Welcome to the Solinger Method podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Solinger, and this podcast exists for one very specific reason to help you understand your body clearly, without fear, without overwhelm, and without being dismissed. If you've ever been told your labs are normal, but you don't feel normal, if you've ever been given labels instead of explanations. If you've tried supplements, diets, protocols, or lifestyle changes that may have helped a little but never fully resolved what's going on? I want you to hear this clearly right now from the start. You are not broken. Your body is not failing you and your symptoms are not random and conventional care. We're often taught to wait until something is diagnosable before it's taken seriously. Physiology does not work that way. Plain and simple, the body doesn't suddenly malfunction one day out of nowhere. It adapts. It compensates. It shifts, and it sends signals long before anything crosses a clinical threshold. Those early signals often look like fatigue. That won't lift anxiety, that feels disproportionate digestion, that's inconsistent sleep, that never feels restorative. Moods that feel unpredictable, and when those signals are ignored or minimized, the body doesn't stop communicating. It just gets louder. This podcast is about learning how to listen earlier, more accurately and more calmly. The Solinger method is a system space biomechanically grounded framework that looks at what your body is missing, what it is compensating for, and why symptoms show up the way that they do. It is not about chasing a diagnosis. It's not about fear-based health messaging, and it is not about quick fixes. It's about understanding how physiology actually works so you can make sense of your symptoms instead of feeling at war with them. Today's episode is foundational. It sets the lens for everything that follows in this podcast. If you understand this episode, the rest will make sense. So whether you're listening while driving, walking, or sitting quietly with a cup of coffee, take a breath. You do not need to take notes. You don't need to remember everything. You just need to listen. Let's begin at the beginning. Today I wanna introduce you to the foundational idea behind the Solinger method, and it's one that immediately reframes how we understand chronic symptoms. Most chronic symptoms begin as biochemical imbalances long before anything becomes diagnosable. That single idea explains why so many people feel confused, frustrated, or dismissed inside the healthcare system. Think about the symptoms people often experience years before they have ever received a label. Fatigue that doesn't resolve with rest. Anxiety that seems to surge without clear triggers. Digestive issues that come and go. Unpredictably brain fog that makes simple tasks feel really heavy. Hair thinning and hair loss, heart palpitations, mood changes, hormonal irregularities, sleep that never feels restorative. These symptoms are incredibly common, and yet they're often minimized. We're told. It's just stress. You're told it's aging, you're told it's hormones, you're told it's anxiety, you're told everything looks fine. Physiology doesn't work that way. Plain and simple symptoms are not random events. They are signals, they are adaptive responses. They're the body communicating that something upstream is strained. In functional physiology, symptoms don't appear because the body is broken. They appear because the body is compensating, and compensation is not a failure. It is survival. The problem is that compensation does have a cost. When the body is under-resourced for long enough systems start borrowing from one another. What one system lacks, another tries to make up for over time, that creates patterns of dysfunction. So when someone says everything started at once, what's usually true is that everything crossed a threshold at once. The imbalances began much earlier. This is why chasing symptoms rarely leads to resolution. You can quiet a symptom temporarily, but unless you address what the body has been missing. The signal will reappear somewhere else. The solinger method begins before the diagnosis, before the label, before the breakdown. It begins at the biochemical level. Their early alarms, not the starting line. Now that we've established that symptoms are early signals, not random failures, we need to talk about why biochemistry is always the starting point. Because your body does not run on diagnosis, it does not run on symptom labels. It does not run on protocols or plans. It runs on inputs every second of every day. Your physiology is making decisions based on the raw material available to. Those materials include vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, electrolytes, za, co-factors, and mitochondrial substrates. These are not optional extras. They are the currency of cellular function. Every organ system depends on them. Your nervous system depends on them to regulate tone, stress, response, and signaling. Your endocrine system depends on them to synthesize, convert, and clear hormones. Your digestive system depends on them to produce enzymes, stomach acid, bile, and motility signals. Your immune system depends on them to mount appropriate responses. Without overreacting, your brain depends on them to produce neurotransmitters, maintain focus, and regulate mood. Nothing in the body operates in isolation. Everything is interconnected and everything is downstream of biochemical availability. Now, here's where modern life quietly disrupts this balance. We live in a world where nutrient demand is extraordinarily high, and nutrient replacement is often inadequate. The stress alone dramatically increases nutrient utilization. This includes psychological stress, emotional stress, physical stress, inflammatory stress, and metabolic stress. The Emotional strain and trauma increase autonomic load, which directly increases nutrient utilization. All of this means that the body is being asked to do more with less for a while. The body compensates. Compensation is not pathology. Compensation is intelligence. The body rea allocates resources. It downshifts non-essential functions. It prioritizes survival over optimization, but compensation has limits. When demand continues to exceed supply systems begin to adapt in predictable ways. Let's make this concrete. When thymine availability drops, the nervous system becomes less efficient at gathering cellular energy and. nervous system under stress burns through B vitamins, magnesium and electrolytes at a much faster rate. Medications, alter absorption, transport, and excretion of nutrients in predictable ways. Acid suppressing medications affect mineral absorption. Hormonal medications alter nutrient demand. Stimulants increase metabolic turnover. Anti-inflammatories change, gut integrity, soil depletion reduces mineral density and food. Even people who eating well may not be getting the micronutrient density, their physiology expects restricted eating, repetitive diets or long-term elimination diets limit nutrient diversity. Over time, this creates quite quiet deficiencies that don't show up immediately, but alter system resilience, inflammation increases metabolic demand, blood sugar instability, taxes, the nervous system, sleep disruption, impairs repair process, gut dysfunction, interferes with absorption and assimilation, Emotional strain and trauma increase autonomic load, which directly increases nutrient utilization. All of this means that the body is being asked to do more with less for a while the body compensates. Compensation is not pathology. Compensation is intelligence. The body reallocates resources, it downshifts non-essential functions. It prioritizes survival over optimization, but compensation has limits when demand continues to exceed supply systems begin to adapt in predictable ways. Let's make this concrete. When thiamine availability drops, the nervous system becomes less efficient. At gathering cellular energy, the autonomic nervous system becomes more reactive. People may experience anxiety, palpitations, digestive slowing, temperature dysregulation, or exercise intolerance. When ferritin drops, oxygen delivery becomes less efficient. That can present as fatigue, brain fog, cold intolerance, hair shedding, shortness of breath, or reduced stamina. When magnesium becomes insufficient, muscles remain in a semi contracted state. Migraines increase. Sleep, becomes lighter, irritability rises and stress tolerance drops. These are not random symptoms. They are patterned responses to biochemical strain. Every insufficiency creates a signature. Importantly, these patterns are often overlap. Multiple systems compensate simultaneously, which is why symptoms rarely stay neatly confined to one category. This is also why people are often told they have multiple issues, when in reality they have one upstream strain expressing across systems. Symptoms are rarely the first domino. They're usually several steps downstream. This is why symptom chasing feels endless. You quit one signal. Another one appears you address one system, another becomes louder. The Solan method was built to reverse that process to trace symptoms back to their biochemical origin. Instead of reacting to noise they create later. The collapse always starts upstream. I. This brings us to how the Solinger method actually works. Every case without exception begins with two pillars. The first pillar is biochemical foundations. We ask simple but powerful questions. What is missing? What is insufficient? What is being depleted faster than it's replaced? What systems are under the most strain right now? We are not guessing, we're not assuming, we're not treating symptoms in isolation. We are looking at what the body needs to function and where that supply chain has broken down. The second pillar is pattern recognition. This is where complexity becomes clarity. We look at how symptoms cluster together. We identify which systems are compensating for others. We ask what the body is trying to stabilize, and we look at what adaptions are being used to maintain function. When you understand patterns, symptoms, stop feeling chaotic. Instead of asking, why do I have all these issues, we ask What signal strain could explain all of this? This approach is why complex cases become manageable. We don't start where symptoms are loudest. We start where imbalances began, and when you support the body upstream, downstream, symptoms often resolve more easily than expected. This is not about being more, it's about doing the right things in the right order,. If you're listening today and you're tired of feeling dismissed, I want you to hear this clearly If you are exhausted but can't sleep, if your digestion is inconsistent, if your mood feels unpredictable, if your labs look fine, but you don't, your body is not broken. It is communicating. Physiology speaks through patterns, and when we learn how to interpret those patterns, the body often responds with remarkable clarity. You were created with wisdom woven into your physiology. Your body is doing the best it can with what it has available. Sometimes healing isn't about forcing change, it's about restoring what's been missing, and that's what this podcast is about. As we move forward in this podcast, we're going to break down individual nutrients, systems, and patterns in a way that is clear, grounded, and practical. My goal is not to overwhelm you. It's to help you understand your body well enough that symptoms stop feeling frightening or confusing. As always, this podcast is for educational purposes only. While I am a doctor, I am not your doctor. Please consult your own qualified healthcare professional before making personal health decisions. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If this episode brought clarity, share it with someone who needs a calmer, more grounded way to understand their health. This is the Solinger Method Podcast, and I'll see you next time.