I'm the only one who has the answer. Whereas
[00:30:09] when we ask the question in this way, you can sort of start to see the answer for yourself
[00:30:13] as well. And that's a little bit of a gift. And it's a dialogue and it's a conversation
[00:30:18] and it's touch points with clients overall. I can't do it for them, but it's this beautiful
[00:30:23] thing that starts to take shape after we've been together for a couple of months. And as they
[00:30:26] start to actually see and believe and trust, because we have to be able to see results
[00:30:31] to trust the process. It's almost like this cliche thing, trusting in the process.
[00:30:36] But we have to be able to see results to regain some of that capacity.
[00:30:39] As we've been talking about the stress triad, the stress triad and stress chemistry
[00:30:46] that impacts gut and immune system that impacts inflammation, that really you're
[00:30:49] recognizing or not you recognizing, but you're sharing that, yeah, that is secondary, right?
[00:30:55] And the core root of so much of this is how much stress and dysregulation there is in our body,
[00:31:00] which is causing more of our reactivity and inflammation. Am I getting that right?
[00:31:04] So that all just plays into each other, but the more dysregulation we have,
[00:31:08] the more impact in the physiology, of course. And like we were talking,
[00:31:11] we were giving different examples. It's very human to want to address
[00:31:15] what we think the physiological reason is first, but part of our healing journey,
[00:31:20] and that's just layered and you can go about it from one angle, that's okay.
[00:31:24] You can go about it from, so people can come in and do nervous system regulation work and
[00:31:27] not do the physiology work. They could do that first. That's fine.
[00:31:30] And see how far they can get with the physiology will make a difference.
[00:31:33] When they come into me, like I've had people do that. Sometimes they come into me and
[00:31:36] we're doing a little bit of right, we all do different things, right?
[00:31:39] Essentially all of my work was physiology, but I had to start layering in something around
[00:31:46] emotional and energetic because without it, people will ask questions that they think
[00:31:49] are questions about their physiology. And so that is not a physiology question.
[00:31:53] That is your nervous system talking. That is fear. That is worry. That is etc.
[00:31:59] And when I started to just help them become more aware of that simply, that was all,
[00:32:03] and it was just work that I had found really transformative.
[00:32:06] When we started to sort of shine a light on that and it seems oversimple,
[00:32:09] but it's like we all kind of have like this whole paragraph story in our brain where we
[00:32:13] like think our version is super unique. And it's like, oh, actually what's fascinating
[00:32:18] is we all have fear operating underneath those things. We all have worry, worry,
[00:32:22] fear, overwhelm, etc. And so when we start to just be aware of how the soundtrack of
[00:32:27] our brain and our thoughts is triggering that and that's creating a physiological response on
[00:32:32] our body. Now we can kind of take back some control over our thoughts. We have complete
[00:32:36] control over our thoughts that can start to change some of those emotional manifestations.
[00:32:40] And so the beautiful thing where all these things work together and they just help,
[00:32:44] you know, the bottom line is like when you start to do that work,
[00:32:47] you get faster physiological healing hands down. And for a better or for worse,
[00:32:51] some of the people who need it the most will not access it because they just kind of like
[00:32:55] don't value or respect it as much. That's not necessarily that's certainly not the person
[00:32:59] that's leading to this podcast, but that's one of the sorrows of my heart, right? Which is
[00:33:04] the beauty of podcasts because if we can try to come at it, sometimes it's just someone's story
[00:33:08] that hits you in a different way, right? And when you are inspired by someone's story in a
[00:33:13] different way, maybe that's the door that opens for you. Exactly. And I really appreciate
[00:33:17] you acknowledging that and recognizing that you do now work with the emotions and
[00:33:22] energetics of fear especially, right? Like fear wreaks havoc on our bodies or nervous
[00:33:26] systems and takes that hold. And so I just think it's a beautiful thing that you're bringing
[00:33:30] into your practice. So thank you for doing that. I'm sure your clients, thank you for that too.
[00:33:34] It's been, I can't even put words into how transformational it has been because we sort of,
[00:33:39] you know, and especially as an achiever and someone who like,
[00:33:43] like one of my stresses is if someone else isn't getting results and it's like,
[00:33:47] it's multiple layers here. And so as long as we're like hitting on the right layer,
[00:33:51] it's like we're able to get through to the results piece so much faster that way. So
[00:33:55] it's a beautiful, I'm very thankful. I'm thankful for the work I've done that I'm now able to share
[00:34:00] with clients as well. Yeah, amazing. Is there anything else around, just around what we've shared,
[00:34:06] we've talked about and how you see everything go together that we haven't talked about,
[00:34:10] you haven't mentioned that it's important or it doesn't have to be. Yeah, a few of the
[00:34:16] bottom line pieces is like you have so much more control than you think your body is not
[00:34:20] trying to betray you. It is just trying to communicate with you symptoms or simply
[00:34:24] signals as my like whole thing. And there's a lot of beauty and power that gets everyone's
[00:34:29] got a different thing at a different time, but there's a lot of beauty and power. You can start
[00:34:33] to correlate those things that your body is telling you into buckets and start to support those
[00:34:37] systems and support your physiology, your overall, you can bring things back into balance. It's
[00:34:42] very possible. It's how you were designed perfectly, right? You can bring those things
[00:34:46] back into balance and you can resolve symptoms and you can live fully and happily.
[00:34:51] And it gives you a lot more time and freedom back. Like sometimes we don't realize how much
[00:34:56] are we are preoccupied with some of these symptoms overall. And so it's a beautiful
[00:35:00] gift to be able to support people in this way. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for sharing
[00:35:05] everything, especially coming from the place that you've come from and not only your personal
[00:35:08] journey, but also how you interact and how you work and what you share is just so,
[00:35:13] so important because there's so much out there in the medical wellness world that
[00:35:18] they're not trying to be, but can be harmful, right? Can invoke so much fear.
[00:35:23] Yeah. Well, we're not really taught in anything medical about anything related to the emotional
[00:35:28] energetics. And so I think sometimes you have to walk through and I will say just from the
[00:35:33] perspective of being in the client position, when you're working with someone who hasn't
[00:35:37] gone through something you've gone through, it's hard for that person to maybe have empathy
[00:35:40] or to fully understand that. And so, you know, it's just a reminder to ourselves is like,
[00:35:45] you know, some people just are not equipped with those skills and it can feel really garbagey
[00:35:50] and really trashy. And sometimes we just have to release that that's theirs and not ours. Exactly.
[00:35:56] Exactly. Exactly. Awesome. Okay. We will of course link everything below,
[00:36:01] but where can people find you? Yeah, you can find what you need at my website,
[00:36:05] which is christabiggler.com. I'm over on Instagram at anti-inflammatory nutritionist,
[00:36:10] or if you found this conversation helpful, I have a pretty nerdy podcast called The
[00:36:13] Lestress Life. Amazing. All right. We'll link it all below. And I really appreciate you coming on.
[00:36:18] Thank you so much, Krista. Thank you, Grace. If this podcast means something to you,
[00:36:23] it would mean so much to me if you could do these couple things. One, go to the
[00:36:27] Heel with Grace Show page wherever you listen and tap the plus sign or click on the follow button
[00:36:32] so you don't miss an episode. It helps both of us out. While you're there, if you could
[00:36:36] get a five star review so that this podcast can reach more people, it would mean so much to
[00:36:42] me so I can continue sharing episodes that help you as well as others. Thanks for listening
[00:36:48] and I hope this brings you hope on your journey.