Episode Overview

Your body has been talking to you your whole life. The question is, have we ever been taught to listen?

In this episode, I want to widen the lens on how you look at your body and what you think it is telling you. We have lost so much of the generational knowledge that mothers and grandmothers once passed down, the everyday wisdom of reading our own bodies. So often in our Western world, we wait until something hurts, until the fatigue is overwhelming, until a small dry patch has spread and become inflamed, before we pay attention. But your body speaks in subtleties long before that, and learning to notice them is one of the kindest forms of preventative care.

I share one of my great loves, Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old healing system I studied for three years through the California College of Ayurveda. At its heart is a practice of observation called the eightfold examination, where a practitioner reads the pulse, urine, stool, eyes, skin, nails, and tongue, along with the body overall, to understand what is happening inside. What fascinates me most is how closely it aligns with modern functional nutrition's Nutrition Focused Physical Exam. Thousands of years apart, different language, same conclusions.

We walk through what different parts of your body may be reflecting. The tongue as a map of your digestive system, with research going back to a 1942 New England Journal of Medicine paper, and modern studies connecting tongue changes to iron, zinc, and B12 status. The skin as a window into the gut, through the gut-skin axis, psychodermatology, and even early markers of metabolic health. Your hair as the rings on a tree, reflecting months of nutrient status and oxidative stress, including why so many of us gray early during seasons of stress. Your nails as a slow report of what was happening inside you a while ago, and your eyes, one of the few places you can see your blood vessels from the outside, as possible early signals of everything from omega-3 status to blood sugar.

Here is what I most want you to hear. This is not about self-diagnosis. None of these signs are proof of anything on their own. A coated tongue does not mean a thyroid problem, and dark circles do not mean anemia. These are invitations to pay attention, not verdicts to fear. For a community that already carries so much fear, my hope is that noticing your body builds confidence instead, the quiet confidence of someone who is in a loving conversation with her body rather than at war with it.

If you take one small thing from this episode, try this. Tomorrow morning when you brush your teeth, look at your tongue. Notice the color, the coating, the texture. Don't decide what it means. Just notice, and do it for a week. That is the practice. That is self-awareness.

Resources Mentioned:

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kajabi.kajabiapp&hl=en_US

References:

Foundational

Asif T, Mohiuddin A, Hasan B, Pauly RR. Importance of Thorough Physical Examination: A Lost Art. Cureus. 2017;9(5):e1212.

Newton C. The Functional Nutrition-Focused Physical Exam. IFNA Track 3 Module 2.

Tongue

Jeghers H. Nutrition: the appearance of the tongue as an index of nutritional deficiency. New England Journal of Medicine. 1942;227:221-8.

Khayamzadeh M, Najafi S, Sadrolodabaei P, Vakili F, Kharrazi Fard MJ. Determining salivary and serum levels of iron, zinc and vitamin B12 in patients with geographic tongue. J Dent Res Dent Clin Dent Prospects. 2019;13(3):221-226.

Chiang CP, Chang JY, Wang YP, Wu YH, Wu YC, Sun A. Atrophic glossitis: Etiology, serum autoantibodies, anemia, hematinic deficiencies, hyperhomocysteinemia, and management. J Formos Med Assoc. 2020;119(4):774-780.

Skin

Salem I, Ramser A, Isham N, Ghannoum MA. The Gut Microbiome as a Major Regulator of the Gut-Skin Axis. Front Microbiol. 2018;9:1459.

Wang X, Li Y, Wu L, et al. Dysregulation of the gut-brain-skin axis and key overlapping inflammatory and immune mechanisms of psoriasis and depression. Biomed Pharmacother. 2021;137:111065.

Jafferany M, Franca K. Psychodermatology: Basics Concepts. Acta Derm Venereol. 2016;96(217):35-7.

Reunala T, Salmi TT, Hervonen K, Kaukinen K, Collin P. Dermatitis Herpetiformis: A Common Extraintestinal Manifestation of Coeliac Disease. Nutrients. 2018;10(5):602.

Stefanadi EC, Dimitrakakis G, Antoniou CK, et al. Metabolic syndrome and the skin: a more than superficial association. Diabetol Metab Syndr. 2018;10:9.

Hair

O'Connor K, Goldberg LJ. Nutrition and hair. Clin Dermatol. 2021;39(5):809-818.

Arck PC, Overall R, Spatz K, et al. Towards a "free radical theory of graying": melanocyte apoptosis in the aging human hair follicle is an indicator of oxidative stress induced tissue damage. FASEB J. 2006;20(9):1567-9.

Zhang B, Ma S, Rachmin I, et al. Hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells. Nature. 2020;577(7792):676-681.

Poonia K, Bhalla M. Premature Graying of Hair: A Comprehensive Review and Recent Insights. Indian Dermatol Online J. 2024;15(5):721-731.

Nails

Singal A, Arora R. Nail as a window of systemic diseases. Indian Dermatol Online J. 2015;6(2):67-74.

Cashman MW, Sloan SB. Nutrition and nail disease. Clin Dermatol. 2010;28(4):420-5.

Eyes

Knapp A. The Eye as a Guide to Latent Nutritional Deficiency Diseases. Bull N Y Acad Med. 1946.

Wakamatsu TH, Dogru M, Tsubota K. Tearful relations: oxidative stress, inflammation and eye diseases. Arq Bras Oftalmol. 2008;71(6 Suppl):72-9.

Seydou A, Arnould L, Gabrielle PH, et al. Plasma Fatty Acids Pattern and Dry Eye Disease in the Elderly: The Montrachet Population-Based Study. Nutrients. 2022;14(11):2290.

Bu Y, Shih KC, Tong L. The ocular surface and diabetes, the other 21st Century epidemic. Exp Eye Res. 2022;220:109099.

Rahman A, Yahya K, Ahmed T, Sharif-Ul-Hasan K. Diagnostic value of tear films tests in type 2 diabetes. J Pak Med Assoc. 2007;57(12):577-81.

Seifart U, Strempel I. Trockenes Auge und Diabetes mellitus [The dry eye and diabetes mellitus]. Ophthalmologe. 1994;91(2):235-9.

Campagnoli LIM, Varesi A, Barbieri A, Marchesi N, Pascale A. Targeting the Gut-Eye Axis: An Emerging Strategy to Face Ocular Diseases. Int J Mol Sci. 2023;24(17):13338.

Let’s Connect!
If this episode helped you breathe a little easier, please share it with a friend or leave a review. Every share helps spread this message of hope, healing, and whole-person wellness.

💌 Join my email list for weekly wellness tips & podcast updates → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

💌 Join the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership → Life Coaching

💌 Join the Living Well After Breast Cancer Community → The Living Well After Breast Cancer Community

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration → @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Facebook → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts → Better Than Before Breast Cancer with The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎥 Watch on YouTube → @BetterThanBeforeBreastCancer

Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to Better Than Before Breast Cancer with the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach. I'm your host, Laura Lum Erm. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides 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. Hey friends, welcome to episode 468 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lum Er. I am thrilled that you have joined me here today, and ask you a quick question before we jump into what I think is a really interesting topic today, but if you are a new or regular listener to the podcast, if you watch it on YouTube, if you get anything out of the podcast, it would be so helpful if you could take just a moment to subscribe, if you're watching on YouTube, to follow if you're listening to this podcast on any one of your favorite podcast hosting sites, follow or like it, whichever that site offers. It's really pretty fascinating to see how many downloads the podcast gets, or how many views it gets on YouTube, versus how many people take the time to subscribe, but in taking that extra step, that time to subscribe, you show the algorithm that this is of some value to you, and then they start showing it to other people who might see value in it as well, and then those people can get help from the information that's provided here, and while you're at it, will you like or follow? It would be fabulous, amazing if you could take the time to rate or leave a five-star review for the show. All these things really help a podcast get more visibility, so the people who need this information can be helped by it. All right, so super appreciate you taking the time to do that. It really, really means the world to me. So, thanks in advance for that. All right, you know, I talk about this on the podcast often. I tell my clients this all the time. I tell myself this all the time. It's been something that I've really gone in deep and learned a lot about over my years of working to heal my own body, and of the study, and the education, and the trainings, and degrees, and certifications, everything that I've put my energy into is all about understanding the body, and there's no doubt in my mind that our body is constantly communicating with us, it's constantly talking to us, but sadly we've kind of lost that generational knowledge, meaning there was a time, which I'll talk about in a minute, that we as parents, especially as on the female side, as mothers and grandmothers, we pass down to our daughters or to our children ways to understand their body techniques and remedies and things of that nature, and we've gotten away from that connection, which I think is really sad. So sometimes now in our Western world we wait until we're experiencing something really uncomfortable, something like pain or something like fatigue, right? When something's very much out of the normal, then we start to not necessarily listen to our body, but start to think about our body in different ways, like maybe something's going on here. But there are so many subtle ways that your body speaks to you, and if we understand those subtleties and begin to pay attention to them. This is like the preventative medicine, right? So, when I talked with people about the difference between labs their oncologists or their GPs run and labs that are run by a metabolic health practitioner, those are - it's the same tool used for two very different purposes in the medical world, and licensed medical professionals, doctors, physicians, they are looking for certain things to make sure that you're not showing any indications of disease or a need for medications, and they're looking at your labs to follow that and see how they can support you. We're from a metabolic or terrain perspective, we're looking to see what's the body telling us before, hopefully before anything is manifested and become a disease or a need for medication.

4:25
What are the subtleties that we can learn, and what is the body trying to express through the blood? Right, so two very different lenses looking at the same tool. Well, if you can learn the lens that we will talk about is called the nutritional physical exam in Ayurveda. It's simply the, the observation, you know, of what's going on in somebody's body, and if you're not familiar with the word Ayurveda, we'll talk about it here in a minute, but those subtle ways that your body is communicating with you. Are things like the way your skin looks in the mirror in the morning, is it puffy? You have dark bags. What's going on with the texture of your skin, the texture, the color of your tongue, the shape, and the signs that you might see in your nails, the dryness of your hair, of your skin, things that we see every day, and oftentimes we don't make a big deal of, we just think I feel dry today, because whatever, the weather is drier, it's been windy, you know, which can absolutely have an effect on your skin, but it's these subtleties that we look at, and we often don't think of them as in my body's giving me a sign about something. We wait until let's say that you saw a dry patch, you know, in the corner of your eye, on your skin, in the corner of your eye, and I go, gosh, I have this little dry patch, and we don't think about, like, what's going on with my skin. My body's sending me a little sign here, but if that dry patch starts to spread, starts to become inflamed starts to become uncomfortable or itchy, then we're going to go to the dermatologist and say, "What's wrong, right? What medicine can you give me to deal with this to make it go away? But if we learn that these signs can be indications of what's going on inside our body, then we can perhaps make changes faster to help support our body and healing itself and prevent some of the things that are viewed as discomforts from becoming something more, so that's what I want to do today. On this episode, I want to give you some information to help you widen the lens of how you look at your body and how you think about what it's telling you, and so you know I want to think about the really big idea, which is the whole body and how it works together, right? How to start noticing what your body is trying to tell you as a whole, not just, uh, oh, this is going on with my skin, it must be something to do with my skin, but could something going on with your skin be telling you something about what's happening in your gut, so I mentioned Ayurveda, which I absolutely love. I studied Ayurveda for three years. I went through the California College of Ayurveda program internship. I had an Ayurvedic wellness center where we did lifestyle programming for people, and I absolutely loved Ayurveda, which is the ancient healing system, one of the oldest healing systems in the world, and this one comes out of India, so we're 5000 years old, and what I love about Ayurveda is it is just an amazing system of lifestyle and observation of getting to know yourself and connection with your own body and the world and how everything in life is integrated and how we can take this ancient healing system and fast forward to today's world where we can look at research and integrative and functional nutrition and we can see the alignment, and that alignment is so fascinating, and of course, in the Western world, some people look at, you know, 5000 years of history and say that's anecdotal, because there were no clinical studies done, and if so, cool, whatever, we can look forward now and say, well, here's the clinical evidence that proves that these 1000s of years of understanding and the treatments that were used were actually accurate.

8:28
So, in Ayurveda, there's something that's called the eight fold examination, and this is when ancient practitioners and modern practitioners of Ayurveda would look at eight different things in the body to help understand what was going on with a person's health, and now, mind you, I've had training and practice in Ayurveda, and I am a novice at best. There, I mean, there are medical schools dedicated to Ayurveda, there are incredible va ideas, doctors of Ayurveda, so I'm giving you foundation, but there are some incredible Ayurvedic practitioners out there in the world that can do things that are so incredible, what they can tell you about your body simply by checking your pulse, and I was fortunate enough to get to have a pulse exam by one of these incredible practitioners when I was in the Maldives a couple years ago with the healing retreat with Dr. Nasha Winters, it was absolutely incredible and spot on what this physician could tell just from testing my pulse. So, the eight things that one of these doctors would look at is your pulse, your urine, your stool, your eyes, your skin, nails, and tongue, and then the body overall, and just by looking and observing, a lot can be understood about what is happening inside of you. So, if we fast forward now, and we talk about modern integrative and functional nutrition and. There's an exam called the Nutrition Focused Physical Exam, and that is an important part of the clinical skill set for a functional nutrition practitioner. So, there's actually a paper that's called The Importance of Thorough Physical Examination: A Lost Art. This was published in 2017 and the researchers pointed out that modern medicine has drifted away from the bedside exam, and they say that careful observation of the body still tells us things that no lab work alone can, so this isn't some fringe idea, it is really a return to something we used to do really well in the areas of wellness. In the practice of medicine, people used to look at the body and be able to gather a lot of valuable information to help understand what might be going on inside of you and where to start looking, and I do the same thing now. When I see someone, even if it's a Zoom call, I see them get on a Zoom call, I just take in their appearance. It tells me a lot. And when I'm working with a client and they fill out the questionnaire on the nutrition focused exam, and I can see what they're dealing with in their skin, hair, nails, digestive tract. I can tell a lot about this person. So, let me tell you a few things. What kind of things could you learn about yourself from a nutrition-focused physical exam? What does it look at? So, it looks at the skin, hair, nails, eyes, mouth, tongue, and general body composition, looking for the signs of what's happening underneath, so it's the same exam as the eight fold exam from Ayurveda, with different language, 1000s of years separating them, but so connected, and I don't think this is a coincidence, because I think that the body is telling us the same thing in every era, and sometimes we're open to it, and sometimes we think we're just discovering it, but what happens on the outside is very reflective of what's happening on the inside. So, let's talk for a second about the tongue, because the tongue is easy to look at. You brush your teeth, hopefully at least two times a day, and when you look at your tongue, especially in the morning, when you brush your teeth, what do you see in Ayurveda? The tongue is considered a map of the entire digestive system, because it's really the beginning of the digestive system. Your tongue is the start of the digestive system, right? It is attached to the entire track. The tip of the tongue reflects what's going on in the heart and lungs in Ayurveda. The middle reflects the stomach and pancreas. The back reflects the large intestine. The sides reflect the liver and gallbladder. And just by looking at the tongue, an Ayurvedic practitioner can get a sense of where someone is holding tension, if you have congestion, if there's a lot of toxic buildup in the digestive tract, if there's heat, if there's dryness, and here's something really cool.

13:12
There was a paper in 1942 1942 called Nutrition: The Appearance of the Tongue as an index of nutritional deficiency. This paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a very well respected journal, and this was 80 years ago. 80 years ago, doctors in the Western world were documenting that the tongue tells us about what's happening in the gut and the body's nutrient status, and modern research continues to confirm that in 2019 there was a study in the Journal of Dental Research. It looked at people with what's called geographic tongue, where there's a smooth patch that looks like a map, and the researchers found that these people had significantly lower levels of iron, zinc, and B 12 compared to the control group. Another 2020 paper on what's called atrophic glossitis, which is when the tongue becomes smooth and inflamed, and that research found that that was strongly associated with anemia and deficiencies in multiple B vitamins and iron, so when you see a tongue that looks pale or unusually red or has a thick coating or has these smooth patches, science says that it is telling you something about your nutrient status, something that may be going on in the gut, and what do we know about the gut that just becomes clearer and clearer and clearer with every passing year. We know that Ayurveda says all disease begins in the gut, all disease begins in the digestive tract, and now we move forward into modern day, and we are seeing all. Of the science come up about the importance of gut health and the impact of gut health on our metabolic well-being, on our disease state, and on our mental wellness state. So, in Ayurveda, it is said that the tongue reflects agni, agni is your digestive fire, and when agni is strong, the tongue is pink and clean and slightly moist, but when that digestifier is weak, the tongue gets coated, dull, and sometimes even swollen. A modern nutrition would say something very similar, that a healthy tongue reflects good digestion, good absorption, and a balanced microbiome. So, let's talk about what your skin might be saying in Ayurveda. Your skin tells us a lot about the overall energetic balance in your body, about whether you're running too hot or too dry or too damp on the inside. So, dry, rough skin can point to what's called a Vata imbalance, that's much more of the dryness, inflamed red sensitive skin that points to what's called a pizza imbalance, which is more inflammation. Oily congested skin can point to what's called a kava imbalance, so congested body digestion elimination issues, and this is a way of just reading your terrain, right, your internal terrain, like looking at what might be going on, and how it's being expressed on your skin. So, let's look at what modern functional nutrition says about the same skin with different words, the same skin issues but different words, right. There's a lot of research now on what's called the gut skin access, a 2018 paper in Frontiers in Microbiology said that the gut microbiome is a major regulator of the skin health, and when the gut is inflamed or imbalanced, the skin shows it. And then there was a 2021 paper that looked at gut brain skin access, and saw that psoriasis and depression shared overlapping inflammatory mechanisms. You know, when I talk about this, it always reminds me when my daughter was a young teenager, and she was having problems with acne, and I took her to the doctor, who at that time was still a pediatrician, she was under 18, and the doctor was giving her exam, I think it was just her annual physical, and I, he said, "Do you have any specific concerns? and I said, "Yes, will you talk to her about the food choices she makes when she's with her friends, what she's choosing to put in her body, and how that's reflecting on this acne that we're seeing, and that pediatrician looked at me, and he goes, "That has nothing to do with her skin; nothing she eats is going to have an effect on her skin.

17:49
And I knew right then and there that we needed to find a new doctor, and it is amazing to me to think that what we put in our body, the food, the very nutrients that our cells are built off of, we would think does not have a reflection on our health, on our gut health, on the appearance of our skin. Amazing to me. Look around you, if you don't believe it, look around you, look around you at people, say your age, those who drink a lot of alcohol, those who maybe smoke cigarettes or smoked a lot of cigarettes, those who exercise drink a lot of water, those who don't, those who you know may have a really crappy diet versus those who don't. If you start looking, you will see differences in those people's skin, in the color, in the texture, in the appearance, that is telling you something about the health in the inside of their body, and so there's another really interesting field called psychodermatology. How cool is that? It's exactly what it sounds like. A 2016 review in Acta Dermato Venerologica describes how skin conditions can be triggered or worsened by emotional and psychological factors. Hives, when you're stressed, eczema, flaring during hard times, the skin is a conversation with your nervous system, and Ayurveda has been saying that for 1000s of years, and now we're finding names for it in Western medicine. So, even something specific, like dermatitis, hep deformis, those little itchy bumps that show up on the back of your arms and thighs, those have been documented as a skin sign of celiac disease in many people, a 2018 paper in nutrients explained that as a common extra intestinal manifestation of celiac, so a skin sign points to a gut diagnosis, and I'm not saying that any of the things we're talking about are diagnosed. Sick, but this study found that right, so that was interesting. Does not mean that if you have those bumps, you have celiac disease, because they can be related to other things as well. In a 2018 paper that looked at the connection between metabolic syndrome and the skin, and the researchers concluded that skin science can be early indicators of cardio metabolic risk. How cool is that? Things like skin tags, pigmentation patterns, and even certain kinds of acne. Your skin is reflecting your metabolic health. So, when you look at your skin and you notice it's changing, that is not diagnostic, as I said, but it's worth being curious about. It's worth saying this is interesting. I'm noticing this change. What is my body trying to tell me? Another thing that I see often, that's one of the first things that I notice when someone gets on a call with me. Your hair, what is your hair saying? You know, hair is so interesting because it's kind of like rings on a tree, right? It grows slowly. It reflects not what you ate yesterday, but what's been happening in your body for months and months. In Ayurveda, hair is a tissue that is connected to bone tissue, and I don't mean connected, as in, it comes from bone tissue. It's connected in that evaluation of the strength of your overall vitality. That's what I mean. So, bone health, hair health, we kind of look at both, and if you see that hair is suffering, then you might think, as a practitioner, as somebody who's looking at this, you might ask questions of your client to see if something deeper is going on too. And, of course, modern nutrition agrees. A 2021 review in Clinics in Dermatology called Nutrition in Hair walks through how protein status, iron, zinc, biotin, and essential fatty acids all directly impact hair growth, strength, and shine. So, when hair is dull, thin, breaking, and shedding, those are signs of things worth looking into.

22:00
Now, of course, in our community that may be driven by some kind of medication, we know that that can be a side effect of many medications, hair thinning, and this type of thing, but even then, right, even when we know that a medication may be affecting it, we can look at our labs, because certain medicine will block the absorption of specific nutrients, we can look at our labs and see, yes, this medication is doing this, and this is a potential side effect, but are my labs telling me I may need more support in these nutrients as well? And if I can step up this support, will that help? And so, speaking of hair, let's talk about hair color, let's talk about gray hair, one of my favorite examples of where ancient and modern sciences agree. Again, Ayurveda would say that early graying is a sign of pizza accumulation, so the accumulation of internal heat and tissue aging, and modern research calls that oxidative stress. In a 2006 paper that was published in a really well-respected journal with the wonderful title "Towards a Free Radical Theory of Grain, the researchers documented that the loss of pigment in hair is connected to oxidative damage to the cells that produce color oxidative stress. A more recent study that was published in Nature in 2020 found something really cool, acute stress that kind of activates your sympathetic nerve system. Right, so acute stress is like it's really stressful right now, that it can actually deplete the stem cells that make hair color. So when people say their hair turned gray during a really hard time or really early in life, they're not imagining it. And I, for instance, started getting gray hair in my late 20s. I can look back now and I can understand, especially with my genetics, that I was very prone to oxidative stress and that my body has a hard time detoxifying things, I didn't know there was a connection back then, but I do now, and so we see science backing up what healers and traditional systems of healing have known for 1000s of years, and we could look at the presidents of the United States, let's look at them historically, from the time they entered the office to the time they left. Look at the color of their hair, look at their skin, look at the incredible amount of aging that would take place in four or eight years. Look at the validation of how stress can age a body. So, finally, one last thing on gray hair in a 2024 review called Premature Graying of Hair, it pulled all of what we're talking about together, and it named oxidative stress, nutrition, and emotional stress as major contributors to graying hair. So different languages, but same conclusions across 1000s of years. So your hair has been telling you a story. The whole time, but few of us were taught. I know I wasn't taught that that's what it was telling you, that when you saw that in your body at a certain age, you could connect it back to some other pieces of what your body might be telling you. So, what about your nails in the day and age? And I am guilty of it, obviously. I have a thing for glitter nails, but our nails tell us a story, right? Nails give us a report of what's going on inside of our body. They take months to grow, so what you see at the tip is what was happening inside your body a while ago, and I think for those of us who did certain chemo therapies, I know for me, for example, it had a major effect on my nails, anything from nails falling out to deep ridges in nails to these weird discolorations, or to the white part of the nail actually going away, so everything looked one color or a thickness or a funky color. What was that saying about what was happening inside my body? It was super impactful, right? There was a 2015 paper in the Indian Dermatology online journal called Nail as a Window of Systemic Disease, and it walks through how nail changes can reflect everything from thyroid issues to liver disease to anemia to nutrient deficiency, so things like white spots can point to zinc deficiencies, or a need for more support.

26:30
Vertical ridges in your nails can point to iron or folate, or a need for more essential fatty acids. Spoon-shaped nails are a classic sign of iron deficiency anemia. Weak, brittle splitting nails can point to thyroid issues, low stomach acid, or a need for more B 12. So, in a 2010 review in Clinics in Dermatology that was called Nutrition and Nail Disease, many of these connections were documented in detail, so in Ayurveda, a practitioner might look at the nails and talk about tissue strength, absorption, and the body's building blocks, needs of the body. In modern science, we talk about it in specific nutrients, right, but we're essentially saying the same thing now. Your eyes, the windows to the soul, what might your eyes say? Have you ever looked at somebody, and you're like, their eyes are so tired, right? Or their eyes don't look right, or their eyes are like watery, or almost like appearing gelatinous, like something's not right. What's that saying about what's going on inside their body? Well, the eyes are really extraordinary, because they're one of the few places in the body where you can actually see your blood vessels from the outside, right. There's a paper way back from 1946 called The Eye as a Guide to the Latent Nutritional Deficiency Diseases. This was published in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of medicine again, almost 80 years ago, doctors were already documenting that eye signs can show up before other symptoms of disease, so they were ahead of their time, and I love when we can see the correlations with these older studies, because I think sometimes that as we move forward with pharmaceutical medications and as the whole practice of Western medicine becomes much more medication focused, that these natural ways of looking at things and reading the body and examining the body and understanding what can be treated in the body actually may have happened before disease, right. So this is pointing to symptoms of disease or symptoms that have gone wrong, but like this study said, eyes things can show up in the eyes before other symptoms of disease, and that's what we want. We want to realize the body is telling us something is off before we have something that can be diagnosed as a disease, that's why this is not diagnostic. This is a thing of listening to the needs of the body, not diagnosing any kind of disease, right? So, there is an absolute difference there. So, even in Western medicine, dry eyes, which so many people have dry eyes and dismiss them as just being a nuisance, and now we see that studies are connecting dry eyes to deeper things. There was a 2008 paper in a Brazilian ophthalmology journal called Tearful Relations, Oxidative Stress, Inflammation, and Eye Diseases, and it laid out the connection between oxidative stress and dry eye. And then, in another study in 2022 it was found that omega three fatty acid status is significantly associated with dry eye risk in older adults, and again with these older studies that I love to find, there's research going back to 1994 German paper, and it confirmed by multiple studies since then, including a 20. 20-two review called the ocular surface and diabetes the other 20-first century epidemic. These showed that dry eyes can be an early sign of type two diabetes. A 2007 study in the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association actually documented that tear film tests can have real diagnostic value in type two diabetes, and so most people have absolutely no idea their eyes might be telling them something about their blood sugar. Why would we? We never talk about that. And just so you know, there's a reference in the show notes at the Breast Cancer Recovery coach.com forward slash 468 with all of the links to these studies, so if you want to go in and read these papers deeper, please do that. So let's just quickly touch on then the gut eye axis, because that's a real thing. Yeah, a 2023 paper in the International Journal of Molecular Science called Targeting the Gut Eye Axis reviewed the growing evidence that gut health affects eye health, including dry eye and age-related macular degeneration. So, your eyes, just like everything else, are reflecting the health of your gut and the health of your gut has a lot to say about what happens in your body.

31:17
So, in Ayurveda, the eyes are governed by the fire element, and dry, burning, irritated eyes are a sign that the internal fire in the body is out of balance. So, if we're perceiving things from an Ayurvedic perspective, which I look at as like an energetic perspective, we would look at heat and dryness at the liver and at digestion, and so I love the fact I love that I've had training in Ayurveda, because there's no question in my mind that there is an energetic and physical element to everything that has anything to do with our health, and that there's true value in seeing that entire picture. So I want to be very careful here to point out that I don't want you going to the mirror in your house, looking at the mirror tomorrow morning, and starting to diagnose yourself with something. Okay, that's not the point here. None of these signs are proof of anything on their own. A coated tongue does not mean you have a thyroid problem. Dry skin does not mean you have a fatty acid deficiency, dark circles don't mean you have anemia. The research I just wanted to walk you through here shows associations and possibilities, not certainties. So, what these signs are is invitations to pay attention to your body, right? Some people may say, I've just had dark circles my whole life, that's interesting, because we're born with certain genetics and genetic snips. Have you your whole life needed more support in some nutrient? Maybe, maybe not, but it's worth looking into, right? So, some of these signs are your body saying, hey, something might be going on here, look closer. And when I look at somebody's labs, as I was trained by Dr. Nation Winters. One lab does not tell the whole story. One lab is a snapshot into a moment, but labs and the trends that we see, right? So, you look at multiple labs and you say, oh, here's an issue that we're seeing over the last five, six labs that you've done. Hmm, this is telling us a story. So, same thing here. Just because you might have a coated tongue today doesn't mean you have to freak out about something, but it means, well, let me watch that. Do I have a coated tongue every day? Is there something I could do to support my digestion? I have a coated tongue, and I get a lot of stomach upset, and I have a lot of indigestion, and I have GERD, right? Maybe things stack upon each other. So one thing in a physical nutritional exam is not going to tell you a whole story, and it's not a reason to diagnose or freak out or anything like that. Okay, it's just another way to know your body, and if you do have concerns, if you do feel like there's multiple things going on with my body, and that's not to say I think I have some kind of a disease, but it does mean that I think, well, if my body's struggling, I want to get ahead of it, and I see these signs, so let me talk to a practitioner, let me talk to a naturopathic doctor, or a metabolic health practitioner, or a functional nutritionist, and let's look at this, and let's look at everything together, and see, and be really curious, and ask, is there something here that I could be doing to support myself. Is there an opportunity to support better health because of these signs? Okay, so there's a big difference between self diagnosis and self awareness. Please don't start self diagnosing. Don't go to Chat GPT and say, "Oh my god, there's ridges on the side of my tongue, what's wrong with me? Right? Know yourself, self awareness. Your body is telling you things, and I just want you to get an understanding of that more and more and more, and I know that in again in our population, in our group, in our little cohort of people who have had a breast cancer diagnosis, if we can be stuck in a lot of fear, and so it is my hope that paying attention to your body, notice. The signs and watching the patterns, instead of instilling fear, instills a sense of confidence, right?

35:07
That paying attention to your body helps you to not be afraid of it, helps you to see what's working and what you can do to support it, and that you start to adopt the mentality of not looking for what is wrong, but working for looking for what you could do to support yourself and improve the relationship you have in your amazing body. This is about listening. This is about seeing what is there and being curious instead of anxious, right? Your body's been talking to your whole life. Your mirror has been showing you things your whole life, your tongue has been telling the stories, your nails have been telling you a story, and most of us were never taught to pay attention to that. In fact, me, guilty, I always had thin, brittle nails, so I had my nails done right, and I was like, oh, this is great, I can have pretty nails now, because without it, no way, Jose. And so I realized that now, as an adult, okay, I have to pay attention to this kind of thing, and especially watching toenails, right, and seeing a lot of patterns in them over the years of my recovery, and how different medications affect it, always causes me to think about what else is going on inside my body, so it's a very interesting thing to realize that you are not separate from your body, you are not at war with it, you are in a constant conversation with it, and Ayurveda, the beautiful practice of Ayurveda is a practice of observation, and what I absolutely think of as an act of love and a relationship of love, because it's examination of yourself without judgment. It's the, the, the repetitive checking in with yourself, the way that you would check in with a friend. So, if you want to take away one small thing from this episode, let me offer this to you. Tomorrow morning, when you brush your teeth, take a look at your tongue, and just look, notice it, the color, the coding, the texture, the shape. Don't decide what it means. Don't try to tell yourself it means something. Don't go to AI, just notice. And then do that for a week and start to see your own patterns. Some days it's going to look different. Some mornings it'll be coded, other mornings it'll be clean. And start to ask yourself and notice, like, what does that correspond to? How did you sleep? What did you eat the day before? What's going on in your life? Do you see changes, these subtle changes that your body is responding to? That's the practice, right? It's like mindful eating seems so simple to people, and yet we don't do it sitting down, looking at our food, not being on phones, not listening to music, not watching TV, sitting with our food, and building a relationship with it as we take it in and notice the way our body responds to it. All of these things are ways that we can get curious about our body, and we can build a better relationship with our body and with our food, with the nutrients that we take into ourselves, so I hope that you find that helpful. If you want to learn a little more about the foundations of Ayurveda, I have a little mini course on understanding Ayurveda, and you can look for the link right here where you're listening or watching the podcast, or you can go to the Breast Cancer Recovery coach.com forward slash my body and learn a little bit more. All right, my friends. Thank you so much for being here today. I will talk to you next week, and I'm very excited about that, because next week, the first week of July is the first week of 15 years since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I plan on doing a lot of celebrating. I'm going to have some great stuff for you. I'm going to have some great deals for you.

38:46
I'm going to have exciting things going on all month long in July to spread knowledge, to spread awareness, to give you all the information that I can, in addition to what's already out there that I've created to help you feel more empowered over knowing your body and being the CEO of your own health. All right, so I'll talk to you next week. And until then, be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.

39:11
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your future's at the door. Give it all you got. No hesitating. You've been waiting all your life. Time this is your moment this.