S2 E5: The Missing Pieces Behind Your Energy, Hormones, and Gut Health

In this episode, I'm sitting down with naturopath and founder of Eat2Live, Jessica Hoogendorn, for a conversation every woman needs to hear.

If you've been dealing with low energy, hormone changes, gut issues, poor sleep, or you've just felt like something is "off," this episode is packed with practical insights to help you better understand what's happening in your body.

Jessica has spent more than 20 years helping people get to the root cause of their health concerns instead of simply managing symptoms. In our conversation, she shares why your body isn't working against you, how chronic stress impacts your overall health, and the simple, foundational habits that can make a huge difference in how you feel.

This episode isn't about chasing perfection. It's about learning how to better support your body so you have the energy to show up for the life you're building.

In this episode, we cover:

• The connection between energy, hormones, and gut health
• Why your body isn't broken—it's communicating with you
• How stress impacts your hormones and overall health
• The role nutrition plays in how you feel every day
• Why your microbiome matters more than you might think
• Simple ways to better support your body naturally
• The importance of getting to the root cause instead of masking symptoms
• Small changes that can create a big impact over time

Whether you're on your own health journey or simply want to feel better, I know you'll walk away with practical tips and a fresh perspective on your health.

Connect with Jessica:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicahoogendorn

Website: https://eat2live.com

Shop Eat2Live Products: https://eat2live.com

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could use the encouragement. It helps more people discover the show and join us as we continue Season 2 of Rewrite the Rules.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Jordan Reynolds Show, Rewrite the Rules, the podcast for women who are done living by someone else's idea of what their life should look like. I'm Jordan, a 31-year-old entrepreneur, world traveler, and wellness girly who refused to settle for a life that didn't feel like mine. Around here we talk business, health, mindset, and freedom with real stories and honest behind the scenes. If you've ever felt like you were meant for more, you're in the right place. Let's rewrite the rules together. Welcome back to Rewrite the Rules. I'm Jordan, and I'm so glad you're here. Today's guest is someone I've known for years, and I couldn't think of a better person to have this conversation with. I'm sitting down today with Naturopath and founder of Eat to Live, Jessica Hoogendorn. Jessica has spent more than 20 years helping people understand what their bodies actually need to thrive. And I know you're going to learn so much from her. If you've ever felt exhausted, dealt with hormone changes, struggled with gut health, or just felt like something was off, this episode is for you. All right, guys. I have one of my favorite people here today. She is amazing. You're going to want to definitely connect with her. Grab all of her products. I have one in transit right now. I love this woman so much. And so I want to welcome Jessica to the show. Welcome, Jessica.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Oh, it's so good to be here. And I just start laughing when you say favorite people, one of them, because we've had so many fun times together and so many good laughs and travel times. That was memorable.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

We've definitely done a lot. She is so much fun. And I'm so excited because we're going to be actually going to Italy together. And it's going to be great. So I just want to live for that day. Can't wait. Yay. Well, I want to dive in. So tell people a little bit about you, how you got started. She is a naturopath. She is a whiz at everything. And I just can't wait for people to get to know you.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Sure. So yeah, I have always loved health and wellness. I've been in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years. Um, I'm a naturopath, several other things, modality. I do a lot of uh nutritional counseling, hormone testing, etc. But I love formulating. Um, I had a business where I made uh formulas, herbal formulas, salves, tinctures, um, about 12 years ago. I sold it during a move, and about two years ago, I just got the um a real strong desire again because a lot of my clients were needing um uh different formulas. And during the time when we sold our other business, I had walked through my daughter having cancer, two of my children being severely burned, my mom having skin cancer, and we treated a lot of that naturally. And so I learned a lot about the skin during that time, and of course, a lot about healing. And one thing that I that I always had at the core of who I am is I want people to feel when they take a product. I want them to have an experience, like whether it's an herbal formula or our decongest or muscle relief or something for their skin. I want them to notice a difference. And so when we launched Eat to Live, all of our formulas are made with that. They're not um just another run of the mill. They are they're formulas that have an impact. And so that's that's me in a nutshell, is I like results, whether it's on your skin, in your body, in your health, um, because I believe we're truly designed to heal and our body knows what to do when given the right tools.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

That's amazing. I I love everything that you just shared. I would love to know have you always kind of been into natural health?

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Um, for the most part, like my mom was a massage therapist, my sister was a massage therapist, mom sold supplements out of our home. And so it's kind of always I've always had that bent. And um when our first child was six weeks old, she got RSB and spent a week in the hospital. And so that kind of was a really awakening of things that I had learned, natural remedies. And I and we lived in an Amish community at the time, and I had a friend of mine, an Amish lady, bring over some herbal formulas and taught me how to use them specifically for that case, and it was so effective. I'm I was kind of like everything that had been a part of me growing up was reawakened, and I went back to school to first I went to the school of natural healing to be an herbalist and loved it so much. I kept taking classes to be a naturopath and a certified natural health professional and a um uh nutritional consultant. And so it's I've always kind of had that as part of my upbringing, but really, really awakened um and with our with having children and um a clinic picked up some of my formulas and it kind of just took off. And so what I love turned into a profession kind of almost by accident.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

That's so cool. I know too, like just from our conversations, you've taught so many of us so many things about the nervous system, and I know that there have some things that you want to talk about about eat to live and things as well. But I know we have a lot of women that share, you know, on the with me on the podcast, and they're like, Jordan, I'm you know, a mom, I'm doing so many things, I feel so dysregulated all the time. Can you share like how people can work with you and some things that you would tell them to start doing?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah, well, I think it's actually what what almost feels like an epidemic, but and that we don't even realize it that we're that we are like almost born into nowadays because life is so fast-paced, and you in and a lot of times with you know, with various economic reasons, it takes a two-person income or a lot of moms or or even like people that aren't moms, single people. We have to work a lot to make ends meet, and sometimes it for whatever reason, you know, we're put into situations where there's not a lot of time, where it feels like there's not a lot of time to rest, and and sometimes there isn't, sometimes it's our lifestyle we create, sometimes it's trauma, whatever it may be. I work with hundreds of women that underneath so many of their health issues, I've walked through this. I mean, early on when we were having cancer and burns and a new baby and no job for a year, I had a nervous breakdown. I know what it's like to navigate that, and it can be so real sometimes where your body compensates during the trauma, and then when it's over, you almost just fall apart. And so during that time, I learned a lot what it's what it takes to um heal yourself, but to to um walk through trauma, to sometimes live in situations that you can't get out of. I couldn't leave my situation, and a lot of times we can't leave what what we need to do. Or so for whatever scenario it is, the goal is how do I compensate for what is being taken from me on a daily basis? What do how what do I need to put back in for what my body's going to use, and then put in that more back in to heal from what's happened in the past, from what's been depleted, from where my nervous system is now. And so, you know, experience is a best teacher. And so, from what I learned, and then in that case, in the since that time, working with literally thousands of people, the body is never making a mistake. The body is just reacting to the cues and to what it's given or not given. And so, um, I have created formulas that help the nervous system and help the adrenals and help our body to balance, our cortisol to balance because the body wants to balance, it will do everything it can to balance, but sometimes it just needs that extra support. It's kind of like if you come into your house and you're having company and you have your house is a disaster. You could clean it up if given the right time, but sometimes you don't have that time. And so, if someone comes in and helps you, that same work can get done. You just needed the extra support, and that's the same way it is. And so, as an herbalist, um, what I actually started my first business is I made a formula called urban stress relief. Who doesn't need that? And I took it to a clinic and they started testing it on people that came in there, and that's how my first business started. There's like, this is testing on everybody, this formula, it's it's helping people so much. And so I sold that business, but two years ago when I started Eat to Live, I just kept thinking about that. You know, that need has not gone away, it's actually gotten more uh more needed, and so I took that formula and just took the extra intern, like 12-15 years of what I've learned and maximize that into another one that is just more helping the nervous system to regulate, the cortisol to come into balance and supporting the underlying adrenal issues. Because a lot of times what that turns into is that at nighttime we lay in bed and we're like we're exhausted, but our brain doesn't stop. At least that was me. Like my brain just goes and goes and goes, or we fall asleep and we're jerked awake in the middle of the night with kind of like this adrenaline rush and our heart's racing. That's when our body is just upside down, and so there's just to come alongside and to help the body to to remember that it's safe, to to calm down, to just give it that sense of well-being and go back to sleep. It's not an overnight fix, but it is definitely a sense of giving your body tools to know how to clean the kitchen for the company coming in in a in an easy way or in a way that it knows what to do with.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

I think that you I just have loved seeing over the past year just of us being like working together and seeing like how much has changed for so many people. And I love how you always share like it's not complicated. It's about giving the body the things that it needs, especially with what we were talking about in um Scottsdale a couple months ago, too. Um, I would love for you to share just some amazing things that you've seen with Eat to Live and share with the viewers just kind of like how you started Eat to Live um and what you've seen so far. Because I know there's some amazing testimonies.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Sure. Yeah, well, so eat to live, like I said, started. Well, I don't know if I actually told you, but I had a dream and it was the craziest thing. I can still remember waking up from this dream. I had been getting a lot of Facebook messages. It was summertime, and they were like, what do you use for your kids during summer for sunscreen if you need something? Like, I'm a big advocate of the sun, but sometimes we're out all day, or you have littles and you're going to the beach and they need something, but the awareness is just-I mean, there's actually podcasts going out to millions of people the dangers of sunscreen and how people have been duped with the chemicals and the carcinogens in your typical sunscreen. And so um, I was not a big advocate of sunscreen, and there was only like one or two that I could use, and some of them made you so white that it never soaked in, and I'm like, I will only use this out of desperation um because I'm not gonna put cancer screen, I mean cancer stuff on my skin, carcinogenic stuff, because my daughter, my mom, aunts have had cancer, like, no way, but there wasn't anything that I could find, and then something that I had learned in my philosophy was our skin is our biggest organ. What if we could use our skin as not just protect it from a burn, but what if we could use it as a conduit to put good stuff in? Because you think of nicotine patches and estradiol patches and pain patches, your skin is into your bloodstream within seconds, minutes to seconds. What if we could everything that we put on our skin would not just help us, but it would actually put in nutrients. And so I had a dream and I woke up and I'm like, this is a whole list of ingredients I use to help my mom um heal with to come alongside her, help her heal skin cancer and different things. I'm not making a claim with that, it's just some of the ingredients I use to help her support. And some of the things that I used to help them, my children were burned, and it just kind of started coming together. And I'm like, okay, so I just started playing and and with this and um did research and um ran it by other other people who are in the field, and that's when we started Eat to Live was with a sunscreen that could help you prevent burning, but um at the same time, as you're in the sun and your pores are open, you're soaking in things that help your skin repair, help your cells repair that is anti-aging, that is hydrating, that is moisturizing, that is nourishing, that is healing. And so when I looked at the sunscreens, there's nothing like it on the market. There's other tallow-based sunscreens, but they're not loaded with nutrition that is actually helping your skin. And from there it went off into um tallow bombs with also ingredients that we use during the burns and that really helped the body to heal, like raw honey and hopapa oil and castor oil and other things. And so that kind of is where it took off. And and I just started getting like so many testimonies of people using it for um things that I didn't even think of, and um, so many skin issues healing, and hundreds of messages from around the nation and in other countries that have been using the sunscreen of just thanking us for having something that's safe and that is clean and and and um something their family could use. And then from there, I think we were talking about in Moab was intimacy. I I started coaching a lot of women um that were in perimenopause and menopause that were just having all these different issues with intimacy. It was painful, there was tears, there was bleeding, it was burning, there was dryness, all these things that happen as our hormone shift, which is where the hormone formula came in. Um, but then so I thought, well, gosh, you know, in your typical um intimacy oil, there's so many synthetics and so many things that actually make this worse. What about if I could create a formula that was not only a safe lube, a safe intimacy, but that could actually be healing while they're using it. So that is when the intimacy oil came out. And again, I have had messages where people that are able to have um sex for the first time in 12, 13 years without pain, that there's no more bleeding, there's no more tearing, um, issues that women have been to the doctor for and had all these different treatments and nothing could fix it, it's finally healed. And so that's kind of my passion is just when clients come to me. Um, so now I have two hormone formulas coming out. Um, it's because of what I see as a naturopath, coaching people, what the need is, and what I have seen work because when you deal with so many people, you see patterns and you you see what works.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah. I've seen, I've just seen on your Facebook and on your reviews too on Google, just people giving reviews. And I think what's so interesting is they're never short, they're always very lengthy, and I love that because you can tell like how passionate they are about the products that have like changed so much for them. So I think like I'm so excited for what you have coming, and I just know that like these products are changing people's lives, and it's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah, I love that too. I think the customer reviews I learned last week how good our spiralux is, which is our decongested for bug bites and as a bugger pellet. And I'm like, well, gosh, there's another thing I didn't think of, but people used it. But that's the power of natural remedies. The herbs and essential oils are nature's immune system, and when you can combine them correctly, it's what people did for centuries. We just got away from it with chemicals and drugs, but they're still as effective as they've always been.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Yeah. And don't worry, guys, I'll put all of that in the show notes so you guys can go grab them. I currently have Eden's Glow coming, and I'm like, it needs it needs to get here because I'm like, let's go. But her products are amazing, and I just am so excited to see you just continue to grow. I know that you also have a huge passion with coaching and working with women individually and really helping them figure out the missing pieces that they have that aren't really complicated. They just are like, oh, I really need to give my body more. So can you share with everybody what that looks like coaching with you?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yeah, well, um, so I did it for years. It took a sabbatical, and in the last six months, um, I've just really been called back into it. And so um, again, I love working with women. Um, I love helping women and children to be able to thrive. And so um I've expanded into doing um hormone testing, vagin microbiome tests, and that has been huge because so many women are treating BV or UTIs or infections, and a lot of times people think it's just candida. It's hardly ever candida that I've it is sometimes, but that I've been testing, it's actually other imbalanced bacteria that they need, and it's such a simple fix that people struggle with for years and take rounds and rounds of antibiotics that disrupt it, cause another whole host of health issues, treating something that's so simple to fix when you know what's going on. Um, I do DNA, microbiome, genome sequencing, testing, and so that gives you another whole look at the body, what's going on, what bacteria do I have? Because again, a lot of people struggle with mental health, and what I've seen over and over again is when you do a stool test that is this in-depth, and you can see that there is no gap, no bacteria for GABA being created, or the the bacteria that helps with the estrobulum and how we process estrogen is just really imbalanced. And in so many that we used to go on and on, but being able to say, you know, you're not crazy, your body's not making a mistake, it's just literally this is happening. Here's what we can do to fix it. Here's an imbalance, here's a deficiency, or you look at labs and you kind of put everything together, and people find they're like, This makes so much sense. Whereas it's stabbing, it's stabbing in the dark. And I know what that's like having a walkthrough personal health issues myself and with my children and with and with other family members, being able to sit and say, you know, I'm not crazy, even though I may feel crazy, I'm not psycho, even though sometimes of the month I feel psycho, and uh you know what I'm saying? It's just uh I have love. So I'm very selective of um who I coach. It has to be someone who's serious, but um, I love being able to um come alongside people and and help them, you know, find answers.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Yeah. And you guys, she's really good. I'm just saying, like, I will put everything for you guys to connect with her because I'm personally working with her as well, and I am like stoked about it. Um, I would love to know, just kind of as we wrap up, if somebody's listening to listening to this and they're like, Jessica, I'm exhausted, I'm not sleeping well, you know, I'm really struggling. Like, what are a couple things that you personally see a lot of whenever you're coaching people that it's the simple stuff that they're just not doing?

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah. A lot of it is nutritional deficiencies when we don't have the nutrients that our body needs. The body will just to keep us alive, it'll take all the nutrients it does have and it'll put it towards the most vital things that keeps us alive. And energy, which is comes from those nutrients that we need, that becomes secondary because energy is not needed to stay alive, but other functions are. So a lot of times it's nutritional deficiency according to our diet, is most people's diet is um is is efficient, or they're not taking the nutrients that they need, or a lot of times they are, but their microbiome is so messed up that they're not able to extract those nutrients, they don't have the right bacteria to extract the nutrients that they're taking, and so they have expensive pea. It just is their body is just you know washing it all out. And so that's a big reason. Um, a lot of times for women, and this was a really big eye-opener for myself. When I started tracking my nutrients, I was getting a third of the protein I needed. Protein's the building blocks of the cell. The body needs a protein to build our hormones, to build our cells, to help us repair every single day. Just from being alive, our body is repairing every day. When we don't have those nutrients, again, that enough protein, our body can't fully repair. And so just getting people back on simple nutrients, the right amount of nutrients, making sure that they can absorb those nutrients, that's that's a really big one. And then, of course, I look at um, you know, I I go a lot according to their symptoms, but putting people on something simple, like let's just talk about your diet, let's find out what some simple things that we can do. That's a big deal. Um, uh just giving them two or three supplements that are really highly absorbable, even if their body is kind of broken down, that's a big deal. And so it's not doesn't have to be rocket science, it just can be sometimes a uh simple tweak. So if like someone's like, I'm eating so good, I feel like I'm doing everything right. Are you absorbing? Here's a really good probiotic or really good enzyme that can help you absorb. Let's start there. It doesn't have to be complicated.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, those are so good. Um, I have loved having you here. I would love for you to share anything that you feel like you want to just to wrap up.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Well, um, okay, I one of the things that I tell people all the time is it's you're worth the investment. We're gonna pay for our health sometime. And either whether it's down the road or we pay for it now. So one of the slogans that I've always said is you pay for your health now or you pay for it later at a much higher price. And and speaking of walking through a lot of serious health issues with family members, um, it is much cheaper if you want to use that word, but it is it is uh much easier to prevent than to allow the body to break down to the point where something more serious takes over and you're forced to look at it, and it's a lot more expensive than. So just look at yourself and realize you're worth the investment, you're worth the sacrifice. Sometimes it's just sacrificing some of the things temporarily to get what you need now to prevent, you know, something more serious because we're meant to thrive, we're meant to have energy, we're meant to feel good, we're meant to be able to take on those dreams that God's given us. And and sometimes it's not as big a deal as we think it is. It's just simple when when um we put ourselves first and find ourselves worthy of that investment.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah. I agree 100%. I loved having you here. I'll put everything in the show notes, you guys, so you can connect with Jessica and also check out Eat to Live. You guys are gonna love it. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

You're welcome. Thank you for having me. It's been so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Thanks for listening to the Jordan Reynolds show Rewrite the Rules. New episodes drop every Tuesday, so make sure you're subscribed. And if this episode spoke to you, leave a written review and five stars. It helps this message reach more women who need it. Until next time, trust yourself, take the leap, and keep rewriting your own rules.