The Jessie Golden Podcast

131. How I healed my chronic health issues & got my life back

• Jessie Golden • Episode 131

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In this podcast, I'm detailing how I overcome my chronic health issues that took over my life a few years ago. I was really anxious for this period of my life, simply because I didn't have any answers as to why I was feeling so awful, and I stumbled across everything that helped me. I hope it saves you so much time, energy, and hopelessness💕 Let me know if you have questions below!


Nervous System resources

Jenna Hamm - https://www.jennahamm.com/

Alyssa Chang - https://www.instagram.com/coachalyssachang/ 

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DIGITAL RESOURCES!⤵️


FREE training: 4 Steps to Stop Obsessing About Food: https://bit.ly/FFEmasterclass


$11 TRAINING: How I stopped my non-stop Overeating (while keeping my favorite foods in the house): https://jessiegolden.thrivecart.com/overeating-training/ 


$27 TRAINING: Maintenance Masterclass: learn whether or not you're really under-eating & how to prepare your metabolism for sustainable fat loss! https://jessiegolden.thrivecart.com/maintenance-masterclass/ 


COURSES:


Food Freedom Evolution: finally get off the yo-yo dieting & food obsession hamster wheel. https://bit.ly/ffeYT 


Sustainably Lean Academy: get lean while keeping your sanity (+ love of food!) and KEEP IT OFF - no tracking required! https://bit.ly/SLAcourseYT 

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Come connect with me!

- INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jessiemgolden

Welcome back to another episode here at the Jesse Golden Channel. Whether you are listening on the podcast or joining me here on YouTube, if you love a visual as I do welcome. Today we are discussing how I healed my chronic health issues, and this is really. A topic of love and passion for me because it took me so long to put the pieces together.

So if I could save anybody even a day of struggling, of suffering in the way that I did, if I can condense your timeline to healing in any way, shape, or form, I would love to do that for you. And what I'm going to share is going to be a little bit unconventional as the things I share typically are. And this is born out of partly my own personal experience, but also what I have learned through other, other avenues throughout my journey as well.

So let's go ahead and dive in.

Firstly, I wanna take you guys back to where it all began. It was 2018, I remember sitting on my bed and I could not use my brain to function. I was looking at my closet thinking, okay, I need to change over my clothes for summer for the warmer weather. And I simply did not have the energy to do it.

And my brain fog was also so thick and so intense that I could not think, and that is when I. Started to get a little worried and I said, okay, something has to change here and I need to figure out what's wrong. I was working my full-time corporate job at the time. I was in recruiting for a financial services company, and then I was building this business on the side, waking up at five in the morning.

Trying to meditate, but looking back, it wasn't fully meditating. And I would work for about an hour before going into the office at seven, and then I would work until around four, go to CrossFit, come home, eat, shower, work some more, rinse and repeat. That was my life. And any waking moment I was thinking about how can I move forward?

How can I achieve? How can I be productive? I was also focused on my relationships. And showing up for those as much as I possibly could as well. No downtime, no, no downtime at all. It was constantly, constantly moving. So eventually things started to break down and I was doing high intensity exercise.

If you're not familiar with CrossFit, it is typically short bursts, so the workouts themselves are not very long when you are really, really going for it. But you are what a lot of people call red lining it most of the time, or at least I was, of course we have control over how, how much we're pushing it, but as you'll.

Here later in this episode, I was in this masochistic stage where I could not do it unless I was going to push to the nth degree. Everything had to be at 100%, and I didn't understand the limits of my body, of my brain, of the nervous system. So eventually all of these things collided and came crashing down.

And I, by happenstance, found out that I had Hashimoto's. I shared that in a previous video. If you wanna go watch that one, I'm not gonna do a deep dive into that aspect of this, although it's intertwined with everything here and I.

As a result, I took a couple of months off from doing CrossFit, focused on resting more. My inflammation went down, just that puffy feeling, that water logged feeling, and I started to feel better. And so I thought, okay, let's just go back to doing the exact same things I was doing as we tend to do. Right.

Which leads me to 2019.

In 2019, this is when things really started to go downhill. I could not do anything beyond walking for 20 minutes at a time. My blood sugar swings were so out of control. I, they would crash, my blood sugar would crash in the middle of the night. So I'd wake up profusely sweating and feeling like I was gonna have a heart attack.

Wide awake, just panicked. And I thought, okay, maybe this is just anxiety, right? That's a normal thing. And. Blood sugar responses can mimic the feelings of anxiety, and I didn't know that. I also didn't know at the time that chronic stress disregulates your blood sugar, so it was this perfect storm that I was dealing with that led to really bad insomnia where I was sleeping no more than two to three hours a night for weeks on end, and I was losing my mind.

Rest assured my brain fog again was so, so bad I gained. 30 pounds in six months, and this wasn't through osmosis, right? The weight didn't just find itself on my body. This is because it was moving significantly less. For the aforementioned reasons, I couldn't walk more than 20 minutes. I went from doing CrossFit five days a week to barely being able to function whatsoever.

on top of this, I also fell victim to the messaging that all women who don't feel well are undereating. So I was eating more calories during this time. On top of moving significantly less so my calories in, increased calories out decreased leading to very rapid weight gain.

So at this point I was feeling 

awful. It's hard to describe and it pains me kind of to go back to that place because it was such a challenging time for me. And I was panicked because everything I was trying wasn't working. I, because of the Hashimoto's, I went gluten-free. That's what everyone said you had to do.

Cut out gluten, cut out caffeine, cut out all alcohol, was pretty much just resting all the time and nothing. Was working. I made sure with my diet, I thought with the blood sugar swings, oh, maybe there's something with my diet. Even though my diet was pretty damn great before I focused on that, I focused on anything I could think of.

Getting my hands in there really tinkering around with everything and the harder I tried, the worse everything got.

So the first thing that started to shift and led to me just beginning to heal, I just need that little kernel of hope was I was getting a massage that summer in 2019 was with some friends in the mountains. They were all going on a really intense hike. And I said, I just don't have the capacity to do that.

I can't do that. So I went in, treated myself to a massage, and in that moment of stillness, which is why I'm such a huge advocate of being still not having input, being in your body, it was. Th, I don't know what you wanna call it. This message clearly came from me, but from some deeper part of me that just said, your body and your brain do not feel safe.

That is where all this is coming from. Body and brain nervous system. I. Felt through the body does not feel safe, and somehow I knew, and I know that this is widely spread knowledge amongst nervous system practitioners now, but somehow I knew that my exhales being longer than my inhales, which sends a signal of safety to the nervous system.

Activates the parasympathetic part of our nervous system, the rest and digest, versus the sympathetic, which is fight or flight. I knew that having longer exhales would send that signal of safety. How I knew this, I have no idea. Maybe I heard it at one point in time. I have no idea, but this is back in 2019 when I hadn't heard any discussions of the nervous system at that point in time.

So, however, I knew this. Divine intervention. I have no idea. I am so, so grateful because that was the beginning of things just clicking. I needed that one moment of, oh, this is the problem and this is one thing that I can start doing in order to start moving in the right direction.

Then the second part of this, and this was probably the biggest key, is I surrendered once I had that kernel of hope. It's difficult to surrender when you don't have that feeling of I can surrender into something. There's something that is going to hold me. But because I had that belief that I just need to give my body and my brain the environment in which to heal, they know how to do the hard work.

I don't know how to get into the intricacies of my body and brain and heal, right? I don't know how to pump my heart. I don't know how to breathe my lungs. I don't know how to get my blood to flow, right? Our bodies are doing all these things, these brilliant things, without us getting into the trenches. We just like to get our gritty, grubby, little hands in there and try and tell the most brilliant organism on the planet how to do its job.

I have a lot to say about this because I think both allopathic medicine at one extreme really gets into that sense of hubris, that ego of I know better than the body and of course can be absolutely lifesaving in the right circumstances. then on the other end of the spectrum, we have the functional health natural medicine realm that likes to throw supplements and all these tests on top of the body, again, under the premise.

That the body does not know how to heal the brain does not know how to heal. When if we give it the right environment, of course there are gonna be exceptions to this, but by and large, if we give our body and brain the right environment in which to heal, then they can do their jobs. And so this is where I was allowed, I allowed myself to really rest into that state of surrender and say, okay, it's just a matter of time.

I have no idea when I'm gonna start to feel better. When it's gonna click, it happens so quickly though. But I just know that it is time for me to take my hands off the wheel and give my body and my brain, that's my only job. The right environment, which is safety. An environment of safety for them to do their jobs.

And I remember this so vividly. I was on my way to Bali. I'd quit my job, my corporate job was going full. Full-time all in on this business before financially it made sense to do so. So that was a big leap and a big risk for me. I was on the flight there and I was practicing my long exhales, and I just had this sense of joy, this sense of everything's gonna be okay.

And I don't know how, I don't know when my body's going to heal, but it's going to, I'm gonna be able to sleep through the night. That's all I wanted at that point in time, was to stop being awake for. Or rather stop sleeping for two to three hours every single night actually sleep through the night.

And then sure enough, my first night in Bali, I remember I slept six hours and I nearly cried tears of joy because I realized, oh, I've been the problem here the whole time. Me getting overly involved and micromanaging has been the damn problem.

Now the third thing I had to do was really identify the root of what led me there, because otherwise I would just keep repeating the pattern, right of, okay, come out, have some months, couple months of feeling okay, and then go right back to where I was before. So what kept perpetuating this cycle, number one was I had this intense hustle mentality, and a lot of this was coming from me starting my own business and a lot of the rhetoric around entrepreneurship, which.

Entrepreneurship is really hard work. There's no way around that most of the time. But I needed to focus more on smart work versus hard work, and this idea that the more you're working, the more successful you'll be. that's just simply not true. If you think of the people in America, as an example, who work really, really hard, some of the hardest workers are those who are making the least amount of money, unfortunately.

So hard work does not just mean that you are more successful. When I was working the hardest I could on my body. On my health, like I just shared, I had never struggled with my weight more than when I was so obsessed and focused with food and exercise. My health had never been worse than when I was so obsessively focused on it.

So I had to get out of this mentality that more is always better. The another reason that I was in this cycle, in this loop was I had a pretty intense martyrdom complex that I was not aware of. Where I felt like suffering was a badge of honor and that that made me more worthy as a human being. And this stems to parts of my childhood where I felt like I grew up in a family of four kids that were born in four years.

So there was just a lot of us in not enough to go around in terms of time and attention. So I felt like, and this is all subconscious as a child, that the way for me to be recognized was to be seen as the hardest worker. I wasn't naturally good at anything, but I could work harder than anyone. I realized that is, at a young age, I'm not gifted, but one thing I do have control over is working hard, and I got a lot of praise for that.

I won the Workhorse Award in nearly every sport that I played, staying after, going in early, blah, blah, blah, and I also grew up with a lot of messaging around suffering being something that is worth worthwhile. That suffering is something that really gives us the sense of nobility. And so I clung to that and I think is, there was a lot of military background in my family, so I felt like, and this is all subconscious, that if I suffer the most, if I'm seen suffering the most, and if I am working harder than anybody, then I will be loved.

And this was a really deep, subconscious route that I had to address and it was not fun to address. But once I did, it was so liberating realizing a no one cares. Promise you, no one cares, and I deserve better than to be suffering, especially suffering. Coming from a place of just, it doesn't make any sense to be doing that.

It's completely unnecessary. I'm not fighting for my survival here and doing it to impress other people at the expense of my own health and wellbeing. That completely had to go. I also realized that I had become completely detached from my feminine essence, and this won't resonate with everyone, which is fine, but.

I am much, much more of a feminine person in the traditional sense. And if you don't like these labels, I apologize. It just really resonates with me. I am much more similar to what I saw growing up with. I loved the dolls and the dresses and the slowness and the pleasure and the, just the slow living, the romanticizing of life.

- And I thought at a very young age, I received the messaging again, that. It's not cool to be a girly girl. It's not cool to have those things. You want to be like the boys, and again, I apologize that I'm using buckets and categories here, but this is probably just the easiest way to explain this. I basically, in essence, discarded parts of who I really am in favor of choosing what everyone else said I should be and that I need to be in order to be accepted, to be loved, blah, blah, blah.

So I was completely disconnected from my natural rhythms, my natural energy, what brings me joy and fulfillment. And on top of that, I was operating from a place of low self-worth hustle. More is better. All of this led to a recipe of full-blown what I would call burnout, but definitely chronic health.

Spiral roll.

Number four was once I had identified the root cause that I had to actually address it. So I had to do the hard work here, which meant doing nervous system regulation exercises. I will link my favorite resource for that below. Jenna Ham. She's absolutely wonderful. Actually, I will link my two favorites in the notes below, whether you're on the podcast or on YouTube.

I reconnected with my feminine, like I just previously shared, so I started focusing on more slow living. Romanticizing my life, which basically means just the mundane, small day to day parts of our lives. I tried to make them more special. I got in touch with the things that I used to love as a child. I loved doing hair and makeup and dressing up.

I used to draw clothes, which led me to my next business venture. I'm creating my own active wear line, and I'm so excited about this because it really does feel like the truest thing I've done that is connected to my core. Who I always have been and that part of me that I chucked away as a young girl thinking it's not cool to like those things.

It's not cool to like clothes and makeup.

I had to question my beliefs about where my value came from. Was I only worthy as a human being if I was completely violating my personal boundaries, overgiving to everybody, hustling and damaging my health so that people viewed me as the hardest worker or as the one who could withstand the most suffering.

I mean, saying that out loud, it's crazy how deeply that it seeped into some my subconscious to the point where I was just completely violating my own wellbeing. So I had to really detach myself also from this hustle mentality online with entrepreneurship that. You have to always be working. Everything has to be productive, blah, blah, blah, and instead focus on, which is what I had captured with my health and fitness journey and my weight loss journey is smart work over hard work.

I don't care about proving to people anymore that I'm the hardest worker. I actually want to be efficient because there's other things I want to do with my life and my time than just be productive and be suffering. Am I right? So this took time. This took a lot of reinforcement. It took a lot of self-awareness and actually putting things into practice when my old patterns would come up of feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to be doing more.

No pause and allow myself to rest. I focused on in terms of more practical things. My diet was very relaxed, but I, when I was losing weight, 'cause I lost 30 pounds during this time, I really had to make sure that my fat loss strategy was honoring my nervous system. Paid really close attention to my biofeedback throughout the process, the signals from my body to make sure that I was not pushing things too hard.

I went through phases of calorie deficits, followed by long periods of maintenance, again, to make sure that my body and my nervous system. We're super, super happy. And in terms of exercise, I dialed it way back. The thought of doing CrossFit now makes me wanna cry a little bit inside, instead focused on long walks in nature, outside without headphones, without constant stimulation in my head, in my ears, and doing weightlifting, yoga, Pilates, mostly weightlifting with lots of rest days in between.

Ongoing, the things that I do to maintain my health and my wellbeing. Nervous system regulation. Again, check out the resources I share below. Really feeling my feelings. I also don't get too caught up in micromanaging my nervous system ' cause that's another trap that people can fall into. I trust my nervous system to regulate if I give it the right environment to do so, which means a lot of movement.

There's a misconception here, and I fell into this thinking. Okay, the key is to just be still all the time. No, the body needs to move. There's a lot of energy that we have, especially with the modern day stressors. body needs to move. It's just not always super intense exercise. Sometimes it is.

Sometimes they feel like we need to like go punch a punching bag, which is healthy. Sometimes they need to lift some weight, sometimes they need to jump around or dance. Sometimes I need to throw a pillow or scream, or cry, whatever it is. I allow myself to get more into that primal state, and it is so liberating, and I can instantly feel the relief when I just let go and get into that state.

With my body, I focus on romanticizing my day-to-day life. The simple pleasures just make life so much more enjoyable. Instead of just productivity. How do we move forward? It's. Why don't we enjoy the process? Slow down. I stopped having goals for every single aspect of my life, I'm an ambitious person.

But I realized that it was okay to just allow myself to enjoy living, being alive, enjoying pleasure again, tapping into that younger part of me and focusing on who I truly am and what lights me up. These have been the biggest things and allowing myself to live my life for me a little bit more. Not in a completely selfish way, but the martyrdom and constantly violating myself.

I allowed myself to choose myself. And it has been everything.

I really hope that this was helpful for you guys. This is something that I'm really passionate about. If I could leave you with anything, it is trust your body and your brain. The most brilliant things on the planet. Our job is to give them the environment, the resources in which to thrive and let them do their thing.

Let them do their thing and are many of us giving them the right environment to do so? Absolutely not. Because we're running around like chickens with our head cut off. We're constantly stimulated. We can't be with ourselves, be still. We need to have technology, podcast music in our ears 24 7 in stressful relationships, blah, blah, blah, you name it.

So that if we can come to a place of. I want to be well in a well-rounded place, and I want to come back to the most safe environment I can give myself that will naturally give your body and your brain the most safe environment in which to heal as well. If you would like any resources when it comes to your relationship with food.

Weight loss in a way that honors your mind and your body along the way, overeating, et cetera. Go ahead and check out my resources that are linked below, and I will see you in the next one.