Episode 37 Interview with Jennifer Ragazzo -Healing Reimagined

Erin Maillo interview Jennifer Ragazzo about her IBS story and how she eventually healed and helps other women as well to heal gut issues getting to the core of what women have trouble digesting, physically and spiritually. 

You can follow Jennifer on www.jenniferragazzo.com and also check out her podcast : The Daily Surrender.

Connect with Jennifer On Instagram: http://instagram.com/jennifer.ragazzo

Substack :http:// jenniferragazzo.substack.com

Website: http://jenniferragazzo.com

Transcript

Erin:  I'm really excited to talk to you about your IBS journey, how you've healed, and if you wouldn't mind starting just giving us kind of an overview of
 
 Jennifer: what your life was like before you had IBS, before you were diagnosed, and then how the diagnosis happened.
 
 Jennifer: Just a little‚
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Drop, if you wouldn't mind, for the listeners.
 
 Jennifer: Absolutely! Definitely. Yeah, my journey‚Ķ my journey, has been quite a twisty-turny one over decades, so‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: I first was given the‚Ķ I'm gonna use air quotes for people who are not watching, the diagnoses of IBS when I was in my early 20s, and I was struggling
 
 Jennifer: All through my teenage years and into college, I was struggling with swinging from chronic constipation, very, very painful.
 
 Jennifer: bloating, and then I would swing over into perhaps having diarrhea, and then I would go back. I would say I was more of an IBS, you know, constipation type of a person, and when I would go to the gastroenterologist, for anybody listening who's gone to GI doctors trying to seek answers.
 
 Jennifer: they would just tell me, take Miralax, that's it. You know, you have IBS, you have IBS, and‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: you know, today I know, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in our conversation, I know that IBS is just a big umbrella. It's not actually explaining anything. It's not getting to the root cause of what's driving any of the things. But back in my 20s, I had no idea. I didn't know, so I took on that label, and that wasn't my only label that I was taking on at that
 
 Jennifer: Season of my life.
 
 Jennifer: again, teenage years, struggling a lot with different gut issues, not going to the bathroom regularly, but you don't know what you don't know, and it's not like people talk about it. You know, it's not common conversation, although in my house it is, and I've raised my children very differently.
 
 Jennifer: But‚Ķ You know, we talk about poop, but‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: I didn't know, and so it just becomes the normal waters that you swim in, and so for me, it was the normal waters that I swam in. I had been on a lot of antibiotics growing up. My entire life. I struggled with ear infections and strep throat, had my tonsils out, and then it was just constant upper respiratory and sinus infections, which
 
 Jennifer: again, necessitated a lot of antibiotics, and I had, again, no idea at the time that I'm destroying my gut microbiome, that that is‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: contributing to a lot of the digestive issues that I had. So, my journey, since our podcast, you know, our topic here for our listeners is IBS, specifically.
 
 Jennifer: It‚Ķ it was into the world of being given a label that had absolutely no answers for me.
 
 Jennifer: you know, maybe drink more prune juice, take Miralax, and that didn't help anything. And I also was struggling with endometriosis, chronic migraine headaches.
 
 Jennifer: Wow.
 
 Jennifer: adult acne, I was on medications for all of those things, not knowing that all of those medications also had side effects that were affecting my digestion, affecting my gut health. And then I started to struggle with a lot of anxiety and depression.
 
 Jennifer: And we know today that there's a strong gut-brain connection.
 
 Jennifer: But did not know that when I was really, really trapped in the world of allopathic medicine and just band-aiding and band-aiding and band-aiding. So, I would say that that's really where my journey with
 
 Jennifer: IBS began.
 
 Jennifer: In my teenage years into all through my 20s.
 
 Jennifer: All through your 20s. Wow, we have so much in common. It's like my‚Ķ yeah, my IBS was almost like the same symptoms, the same lack of clarity from doctors, just even when you were talking about when you were a kid, the amount of antibiotics that you were on, and I had
 
 Jennifer: chronic, chronic ear infections, chronic strep throat when I was little. Remember the‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: Oh.
 
 Jennifer: The swab that they used to.
 
 Jennifer: Gagging on the swab.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah, and just feeling like‚ oh, okay, I have IBS. Okay, for me, I felt‚
 
 Jennifer: it's‚ I felt initially relieved, like, at least now there's an answer, because I'm like, do I have to cancel? What's‚ what is wrong with me?
 
 Jennifer: And they're like, oh no, just, like, take these laxatives, and, like.
 
 Jennifer: or try to eat more fiber, and I'm like, I had a really healthy diet, I was eating a lot of fiber, it was.
 
 Jennifer: just‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: So, just‚Ķ confusing. I think part of that, just being like, but what do I do?
 
 Jennifer: what do you do? What do you do? And there's really not any answers other than, you know, again, increase your fiber, which can be really insulting if you already are eating a lot of fiber. And we know today, too, like, you and I know this, that
 
 Jennifer: you can‚Ķ you can take more and more fiber, and that can actually exasperate your symptoms. It can make it worse. You can feel even more bloated, and that's‚Ķ those are things that I would experience. Nobody was explaining to me,
 
 Jennifer: that that can sometimes make things worse. And so, yeah, I definitely felt like I was at a loss. And again, you know, in my journey, there were so many other things that were also
 
 Jennifer: being, you know, labels being given to me and things that I was struggling with in my physical health and my overall health, and when I had my second child.
 
 Jennifer: I had had a surgery for‚Ķ and it was‚Ķ I had a small bowel obstruction when I was pregnant with him.
 
 Jennifer: And that was from scar tissue from endometriosis and the endometriosis surgeries, and endometriosis was also all over my bowel. You know, so again, being given this label of IBS, but never‚Ķ nobody ever making these connections, even with the endometriosis, and the endometriosis being on my bowel, and it made it incredibly painful for me to have bowel movements. So, when I had my period, like, I didn't have‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: I couldn't go to the bathroom because it was so incredibly painful.
 
 Jennifer: So, I had had some surgeries.
 
 Jennifer: to remove the endometriosis, but it left me with a lot of scar tissue, so when I was pregnant with him, I had a bowel obstruction, and it was horrible, and I had to have emergency surgery, and luckily, I didn't lose the pregnancy.
 
 Jennifer: And shortly after he was born.
 
 Jennifer: my IBS came back, and it came back with a vengeance, and this time it wasn't constipation, it was‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: Diarrhea, but it was
 
 Jennifer: running to the bathroom constantly, like, I couldn't get to the bathroom fast enough, and it‚Ķ and my stomach was in agonizing pain. It did feel like spastic colon. Went back to the GI doctor again. I'm like, this is not normal. This doesn't‚Ķ this does not feel in any way, shape, or form like I just need to take more fiber. I mean, I was in agony.
 
 Jennifer: And again, I walked away with the most dismissive diagnoses of IBS. Just IBS.
 
 Jennifer: So, now, you know, instead
 
 Erin: Why do you think that is? Like, why do you think when you go to the GI, what was your understanding? Do you have any understanding aboutthat?
 
 Jennifer: Well, yeah, so today, just so your listeners know, you know, what I do, I mean, today I'm 50, so I have been practicing for the last 15 years as a coach. I started off in traditional
 
 Jennifer: health coaching, and me entering into this career really came from my own health journey, and getting so lost in the system, searching for answers, trying to find somebody that could help me, and not really finding
 
 Jennifer: answers in a way that it was, helpful to me from the doctors that I was going to. So I started to do my own research, and it was‚ it was, just a series of different people that were brought into my life that opened me up to
 
 Jennifer: different, more ways of looking at the human body, and through a more holistic lens, and my son's pediatrician, when I was having that, you know, second diagnosis of IBS, but it was IBS,
 
 Jennifer: with the‚ the chronic diarrhea. She‚ she put me on some herbs, because she was a very holistic pediatrician.
 
 Jennifer: And I look back now, he's 20 years old, but I look back now, and I remember it was a standard process black radish. You know, I don't know why that worked at the time, but I‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: It worked, but she said to me, no, your gut microbiome is imbalanced, and she also recommended a probiotic, and she recommended that we switch to raw milk, because, raw dairy is‚
 
 Jennifer: legal in Pennsylvania, so we were able to go access to a raw dairy farm, and so I made more changes, and I had already started to make changes in my overall health, because I had to go through IVF to get pregnant with my first two children.
 
 Jennifer: And in going through IVF, I had met a nurse in, who was, overseeing my case, and she had.
 
 Jennifer: made some recommendations for me in my diet, and cleaning up my diet, getting off of traditional dairy products and any soy products at the time, and she had me
 
 Jennifer: making sure that I, had organic, if I was having dairy products and eating very clean and whole foods, and that really was the first time in my life that anybody had ever guided me on the connection between what I was putting in my mouth and how my body was reacting. I mean, outside of take fiber, you know, the, you just need more.
 
 Erin: Right.
 
 Jennifer: And so I really became obsessed with learning more and more and more about, the human body and all of the different ways that it is so brilliantly interconnected.
 
 Jennifer: So, you're asking me, why do I think that we get so dismissed when we go to a regular GI doctor?
 
 Jennifer: Well, I believe we have a broken medical system. You know, you're living in a different country than I am. I'm in the United States, but I don't think that our medical system, you know, globally is much better.
 
 Jennifer: I think, to some degree, how we handle things is better in different countries, but we don't have a system that is here for healthcare. We have a sick care
 
 Jennifer: So by the time you go to an actual doctor, what you're doing is you're getting a diagnosis, and then you're given this label, and then we're going to give you the band-aid treatment that is just scratching the surface.
 
 Jennifer: Right.
 
 Jennifer: It's just scratching the surface. We're not getting underneath.
 
 Jennifer: To look at what's driving the symptoms of dis-ease to begin with.
 
 Jennifer: And so‚
 
 Jennifer: in my own health journey, I began to learn more and more about how to get down underneath into the root cause. So, when I started coaching 15 years ago, I was a traditional health coach, I went to school for integrative nutrition, and you know, my education was great.
 
 Jennifer: But it still felt very limited, because I would have so many clients sitting in front of me, and we would make changes in their diet, and make sure that they're eating whole foods. And these are conversations, again, I never had‚Ķ I never had a GI doctor in all the years that I've ever gone. And I had to go back, even recently, 5 years ago, I went back to a GI doctor, and then I went to a rectal surgeon, because I had to have
 
 Jennifer: I had to have surgery, a hemorridectomy, from years of chronic constipation.
 
 Jennifer: I had really bad hemorrhoids, and even then, I'm reading the pamphlets, and I'm looking at what the dietary recommendations are. They're awful. You have surgery. The dietary recommendations are horrible. None of this is supporting gut health. None of it is supporting, our gut microbiome.
 
 Jennifer: So, I don't know that it's a system that's designed to even educate us. Medical doctors do not have nutrition education.
 
 Jennifer: They're not educated from through a functional lens. In order for them to get that education, they have to go off on their own time and go educate themselves, and oftentimes, they're not even given
 
 Jennifer: The space to have conversations that they need to have with their patients, such as
 
 Jennifer: You know, what is your diet? What's your stress? How's your nervous system? What are you doing to support your nervous system? How hydrated are you? Properly hydrated? Are you eating crap foods that are irritating your gut lining?
 
 Jennifer: So, I never experienced conversations like that.
 
 Jennifer: In any of my allopathic care outside of that one reproductive endocrinologist nurse that talked to me about foods that were affecting my hormones.
 
 Jennifer: No.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Erin: So, what‚ So, this nurse was very helpful.
 
 Erin: And then you started going on your own journey on learning just as much as you could about.
 
 Erin: about your body, about what was affecting your body, about nutrition, changing your diet. Yes. When did you start‚ did you start noticing immediate relief when you were changing your diet, or what was the process like? Like, was it a slow process? Was it quick?
 
 Jennifer: Yeah. Where can it take you to‚
 
 Jennifer: quote-unquote feel. I don't know if you can fully say, because it's so interesting with, like, the gut issues, because it's like, we all experience, like, it's kind of like a spectrum.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: You know, like, sometimes even now, I'm like, I feel really full. And then I think, you know, oh, am I constipated? Am I bloated? It's like, no, you're not bloated, like, you're just a little full. That's it.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would say that my biggest shift away from, like, the years of chronic constipation happened when I made dietary changes. So I'm eating whole foods.
 
 Jennifer: Oh.
 
 Jennifer: again, I'm 50 now, so if we're jumping back 30 years, you know, the dietary trends at the time.
 
 Jennifer: were sugar‚ it was all processed, right? It was, like, sugar-free, fat-free, packaged foods, you know, my lunch might be a fat-free yogurt and a Diet Coke and, like, a sleeve of Snackwell cookies. Like, I look back on that now and I cringe, thinking that that's what I thought was nutritionally optimal for my body. And so when I started really eating real food.
 
 Jennifer: like, in its whole form, I saw a drastic difference in my GI symptoms. I would at least be able to go to the bathroom every day. When I had that bout after having my son and I took some herbals, I understand today what we did was
 
 Jennifer: you know, with some antimicrobials, so there must have been some microbial overgrowth going on in my gut, and whatever I took knocked down the microbes that were overgrowing. So, when you look at, like, chronic constipation.
 
 Jennifer: because, again, IBS is an umbrella. It tells us very, very little. Very, very little. It's all it's, like, the most dismissive thing.
 
 Erin: About specifically what's going.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, absolutely.
 
 Jennifer: Absolutely, it's
 
 Jennifer: It's like‚ it's just like chronic fatigue, you know, when you have people who are very, extremely tired all day long, and then they go to their doctor and they get a diagnosis of chronic fatigue. I mean, you're like, no, no kidding. Okay, I could have told you that. I'm tired, I'm looking for answers, I'm looking for an understanding of why this is happening in my body. So, for me, I started to see those changes
 
 Jennifer: And I made a lot of, again, dietary changes, eating whole food, switching my food to organic, that was really important, because when you're not eating organic foods and you're eating non-organic foods.
 
 Jennifer: you're eating, you're in Italy, so you don't have the same exposure, fortunately, that we do in the United States, but glyphosate is legal here, unfortunately.
 
 Jennifer: And
 
 Jennifer: glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup, and it's heavily sprayed on our crops, especially our corn, wheat, and oat crops, and soy crops, and so that's the majority of what Americans eat. And you take processed foods, and on top of it having all of these different additives and chemicals.
 
 Jennifer: it's loaded with pesticides, so if you think about the pesticide, what is that doing to your gut microbiome? It's annihilating it, you know, you're killing off good microflora in the microbiome, and then you're really compromising your gut. So.
 
 Jennifer: making those types of changes made a big difference in my life. Learning how to properly hydrate, not just with actual water, but with minerals and sodium and electrolytes, that all really helped me. And I went in my, all of the education that I've gotten over the years, I went back to school for applied functional medicine.
 
 Jennifer: And when I started diving into the world of functional medicine, that's when everything started to change for me. And I became very, very well educated in the inner workings of the gut microbiome.
 
 Jennifer: understanding all of the nuances through a lens of functional medicine. And in functional medicine, you're really looking for root cause, and we're looking for optimal health, not just the average of the sick population. So, I became really well-versed in reading stool tests.
 
 Jennifer: And every one of my clients would get a stool test, and I can't tell you how many clients I've had over 15 years who came here
 
 Jennifer: With a, you know, giant umbrella diagnosis of IBS, and what I would do with them is, let's understand it, let's unpack it. So here I am helping other people unpack it, and I'm absolutely here. I know I'm telling my story, but I'm also weaving it in, because my story became
 
 Jennifer: how I also stepped into a profession where I help other.
 
 Jennifer: Absolutely, yeah, I totally relate to that.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah, yeah. So, over my.
 
 Jennifer: He was separated, really.
 
 Jennifer: You can't separate it, because I‚ in all that I started to learn about my own body, and as I started to see these changes.
 
 Jennifer: I was a teacher, so, you know, I went to college for, psychology, and my master's is in education, and I was a teacher, so‚
 
 Jennifer: when I had my children, I had stepped away from my teaching profession, and this was still all through my health journey. Like, a lot of the acute health diagnoses and struggles that I was having.
 
 Jennifer: And  I'm just somebody who's naturally curious, and I'm a critical thinker, and my favorite question to ask is why. So, I'm doing my own research, and I'm learning, and I'm learning, and I'm experimenting on myself, and‚Ķ
 
 Jennifer: I wanted to bring what I was learning to other people. I wanted to help other people find hope and healing in the ways that I was experiencing, which is what
 
 Jennifer: you know, really inspired me to step in and start educating myself. So, even all the education that I got, I'm also certified in naturopathy and
 
 Jennifer: you know, I've done a lot to learn, but really, truly, the greatest forum for learning has been the people that have sat before me, and my own health. So, you know, my journey with the gut
 
 Jennifer: the IBS, in the traditional sense that people think about either chronic constipation or diarrhea, which oftentimes really is‚Ķ we've got SIBO going on, so we have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and or overgrowth in the large intestine.
 
 Jennifer: And or weak digestion. There's, like, a lot of different layers.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, yes.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah, there's so many different layers there, and drivers, for me, I'm constantly learning, and as I'm working with people, and then my own stuff, some of the things that kept popping up that I learned about myself is I had H. pylori, so H. pylori is,
 
 Jennifer: a bacterial infection that is in the gut, the H. pylori overgrowths in the stomach lining itself.
 
 Jennifer: And 40% of the population has H. pylori, and it doesn't mean that everybody has it so overgrown that it's problematic, but once you have it, it's going to be there, it's commensal, but we want to knock it down so it's not problematic, and when you have an overgrowth of H. pylori, what happens is
 
 Jennifer: The bacteria release an enzyme called urease, and urease neutralizes stomach acid.
 
 Jennifer: And I might have had this since I was a child, but this was never checked in all the years. And even when you get it checked by a GI doctor, it oftentimes will fail. Like, you'll pass it, and you don't have it, but it's not sensitive enough. The functional tests are much more sensitive, and so they'll pick it up.
 
 Jennifer: And so, when I‚
 
 Jennifer: learned about my H. pylori, it made so much sense, because the enzyme urease that's neutralizing stomach acid, it's hindering the entire digestive process, because we need robust amounts of stomach acid in order to break down our food.
 
 Jennifer: break it down into little bits, to denature it, to pull out the nutrients from the food, but it also is needed because it's the first line of defense.
 
 Jennifer: If you're eating food that has‚ because we eat things, and we'd have bacteria and stuff, but then it's also needed because it helps break our food down into what's called chyme, that's that liquidy stuff that is in the stomach, and that gets passed over to the small intestine, and then there's a triggering process.
 
 Jennifer: And if it's really acidic, it will trigger the gallbladder to release bile, it will trigger our pancreas to release pancreatic enzymes. But if you have weak digestion and really poor stomach acid production.
 
 Jennifer: Perhaps because of H. pylori, then
 
 Jennifer: there's no triggering. So we're not triggering the gallbladder to release bile. Bile is so important. Bile is not needed just to break down fat. Bile is antimicrobial. Bile helps‚ is like grease the pipes, so to speak. So people who have poor bile flow will have a much greater, chance of having microbial overgrowths and constipation. I've seen this so many times.
 
 Jennifer: And then, also, our pancreas releasing pancreatic enzymes, we need these enzymes to continue to break down the food. So when we don't have this nice enzyme release.
 
 Jennifer: then we have undigested food going through the digestive tract. Think about bloating, gas, food sensitivities, irritation to the gut lining. We're creating a leaky gut situation, right? So, that, for me, when I found that, even in myself, and this was in the years that I was looking at myself through a functional medicine lens.
 
 Jennifer: also.
 
 Jennifer: helping other people with it. I'm like, oh, that was probably a big driver, along with all the antibiotic use and the massive, you know, annihilation of the good bacteria in my gut, and
 
 Jennifer: So, I would treat- I treated myself, this is kind of a little bit more of my own behind the scenes. I would treat myself holistically for H. pylori over and over, and then it would come back. And I'm like, what the heck? Why is it coming back? And it would come back, and it would come back.
 
 Jennifer: So, in all of the years of working with humans and sitting‚ having them sit before me.
 
 Jennifer: And being a critical thinker, I start to think, okay, there's more here. It's not just physical. We need.
 
 Jennifer: to take a
 
 Jennifer: look at the mental and emotional aspect and the spiritual aspect. It's mind, body, spirit. We cannot leave any part out.
 
 Jennifer: So, I, in my coaching, I always talk to people about, you know, their emotional states and what they do for nervous system, but I start digging in even deeper, and I start really exploring the metaphysical, and I'm doing it
 
 Jennifer: I‚ I had a I had an amazing, amazing coach that I hired for myself, because I was so frustrated with my own, you know, behind the scenes and things like H. pylori that wouldn't go away, because also, if you have weak digestion, you're going to have really low minerals, you're going to have‚ and that's going to affect other areas, like your hormones, and‚
 
 Jennifer: Other issues in the body.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: everything starts in our gut. Our gut is, like, the epicenter of our entire body. 
 
 Jennifer: So, in my exploration, and again, understanding, trying to help myself, along with helping other people, I start to really explore deeper into the metaphysical.
 
 Jennifer: And the metaphysical, so metaphysical is taking a look at how our trapped emotions in the body are showing up for us in our physical symptoms.
 
 Jennifer: And that's‚ Yes.
 
 Jennifer: really, really started to blow my mind. And, I mean, for me, you know.
 
 Jennifer: I had‚ again, I'm working with people in my practice, but every good practitioner, therapist, coach should have their own, at least at some point, because you‚ it's the best training ever. I mean, your personal work on yourself will always be the best professional training, so I hired someone to help me, and she and I tore the house down, and we started to really take a look at
 
 Jennifer: at my
 
 Jennifer: my mental and emotional state, and the emotions that were trapped inside of me, the limiting beliefs that I was walking around with, the things that I was not digesting. So if you think about, like, not digesting,
 
 Jennifer: like‚
 
 Jennifer: leaky gut, for instance, can really symbolize leaky boundaries, and I had terrible boundaries. I was a chronic people pleaser. I took on what was not mine a lot throughout my entire life. I did that. I didn't understand why I was doing it. Like, that was a lot of the conditioning from my childhood that led to these limiting beliefs, this belief that I had to please everybody around me.
 
 Jennifer: And if you do that, you can't have boundaries. I see that, by the way, in a lot of women, a lot of my female clients.
 
 Jennifer: our crop.
 
 Jennifer: people-pleasers, like, over-givers, overdoers. I cannot emphasize enough that if we are not addressing that, we will not heal our gut. You could take all the supplements in the world, you can do all the things,
 
 Jennifer: the gut protocols, eat the healthiest of food, which I was doing, and yet, I would still have this reoccurring H. pylori over and over and over again.
 
 Jennifer: And, you know, when I came‚ I started to look at it through a different lens and dig in, and I'm like, wait a second, so if H. pylori literally breaks down the gut lining, that's that very tissue that's meant to protect and nourish us.
 
 Jennifer: So, metaphorically, that's mirroring how I was letting stress and unprocessed emotions and even, like, relationships in my life break down my own inner boundaries.
 
 Jennifer: I wasn't just struggling to digest the food, I was literally struggling to digest life, right? So‚
 
 Jennifer: When we start to get down, again, to those deeper, deeper issues, Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: where we see the shifts. And so,
 
 Jennifer: I began to do my own really deep inner work, and it wasn't until I started to do the deeper inner work that my nervous system was finally able to stop living in hypervigilance. I lived in hypervigilance,
 
 Jennifer: I lived in hypervigilance mode all the time. Like, all the time.
 
 Jennifer: Can you‚ can you just tell us‚ I mean, I know what you mean, but‚
 
 Jennifer: what do you mean? Just so‚ because I‚ I was in that mode, too. I absolutely relate to 100% of what you're saying. The emotional piece‚
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: The metaphysical piece is so‚ to me, it was the missing key.
 
 Jennifer: Yes.
 
 Jennifer: Me too. I was like, okay, food, okay, this, yes, that was helpful, but the real, like, unlocking was, like.
 
 Jennifer: I can't stop‚
 
 Jennifer: doing all this stuff, I can't stop doing all this stuff, I can't stop doing all this. And so, what do you mean‚ how did you experience that hypervigilance? Like, how did you.
 
 Jennifer: How did I?
 
 Jennifer: within your body. How did it manifest? For people, I think a lot of people are in it, and they don't‚ they're like, what do you mean?
 
 Jennifer: This is just life. This is just life.
 
 Jennifer: life, right. Well, you don't‚ again, you don't know what you don't know, and it becomes the normal waters that you swim in. So, for me, I was
 
 Jennifer: wearing‚ proudly wearing the, you know, I'm a Type A person. I'm, like, Wonder Woman. I can do it all. I can be super mom, and run a business, and work myself‚ like, I was working, working, working, running from myself. I was very much a perfectionist.
 
 Jennifer: And how did this show up for me in my physical body? I really struggled with sleep a lot. I had‚ I was wired and tired. It was very hard for me to fall asleep and stay asleep. I had‚ I had dysregulated cortisol.
 
 Jennifer: My thyroid was hypo, so, you know, if we're looking‚ we're, you know, bringing everything back to the gut, see, you can see how there's so many different routes, right? But the thyroid is the‚
 
 Jennifer: It's like the canary in the coal mine, and it's just responding to all of the other stressors, plus the thyroid needs certain nutrients to function properly, and you're not going to get the nutrients if you're not digesting properly, but you're not going to digest properly if you are not
 
 Jennifer: digesting life, and you're holding things in, and you're, again, leaky‚ leaky boundaries, chronically people-pleasing, never able to really settle. That was something that I‚Ķ I felt like I couldn't really ever settle. I was tired. I was so tired.
 
 Jennifer: Yet, I'd go to‚Ķ try and go to bed at night, and I struggled to fall asleep. I just wanted to fix, fix, fix, and I was running from
 
 Jennifer: sitting still with myself, sitting quiet with me, sitting with my emotions, sitting with my thoughts. I couldn't do that back then. I really couldn't, like‚
 
 Jennifer: it was probably only the last 5 years when I had my‚ again, my health journey's been long, you know, so we've gone through, like, a lot of the chronic illness and labels that I was struggling with in my 20s, and then even into my 30s.
 
 Jennifer: I had had autoimmune diseases pop up, you know, so here I've got, Hashimoto's, which is autoimmune thyroiditis. I've got vitiligo on my forehead.
 
 Jennifer: in all of my search to figure out what was going on with my‚ why I wasn't digesting. I had antibodies,
 
 Jennifer: to‚ it's actually they're antibodies to the parietal cells in my stomach lining. Like, so I'm like, great, so now my body is, you know, quote-unquote, attacking the parietal cells in my stomach lining? Why? Why in the world am I having all of this? And so, when you look at
 
 Jennifer: your emotions, it I was starting to really dive deeper into my emotional state, because
 
 Jennifer: again, I was doing all of the right things physically, or so I thought, and it wasn't enough. It was just enough to keep my head above water. Yeah, I'd go to the bathroom, but, you know, I wasn't getting my perfect number 4 on the Bristol stool chart, you know.
 
 Jennifer: bowel movement consistently, and I'd had to have to take so many things in order to even achieve that once in a while. So, how did it feel in my body? I felt anxious.
 
 Jennifer: I felt tight. If I really was still, I felt depressed. Sad. I didn't feel
 
 Jennifer: I didn't feel joyous, and so when I had my dark night of the Soul, and I hired someone to work with me, and we tore the house down, I mean, we went‚ we tore it down to the grounds, and we started to take a look at the thoughts that were in my head, and was I speaking life into myself? Was I loving myself? No, I wasn't.
 
 Jennifer: I didn't know how to love myself.
 
 Jennifer: I just knew how to fix myself, right? As if I was just inherently broken, and the more that I
 
 Jennifer: chaste fixing, which, again, extended decades, the more that I was driving home this inherent belief that I was broken, and that I was
 
 Jennifer: in constant need of external things to fix me. So, taking a look at the thoughts in my head and my limiting beliefs.
 
 Jennifer: was absolutely life-changing for me. Life-changing. And when I began to shift away from, again, a lot of those limiting beliefs is really, really when I began to experience what I would say is
 
 Jennifer: True healing. True healing on a deeper.
 
 Jennifer: super loud.
 
 Jennifer: level. Like, my,
 
 Jennifer: H. pylori that was just constantly coming back. It was coming back because it‚ I look at it like this. This is what I say to my clients, too. It's like a divine tap on my shoulders. It's like this messenger. Like, hey, you are so loved and so cared for.
 
 Jennifer: That this symptom is not gonna go away, because we want you to take a look at
 
 Jennifer: How you're not‚ how you're not expressing yourself, how you're not loving yourself, how you're not digesting certain things in your life, how you're not feeling inherently safe. And because you're not inherently safe, you're not defended. You remember how I talked about how we need strong digestion?
 
 Jennifer: And that's our first line of defense. Well, when we have weak digestion, and H. pylori creates weak digestion, well, I'm not safe. You know, I wasn't safe. I wasn't‚ I was defenseless. I didn't have the defense that I needed, but that started in my head. Like, that had to start here, in my head and in my heart. And so, yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Does that does that make sense?
 
 Erin: Absolutely. Oh, 100%. Personally, I mean, absolutely, absolutely. It's uncanny how much we have in common.
 
 Jennifer: Like, it's‚
 
 Jennifer: just hearing your story is like, oh my gosh, me too, me too. And the more women that I work with and talk with who have IBS, it's‚ and that's why I work with women, because it's‚ to me, it's, like, exactly that. It's like, this IBS is coming into your life, because
 
 Jennifer: There's something that's not working. Yes. Yes.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, yeah.
 
 Jennifer: not working in your heart, in your soul, in your mind. And it's like, the more research you do, it's like, you know, when I was first diagnosed with IBS, I didn't know how much stress.
 
 Jennifer: It was‚ it was like, that just sounded like hocus pocus to me. I just was like, what did that? But then you dig into the science, and you're like, it's not.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, it's not. When you look at, like, Dr. Gabor Mate's work, I mean.
 
 Jennifer: I'm.
 
 Jennifer: I'm sure you're familiar with his work, and just the drivers of autoimmune disease, and the rates of autoimmune disease in women, especially.
 
 Jennifer: You know, and where is this coming from? It's coming from‚ it's all of these trapped emotions, you know? For so long, even in the functional medicine space, we've just blamed it on, what, like.
 
 Jennifer: bacteria in the gut, and of course, toxins, like, literal toxins in our environment and in our food, but what about the toxins in our mind? You know, what about the emotional suppression? You know, the stress that keeps our nervous system in fight or flight? The emotions that‚
 
 Jennifer: we're swallowing down, like, swallowing down instead of processing. And for women, you know, I‚ you know, we could have a whole separate conversation on, like.
 
 Jennifer: It's just‚
 
 Jennifer: where we are today as women in what even the feminist movement did to harm us, and then women swung so far into a masculine energy, and we're straying from our divine design, and now we're living like little men, and we're not created to live like little men. I had so much masculine energy.
 
 Jennifer: And it was showing up as control.
 
 Jennifer: You know, I was so controlling, I had to be in charge all the time, and underneath that, there was really fear. There was a lot of fear. And then even in my marriage, there was an imbalance there, because I had to be in control all the time, and that's a heavy masculine energy that I can tell you is going to deplete you. And it's tight. You know, you think about‚Ķ we've got constipation.
 
 Jennifer: tightness. What are you holding in? I had a client, that I worked with about 5 years ago, and
 
 Jennifer: I love her story because she had gone through a lot of abuse in her childhood, including sexual abuse. Mother was really not a very, very, a very healthy mother. Nobody was really listening to this beautiful young woman.
 
 Jennifer: But as a child, and so she became a fighter. She's just her personality. I'm a fighter. I'm tough. I gotta be tough to survive this life. So she didn't cry. She worked really, really hard, defied all of the odds, put herself through college, got a good job, bought herself a house, but, like, tough, tough.
 
 Jennifer: She came to me so chronically constipated that her worst month of bowel movements, she had
 
 Jennifer: Not pooped for a month. So, you know, she's coming to me, and we're averaging one bowel movement a week at best.
 
 Jennifer: And, like, how are you alive? You know, like‚ and so, you know, of course, we're doing all of the, you know, we're doing a stool test, and there's all kinds of craziness, because we're trapping these bacteria in the gut, and we're shifting her diet, and we're hydrating her properly, right? But yet, it's getting a little bit better, but our real work came in digging into her emotions. I mean, she couldn't cry.
 
 Jennifer: She couldn't cry, so she had a hard time
 
 Jennifer: Sharing and verbalizing motion, because she had shoved it down her entire life.
 
 Jennifer: she was repressed. She was holding in constipation, right? And one day, I would prompt her. We would do a lot of work between our sessions and writing, and I do this with, you know, many clients, because a lot of people‚
 
 Jennifer: have a hard time just digging in, but in writing, they can dig in. That's why journaling can be very powerful.
 
 Jennifer: too, so I would send prompts, and we would write back and forth, and one day, I sent a prompt to her, and she really dug in, and she just started to write, and the writing opened floodgates. And then all of a sudden, she started to cry. And she had never cried. And she starts to sob, and sob, and sob, and sob, and then she runs to the bathroom and has the largest bowel movement she said of her entire life. She was so cute. But she was celebrating it. She's like.
 
 Jennifer: Yay!
 
 Jennifer: Her mind was blown, because the connection that she made between her repressed, held-in emotions and her vows-
 
 Jennifer: that changed her‚ everything. She actually came back to me this past summer. She's a teacher, she's so cute. So she had the summer off, and she said, I want to do another round of coaching, because I've just come to a different level in my healing. But, I mean, she's, like, night and day not the same person that I met 5 years ago, because
 
 Jennifer: Once she realized that
 
 Jennifer: her bowels could be her guide. Like, they actually‚ because she's constipated, this beautiful young woman, she's, like, in her 30s now, and she's like, if I get constipated for a day, I know to ask myself, what are you holding in? What are you not‚ what are you not sharing? What needs to be expressed?
 
 Jennifer: And‚
 
 Jennifer: She's using her physical body to guide her on digging deeper into what's going on in her mind, what's going on in her emotions. You know, again, is she in fear? Is she feeding fear?
 
 Jennifer: in control mode, or are you, you know, flowing in faith? What is the soul asking for? So, I really believe that our symptoms that show up for us, and IBS is a big one, is really this beautiful love note from our body, saying, hey, hey, we're out of alignment.
 
 Jennifer: And that's why, after all the years of working with people, and then, again, my own behind-the-scenes journey with my own health, you know, I am very mind-body-spirit. It's a very integrated, integrated
 
 Jennifer: approach, and that's why I even changed my title from being, you know, a functional wellness coach to I'm a soul-aligned wellness coach, because I look at what is your soul asking you to take a look at? So we've got these symptoms up top of dis-ease.
 
 Jennifer: And, you know, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas can be some of the symptoms. We get underneath, what's the breakdown in function?
 
 Jennifer: oh, okay, so we have weak digestion, you know, we're not‚ we've got metabolic dysfunction, like, so we might have chronic dehydration. So that's the breakdown in function, but we can't stop there. We still have to go underneath that and look at all of the building blocks that make up your house as a whole.
 
 Jennifer: And we want to look for cracks. And of course we're going to look at diet, and hydration, and your sleep, and your movement, but we gotta really get into the nervous system. You know, I believe that the nervous system, a dysregulated nervous system, is where we're really gonna
 
 Jennifer: create to seize. But even that, what's driving that?
 
 Jennifer: And at the root, root, root, root of that, what I have come to see and believe is it's misalignment with our divine design. And we're shooting our you know, you think about how many of us are pro‚ we're programs. We come into the world, and we're programmed, and we're shooting ourselves. So, like, you‚ you work with women, a lot of women, too, and you're passionate about sharing this message with women.
 
 Jennifer: But the constant shoulding of ourselves, the morphing into what we perceive other people think we need to be, the overworking of ourselves, the trying to be a man, not a woman, you know, and in that divine‚ like, be your divine feminine self. That's soft. That's not tight.
 
 Jennifer: And our body is going to speak because it is so beautifully designed to
 
 Jennifer: help us step into the path of living a full, abundant life. We're not designed to be bloated and gassy and constipated or sitting on a toilet all day long. And‚
 
 Jennifer: When you start to‚ Really receive the symptoms that show up, and receive them with gratitude.
 
 Jennifer: I'm so grateful you're here. Like, I'm so grateful for.
 
 Jennifer: I'm lord!
 
 Jennifer: It's so hard, it is so hard. And you know, and I, you know, listen, I don't have a client come on to‚ like, I'm sure you don't either, like, they, you know, start working with us, and I'm like, let's start with being grateful for every one of your symptoms.
 
 Jennifer: but we can start to take a look. It's just like, let's flip the script a little bit and start.
 
 Jennifer: to act.
 
 Jennifer: these harder questions, like, you know.
 
 Jennifer: do you have solid boundaries in your life? Because if you don't have boundaries, your gut is not going to feel safe enough to heal. Our gut is a boundary. You know, when you look at the gut lining, that is a big boundary. We need to have really tight junctions.
 
 Jennifer: You know, the little microvilli that line our gut lining, we don't want them to be wide and leaky. We want them to be nice and tight. So we‚ so we're not going to have physical boundaries that are really solid if we don't have emotional boundaries and, you know, energetic boundaries. We just won't.
 
 Erin: It's just such a beautiful metaphor.
 
 Erin: It's such a beautiful metaphor, and at the same time, it's so practical, it's so real, that it almost seems like, how could such a beautiful metaphor be so practical, and so‚ but it's
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: In my experience, in my work, it's‚ I totally‚ and you're right, it's like, you don't start there, you don't start there. You can start tiptoeing‚
 
 Jennifer: Yes. Words there.
 
 Jennifer: Establishing boundaries with what you're eating, with how.
 
 Jennifer: Oh.
 
 Jennifer: Yes.
 
 Erin: Right? Taking care of yourself, and that‚ that security can build up. Like, you're saying, like, the metaphor.
 
 Erin: from the house.
 
 Erin: That was so beautiful, too, like, you know, whether you start from the top, or whether you start from the bottom, it's like you can kind of start from the bottom, and‚
 
 Jennifer: self, and, like, how are you Exactly, and the‚ the‚
 
 Jennifer: ugh, the overworking, you know? Like you were saying, I've been thinking about this a lot, too, about the feminist movement, it's just‚
 
 Jennifer: I mean, I'm so grateful for the equality and for.
 
 Jennifer: Right.
 
 Jennifer: But I'm I'm not super grateful for‚
 
 Jennifer: you know, I always thought I can either work or I can be a mother. I can't do both, right? It's too much, and it turns out it kind of is too much.
 
 Jennifer: Yes!
 
 Jennifer:  is too much!
 
 Erin: You know, when you're doing it, and the one that I.
 
 Jennifer: Amazing.
 
 Erin: a lot of responsibility to be working 40 hours a week and caring for a home and a family and children. It's
  like, you know, it's‚ it‚ and the pressure of that, and the anxiety, and the stress that comes‚ that makes you feel like, but I can't stop, but I can't‚ you know, it's‚ it's really hard to recognize, and so I appreciate‚ you speaking on that as well, because I feel that very‚ I've seen it in my own life. I mean, that's why I'm in Italy, you know? It's like, I couldn't‚ I couldn't do it anymore. I was like, I can't‚
  I can't do this anymore! It's so expensive to live. I lived in California. It's so expensive, I had my first child, and I was just like, this life isn't gonna work.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're embodying yourself in a culture that's slower, that values a slower pace of living.
  And I'm sure that that was challenging for you, even in many ways.
 
 Erin: Yes!
 
 Jennifer: I would have to reprogram.
 
 Erin: it's not always an easy pro‚ you come up daily, you know, even when I didn't have so much pressure. Internally, I would feel overwhelmed, and I'd be like, why am I overwhelmed? I literally do not have to be at a job at 7.30am, like, but I would still, like, kind of living that pattern out.
 
 Jennifer: Hmm.
 
 Erin: It still happens, you know? It still happens, and I'm like, why am I stressed? Like, I'm just‚ I need to, like, calm down, you know?
 
 Jennifer: Oh, yeah!
 
 Jennifer: A lot of‚
 
 Jennifer: that a lot of that is coming just from programming. And so, even when we start to shift, and I want our listeners to really understand this and give yourself lots of grace and compassion if you're listening to
 
 Jennifer: this conversation, and like, wow, I identify myself, I'm definitely, you know, in that state of hypervigilance, or type A, or thinking I can do all the things, and I want to slow down. But grace and compassion, because we start to create the change in our conscious state of mind.
 
 Jennifer: And that's wonderful. That's, you know, first step to change always is awareness that it's‚ there's things that need to change. That's the first step on the continuum of change, and then we, take action. But it's‚ it's happening up in our consciousness, but the nervous system, there's a big lag time there. So there's a lag time with the
 
 Jennifer: nervous system, so it's going to feel like you are saying, you know, oh, sometimes you're like, why am I feeling stressed? I don't need to feel stressed. Well, that's just because
 
 Jennifer: the old you was programmed in a very different way, and so, you know, we create the change, and we're carving out new neural pathways with our thoughts and our behavior, and we do it slowly, over time, and we do it with grace and compassion. So, you know, you can start just by
 
 Jennifer: like, for any of the listeners here, like, where do I even start? Like, pause and listen. So, just pause and ask your gut. Like, if you're feeling something in your belly, whatever that is, instead of just reaching for the next thing that's gonna shove it down my throat so I can keep on going with my day, what am I not digesting right now? Maybe you stop and you just do some deep breathing, deep belly breathing, hand on your heart, hand on your belly, and maybe journal. What am I not digesting? Maybe you go outside and you put your feet on the earth and your sun‚ the sun in your eyes, and just really drop in and ask. You have internal wisdom. Every one of us has this internal wisdom, and only we can answer those questions, too. Like, I know when I really started to slow down, and that was hard, oh my gosh, my nervous system didn't like slowing down.
 
 Jennifer: Even though my consciousness, I was like, I need to slow down, I want to slow down.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, it was so uncomfortable. But‚
 
 Jennifer: Just wrapping myself up in, like, metaphorical arms of safety.
 
 Jennifer: And doing things that helped me, like belly breathing, and feet on the earth, and just letting myself know that I am safe. I'm safe to create this change.
 
 Jennifer: you know, supporting the nervous system is so, so, so important. And, you know, when we're talking gut health here. So, the gut and the nervous system are truly one continuous highway. So.
 
 Jennifer: What are your practices, right? Do you have deep breathing? Is it deep breathing? Is it EFT? You know, emotional freedom tapping, technique tap that's tapping? Grounding, prayer, meditation, time in nature. Really make sure that you've got those things on board. even before you go to supplements, pills, things like that. I'm not saying that a good, robust digestive enzyme can't help. or, you know, an appropriate probiotic for your body, but make sure you've got these other things in place, like chewing your food. I‚ I love‚
 
 Jennifer: Using the act of chewing, because we all have to do it. Digestion starts in your mouth, but using it as a practice for presence.
 
 Jennifer: It's like bringing us, literally and figuratively, into the present moment.
 
 Jennifer: slowing down. So, when we are chewing, we're also symbolically digesting life more intentionally. So, as you're trying to deprogram yourself from, you know, that hypervigilant mode, use
 
 Jennifer: use these acts that you're already doing that are gonna help your digestion, like chewing, but use them, again, to practice shifting in your mental state, too. Yeah.
 
 Erin: Absolutely, thank you so much. That was so, so helpful. I absolutely agree with you.
  It's so‚ and it's¶ it's counterintuitive, because when you feel those symptoms, it's your body, your mind is out of that, at least for me, and a lot of women I've worked with, it's like, pain, you're just‚ pain, no, no, it's like your whole system is like, no, no, no, no, and your brain, da-da-da. But if you can just take the moment and just kind of turn the bus just a little bit in the opposite direction, you start kind of undoing that automatic loop that just gets you further and further into, I think, the fear and anxiety of my symptoms.
 
 Jennifer?  Oh, yes, that's a big one.
 
 Erin: You know, it made it so much worse, and it's just‚ it's natural, it's natural, it's natural to‚ I want to avoid, to be afraid, to be thinking of the future, but it's‚ it's strange how it's not necessary.
 
 Jennifer: Oh, gosh, no, because when we're living outside the present moment, we're living into an illusion. We're living into something that doesn't exist yet, but now we're really experiencing it,  catching it. Like, if you're starting to feel‚ I had a client last week, it was so brilliant, and I loved her. I'm going to share what she did. So, she was getting really bloated, and she's somebody that has struggled with chronic constipation. She came to me needing to, use enemas to even go to the bathroom. And so she‚ Yeah, it's like so‚ it's hard. I feel so sad, for people who have struggled with that. And her stomach was really bloated, she was constipated again, and then so, of course, she's starting to write the story, script the story of how the rest of the day and the week, and oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're going down, we're sliding downhill. And she said, okay, I'm gonna just take a pause for 5 minutes.
  And she works from home, so she went outside, she sat in the grass with the sun on her, and she did some heart math breathing.
 
 Jennifer: And she was saying a mantra as she was doing it, and I am safe in this moment now.
 
 Jennifer: I'm just belly breathing in and out, and the bloating went away. It went away. She was able to stop it, she was and I really believe that that was, again, that connection between the gut and the nervous system. Like, that's one continuous highway. So maybe the bloating was triggered because she was in, you know, work mode, hypervigilant, a little bit of stress, right? We're shutting off digestion. Digestion gets deprioritized. Anytime we're under stress. Our body will not prioritize digestion. And so she relaxed herself, but she also stopped the story, and it went away. Beautiful, right?
  

Erin: Yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Erin: That is really beautiful. Well, I have kept you for quite a while, so I'm gonna let you go.
 
 Jennifer: It's so fun.
 
 Erin: It really was. I loved, loved, loved talking to you, and I'm so grateful that you agreed, and that my listeners get to hear your perspective, and your story, and your clinical experience, and your wealth of knowledge. It's just so deeply appreciated. So, before you leave, though, could you just share with my listeners, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way? Like, where can they reach you, see you?
 
 Jennifer: Absolutely! We'll put my contact information in the show notes, but my website is www.jenniferragazzo.com, I'm also on Instagram, I'm on Substack. And I have a podcast, too, called The Daily Surrender, and yeah, so I really started that podcast as a passion project, like- it's not as health-related directly. The conversations on the podcast really are, how do we surrender and let go?
 
 Jennifer: So that we can step into living this abundant life that we're created to live. Like, none of us are created for anything less. We're created for everything, right? Like, we're created for abundance, we're created on purpose for a purpose, but it's‚ all the other stuff, I call it the gunk and junk, that get in the way of us receiving that. So, yeah, I just have a lot of conversations on there, and I think I just did one I haven't launched it yet, but I did one all on, the metaphysical behind gut health.
 
 Erin: Oh, wow!
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Erin: That sounds really interesting, yeah.
 
 Jennifer: Yeah.
 
 Erin: Well, thank you so much, and I hope you have a lovely day!
 
 Jennifer: Oh, you well, you have a lovely evening.