This episode is all about making a significant shift in how we approach our health after breast cancer. We’re diving deep into the difference between simply treating physical symptoms and truly supporting our bodies for optimal health and function.
So often, we get caught up in the cycle of addressing one symptom after another, like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole. But what if we changed our perspective?
What if, instead of focusing solely on symptoms, we started looking at our overall health and how we can support our bodies to function at their best?
In this episode, we’ll explore the importance of a holistic approach. We’ll discuss how our bodies are wonderfully interconnected systems, and by nurturing overall health, we can often see a reduction in symptoms as a natural result. It’s like tending to a garden – when the soil is rich and the environment is right, the plants flourish.
I’ll share practical tips on how to shift your focus from just symptom management to enhancing your body's natural functions.
Remember, this journey is about progress, not perfection. It’s about making small, sustainable changes that add up over time. I’m here with you every step of the way, and I’m so grateful to be part of your healing journey.
Referred to in this episode:
The Four Pillars of Breast Cancer Recovery Coaching Experience
Books:
Dirty Genes
Follow me on Social Media:
Read the full transcript:
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hello, Hello, friends. This is episode 359 of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. This is going to be the first podcast episode that comes out in July in July has a very special place in my heart. Because July of 2011 was the month I was diagnosed with breast cancer the first time July 3 was the morning I rolled over in bed. And as my arm fell across my chest, I felt a lump underneath my forearm in my breast. And I knew something was wrong. And by July 11, I had a diagnosis of stage two breast cancer. And then by the time we did surgeries, it became stage to be because it had spread to my lymph nodes. So when July rolls around, which is interesting, because it was actually July 11, I was diagnosed the first time, October 11, I was diagnosed the second time was stage four metastatic cancer. But some how it's just July brings all of this up for me, right? It was like the month that really changed my life, change the direction of my life, change so many things, much of it was tough. There were a lot of challenges and struggles there still are. But I gotta say a lot of it has been amazing. I really truly feel like I live an amazing life. And it wouldn't be the life it is now if I hadn't had that diagnosis of cancer. You know, sometimes we say like, why do we have to learn things the hard way? I don't know. But I do have a tendency to learn the hard way. And it was definitely a hard way of learning. But so many things have changed. And when July rolls around, it just inspires me to do more to support you more, to help more women understand the power they have over their health, over their mental health over their physical health, and the things that we can do to help us feel safer in our bodies, confident in our bodies, safe and confident and happy in our lives. So I want to talk to you today about a mindset shift when we're thinking about our terrain, the tissues and the health of our overall body. And before I do talk to you about that, I want to say that starting now from now actually started a couple of days ago. Now through the date of my diagnosis July 11, you can enroll in my signature coaching program, the 16 week program called the four pillars of breast cancer recovery, and get $130 off. If you use the code 13 years, you can go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, you'll see a banner right across the top that will take you through the steps. This is a super powerful program. It was where I started, and is going to walk you through what I developed as a coach and as a person who has been through breast cancer. And it helps you to understand these four pillars of letting things go of release. Release being the first pillar letting go of old ideas about yourself and your life and the way things have to be how you renew your body. And that's really a focus on health. It's really a focus on nourishment on you looking at your relationship with food and moving your body. regrouping your life is when we look at that third pillar of what do I want my life to look at like now, now that I've stared mortality in the face, and I've let go of things that hold me back. And I've learned to treat my body from a heart centered place and nourish it with love and specific to the needs of my body. Now, you feel so much more confident. And you get so much more clarity on what you really want your life to look like. What relationships do you want to regroup? What relationships do you want to put more energy into? What relationships do you need to let go of? What about jobs? What about hobbies? What about passions? What about all the things that are in your life? Where do they stand with you now? And what do you want them to look like? What do you want to keep? What do you want to toss? What do you want to donate? And then the final pillar of revive really helps you to think about the special gift, the unique person that you are and how you want to put yourself into the world. What feels good to you. How do you want to show up for yourself in this life and for the people that you love? What lights and passion within you and how do you pursue that with just joy and be all in for yourself having your own back? This is what the four pillars of breast cancer recovery take See through. So there's lots of videos there. 16 weeks of videos, there's downloadable PDFs, there's journaling exercises. And there's a live coaching call once a month, where you can ask all your questions or listen to other people get coached. And I find that that always helps everyone, when we listen to what other people are going to sometimes it reminds us of what we're going through that we didn't even have the ability to put into words to state openly. So check it out. It's the four pillars of breast cancer recovery coaching experience, it's on my website, and you can get $130 off now through July 11 2024. I think it closes at 9pm. Pacific Standard Time. All right. So that is a great bonus that's going to help you out so much, you're going to love it. And I want to talk about a really common mindset that I see when it comes to supporting our ability to be healthy, when it comes to supporting our mental wellness and our emotional wellness. And I think that I totally understand why this happens. And the more I coach people, the more I see it, the more clarity I get on it. We are raised and conditioned and taught to think in a symptom focused society, we label things. And we look at things in silos. So if you have joint pain from arthritis, then it's What can I do about my arthritis? If you have breast cancer, it's what do I do to heal from the breast cancer, if you have a hormone dysfunction, if you have gut dysbiosis this is what people come to me for. They're looking at my metabolic health coaching programs, where we're looking at lifestyle, we look at lab work, we look at genetic blueprints, we look at diet, all of the lifestyle habits and the terrain 10 and how they're affecting you. And people come to me and they say I have this thing, right, this label this problem. And when we do that, we are focusing on the wrong thing. Because we're not doctors, we don't practice medicine. And MIT I mean, for the most part, if you're a doctor, then you certainly do. But for me, I'm not a doctor, I don't practice medicine, I don't treat disease, I support people in understanding their body, in understanding how to make their body be as healthy as it can, and how to function as optimally as it can, through lifestyle choices, which can be huge and very diverse. So I want to give you an example of why understanding this getting really clear on this is super important. So we don't only label and categorize things and look at them in this way when it's physical health, but also mental health, right? I hear depression, anxiety, right? A tendency to catastrophize a tendency to ruminate, we look at the way that our brain works. And we say something's wrong with my brain, right? I have this dysfunction in my brain. And it's so interesting, because as I work with people through my coaching packages, we look at their labs, we look at their genetic blueprint, I really start to see a pattern. Everybody's different. Everybody's got different genetic blueprint. But there are some really interesting patterns that come up in my clients who had breast cancer, because not all of my clients when it comes to metabolic health coaching are people who have had or have cancer. But I see in specifically those who come to me with cancer, some really interesting patterns. I was just talking to someone one of my mentors recently and said, the more people I see, the more I'm going to put together my own clinical study here and say, here's the commonalities I see. And people who come to me with breast cancer, because it's really fascinating.
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When they come to me, I will hear things like the problem is sleep. The problem is digestion. The problem is joint pain. The problem is stress, anxiety, you know, stress affecting my mind. And we target those areas, right. So we think I gotta help the brain, I've got to help the joints. But a lot of times what I see are very powerful genetic pathways that are expressing themselves as symptoms, like joint pain, like an overactive mind. And as we dig deeper, we go upstream and say, Where is this coming from? Not just like what's backing up here at the dam, but where is this coming from? It is fascinating to see how your body's ability to effectively detoxify your body's ability to effectively methylate your body's ability to control and regulate hormones manifests in these symptoms that we focus on. So if we can move away from the symptomatic thinking of the body, and notice the symptom and say, Wow, I have a over active mind, my mind is going 24/7. They say there's 60,000 thoughts in the human brain every day, I think I have 600,000 thoughts. Notice that if that's happening, there's something underneath it. Right? There's something that's driving it, there are neurotransmitters, maybe they're driving it, there's a hormone impact. There's something else that's going on in the body that could support or that is not supporting that experience of being more calm. But we just think, and I hear this all the time, I'm crazy, my brain is broken, my mind is out of control. Because we don't step back and look and say, If I'm experienced this, experiencing this, and it's uncomfortable, what's happening in my body that's either causing this to happen, or that isn't stopping this from happening? And how can I get my body to function better overall? And will the symptoms improve? It's really fascinating to look through a nutrition genome and see how many genetic variants impact the brain's ability to function properly and properly receive different neurotransmitters, right? Because in our cells in our body, we've got receptors in your genes are going to affect how many receptors you have on different cells. So maybe you're not as sensitive to the feel good chemicals in your brain, maybe you absorb too much of them, maybe your body doesn't detoxify well. And so when you take in things like a glass of wine, when you have super fragrant stuff, laundry detergents, and dryer sheets, and things like that, and those chemicals are in your clothes, and those chemicals absorbed through your skin, or hair dye or things of that nature, how it gets into your body. But if your detoxification pathways have issues, that those chemicals stay in your body for a longer time, and then they can create more inflammation. And then that inflammation, again, has a cascading effect, so that it affects your body and ultimately, can affect your mind, and the way your mind functions, and the amount of effort it takes to calm yourself. So it's an interesting thing. I think one of the things that I noticed a lot, because I have this is how your genes affect your ability to feel satiated, or how much hunger you experience. And I think a lot of times we don't think about this as something that's genetically driven, that we think about when people say that they've been overweight their whole life, they think that their genes make them overweight. But that's not really what happens, right? So your genes can indicate like, okay, these fat cells hold more fat, or these fat cells have a higher chance of being inflamed, right, you have a higher predisposition of inflamed fat cells, and they're not going to want to let go of fat as easily as someone whose genes aren't directing that to happen. Or some people and I know I have a couple of people in my life like this, they're just freaking never hungry, right? I'm hungry all the time. They're never hungry. We don't think about that as something necessarily that's driven by our genetics, but it is. And it can be really powerful. So a lot that I'm learning about, especially your genetics, and how to understand how they work so that you can better manage your weight is really powerful. So for instance, when it's appetite and satiety satiety that we're talking about. I noticed when I started intermittent fasting, that I was hungry all the time, right. And I, I thought about my hunger as related to activity, because I've always been a pretty active person. But when I started to gain weight, it didn't make sense to me. I'm expending a lot more calories than I'm taking in. I knew this because I was monitoring everything right. And I was gaining weight, and I didn't understand what was going on. So it's an interesting thing to look at and begin to understand that that hunger for me became a mental decision. Right? This was in my mind. And what I mean by mental decision isn't that I wasn't experiencing hunger. My body was experiencing hunger, I would feel hunger pangs. But I would know I have eaten enough calories to support my body. So my energy needs have been met. And yet something else is making me hungry. And this was a really interesting thing. So I started intermittent fasting, and I had to start working through what was in my mind and noticing. I don't need to eat this hunger pang is triggering an urgency that's making me want to go get food, but I know I don't need food right now. And so fast forward when I got my genetic reports on I can see that that's something that's driven by my genetics, it made even more sense and it made me feel better about my choices, because I realize okay, This is something that I'm managing, by changing my story about what a hunger pain means. And I'll be honest with you, there are a lot of times where I am hungry. But I have learned what it takes to manage my weight to maintain what I believe is a healthy weight for me, what I believe is a healthy level of body fat for me, and I know how I need to maintain that in my body now. So I want to be very careful because people with eating disorders, this is not what I'm talking about. This is just an average if you don't have an eating disorder, but you're curious about your hunger cues and your satiety cues. I learned that and this was a thing in Ayurveda, too. In Ayurveda, you're taught stop eating when you're 80%, full. But when you have genetics that drive hunger hues, and drive satiety cues, a lot of times, you will want to feel this, this sensation of fullness before you stop eating. And when you learn that, and you know that, then you can make choices to change that, then you can make choices, say, I know this is just something that's being driven by, you know, the blueprint of my body, but I don't have to go with it. It's a lot like the way that I work with my clients on you know, you can't always stop thoughts from coming up, thoughts are gonna come up. But you can decide whether or not you're gonna run with the thought. So if you've got one of those thoughts that I call the Netflix original horror series, right, telling you about some disastrous thing that's gonna happen in your life. It's not a true thought, because it's make believe about something in the future. So you get to decide if you're going to put energy into believing that or not, you get to decide if you're going to reframe it, and you're going to choose a thought that's going to serve you better. Well, I think when you start to understand how your body works, and you stop thinking about it as something you have no control over, or you stop thinking about it in the terms of something just being very symptomatic and managing symptoms, and you really understand it, then you can start to say, Okay, I understand this is happening. And this is why and then you make lifestyle changes to support that. So for me, intermittent fasting is a very powerful tool for me in supporting my weight management and a healthy weight. Sometimes when I'm intermittent fasting, I feel hungry. Oftentimes, I'm checking my blood sugar, because I'm looking to keep my glucose low. So I do check it to make sure that I'm not so hungry, that my body is going into a stress response, right, and then that would shoot my glucose up because it spikes my cortisol. And when we're under stress, that increases our cortisol, right, and it starts a whole nother insulin glucose kind of cascade in our body. So I think that when we can change from looking at a, it's just so hard for me to gain weight, or so hard for me to lose weight, or I have this symptom with this label. And instead, we notice I do have a symptom, that's an indication of a bigger process happening in the body. Now, how do I look at my body differently and support it in such a way that it's more comfortable and functions more optimally? If you have, for instance, frequent headaches, or histamine reactions, instead of just looking at it as I'm allergic to something we look at why is my body reacting with so much inflammation? And can I support my detoxification and my pathways that affect inflammation in my body to calm them down. So they don't have such a big reaction to things, instead of just looking at the reaction to things. Now, I'm not saying that that's the case with every headache, always look in and take care of your health decision generalization. Because a lot of times, if we have genes that affect our ability to process what's called catecholamines, right? People, for instance, think green tea is super healthy. And it isn't that it's not super healthy. But if you're drinking a lot of green tea, and it's got a lot of catecholamines in it, and your body can't process those, then green tea is not healthy for you. And it may actually be causing more reactions, and you don't even realize it because you think I'm eating something healthy. So we have to start looking at the body from a bigger picture, a higher level, like where is all of this starting. And I think that, you know, it's
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great to understand your genes. It's great to do a nutrition genome report. But it's also important to just listen and understand there's a great book called dirty jeans, I'll link to it in the show notes for this podcast. And in that book, even if you don't have a genetic report, or it's not something you're interested in doing, then you can look at a book like this. And it will tell you, you know, with these certain genes, you see these certain patterns. And that's not to treat the patterns, but maybe to understand how the body works. So if you're seeing these patterns, these lifestyle choices could support You and maybe quiet down that genetic reaction in your body. So there definitely are ways without knowing specifically what your genetic blueprint is to notice symptoms just as indicators of a bigger underlying issue that you can address by supporting the health of your body. So I think moving away from looking at the solutions, when you're looking for more of a natural or lifestyle approach to health is very different from when you go to a doctor and you say, here are my symptoms, here's what I'm experiencing. And that doctor will give you a protocol to help reduce that suffering from those symptoms. So that's okay, that's on one side. But thinking about how do I support myself through lifestyle habits, changes from I have this symptom, this symptom involves inflammation, my body seems to have trouble calming inflammation, how do we handle that? How do we calm the inflammation? How to reduce the exposure to toxins that might be driving inflammation? Will that calm the body down? How do we look at your food intake and adjust it in such a way so that it's actually calming inflammation? And, you know, I think it's really important, I've said this so many times, we've got to be super honest with ourselves, and very specific, we think a lot in generalities. And this is something I work with my clients on often. Because until we can get very specific, it's really hard to nail down what the actual problem is whether we're working through a mindset thing, or a physical thing. So if we say I generally do, I most often do this happens, usually, I'm pretty good about it, that's not going to be specific enough to really target the thing you want to work on in your mind or in your body. So when I'm saying this for a reason is if you're saying, but I think I eat really well. And I restrict carbs, pretty much and I only have this then in this now. And I exercise, not a whole lot but pretty regularly. It's really important to track this stuff. If you're having an issue that you want to address. If you're having an issue, and you're not feeling comfortable, you're suffering in your body, somehow you're not happy with it somehow. It's very important to know, specifics. So when this happens, this is when I feel stressed when this happens is when I think about it. This is when I feel stressed. When I eat X amount of protein, when I eat this much per day, when I move this much. This is the result that I'm seeing from it. So just like how much I love doing nutrition genomes and labs and things like that, because they're very specific, right? They're telling a specific story, they're testing a specific attribute in the body. This is also important, just when we're looking at an overall lifestyle and behavior change. Be very honest with yourself, without judgment. Right? Say to yourself, gosh, I think I'm eating an overall healthy lifestyle. I think I move enough. Write it down. And don't be afraid of it. Don't try to change it before you write it down. Write it down. This is like when people I love to equate things with money, because we relate a lot to finances and money and the pain it causes up if us if we're not careful with it, right? So we'd be like saying, when we're addressing health issues, and we're saying I think I you well, or it's good enough, or I could probably tweak here and there, but I think it's good enough. That would be like having money coming in, and just not having any idea where you're spending it. I don't I don't think I spend that much I don't worry about oh my god, where's the money? It's gone. My bank account 70. Why? What did I spend it on? Right? So we want to know specifically what is happening in our life when we understand it. And we're not afraid to look at it. But we're willing to look at exactly what's going on without judging or criticizing ourselves. But just looking at things for the purposes of data, and seeing how is this overall affecting and or supporting my body? And we don't just write off things, as I often hear Ed's just genetics. No, because genetics are a lot of times very controllable can be turned off and can be turned on. So even if you say this is affecting my body, and it's just genetics, that's fine, as long as you're honest about the fact that there are things you could do to turn that off or quiet that down so you don't suffer so much from the outcome. Right? There's a lot of power there. But where we see our power is when we get very specific. We understand the details. And we stop thinking about just the symptoms, and we go upstream to look for what is sending this down, right? Where's the starting from? And why am I experiencing this one thing as the outcome a result of something deeper and bigger. All right, so when it comes to our Tuesday terrain talk, we're going not talking about any symptoms, specifically, we're not talking about any label any disease, we're saying, how is your body working? What is your body telling you? What is your body presenting you with to say, this is where I need support, okay? So when we can look at it, I think from this bigger picture, and understand supporting our body from so much more than just the average stuff that we hear like, eat more vegetables, eat whole foods, move your body, there's so many more things we can do and so much deeper, we can dive into that, to give you the support you need. So you don't find yourself thinking you're doing something and then ending up frustrated, because you're not getting any results or any outcome. All right. So ask yourself these questions kind of look at the way you refer to your body. Look at the way that you refer to, you know, you get up out of bed and when I'm 60 years old, so you know, bed injuries are a real thing. Now for a lot of people my age, we get up, right? Oh, my joints are stiff. My shoulder hurts, my back hurts. We got to go deeper than that. Why pain should not just be a normal part of life, right? Pain is your body indicating something is wrong. So where do we dig down deeper under that and see what exactly is going on? And how you can modify your lifestyle and relieve yourself of that discomfort by creating an overall healthier terrain. All right. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't, or if you have questions, come and find me on Facebook, the breast cancer recovery coach Instagram, the breast cancer recovery coach, you can DM me, and you can join my free Facebook group, the breast cancer recovery group on Facebook, where you can interact with 1000s of breast cancer survivors or oceans 1000 over 1000 breast cancer survivors and ask me questions anytime you want. All right, friends, take care, learn to love your body and support your train be your body's best friend. I think if we can start thinking about like that, am I really what I think about my body is my best friend. Because I hear a lot of people thinking about their body as an enemy. And as a betrayer it's gonna be really hard to experience optimal health when you think about your body in that way. All right, get some support with that, go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com Join the four pillars of breast cancer recovery, get a smoking deal on it or join me in my better than before breast cancer life coaching membership or even just individual metabolic health coaching and create the change you want to see in your life. We got to get in and take action and there's a lot of action that can be taken. Alright friends, take care.
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