Band-Aids Or Root Causes: How Functional Medicine Uses Food And Labs To Find The Real Problem

“Your labs are normal” can sound reassuring, but what if it’s also the reason you stay stuck for years? We sit down with Lisa Marie, a nurse practitioner, family practitioner, and PhD in holistic nutrition, to talk about how functional medicine looks for what’s coming next, not just what’s diagnosable today. Her story starts early, with a metastatic thyroid cancer diagnosis at 23 and a life-changing decision to keep her pregnancy despite intense medical pressure. That experience pushed her to ask better questions, dig into research, and eventually build a practice rooted in both clinical data and real-world sustainability.

We get into the heart of preventive health: optimal lab ranges versus “normal” ranges and why you can feel awful even when your doctor says everything looks fine. Lisa Marie breaks down how fasting insulin can reveal insulin resistance years before type 2 diabetes appears, especially when you interpret it alongside fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C. We also talk about using labs as data, retesting regularly, and learning how to advocate for yourself inside a medical system that’s often designed for disease treatment rather than true prevention.

From there, we zoom out to the daily habits that actually move the needle. We talk gut health as a starting point, mineral deficiency as a hidden driver of symptoms, and why supplements should be used strategically instead of sold as shortcuts. We also address weight loss medications with nuance, including why muscle matters for longevity, why the scale is only one metric, and how to build a plan you can live with after any “quick fix” ends.

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Transcript

Band-Aids And Root Causes

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And I've always had the opinion that all medications are a band-aid. And, you know, very often, a lot of times, we have to stop the bleeding. So, you know, we'll stop the bleeding, put a band-aid on it, and let's fix what's causing the bleeding. And then, hopefully, and in many cases, in most cases, we can take the band-aid off.

Meet Lisa Marie And Her Story

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Do you get confused by all of the information that bombards us every day on ways to improve our overall health and our overall wellness? Do you often feel stuck, unmotivated, or struggle to reach your wellness goals? Do you have questions as to what exercises you should be doing, what foods you should or shouldn't be eating, how to improve your overall emotional and mental well-being? Hello, everyone. I am so excited to welcome you to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelly Jeffries, and I will be your host. My goal is to answer these questions and so much more. To share tips, education, and inspiration around all of the components of wellness through solo and guest episodes. With 35 plus years as a health and wellness professional, a retired college professor, a speaker, and a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I certainly have lots to share. However, my biggest goal and inspiration in doing this podcast is to share the wellness stories of others with you. To bring in guests who can share their journeys so that we can all learn together while making an impact on the health, the wellness, and lives of all of you, our listeners. The ultimate hope is that you leave today with even just one nugget that can enhance the quality of your life, and that you will, we all will, now and into the future, live our best quality of lives full of energy, happiness, and joy. Now let's dive into our message for today. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelly, and I'll be your host. And my guest today is a nurse practitioner, a family practitioner, and she has a PhD in holistic nutrition. So I know that this is going to be a very, very fun and informative conversation. And I just believe that this is probably going to be the first of probably a few episodes that we might be doing together. So welcome, Lisa Marie.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

So happy to have you. Oh, I'm excited to be here. And I think you're right. I think we could fill up a lot of hours with what we both enjoy in our passion.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

I think, I think we absolutely could. And we've just hit it off already talking a little bit about our backgrounds and sharing. And I know you've been in the medical field for many years, and you kind of touched upon having a an experience, a personal experience of your own of dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Can you share about that a little bit?

Why She Chose Functional Medicine

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Sure. You know, at the young age of 23, um, I was diagnosed with um metastatic thyroid cancer. And it was, you know, misdiagnosed many times. Um, it had, you know, given all kinds of different information. And being a nurse, you know, everybody sees you in the hospital, and you know, so you everybody has an opinion, right? And you get these opinions constantly. Um, the one thing that every doctor agreed on was the day after we found out I had cancer, we found out I was pregnant. And every doctor said, You're young, terminate the pregnancy, the baby will never survive. That was the first time I thought, oh no, you know, not my decision to make. I'm, you know, we're just gonna let the universe, God, see what's happening. I'm not in charge of this. And I'm happy to say I made that the right decision because that's my daughter, who is now also a nurse, and she is 34. So made the right decision. But that as a brand new nurse kind of made me think that that's what set off the whole journey. And every doctor had a different opinion. You know, I was told this never metastasizes, and lo and behold, it metastasized. During the surgery, they severed um my long thoracic nerve, which just causes muscle deterioration. So 30 years later, I basically lost the use of my left arm. And another story, see, we can fill in so many hours because the the cool part about that is um the last couple of years I found a chiropractor who was using this new cold wave laser technology. And literally, I have muscle growth in a shoulder. I got my shoulder back. Anyway, I you know, I go off on lots of tangents, but at 23, that's what sent me down looking for alternative holistic approaches for different things. Um, and so personally, that was what I did. And I always did that with my patients first, you know, looking at, okay, what's your diet like? Let's lose some weight. If we lose some weight, we can not put you on these medications. We can get your blood pressure under control, we can get cholesterol under control. And I've always had the opinion that all medications are a band-aid. And, you know, very often, a lot of times, we have to stop the bleeding. So, you know, we'll stop the bleeding, put a band-aid on it, and let's fix what's causing the bleeding. And then, hopefully, and in many cases, in most cases, we can take the band-aid off. Um, and that is how I've always been. And then I it got, you know, you you just have a breaking point, and I got tired of telling my kids, my patients, that they really need to find a functional medicine specialist to help them if they really want to get off these medications and truly be healthy. And that moment hit me about three years ago, and I thought, well, I think maybe I'm the one who needs to be this functional medicine specialist. So that's how that's how we're here.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

It's so fascinating how uh stories that you hear and that we experience lead us down the path that we're meant to go on. And now you can be such that that advocate and voice for those who maybe have gone through what you went through. And they always say, you know, your best position is serve the person you once were. So, gosh, I think going through that cancer journey in your early 20s and and being told to terminate your pregnancy, I can't even believe what that would have been like at that age. And uh thank God you you didn't listen to that doctor at the time. I know.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

I know. And full circle moment, kind of crazy. As a nurse practitioner, um, the first cancer I diagnosed was the same cancer I had in a 21-year-old girl. So I get I get a little, you know, choked up when I think about that, especially because I was like, you know, that that again, you know, there are no coincidences, everything happens for a reason. And you know, that was she's okay. And it was a very special moment. So in my career.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

I'm sure it was. I can only imagine it was very, very special. And so you have been on this journey just recently with the functional medicine. And do you have your own personal practice?

Normal Labs Vs Optimal Labs

SPEAKER_01 7:55

So what does that look like for you? I do. I um I have a one-on-one practice. Um, I'm licensed in four states, so I I see patients in those four states. But because it's you know kind of kind of cool that I'm for filming, I'm a research geek. So I'm always any decision I make has is always based on getting the clinical data that supports it. You know, I I did research in the 90s. Uh I was a liver transplant ICU nurse back in the day, and um, I did research for the FDA approval of a drug. So, you know, kind of know what to look for in a good research study, what you can kind of pitch. Um, so I and I say I I like to say I I practice common sense health. It usually middle of the road is where the answer always lies. Um, and not everybody is uh, and you know what, even if people are like all gung-ho, it's human nature that we jump all in and then something gets hard, or you can't stick to something. And you know, after six weeks, you're like, I can't live my life like this. There's and and again, I've been in that position, you know, in my I say 50 hitting me like a brick wall, and you know, couldn't lose weight, just everything changed, did not recognize myself. And so I was my own first patient in in this, I always am, but you know, in this new set session of life, whatever. Um, and it was, I thought I just it just has to be sustainable, like extreme ways of eating are for extreme circumstances. And for the average person, we want to be as healthy as we can, but we also want to enjoy going out, enjoy being social. So the answer is always in the middle. And that's I that's the framework that I uh have applied with all of the patients I work with. And last year ended up making an educational program out of my framework. So I am not the healthcare provider in Lease Marie and P education, but I'm your educator. Most functional medicine, this sounds I say there's a lot of dabblers in functional medicine because, you know, there's coaches, there are, you know, physicians, nurse practitioners, there's NDs, you know, naturopaths, and every state is different. Who can prescribe, who can't prescribe. So, and I used to tell my patients when I was not the functional medicine provider, I would say, we have you have to find a good functional medicine practitioner. But this sounds horrible. I'd say they're like snake oil salesmen. You know, some are good and some just want to sell you supplements. And, you know, supplements are great if they're used properly in the right situation. And, you know, everyone has an opinion about those, but you know, they have to be used strategically. That's pretty much, again, the middle of the road framework, right? But we we look for the most part, functional medicine providers were taught to look at labs in a whole different way. So people will bring me to their labs all the time and say, oh, but they're they're normal. No, let me take a look at them. And and I tell them, like, I am looking Goldilocks levels. I want optimal levels because you know, traditional medicine, we're looking for you don't have a disease yet, so I can't give you this pill. If we like, for example, fasting insulin level. Fasting insulin is the one metabolic marker that you can see, you can see diabetes coming 10 to 15 years before it happens. And not only that, but you can see with with hemoglobin A1C, blood sugar, and a fasting insulin, you can look at those three together and see what's your pancreas doing? Is your pancreas burning out? Because it's, you know, your blood sugar and hemoglobin A1C might look fantastic, but if your fasting insulin is elevated, that means your pancreas is working so hard to keep that blood sugar normal. And that's a maybe$10. No one's getting. No one's getting it.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

It's just so mind-boggling to me. I was just having this conversation because I and I said these very words. I said, you know, I this became a light bulb moment for me when I was reading the the good energy book, Dr. Calvin Reads, right? That moment as I'm reading it, I went, oh my gosh, because we do just kind of look at the labs and we're told a certain thing, you're in the right average, you're in the the the fine, healthy, whatever you want to call it, range. Yeah. When I was reading that book, I went, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. No, I don't want to be in that range. I want to be, like you're saying, optimum and catch where I can catch now before it gets full blown into something that I can't do anything about. Exactly.

Food First And Sustainable Change

SPEAKER_01 13:19

And and I always, I'm I'm a big analogy person. And I always say to people, wouldn't you rather lose five pounds than have to lose 20 pounds? Yes. Right. Sign me up for that, right? Um, and again, you know, oh my gosh, we could go down so many avenues, but what just popped into my head was two things. One, in, and and believe me, I have had many really like come to Jesus moments moving from, and I always say I love being a nurse. I absolutely love being a nurse. You know, people say, you know, when did you decide to be a nurse? Literally, I have a picture of me in third grade dressed up as a nurse for career day. So, you know, it I always I used to give my baby dolls chicken pox, poke them with a pin, color them so I could take care of them. I love it. So it clearly it was my calling. Yes. But to have the aha moment of all I'm doing is giving people medicine. Not one person ever came back to me, other than extreme cases where, you know, you diagnosed a cancer, you know, I diagnosed a major event that, you know, saved a life. Um, the average person just wants to feel healthy and they have no idea why they feel like crap. So to realize, and and this, of course, was after because I went through labs. I can't tell you how many labs a day I would go through. Yep, you're good. Yep, you're good. Because I was only taught to look for a disease. That was it. I wasn't taught to look for the disease coming. And that was all in my functional medicine training and certification and you know, the holistic nutrition. When I was after I got the um functional medicine certification, I thought, okay, because I prefer to do food as medicine. And, you know, that's that's ideal. If you're getting everything you need from a whole food diet, then you have the luxury of being able to use supplements when you need to, when you might feel a little off, or to replenish something you know needs replenished. Um, so it was a really hard pill for me to swallow that I spent my entire life not even making a difference, if if that makes sense. Because now, like looking at labs and actually, again, I'm I'm love love what I do and love being able to help people at the at the level I'm helping people on. And I don't want to say it's easy, but people don't understand that if they change their diet in two weeks, they're going to maybe not lose weight on the scale, but their clothes will fit differently, they will be sleeping better, and they're going to feel lighter and be like, okay. And it's and it's amazing when you when you get that quick win, and then it's like, okay, I want to keep doing this. And I say it's kind of like cleaning an old car or doing spring cleaning, right? You clean up the house. Well, you know it's gonna get dirty again. So how do we keep it clean? And every time you polish that silver, it gets shinier and shinier. And that is literally what we do in functional medicine when we are focusing on getting the cell healthy. And when you get the cell healthy, everything starts to reverse, you know. Um, and to go back to the analogy, I say it's kind of like you're driving toward towards a cliff. How much space you have to hit the brakes is how aggressive we need to be in a treatment plan. And, you know, some people are just, you know, especially like the 30-year-olds, which by the way is the sickest generation. It their guts are a mess. Um, but depending on your symptoms and what your labs look like, you know, we can pump the brakes a little bit. But then there are some situations, you know, when like mast cell activation syndrome and when you your body becomes so reactive that it's like we need to hit the brakes hard. And, you know, the harder you hit the brakes, the faster you're going to start feeling better and reversing some of those symptoms. But let's go back to we all like to live our life a little bit. And you know, so many people don't want to give up their wine or their pizza. So again, let's see how close you are to the cliff, and then we know and then go back. Then we know what we have to give up, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:19

It's I love that analogy, and it's so true. And I, you know, I'm working with a couple right now where I and I tell this is like my mantra, like just exactly like you're saying, you have to still enjoy your life. This is not about restriction and not eating this and not doing that. You you have to make some healthier choices. Um, but at the same time, we also need to enjoy ourselves. And so that you need to make room for that, you know? And I and I just feel like that's an important message because we've been kind of kind of sucked in as a society into this all or nothing mentality. And I have, I personally have never been down that road, but it's it's amazing how people many people are like and they look at everything as a diet. I said, no, no, no, no, this is not a diet. I hate that word. This is not. I know, I know, totally. And I have to like remind them that look at this as your nutrition, that you're a lifestyle. It's it you're supplementing, you're still gonna you know eat your your food, but you're supplementing what you're not getting in your day-to-day nutrition. You're you're you're adding, you're you're you're you know, you're just up-leveling, making it more more optimum and nourishing your body. And it's interesting when you say, we don't know what we're lacking, like for me personally, I was telling you, I had tried a lot of different things. I was dealing with my own personal health journey, uh, having an inner ear disease, and I tried everything. So when I changed my whole nutrition protocol over 11 years ago, everything shifted for me. And even my nurse practitioner, and she still is, and she's also a good friend, she would say, You must have been something was not getting to your body at the cellular level that you needed. And I know for a fact that I was deficient in minerals. For a fact, looking back now and thinking, oh, I'm you know, eating pretty clean, we eat salads every night, but the more you know, the more you learn, you know, it's one of those things where when you know better, you can do better, right? Exactly, exactly. And it's crazy when you think we both have that background. So even for me personally, going, okay, well, I feel pretty healthy, we eat pretty clean, but even for me, it was such an eye-opening moment to realize one, our food supply is not what it's cracked up to be and what it needs to be to really support our bodies completely, and then two, being exposed to so many toxins, and that's going to be a whole other episode for us. I know.

Minerals Matter More Than You Think

Weight Loss Drugs And Long-Term Health

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Absolutely, yes. I'm a huge fan of, you know, there's there's a workaround for everything, right? And as I said, I do a lot of eat this, not that. I'm also Italian, you know, last you know, got two long Italian last names. So food is, you know, a big part of I think every ethnicity, you know, for sure. So as it should be, why not? It is it is, and and I love to cook, luckily. So I do a lot of actually, I have a recipe, I have a cookbook coming out. Oh, excellent. Yes, but I like to rework recipes to make them healthier. Um, and again, the how I teach things, it's like really systematic. And it's I wish it was easier. And it is easy once you understand the principle. But when you start to look at applying health in a systemic manner, right? I look at the one thing I can do. To get the biggest benefit. And that, as we were talking before, is always starting in the gut. Once the gut is healthy, everything starts to get balanced. Metabolics start to get in line, hormones start to balance naturally. And then while we're doing that, the underpinning of that is mineral deficiency. Because minerals, like I say all the time, and and we talked about this earlier, that any supplement, you know, if you're taking a good supplement and if it's working for you, if you stop taking it for a while and you're like, oh, wait, I'm I'm noticing the difference. And so I say that supplements might bring something to the party, but minerals are the party. For sure. And I and there's so many studies now that just tie every miner and every disease process into a mineral deficiency. Yes. You know, magnesium. I'm a fan of magnesium. You know what? There's 11 different kinds, right? And um, magnesium is responsible for over 300 enzymatic processes in your body. So if it's deficient in your blood, it's really deficient on a cellular level. So um I do a lot of I do mineral analysis testing, and we look at what your body burned in the last four months, and then put that together with blood work, and we see a really big picture. And then we're able to make replenish exactly what your body just used. So we're always giving it the new, the natural, the raw materials it needs to make everything. Vitamin D. You know, I mean, how many vitamins are made? Just well, sodium and potassium. The the balance of sodium and potassium is what is responsible for getting your fluids from outside of your cell into your cell. And that's where we want them. So they can be flushed through our body and eliminated. Right. So um just, you know, when you when you start to like unpack it all, again, it's it's fascinating because our bodies are amazing machines and they, you know, their goal is to find balance. And even if it's off, you know, it'll be your new balance. So to reverse that and get it safe, this is why I'm I'm a no-guilt person. And to your point about we beat ourselves up for everything, and women especially, it's counterintuitive to think that you have to eat more to actually lose weight. But you know, that's what happens. We have to feed our body so it feels safe enough to say, okay, you're not starving me. All right, I have this, this, this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna let go of what I don't need. And it's uh, you know, a leap of faith to do that, and you know, eat your way to being fit. And that's my next little pet peeve. You know, it's uh so easy to get weight loss help, and there's nothing wrong with that. And it's again the band-aid. Um, but uh we need to look at weight loss medications as the band-aid and prepare for getting off of them. You know, my opinion, the none of these should be used long term. And I'm telling you again from experience, the the weight comes back on quicker than it came off.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

It's I'm so glad you're bringing this up. And again, this is gonna be another oh yeah, but all of its own. I I actually just did a solo episode on this very topic. And it's again, it's you know, it's never, and I always say this, I feel like I'm a broken record. It's never to bash doctors, it's never to bash medicine. This, these medications are working for some people and that they are necessary, right? But oh my gosh, when I get two, three, four emails daily to be able to order these meds, I'm like, okay, what is going on here? This is too much for easy access for anyone and everyone, without even like taking their background, their personal health history, their genetics, their what are we doing for nutrition? What are we doing for our movement, our exercise?

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Like, absolutely, because it's and I I could get on a soapbox about this. And I again, you know, everything, everything is is appropriate if given the right time, the right management, and the right context. Everything's about context. Yep. Um, so yeah, we definitely we will definitely come back and touch on that.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

But it's it's it's a concern that there's not people like yourself. In some cases, there there are. Don't get me wrong. I'm not again for any of you listening and you're you're taking the medication and you're having success. This is not directed at you. It's it's more of the kind of the spur of the moment that people want the fix, quick fix, right? Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

And that's the thing. You know, we have to, and I I can appreciate it, right? We all want to hit the number on the scale. But and and and I say that with a little caveat, that as we get older, the number that we that used to look good on us probably doesn't anymore. So, you know, you need to shift that a little bit. But muscle is is our youth. And so that's why any weight loss, even this is the thing about extreme dieting, you know, weight loss should be done in a very controlled manner. You need to feed your muscle to maintain your muscle. Muscle burns fat, and it's it's the whole process. So if we're looking to get skinny, great. You know, and my a friend of mine who's a physician used to say, oh, you'll look good in the in the um coffin. You'll look good in your coffin, you know. But and that's and that's a horrible thing to say, but let's look at what we're what we're trying to get. Let's our goal, let our goal be health and feeling good, and not just hitting that number on the scale and looking thin. I want to look fit, you know. I want to look, I want someone to look at me and say, me as nanny could really hurt somebody. Look at her arms.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

That's it, right? Being healthy, being strong, and being exactly that's something we talk about a lot. And I've been working in the area of longevity, and it's the same kind of thing, right? We want to be strong and focus the attention away from the numbers, away from the scale. I know from all my years of teaching college, I used to always, always tell my students, it's good to be aware of what your weight is, but that's just one piece of the full pie, one piece of the puzzle. You can't look at that. I shouldn't say can't, but they do. Some people do, look at that number, and it's either gonna make or break them. And I will tell them, listen, you need to know your blood pressure, get your cholesterol checked, you know, have your body fat percentage done. There's so much more to this equation than the number on the scale. And yes, so helping people, you know, understand that I I know, I know it's so hard for some people, especially I would have students, I know you have been, you have faced this, I'm sure, with clients that jump on a scale every day, every single day.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

And and uh, you know, I'm okay as long as you're looking at it as data. And I tell because, you know, all everything we're talking about, blood pressure, labs, weight, it's data. It's data, yes. Everything everything can be improved, everything can change. Without the data, you don't know what the what your next step is. Right. So I've actually told people who don't want to get on the scale, and and I the last thing I work on is wait. Unless someone says comes to me and says, I have this coming up, I have to do, I want this, I want to get the weighted off. Okay, then we take things a little bit differently, but we always fix the gut because that is going to be your long-term benefit. So I've told people that I don't care buy an old-fashioned scale with the little dial, you know, that spins, set it a hundred pounds lighter. I don't care if the scale says you weigh 75 pounds. We want to know the difference between today and next week. We just want, because, and I say this, and you know, if anybody, whoever's listening out there, whenever you start to on your journey, um, always get a weight, even if you don't want to take a picture of it, don't look at it, hide it, do whatever. Because the first week, all that weight that you're losing is inflammatory shift. And I say there's, you know, three to five pounds of of what we carry is our shift, and it's all inflammation. So it's kind of a nice win. You don't want to miss out on that first.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Yeah, I think it's so important, like you're saying it, it's data. I used to tell my students about the body fat. I said, listen, I I want you to understand this is this is a tool, and we're going to do the testing now and we're going to repeat it again at the end of the semester. So look at it as a way to be able to see what's happening. And sometimes I would say, you know, if you want to check yours midway through the semester, great, we can do that. But it's exactly like you're saying. I said, I don't want you to focus so much on the numbers, but let's focus and see how they shift and change over time. That's key. Because as you know, a young college student, and if they see that the shift happens and the scale goes up, I say, you know what? But look at this. If your if your percentage of body fat has gone down, then that's super exciting. If your skill goes up, the fat goes down, guess what? You've gained muscle. And we want to celebrate that. So helping to, like you're doing, educate others in that area is so key. Exactly.

Testing For Progress And Self-Advocacy

SPEAKER_01 32:51

And to that point also, um, I'm always, you know, I get so many people who come to me and say, I'm so worried about my labs. I'm so worried about this. And again, it's like, why? You know, why are you worried? Because this is, you know, this is your starting point. And again, I we use it as data. I am even in in both of my programs, in my one-on-one and my group program, we are testing every four months because we want to see what's going on, what shifted. And and that's we even if something gets bad, for example, when we're doing a gut, when we're in the middle of a big gut cleanup, um inflammation markers are going to go up because we're clearing out the garbage. And that causes a little influx of inflammation and then it calms down. So, you know, it just tells us where we've been, what your body's doing, and it also can guide us and say, well, you know, maybe we're going at it a little bit too hard. We back off a little bit. Um, and without that data, you you're flying blind. Right. So that's why I love when people, I have a whole um the lab panel I I use, I put together just because of what I like to see lab-wise, because again, it's like connecting the dots. As I mentioned before, when you're looking at insulin, blood sugar, and hemoglobin A1C, how those three are reacting and playing with each other. Then cholesterol, we're looking at triglycerides and very specific apolipoprotein B and lipoprotein A, the more damaging ones, and putting those together with your metabolics. So I have a whole program that you can just get my lab panel and listen to me teach you why you want these numbers, what the Goldilocks value is, why you want it to be that way, and how you get it that way. Because again, you know, you go to your and to your point about we're not here to trash any of the medical providers. Again, speaking as one, the system is not conducive to optimal health. It's you know, where it'll save your life, and if God forbid, you know, we all need hospitals, we all need physicians, they're guides. Um, but you know, they're there to treat a disease and to find that disease, not to prevent it. Right, right. And so that's why a lot of, you know, I want to empower people to take action. And when I work with people one-on-one, that is exactly what I do. I love to work with other providers and say, okay, you know, a patient will come to me and say, Well, I kind of want to get off this medicine and I don't know if I can. Like, okay, here. This is what you talk to your PCP. If they want to call me, we'll have a conversation. But these are the questions you need to ask. Here are the studies that support what you want to do, and you educate yourself and you need to have your own voice and say to the medical system, what about this? You know, what about approach it from a different perspective? And you know, that's it's awesome. And and usually what I have is coming back to me saying, I don't know what she's doing for you, but your blood work looks fantastic. So keep doing what you're doing. Fantastic. That is so, so great. It is, it's it's awesome. But you know, just have your voice and know you have the data and know what you want out of life. And for all those 30-year-olds out there, now is the time. The decisions you make in your 30s dictate your life in your 50s.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Oh my goodness. Yes, amen to that. I was just talking to someone about that. We were talking about perimetopause and some of the risks that are associated with that during that phase. And I said, you know what? Why were we not told that? Like I was never told anything about perimenopause or menopause and what I should do or should not do, right? And so, I mean, now we can educate people and educate the young people, but it's it's so key and not enough. That message needs to be so loud and clear for our younger generations to uh sound that bell. What you're doing now is going to pay off later or not. So, do we need to make some adjustments, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Exactly, exactly. We we have five kids and we we tell them that all the time, you know, the youngest are like 28. And it's like, guys, yes, this is really important, you know, pay attention to this now.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Yes, it's so key. Oh, it's so key. Well, I I just I love this so much. I know we could go on and on. So I guess with the um consideration of time, we should probably be wrapping this up. But I'm just I'm so excited that we have this time, Lisa Marie. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Thank you. It was wonderful. And I'm let's do it again because we can talk forever.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

I'm gonna say we need to schedule it again. And then on I also want to reach out to you because I will I want to get some information, not just for myself, but when I have my few of my clients when it comes time for them to have some blood work done. Um I'll be reaching out to you. And what's the best place? I will add your information in the show notes, but what is the best place for people to reach out to you?

SPEAKER_01 38:45

Um, LisaMurienp.com or on Facebook at Lisa Marie NP, Instagram, Lisa Marie the NP. Perfect.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

YouTube channel, I have lots of educational videos on YouTube as well. Fantastic. Well, I'll be sure to add all of that into the show notes. And I so appreciate this time. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

It was so much fun.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

So, so fun and so informative. And thank you to all of our listeners. I just hope that you take all of this information to heart. You know, re-relisten if you need to, and please share. Share with loved ones, share with those who need to hear this information, because that's the whole purpose, really, of me having this podcast is to get the message out so we can all fill our best, our healthiest, most vibrant lives now and into the future. So take some time for yourself and your wellness on this day. And until next time, have a beautiful, blessed rest of your week. We'll see you next time on Words of Wellness. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I hope you gained value and enjoyed our time together as much as I did. And if you know someone who could benefit from today's episode, I would love and appreciate it if you could share with a friend or rate and review Words of Wellness so that more can hear this message. I love and appreciate you all. Thank you for listening. And if you have any questions or topics you would like me to share in future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to me through my contact information that is shared in the show notes below. Again, thank you for tuning in to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelley Jeffries, and I encourage you to do something for you, for your wellness on this day. Until next time, I hope you all have a healthy, happy, and blessed week.