Resilience and Adaptability: Real Benchmarks of Health (Solo Episode)

Episode Highlights With Katie

• Why resilience and adaptability...not restriction...are the true markers of vibrant health.
• How rigid diets and “perfect routines” often reflect a dysregulated nervous system
• The mindset and language shifts that changed your health from the inside out.
• The nervous system foundations that created real healing capacity.
• How gradually expanding inputs taught your body it was safe again.
• Why metabolic flexibility is impossible without nervous system flexibility.
• The identity-level transformation required to step into freedom.
• Practical steps you can use to build resilience and adaptability starting today.

Resources Mentioned

• LMNT minerals
• Sauna

Bioptimizers
I love and use so many products from them, but I especially love the magnesium (Magnesium Breakthrough) and digestive enzymes (Masszymes). Visit bioptimizers.com/wellnessmama to get the best deal!

Transcript

1063: Resilience and Adaptability: Real Benchmarks of Health (Solo Episode)


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Katie:  Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I'm Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this will hopefully be a short solo episode today where I just wanted to offer something that was a valuable reframe for me in my recovery and the way I think about health, and that is the concept of resilience and adaptability.
And those kind of being benchmarks and things I'm evaluating in relation to my health journey on, as kind of benchmarks of health. And I personally first encountered the realization around this when I was still navigating Hashimoto's and had been told I would have that for life. I've shared before, how I no longer do.
But there was a point when my body was extremely inflamed. I was definitely having the experience of autoimmunity and I was eating a very, very small range of foods. At one point, like under 10 different foods without reacting to them, and I was having to be very careful in my environment. I was worried about things like EMFs and toxin exposures, and not that I don't think it's actually very good to be aware of all of those things, but I had the realization that my goal long term was not to feel good and to feel like my body was thriving in this extremely rigid and narrow range of inputs that required a very rigid diet and supplements, and staying in my environment very carefully.
But my long-term goal was to be resilient and adaptable and still get to choose really positive inputs for my body as much as I could, but to not be fully derailed and embed if I deviated from that. And I'll say, now I have gotten to see that journey to fruition and I'm at a point where I don't technically actually need to restrict any food.
I feel like my body can handle whatever I kind of give it at this point. And I do still often choose majority, of course, beneficial positive inputs. And I've talked about my focus on like, how do I maximally nourish my body? How do I improve my light environment? Some of the key factors in that for me, but I, the internal shift was in realizing that for me, the goal of health was not just to be healthy with a narrow range of inputs, but to be healthy in a resilient and adaptable way so that my body could handle whatever I throw at it, whether it be intense workouts, which I also couldn't handle for a while. Or occasionally, foods that I want to try and eat just because they're delicious, even if they aren't the perfect, healthy choice. Or even a night of missed sleep for the social capital of spending time with friends or whatever it may be. So that will be the topic of this brief episode.
As always, I'm so grateful that you're here. And before we jump in, I wanna just reiterate, nothing I ever share is medical advice or any type of device. You are and always will be your own primary healthcare provider. And I encourage you to be curious, to do your own research and to listen to the deep wisdom of your body.
And to question everything, even, and especially me. I'm simply sharing my own experience, things I've learned along the way, hopefully from a place to offer inspiration, never pressure, comparison or prescription. With that said, let's jump into this fun topic. And here's why I feel like resilience matters more than perfection.
As I said, I once defined health by how strict I could be and by how well I was doing all of these check marks and things to keep myself healthy and keep my environment clean, and keep my diet perfect and all these things. I was doing AIP, I did elimination diets. I was on all kinds of rigid protocols I've shared before about my spreadsheets of supplements, literal spreadsheets and I was feeling in some of those times pretty good, but only in a very, very narrow range of inputs.
And the reframe for me here was that true health is not fragility wrapped in discipline. True health involves this resilience, flexibility, adaptability, and capacity, and that that's what I was actually trying to cultivate in my life, so that my goal was not to shrink my life until my symptoms disappeared and then lived in that very narrow range of inputs for the rest of my life, but to expand my life so my system could handle more and still thrive. And that journey has led me into a deeper understanding of many things I'm extremely grateful for, including some of the really core foundational pieces that I feel like contribute to resilience and adaptability, like minerals, which I've talked a lot about. And I've done a whole series on like light and its input, like body voltage, like sleep.
I'll put some follow up podcasts in the show notes if you wanna go deep on any of those topics. But I feel like this is kind of an unspoken trap sometimes in the health and wellness world. And so I wanted to just call it out, kind of maybe debunk and dismantle this fragile health paradigm. Because I don't feel like we're actually healthy if we need perfect foods, perfect routine, perfect environment to feel pretty good, I don't think we're thriving if we need, if social situations by nature feel stressful because of our food rules or our limitations. I don't think we're thriving if we fear flareups more than we enjoy life, and I don't think we're thriving if our identity is I am sick, or I'm a person who has X or who can't do X or who must do X.
I feel like those are all kind of like rigid cages, and not that we don't need the tools of some of those things to navigate certain experiences of life, but I want to kind of debunk the fragile health paradigm that those things actually constitute thriving. And how this happened for me was, like I said, these can be a tool.
So AIP and restrictive healing served a purpose absolutely. At a time they let my body have a little bit of a break and probably gave it a little bit more capacity, but they weren't fully addressing the root cause. They did remove some of the major stressors and let my system reset and rest a little bit.
But the goal is not to live inside of a protocol forever. And in fact, I feel even really good practitioners, I've heard many of them say this, like even if you are following a very strict protocol for a while, the goal is not to do that lifelong. The goal is to heal and to move beyond that. Because I feel like often really rigid wellness in some of these ways that I'm talking about and that I was living is still a dysregulated nervous system just masked behind the idea of health and wellness, and that was a kind of harsh realization for me as well. And the nervous system piece and the mineral piece and the light piece were absolutely life changing for me. And as my, as I gave my body what it needed, as I befriended my body, as I addressed the stress side, as I gave it the basic building blocks it asked for, it was asking for, I got to see firsthand how incredibly capable it is of healing, of detoxing being a natural process of it knowing exactly what to do. Of it being so capable and wonderful at that.
And I got to see over and over how my body is, in fact, always on my side and always doing what's best for me and to befriend it in that journey of developing more resilience and adaptability so that now I feel like I don't have any limitations whatsoever. And one of the moments, like I said, I realized that shift in the paradigm shifting way of what the goal was.

I also realized along the way that I had at times supported or healed parts of my body, but not my inner narrative and not my nervous system. And this was at a time when healthy didn't feel like freedom. It felt like management. And that was, became one of my benchmarks of am I moving toward actual, toward health and resilience or am I moving away from it?
It was anytime I felt the management and restriction that became a clue of like, oh, what am I still, how am I still in that experience? And where does my inner narrative still need work? Because for me, like I said, I realized thriving long term, what I wanted that to mean was being able to travel, to eat new foods, to enjoy life, to handle stress normal life stress with grace, and not be completely derailed by those things.
And so my insight in that phase of my journey was that the body follows the mindset, largely. And I've shared a lot about my inner journey of this, even rewriting the subtle script and shifting from I'm sick or my body's attacking itself into I am healing. And every day I get stronger and healthier.
And every day I thrive. And my body is perfectly designed to heal and to thrive. I realized my language was shaping my physiology. And even in the past few weeks of when I recorded this, I've seen studies come out showing, even in kind of advanced chronic disease treatment, they have now proven that our language and how we speak to our body shifts our physiology.
So I've experienced it firsthand, but now there is like emerging data that shows this at scale. So to me, this was rewriting the script away from I am sick to, I am healing, from I can't have that, to I get to choose what supports my body right now to instead of restriction to nourishment from my body, betrays me, or my body's attacking itself to my body is brilliantly communicating with me, and I love to give it what it needs.
I also think it's worth mentioning that the nervous system is the gatekeeper of resilience, and this is why everything flows through safety signals. And I've done a podcast on safety signals versus stress signals, and I'll link to that in the show notes. I think this is actually a massive, if not one of, if not the most massive, one of the most massive levers we can pull and that we often underestimate how much the nervous system and the safety signals can impact, with all other variables being the same, our healing process. 
Because my healing was not just biochemical, it was neurological. It was emotional, mental. It was a complete inner shift. And I've said before, the body can only expand and heal when it feels safe. And this was a missing piece for me for a very long time. So in the nervous system episode, I go deep into the shifts that I made, and they are very, largely, very simple and free shifts that made a massive difference for me.


I'll link to that if you haven't listened. You can listen to that one as well. But I realized some things that created safety for me and started to expand my capacity in this phase were things like morning sunlight, non-negotiably every day, and strong circadian anchors. And when I was still really fatigued, this meant I would set an alarm for sunset and sunrise, drag myself outta bed, go outside and go back to sleep in the backyard in the natural light.
But I started, like really building those light cues and saw a difference from even just that alone as well as earlier bedtime prioritizing, like ruthlessly prioritizing sleep and rest as well as only gentle movement. I talked about how I did not do any extreme exercise during that time. And just gentle movement, breath work.
Sending as much safety signals through nourishing the body, getting enough food, maximizing nutrients within what I could eat during that time, and slowing down output and work. And really just focusing on recovery. And over time, and actually pretty rapidly when I started understanding this inner shift, these built more capacity in the form of more energy. I felt less reactive. My digestion shifted, and so I was actually absorbing more from my food. I felt more emotional stability pretty quickly and more communication and confidence in my body and in the feedback I was getting and giving from it.
And from there I kind of built that foundational practice and those kind of safety signals for a while before gradually starting to expand inputs. And I think this part especially is extremely personalized. So I have no guidance on timelines or how, or what, I think this is a direct communication with your body type situation.
But what I experienced was that once my nervous system stabilized, my biology was able to tolerate a lot more once I was no longer in a space where my nervous system was feeling it was not safe I was able to tolerate more pretty quickly. So during this, I tested very slowly, but adding different foods or eating more variety while traveling.
Even just traveling, I stopped being so fatigued from getting on an airplane, whereas I used to have to, when I would get off an airplane, I would immediately take a nap for hours. I was able to eat in restaurants again. And I slowly was able to let go of specific rules like around meal timing or restrictive foods or perfect ratios of micro macronutrients, et cetera.
I also had to look at and feel and acknowledge my fear around this because I think expansion feels really scary when you have a history full of symptoms and flareups and autoimmune and I, that was a difficult journey to walk through. It was not easy. And I did have a fear of a relapse. I had fear of with trying new foods that it was gonna send me back into a flare.
And the subconscious holds onto that I found for a while. So it was also an internal sending safety signals through my inner language, through reinforcing and then through gradually getting feedback and realizing I wasn't negatively reacting when I listen to my body in this process. I coached myself through this in inner language with things like, I can trust my body now.
My system is different than it was before. Symptoms are information messengers not set backs. So what can I learn from this? Simply shifting into a state of curiosity I feel like was drastically helpful. And I've talked about this before as well, but I also find that even physically gradual expansion of these variables builds metabolic flexibility.
Because you're giving gentle input and you're giving the body time to adapt in real time, which is also brilliantly programmed and designed to do. And then also expanding these inputs becomes a training ground for adaptability. So just like with working out. We don't get better at something by never doing it.
We have to get a little sore sometimes, we have to like expand and go a little past our current ability to expand that capacity. I found the same was true. So in the adjustment, sometimes I would eat something and like notice a little bit of a hmm from it, but not nearly what I would've had in the past.
So then I would wait a little while and do it again and it was like my body was learning. And so I kind of viewed that as almost like progressive overload, in exercise, but with resilience and adaptability. And here's why I prioritize this so much, and now value resilience as a really, a true marker of health.
I think some of the people that we would consider kind of the most optimal humans, this is actually one of the things we love, that we like see in them, is they're very resilient, to their environment to whatever's kind of thrown at them. And I would define resilience as the ability to recover quickly, the ability to bounce back from stress or whatever inputs, food changes, travel disruptions, lack of sleep. Not needing the perfect environment to feel well, and again, still being able to choose that environment most of the time just to keep building that relationship and that strength within our body. What I feel like this looks like in practice for me and what this adaptability has looked like as I've implemented it, is being able to eat things I couldn't eat before.
I can handle stress more so without spiraling. I'm still a human and a mom. But enjoy travel without anxiety. Even if I still choose less travel than I have in the past. I no longer have flare ups. And I recover faster, even from workouts, even from good stress, even from sauna. The more I have really dialed these things in, the more capacity I have, even in the good stress areas.
And most importantly, I would say I no longer fear how my body's gonna respond to something. And I don't fear unpredictability because of this. And the most profound shift for me has been the emotional freedom that comes with this. Not having to think about or stress about or police every meal.
Not fearing having an off day, not fearing having flare ups anymore, not micromanaging my life to stay symptom free and having a return to, as my words of the year last year were grace, ease, and joy. I've also shared podcasts about my biological age and also how I now am, even medically considered not having Hashimoto's anymore, I have no sign of antibodies whatsoever. So at least in me, I have been a N of one case study that this is possible, that full recovery is possible, that resilience and adaptability can be built. And that's why I now share so much on this podcast of these free things. I can't and would never sell you morning sunlight or better sleep.
There are good sources of minerals because unfortunately we don't get this much from our diet anymore. But the things that really were so impactful for me are quite simple, largely free or inexpensive and absolutely life shifting. So, perhaps you're tired of hearing me talk about these same things over and over, and I keep bringing them up because they were so massively impactful.
And I feel like we develop this language and this communication with our body as we go through this process. And the language of a resilient body, we learn how thoughts create signals that shape physiology, which, like I said, they actually just proved this. That when we say things like, I'm healing our body responds to that.
So some examples of linguistic shifts that maybe you could experiment with that I did that were helpful would be even language away from managing a disease or having a disease into supporting my body, away from the ideas like, my body is fragile or broken into my body is adaptive and strong.
Moving away from language like I react to X, Y, Z, to my body is learning to expand or away from, oh, I can't tolerate that or handle that or eat that, to I'm practicing flexibility and I'm learning my body's response. I feel like this identity shift for me was one of the deepest layers of healing, and when I let go of the identity of being sick, eventually I no longer was.
When your identity changes, your behavior flows effortlessly, whereas in my experience, trying to change the behavior first was very stressful.
So path forward in building adaptability. Some practical ways you can build resilience in yourself based on my experience would be things like light. So sunrise, talked about this a lot. Natural daylight, little mini bouts of light as much as possible. Minimizing blue light at night. I have posts and episodes on all of those if you have an interest in understanding them more deeply.
For movement, for me in this time, it was very gentle movement, which was varied, joyful, gentle, lots of walking, especially outside. Prioritizing sleep and rest, which is the master regulator of the nervous system. Minerals, which I did a whole series on. I'll link to that in the show notes, especially the big three, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and then supportive ones beyond that. Hydration with minerals and electrolytes. The nervous system practices that were impactful for me, like breath work, vagal tone, practices, gratitude. I tried a whole lot in this realm. And then a slow expansion of adding new variables and inputs and foods slowly over time. And then most importantly for me in this process was rewriting my identity to align with the new reality.
So in closing, in kind of a returning to wholeness. I just wanna revisit the idea that thriving doesn't happen inside restriction, and it's easy to get caught up in that one. You do need to use the tools of restriction for a short time to heal. That restriction is a temporary therapeutic tool, not a lifestyle.
Resilience is the goal. Flexibility is the goal. Adaptability is the goal. The gift of healing is not just the absence of symptoms, it's the presence of freedom. So my encouragement to you is if your range of tolerance feels small, it does not mean you're broken. It just means your system needs more safety and more time and expansion.
Healing is always possible even after years of rigidity. I feel like that is one of the few unshakable beliefs I have is an unshakable belief in the body's ability to heal and an unshakable belief that our body is always on our side, and that while we may be spiritual beings, we're having a human experience and that part is very important too.
So thank you so much for joining me. If you enjoyed this episode I would be so grateful if you would just take a few seconds to leave an honest rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts, which helps new listeners find and listen and join the community. And if you wanna stay up to date with podcast episodes, my own health tips and more, you can join my VIP list for free at wellnessmama.com.
Either way, thank you so much for sharing your time, your energy, your attention, and your presence with me today. I'm so grateful you were here and I hope you will join me again. On the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.