Everything Looks Good...So Why Do I Feel Like Crap?

You've done the labs. You've heard "everything looks good."

And you still feel like crap.

This episode is for you.

Alex Mufson is the founder of Canary House, an integrative clinician who spent 14 years becoming the provider she needed after her own health unraveled while every doctor told her she was fine.

In this conversation, we get into why the women who look the most put-together are often the hardest to diagnose. Why your labs can look perfect while your body is quietly working overtime just to produce those results. And why over-functioning isn't a personality trait, it's a survival pattern we were trained into.

If something feels off and you keep getting told it isn't, this one will change how you think about your body.

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ABOUT ALEX:

Alex Mufson, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, is the founder of Canary House, an integrative healing practice specializing in high-functioning individuals living with persistent exhaustion, pain, and unexplained symptoms despite normal or inconclusive labs. Her work focuses on nervous, immune, and metabolic regulation for people whose lives appear stable on paper but feel increasingly effortful from the inside.

CONNECT WITH ALEX:

Substack: https://alexmufson.substack.com
Instagram: @alex.mufson
Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-mufson-lcsw-96146b29/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Let's face it, you can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're caring way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Live Lighter Podcast. I am your host, Jessica Berg, and I am so flipping excited about today's conversation. Alex Moufsan is the founder of Canary House. She is an integrative clinician focused on neuroimmune and metabolic regulation for high-functioning women with unresolved symptoms. There are so many of us out there. So this podcast is going to be really beautiful in supporting a lot of these high-functioning women who go and get lab results and are told, you look great. Okay, but I feel like crap. That's where we're gonna go with this podcast. And I'm so excited. So thank you for being here, Alex.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Well, I'm so glad to be here. You did great introducing, and it is the worst to hear everything looks good when you feel bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

So tell us, tell the listeners a little bit about um anything in addition as far as like what you do and and your story.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Two, I am an integrative clinician, but the story is mine. So I am also a high-functioning woman who was told everything looks good. And I was told everything looks good through literal brain hemorrhages. I mean, it was not subtle. My body is not subtle. And it took me 14 years of education and study to become the clinician that I needed at that moment in my 20s. Actually, the first time I was hospitalized, I was 18. And so now we're 20 years later. But it took me a long time to become the clinician that I needed. And now I'm so grateful to be her because so many of us are just stuck. We're stuck in this cycle of everything looks good while deteriorating and losing a lot of the sense of ourselves and at the same time performing at really high levels, crushing everything, accomplishing a lot, which makes it that much more confusing as to why you're deteriorating health-wise and also still such a badass in life. So that is my mission is to make the time that it took me to study and become the provider I needed. I want to shorten that for so many other people because I think there are the world needs high-functioning, amazing women to shine and feel healthy. And there's there's a huge net loss when all of us feel like crap and are constantly gaslit into t telling us like that's normal. I think that the world loses so much of our energy and our potential and our future. It is it's a life's mission to make sure that we feel good so we can do our thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

God, the world needs women feeling great, right? Yes. I love that. I love your mission, I love your passion, all of it. So there's so many of us, I know me, because I'm a high-functioning woman, right? And especially coming from the corporate world where we are trained and conditioned to just power through, to not listen to our body, to push the body's signals down and just keep powering through. Take the Tylenol, take the extra caffeine, and just go be productive, get things done. And so, what you're saying too is also helping women understand how to listen to our body signals and that our intuition that something is off is true. Like that is our true north. And the body never lies. And so the more that we can listen to it, the better we'll be. And the body eventually will get to where it's sending off alarm bells, and that's when we have no choice but to listen.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, and I think the corporate space is a great example of that, but it's not the only place. We are conditioned as women to be caretakers, and we lovingly say high functioning because we're crushing everything, but I would offer that overfunctioning is what we're trained to do. We're trained to take things that are not ours and make them ours and then fix them. And so there's this constant state of push involved, and that actually teaches an individual to be excellent at ignoring their own needs. And I think that whether that's in the corporate world, in motherhood, in just this ideal of femininity, women are really taught and rewarded for self-sacrificing. And it's so important that we understand that that actually takes us further away from the embodiment that everybody's looking for with the Instagram hacks and all of these things. But the reality is this is kind of a trauma response to be stuck in a world that only values you for productivity. And I would argue that we will all be more productive when we do feel good, but that's such a difficult transition to make because we feel so important and like it's so necessary for us to be so overfunctioning and high-functioning, and that we just abandon ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

You just hit on so many. We could go in 10 different angles for this. There's so many good nuggets here. And the identity piece in the women that I work with and in myself too, like I tied so much of my identity to my productivity because that is what I had been taught. Um, and that's what I valued within myself. And when I started to slow down, when I started to peel away from that, my my nervous system panicked because it was like, whoa, we this is this is not safe. What are you doing? So there's this conditioning that we get to relearn.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

And I want to add that it's not actually just yours. There's generations of women that we have pulled through that we are carrying. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the conversation as we grow into adults, we are kind of an intersection of many generations of whether it's overfunctioning because we had to, right? Our mothers were the boomers that were taught you have to be as good as a man, but also still take care of the house, right? Like it was not the it was not one or the other. It was very much encouraging both. We have the women before us, we have generations of toxin exposure, generations of trauma from whether it's immigration or you know, the thing, the famine that you came from. Our our histories are rich with all of this. And I think that it as we as millennials are coming into ourselves, and this goes for like, I I work with a lot of like older Gen Z and Gen X and younger boomers, but I would say millennials are specific in that we are the conjunction of all these things coming together. And now we're old enough, powerful enough, and educated enough to say, wait, I actually don't think that the last 20 years of my life was normal. I actually think that I may have, whether it was inherited genetics, inherited trauma, and I work kind of at the intersection, I'm working with neurological changes, I'm working with metabolic changes, I'm working with epigenetics and inherited trauma. All of these things come together into bodies that are like on the fritz. And we're now powerful enough to say, like, we're not actually going to accept this. But then when we go to the institutions that are meant to help us, those institutions have been there for generations and have been keeping this lineage alive. So they look at you and they're like, Well, I mean, you're working, you're crushing it, your family seems good. A lot of the time it's even you look fit, you're working out. If you have gained a little bit of weight that you know is not normal for you, you know it's not normal for you, and you say, I'm eating beautifully, I'm lifting weights regularly, I do my cardio, and they say, but you're beautiful and curvy, and there's this like body positivity that comes at you that you know in your heart something has shifted. I think we're the representation of people who are saying, We're not gonna, we're not just gonna say, okay, anymore. Like we're gonna actually push, even if that means abandoning the doctors that we were told to believe and the systems and the medications or using them differently. And that's, I mean, that's ultimately where my career has led because my life had to totally disintegrate from physical, physical ramifications of all of this while still being incredibly productive and being told I was like a good girl, right? All of that had to happen in order for me to get here today. And I just think it's so many of our stories.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

I would love to just kind of understand how you fell into this line of work. And obviously, like your story, like what you were just saying, is your health was deteriorating and you kept hearing from the doctors that, oh, everything looks good, and you were high functioning, so you were pushing and pushing and pushing. But tell us a little bit how you fell into this specific line of work.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

It might surprise you, but I was a horse trainer. That was my that was my career. And I woke up one morning. I like I said, I was hospitalized when I was 18, but I didn't really associate any long-term condition with that. Now I know that it was a lot of autonomic instability and the things that I I know to treat now. But at the time it was just like a one-off. So it wasn't until I was in my mid-20s, I was a profession professional athlete. I was working at the top of probably what I'll ever be physically. And I woke up and I had neurological symptoms. And of course, I went to, you know, the local urgent care, whatever. Everyone's like, you're fine. Like 24-year-olds don't wake up and like something's wrong with their brain. And I'm like, I kind of think something's wrong with my brain. I didn't identify at the time that I also always had horrendous periods. I had all these inflammatory responses from like excess responses to like viral infections and cold sores and all these things that were weird. But at the time, I was just like a young, invincible young woman following her passion. But when the neurological symptoms came, they knocked me on my ass because it turns out it's really hard to be a horse trainer when your brain is completely coming undone. And I was eventually uh believed enough to have an MRI, emergency MRI, by my chiropractor of all things, because no one else at the time I was just like splatting myself back together as a as an athlete. So my chiropractor knew me and she's like, Well, I've seen you like wreck in every every type of way, and you've never said something was wrong. In fact, things were wrong, and you never said something was wrong. So the fact that you're saying something is wrong, maybe we should just stick you in an MRI. See, see if maybe you did some mystery damage. It didn't really occur to me that it was sickness. I thought that I had done some damage. And it turned out that I had this inflammatory lesion in my brain, which sent me, I call it like the water slide of the medical industrial complex. I was like told to leave the state because I was in Montana. I went to Chicago, I was hospitalized. It was just like I was just taken in. They ran every single test known to man from spinal tap to like, did the pigeons in your barn infect you and something? Because I didn't know what it was. And at the end of it, they had no idea what it was. And they just said, Well, go live your life and see if it happens again. Well, big surprise it did happen again. And over the years, I tried they put me on hardcore immunosuppressants. They were like just guessing, really. And like, I appreciate that they were using their tools, but they really did quite a bit of damage to my, you know, once vibrant body. And finally, a few years in, I said, enough. You don't know what's wrong. These drugs are making me sicker, and I don't want to do it anymore. And so I switched careers because I was a hot mess and could not stably uh train horses for a living with neurological disease, and what I now know to be advanced stage endometriosis, which was escalating at the time. That's what it was. That's one of the presentations.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

I did have advanced stage endometriosis, and that has that's later in the story, does that get found in in equally horrible ways? But you asked how I came to this career, and I decided to shift to mental health because I had been working still with a lot of people, and and what we now think of as like equine therapy was absolutely a portion of my work. But as I uh progressed, both in my physical symptoms and then the evolution of learning things, like why is this happening to my body? Why am I constantly inflamed? I was doing that research pre-COVID and discovering things about cytokine storms and the what we now know as long COVID, those sorts of things. I was exploring those in 2014, 2016, trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually, I was both a licensed clinician and eventually diagnosed with endometriosis as one of the main presenters. And that's a whole other story that we can absolutely go into, but believe women, and I had many, many bad surgeries and many good surgeries. And I also was seeing concurrently with my clients, as now a licensed clinician, that there was a subset of people who were showing up to the work from a mental health standpoint, from a going to the gym standpoint, from a boundaries lifestyle, change their career. They were showing up and they were still sick and they were still miserable, and they usually still had anxiety and intrusive thought loops that did not match their level of insight. I was one of those people, right? Like I had all of this insight. I was feeling in many ways more balanced and stable as a human than I ever had through these very scary experiences. And I was still really sick. And so concurrently, I started figuring out well, for me and for them, a lot of these mental presentations, the anxiety loops, all of these things, these are physiological symptoms. And so I started integrating the work of functional medicine, what's what's really beautiful science, even in the mainstream, that's not actually making it to our medical doctors. And then the mental health training that I had into this integrative work until I felt better, and then my clients started feeling better, and eventually Canary House was born because we are the canaries in the coal mine. We are the people that should have been listened to when we were having little tiny issues at, you know, sometimes infancy, but it's until we're millennials and we're strong adult women who say, like, this is wrong. Something is wrong. I deserve care that doesn't just say, like, oh, you look great, everything looks good.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yes. Oh my gosh. Wow, that is a powerful story. And I love the name of the company and what it stands for. It's really beautiful. And I think we got right? That's who we are. It is. And and what I hear in your story and just in my in my own experience too, is listening to our intuition and really starting to get prescriptive and curious, right? It's about getting curious of like, well, where is this coming from? And kind of taking your destiny and your health into your own hands. There really is this sense of empowerment that gets to happen. And I am I'll share really quick a small example that I had last year as someone who was kind of on the cusp of entering perimenopause, right? But when I was having perimenopause symptoms, I was losing sleep. I was waking up in the middle of the night and just like jolting out of bed as if thinking that I got a full night's sleep, but really it was just cortisol ripping through my body and it was 1 a.m. and I had been sleeping for four hours. So my sleep was a wreck, my cycle was all over the place. Everything else looked normal though, like being told that, yeah, you're just having perimenopause. This is just a part of becoming a different phase of your womanhood. And then I went to a woman who she took like 11 different blood panels. And what she found, because it typically you only take like what two or three, two blood panels, I think.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

A regular doctor is not doing very much at all, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

No. This one took 11. Yeah. And what she found was by going super deep into the numbers and the data, it was pretty much coming down to a lack of protein in my diet. And so I was hyper reactive glycemic. And so what was happening is I my body in the middle of the night, my liver was going into starvation mode. So it was sending a signal to my brain that, oh my God, we're starving. So then my brain started shooting out cortisol, fight or flight, and that's why I was waking up in the middle of the night. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

And so it's so so confusing because cortisol goes high, you start to gain weight, you think you should eat less, when really it often means you're under-eating.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Right. Yes, yes. And so she gave me a ton of other like vitamins to support too. And so when I started to take some some additional vitamins and being more mindful about my protein, eating a little bit of protein before bed, my cycle went back to normal. My sleep is blissful. I get eight hours every night. And it's just, I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but that was my experience where I was about to go on the over to the deep end and start doing all these other types of HRT and like hormone replacement therapy. But sometimes eventually maybe I would get there. But at this stage, there was actually something else that my body was saying it needed that with the proper blood work, I was able to get those answers.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

I think that's such a beautiful example because, first of all, perimenopause is thrown around like it's something you can't argue with. And you know what? Okay, we are all technically going to be before menopause and entering menopause.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

But there's actually a new billion-dollar market.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Yeah, there's actually not a lot of structure around what it is, okay. So you're 38 or you're 43, or like what is it? And I actually would would offer to anyone listening that the reframe is your body may be at a point where it is less tolerant of abuse, neglect, and all of the stressors that it could tolerate, perhaps at 23, 24, because you are approaching more mature adulthood. And that's, I guess that's perimenopause if you happen to be before menopause, but it also could just be your body saying, I needed this the whole time. I'm just tired of asking nicely. And now I have to get really loud because it's no longer optional. And so a lot of the time we start doing the things at 35, 45 that we probably should have been doing at 15, but we weren't, and we were able to manage. But then because we were just reflected, like, oh, you're perimenopause, that's just being a woman, that's the same as saying, like, oh, you have horrible periods, that's just being a woman. That's actually not accurate. You know, being a healthy woman should mean that all of these things, from your menstrual cycle to ovulation to what is now hot topic, peramenopause to menopause, should be a smooth experience if the rest of the system is regulating properly. And what I find is that I'm often not looking at the output. So the blood work that you're talking about, we're often seeing like the end result. So did your body produce the right amount of whatever it is that you're testing in the output? Those numbers don't actually represent how hard the body worked to produce that result. And so often what's missed, especially, I always say our high-functioning selves in work, our bodies are just as high functioning. So our bodies are managing heavy load, stress, all of these things and still getting it done in the same way that you're still getting work done, you're still getting parenting done, you're still an excellent spouse, all of these things are happening for you. But nobody is asking, how much did she sacrifice in order to make it look effortless? Well, let's apply that to your blood work. If you only look at the end result, you miss the regulatory functions that may have been overfunctioning, working so hard to make those flawless looking results. So what I do is I come in and actually look at the regulation process. How hard would the body have to work to produce this? Sometimes it doesn't even involve more tests. Sometimes it involves reading the existing tests through a different lens. Other times it does involve taking more functional tests that allow us to see the pathways that these parts of your brain and hormones are taking to understand if you're skewing towards inflammation and survival or if you're skewing towards a more shutdown place because, you know, at this point you're working so hard that the body has to triage. We get to, we get to see that, but that regulatory approach is kind of completely at odds to traditional medicine, which is very much about the not dead scores. And look, I want you to have not dead scores. I want those for you, but not dead and feeling well actually can be very different. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes not dead equals you feel great and vibrant. Other times not dead just means that your body has overfunctioned to produce the results and keep you alive. Thank you, body. We love you, body, for doing that. But also, how hard were you working to get there? And so that's like the entire shift that we take as integrative clinicians in the sort of work that I do is not what's the result, it's how hard did you have to work to get there. And that looks the same with blood work as it does with boundaries.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Really? Wow. So that's fascinating. I love that because it's almost as if you're you're kind of like the body whisper where you come in.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah. And you come in and you I don't sometimes think it's like medical witch. Medical witch, body whisper.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

I love that. But you kind of come in and And you, what I'm hearing is we get to bring the body back down to a baseline in the pace at which we were meant to be functioning. Yes. Versus where our culture is pushing us into this high fight or flight survival mode constantly, and our body's trying to keep up with it. And instead, what you're doing is you're kind of taking a step back and resetting the baseline so that the body can thrive and operate in the way that it's supposed to. So, okay, I have a question for you. Basically, what I am interpreting is you go in and you identify, okay, you help make sense of what's happening to all the different pieces of the body, like as the whole picture. And then from there, you go in and you say, okay, this is actually what this machine needs in order to operate at its prime function, right? Correct.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Okay. And sometimes, like you said, that's protein or boundaries with your X, or like sometimes it's not necessarily a compound. And if you are someone like me who I knew I needed more protein, there was no question that my diet was low in protein. I couldn't tolerate it. So I needed something to help my body so that then I could change the behavior. And honestly, the behavior wasn't that hard to change once my body accepted the fuel.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Okay, I love what you just said there too. So it's not even just like what you're putting into your body, but it's also, and I and I know you've mentioned this throughout the podcast, so I'm just gonna call it out here too. Is it's also your external environment because you were even saying like maybe it's the boundaries with a partner that you need to establish because that is actually creating a lot of cortisol or certain functions in the body that is doing the harm.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

You know, so I'll use an example of a woman that I spoke with fairly recently. So I have a team, and my team includes me doing the integrative care. I have a bioadaptive regulation specialist, which is a really fancy way of saying she teaches you to speak correctly to your body and interpret signals correctly. And then I have a complex trauma specialist because sometimes you're not going to be able to smooth out these signals because of your body's experience of trauma. So we all work together. So I was doing a, we call it a full circle evaluation. It's like the first thing that people come in and do with us. And I looked at her, she wanted to get extensive functional testing right off the bat. And so we had blood and I think a Dutch plus, which a lot of you have heard about. It's like hormones, adrenals, neurotransmitters, metabolites, organic acids, super cool. Doesn't just tell you if you have estrogen, tells you what the estrogen is doing in your body. Like that's kind of the that's the cool part of it. And it tests a lot of cortisol as well. So I started looking at our testing and I got, we do an interview portion, and I said, look, I said, your testing, your body reflects a huge amount of stress. I don't actually see any underperforming or disease state or anything like that. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm like, oh, this is important. I said, so I can support you with, you know, a supplement stack, dietary changes, and you know, if that if you need a little more of a boost, I have a compound, not a GLP one for anyone asking something different, that I think will support. But I need to ask you, what's going on in your life? Because you present as someone that is in the process of a traumatic experience. That's what your blood and your your urine and your spit are showing me. And she was like, Well, yeah, I'm actually divorcing my husband. He's harassing me, he's stalking me, he won't stop calling me from the time and we work together. They work together in very high power jobs. That's like positions of authority. And so I said, Well, that's a lot that your body is navigating. And she said, Yeah, I I am still very active and I I want to eat, but I can't always make myself eat in the evenings, especially. I said, Well, what's happening in the evenings? Well, he calls me incessantly and he harasses me. Okay. So when I when I speak to someone like that, it's all there in the testing. I didn't magically know to ask her if she was in the midst of a traumatic, uh, you know, abusive divorce. I saw it in her in her blood, in her urine, in her spit test. But I can give her as many supplements and you know, ask her to obviously she needs to eat, and I could give her some compounds that would support the cortisol. But if she doesn't understand how to set boundaries for herself around allowing this other person to fully dysregulate her life, I can only do so much because the outside stimulus that is causing the dysregulation will just keep coming at her. So she ultimately is working also with our complex trauma specialist on boundaries while I have given her a dietary plan, a supplement plan, and and she does have medicines available if after eight to 12 weeks of, you know, boundary setting and doing all these other things, protein intake, like you said, if that doesn't help, we do have some resources that we can to get her out of this state because you know her body's in a traumatic experience, but we're not starting there because the the active trauma is still there. That's very different than I have many women come to me where I am, I was kind of early in her journey. Like she got to me quickly, which is lovely. Most women that I meet had that traumatic experience 20 ago and have been operating in that, whatever you want to call it, hypervigilance, fight or flight, activation, inflammation. They've been doing that ever since. And so it's a much different, it's not about separating from their ex right now. It's about now we have to recover, recover the body and teach the regulatory systems how to not be in crisis. Those people were probably doing the same trauma or bioadaptive regulation work, but we can typically bring in a compound faster because they already have, unfortunately, very visible pathology, even if the doctor said everything looks good. I'm seeing visible pathology. I can see something different. And so we can come in and we can use regulatory medicine faster. But that doesn't mean the boundaries don't, they don't go away. You still have to set the boundaries.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Oh my gosh. This this is probably the best example of holistic health I've ever heard of. Because I mean, and and from my from my exposure, right? What I've seen in experience, because you're taking in the actual, like the scientific data of it, and then you're also taking in the human experience of what they're exposed to and their relationships and their life, and you're treating the whole, which is really beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Thank you. Yeah, and that's what's often missed is the whole human. And I actually think that high-functioning women are the easiest to miss in the paradigm that just looks at outcomes because we we have to be half dead before the outcomes slip. Like I always say, I was having brain hemorrhages in my 20s, and I went to grad school, obviously, because I needed to not be a horse trainer anymore. And I always say that one A minus I got, but I was having a brain hemorrhage while it happened, you know, like, and that's like, okay, yeah, that's really sick, but that's so representative of like that's how significant it was. I didn't skip the class. I didn't not get an A. I got like a 92 instead of a 98 while having an active brain hemorrhage. That's what most women are living with, right? We're still shining, and even our not so great for our population is still like an A minus. And so nobody is gonna see when we know that we're A plus students. We know that we we should be shining much brighter than that.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

Oh my gosh. Yes. Can you imagine a world where all these women are just in their own?

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yes, it would not look like it looks today. I I mean, I do think, I do think a lot of our circumstance right now is not unrelated to the fact that there have been generations of women told, this is your life, this is perimenopause. You should just accept womanhood. And I don't accept it. I I don't accept it at all. And you know what's beautiful? The science actually doesn't accept it either. It's just not making it from the scientific benches to the medical doctors. And that is where that's my job is to like bridge that gap. Because I'm not even saying don't use not all, but some of the medications available to us. I'm saying use it differently and use it with data that is typically just ignored and dose it completely differently. A lot of, luckily, a lot of the regulatory meds, one of my favorites is called low dose naltraxone, and it is amazing for neuroimmune dysregulation, like the type of person who is stuck on crisis and they're and I can get really nerdy about it, but really all you need to know is like your brain is stuck on crisis. It's a beautiful medicine, and you know what? It costs 25 bucks a month. And it's some of the best science that I have found out there, but it's not making it to mainstream medicine. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

So powerful. So, Alex, I I have I feel like we could talk for another hour. Before though we wrap up, what I I wanted to ask two things. One, is there anything for for anyone listening that hasn't that has kind of continued to do just the mainstream health checks and but they're still feeling off inside? Like, what is is there anything that you want to make sure that you want to share with that woman that we didn't touch on yet? And then how can how can people find you and work with you?

SPEAKER_00 31:51

First of all, trust yourself because a doctor will sometimes, there are beautiful providers out there. I don't want to, I don't want to vilify all of them, but like often a doctor will say that you have done complete testing, and I won't even get enough to do an initial analysis from my perspective. So just know that sometimes it's about the eyes reading it and not about you. And that's so important to remember that it's not, it doesn't even always take different tests, just different eyes. And I really believe that there is always something else to try as long as you stay alive. And so it's really important to hold that and keep fighting. There's some basics that are often just totally missed. Like you may have had your iron tested, but get your ferritin tested. You may have had glucose and your basic metabolic panel, but you didn't have fasting insulin. Like there's some basic stuff that is often just left off of the first panel. So, you know, initially go in and say, I actually really want ferritin and a full iron panel. I want, yes, I want my thyroid tested, but I want a full thyroid panel, not just TSH. Yes, I want metabolics, but I also want fasting insulin and fasting glucose. You'll just come out with a more robust set of labs. Like, and this is actually not that hard. Like I can literally order it and send you to a quest diagnostics or whatever's near you, and it's not that much blood. So you may have not even had like the best base panel. So that's my first example. Then I really want to encourage you to know that those are just the very baby parts of testing. And there's so much beautiful functional testing that we can order that comes to your house. It's like you don't even have to pull blood, it's like urine. And so there's so much more data. And I really want to encourage all women to not start treating themselves without data because there's all sorts of little tricks that we learn. So, for instance, I mentioned a GLP1, everybody's super excited about GLP1s, but they go to compounding pharmacies, which I love because it allows us access, but compounding pharmacies will often default to compounding your GLP1 with B12. For some people, that makes you feel amazing. B12 is a beautiful addition. For other people, it makes you feel like you want to die. And it increases your anxiety and it changes everything. I can actually see on the tests that I run if you're likely to be one of the people who feels like death. And then I can say, let's compound this with something else, and we can make that request. But that's so missed, right? Like because we're just like trying things and we're high functioning and we're like, I'm just gonna take over. That's awesome. But I really, really, really encourage everyone to know there's so many little nuances. Even in this sounds crazy, but you know when you get a little pill compounded at the pharmacy, that's usually not just the medicine in that pill. There's usually what's called a filler agent. The fancy word is excipient in there. And you might be taking a tiny little microdose of something completely different in addition to the med, and that might be what you're reacting to. Like, that's how beautiful the science can be when we get granular and we honor that everything that happens to the body matters. And we don't just say, well, B12 isn't toxic. It is for me because of my methylation patterns, because of my sensitivities, right? All of these things. So that's what I really want to encourage people to say. Like, there's always something more to try, and it takes the right partnership. And you should find providers that feel like partners. And if you don't, fire them. It's totally okay to fire them. I love it. I think I answered your first question. I don't even remember your second question because that one made me. How can they find you?

SPEAKER_01 35:38

How can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 35:41

My practice is called Canary House. You can find me on Instagram at just my name, Alex.mufson. And then also I have a Substack called Everything Looks Good, which the irony is not lost on any of us on this call. Because you can find me on Substack. That's where I probably put the most like science-rich information. And then I'm on LinkedIn. And I would love to hear from anyone just in like initial no-cost consults. I do not want to gatekeep this. And our full circles are like under $500, and you will get over 50 pages of custom writing interpretation for you. This is not like, oh, I spend $500 and she spends 15 minutes. Like, absolutely not. I'm in a very, very lucky position where I can just over-offer and over-promise to everyone. So please let me.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

That's so amazing. Look at the ripples you're making into the world.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

I hope so. Every single one of us feeling better means that we will get into a better version of our world faster.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Yeah. And we'll start living life lighter and more free and more empowered.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

That's really light is totally my word of the year, too. I always pick a word of the year. You just nailed it.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Oh, I love that. Yeah, mine's light. I love that. I didn't pick a word. I need to pick a word.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

It's not too late. There's no rules. There's no rules. Maybe maybe your year goes May to May because you like the sun. Ooh, I do. I am a solar charged. Yeah. So there you go. So it's time.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

All right. I will let you know what my word is once I determine it. Well, thank you so much, Alex, for just your wisdom, for the gift that you bring, and just the ripples that you're creating into the world for women so that we can have a world where women feel fabulous and not just okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Thank you so much for having me. Your energy is like contagious. So I just really appreciate what you're putting out in the world too. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Oh, thank you. I'm receiving that with open arms. Or this is open arms, and now I'm taking it in. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Um, I will have in the show notes for everyone all the ways to contact Alex. Please, please, please just take this in, listen to it, and and just soak in her wisdom, and maybe you might be inspired to take some action for yourself as well. So thank you and have a beautiful day. Bye, everyone. Alright, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessbergcoaching.com. That's J E S S B E R G C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.