Episode Overview

What does it really mean to be healthy after breast cancer? 

Many of us measure health by scans, blood work, or whether we've received another diagnosis. But is that the whole story?

In this episode, I invite you to think differently about the relationship between disease, health, and healing. We'll explore why having no evidence of disease doesn't automatically mean your body is thriving, and why living with a diagnosis doesn't mean you can't actively support your health.

We'll also talk about the habits that often return once treatment is over, why consistency matters more than perfection, and how your beliefs about yourself influence the choices you make every day.

If you've ever wondered what "healthy" really means, this conversation will encourage you to ask better questions and create your own definition of health.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why disease, health, and healing are not the same thing.

• How conventional medicine and metabolic health measure different aspects of wellness.

• Why daily habits matter long after treatment ends.

• Questions to help you redefine what health means for you.

Resources Mentioned:

The Feel Good Reset:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/feelgood

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

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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 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. Hey there, friends! You are listening to episode 473 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I am your host Laura Lummer, and I want to share a little bit of a story with you. So the other day, I'm scrolling through Instagram, and I come across one of my lifelong favorites, Captain Kirk William Shatner, and it's a clip from an interview that he did. I believe it was with NBC, and I started watching this clip. He draws my attention in because the man is in his 90s and he looks absolutely amazing, and he starts talking about the fact that he had been diagnosed with stage four melanoma, which I had never heard, and that his daughter actually had a stage four breast cancer diagnosis. So he's talking about how he found these different doctors and how what great care both he and his daughter had, and he says, and now we're both cancer free. So of course, knowing better than to go to the comments, I do it anyway. Grab my popcorn and go see what people have to say, and it was really surprising to me. Now a lot of people had great compliments, great comments. They were telling him how happy they were, you know, blessings, prayers, all that stuff. And then there was a whole nother group that started with this: you can't say you're cancer free. Once you have stage four, you're never cancer free. Stage four is incurable. You only have no evidence of disease. And I was really taken back by some of these because I started thinking about this debate over terminology, and you know, some people saying it was metastatic, other people clearly asking questions or making comments that they didn't understand. You know, what stage four cancer is or how it works, but ultimately, I thought that it was interesting because it was more than just a debate over words. It was really a debate over identity. That's how I saw it. Like the fact that he identified as somebody who is cancer free, right? He's like, I am cancer free. My daughter is cancer free. And then there were all of these people saying, "You can't say that. You don't get to say that. You only get to say no evidence of disease. And I thought this is so fascinating because who gets to decide whether or not someone else is healthy, right? Who gets to decide what someone else wants to think about their state of well-being? Who gets to decide whether or not someone gets labeled as sick? And as I thought about that, I thought, you know, this is a really important question, and it's something that I've worked on over the years, that I work on for myself. And I'll pose it to you: How do you decide that about yourself? How do you decide whether or not you're healthy or you're sick? And it's an interesting thing if you really think about it, because what we decide to think about ourselves influences the behaviors that we take that we take to support ourselves. It influences the decisions that we make in our lives, and I think that one of the the reasons that that topic or the discussion of health or I'm cancer free or you can't say you're cancer free, why it's so confusing, I think is because we blended three different conversations together that are really different conversations. We use the words disease, health, and healing as though they all mean the same thing, and I and I don't think they do. I think that disease is something medicine diagnoses, right? Medicine is incredibly good at identifying disease, finding tumors, identifying infections, measuring blood pressure, detecting diabetes-right? Diagnoses give us information that can save our lives by identifying disease, and I'm very, very grateful for that fact because it saved my life and the lives of people I love more than one time.

Laura Lummer 4:39
But I think health is something different. Health is not just the absence of disease, the absence of a diagnosis, but I think health is how well your body is functioning, right? How is your energy, your sleep, your digestion, your strength, your ability to recover from things, emotions. Or physically, your emotional well-being, your relationships, the ability to live the life you want-that to me is health. And then there's healing, and healing, I would say, is the ongoing process of supporting health through the choices that you make every day, and I think that yes, those things overlap, but they're not the same. And if you're listening to this podcast, you followed, you know who I am, then you know that I live with and am working to heal from metastatic breast cancer. When I was diagnosed in 2020, that cancer had spread throughout most of my bones was everywhere, but today the only place that I have active cancer that's being detected by a PET scan is in a lymph node. So if healthy means having no evidence of disease, then do I ever get to call myself healthy? Am I healthy or am I not? And my experience of life may not match what someone else might label me based on the fact that I have some active cancer in my body, but overall, I sleep well. I exercise consistently as much as I can. I build muscle whenever I can. I nourish myself. I manage my stress way better than I once did in my life. I have meaningful relationships. I have a purpose in my life, and I wake up looking forward to my days. So, am I healthy, or am I sick? And I just don't think the answer is nearly as simple as we've been taught, because one of the things that I hear often, and I am guilty of having said, is I was perfectly healthy until I got breast cancer, and it just it strikes a lot of curiosity when I hear that because of my experience, and I'll tell you a funny story when I was studying with Dr. Naisha Winters in metabolic health, and I was becoming a terrain advocate and an advanced integrative metabolic specialist. In the very beginning, she was having a conversation with a group of us, and she said something about, and if I hear one more time someone saying to me they were healthy till they got cancer, right? She's like, you weren't healthy until you got cancer. You were in a process of something where cancer was able to develop, and so of course I didn't raise my hand and say, but I think I was healthy until I got cancer. But I got very curious. I started thinking about that, and then my eyes were opened more and more as I worked with my clients, who would say to me, "I was healthy until I got cancer. Well, we should rephrase that and say, "I believed I was healthy until someone gave me a diagnosis of the disease that was manifesting inside of my body. And then, as I begin to talk to people. This is really interesting. I had a new consult just the other day, and this woman perceives herself as healthy. She exercises often. She takes a slew of supplements. She's active. If you looked at her, she's fit, and she has a cancer diagnosis. But what she said to me, you know, I just don't want to focus on this because I'm a healthy person, and I just want to keep focusing on my health. Very interesting, right? Are you a healthy person? You have cancer. Are you a sick person? Can you be both at the same time? Are you a person that's working on healing? And how can you work on healing if you don't acknowledge the state of illness in the body and the fact that there had to be some kind of physiological vulnerability in order for that to happen, and so when I start asking people questions, once we start working together, once we start consulting, I find out that when they look back before their diagnosis, they'll often say, "Well, I was exhausted, I was overwhelmed by stress, I hadn't exercised consistently in a really long time. Some of them, not everybody, they were relying on processed food a lot of times because life was busy. And you know what?

Laura Lummer 9:11
Processed food also has a health halo, friends. So when people are telling me that they're drinking protein shakes and they're eating these protein bars, that's processed food. That's not whole food, but a lot of times that has a health halo, and we do it, and we believe that we're eating healthy. So there's that part of it, and then there's other people who just never sit down to a meal because they're not making time for themselves. Right? They're running and running and running. There's so much going on in life, and so their digestion isn't working well. They have bloating. They have constipation. Constipation is like honestly a chronic illness that I see so many people deal with. Constipation, they deal with low energy and brain fog, but because no doctor had given them a diagnosis, they. They're labeled as healthy, right? And they believe themselves to be healthy, and so then that makes me think: Have we confused not having a diagnosis with being healthy? And I do not think those are the same thing. And I do think that it's important to discuss that and for you to think about that for this reason: after you've had a cancer diagnosis, and you've been through whatever it is you had to go through, time goes on, right? And as time goes on, and we move away from the trauma, and we move away from the fear, and the intensity of it dulls, and we have in our mind, I just want to get back to my life. The thing is, we stop living in survival mode, which is good. I want that for every woman. I don't want her living in survival mode. I want her thriving. But what happens is, if we're not really conscious and we're not really aware, or we're thinking I'm healthy as long as I don't have a diagnosis, then we tend to slip back into what could be unhealthy habits that existed in the life you had before the breast cancer diagnosis. It's very easy to slip back and putting yourself last, right? You're the low man on the totem pole. It's very easy to get overly busy in life again and get away from preparing the food for yourself, or eating well, or getting enough sleep that you probably did while you were going through treatment, and maybe you were off work or whatever the case, right? But you were focused on it because we were in a heightened state of awareness and fear, and the more we move away, the easier it is to drift back in into old habits, to ignore your needs, to say yes when you really want to say no, and to live in stress, to skip the exercise because you're too busy to sleep less than you actually need, right? All of these things are so easy to slide back into. So, in your mind, what is health? What if you have beautiful lab work. What if your scans show no evidence of disease? What if your tumor markers are all normal? Is that automatically healthy? Maybe. But what if you still wake up exhausted every day? What if you have very little muscle mass? What if you are bloated and deal with constipation on gas on a regular basis. What if you have aches and pains? What if you can't walk around the block at a quick speed without being very winded, or you have chronic stress and anxiety in your life? What if you're waking up multiple times in the middle of the night or surviving on just a few hours of sleep? Is that still healthy? And let's also consider this perspective: What if someone has had a diagnosis of high blood pressure or high cholesterol or any other kind of metabolic dysfunction, and it's now controlled with medication? Are they sick, or are they healthy? Someone like me with metastatic disease, who I've been on chemotherapies for the last six years, and the disease has been stable for a couple of years. Am I sick, or am I healthy? And I don't necessarily have the answers to that. I just think they're really important questions to ask yourself. Again, why do I think they're important? Because what we tell ourselves influences the actions that we take in life to support ourselves. So it's not uncommon for me to hear, you know, well, I'm healthy, right?

Laura Lummer 13:40
I I see someone's lab work, and I can see indications of inflammatory processes happening, nutrient deficiencies happening. But when they're looking at their conventional labs, everything looks good, and they say, "Hey, I'm perfectly normal. I'm healthy. In the conventional labs, where they are used for diagnostic purposes to determine whether or not you have a disease, versus metabolic labs and a metabolic lens that is saying, do we see red flags? Do we see the body asking for support? Do we see the body struggling with something that we can use now to support it, so that it doesn't get to the point where a conventional doctor, licensed practitioner in in conventional medicine is going to look at it and have a disease to diagnose at some point, right? And I think also what makes this challenging is that social media. I mean, there's some good things about it, right? We can contact each other and stay in contact, and there's some good things to learn, but there's really some things that I really think are extreme conversations. I see people, you know, eating donuts, eating French fries, filming themselves doing that, and saying, "See, sugar and processed food doesn't cause cancer. I'm still here. I didn't just get cancer, and I just think. Think you know how health was not destroyed by one meal or one donut, and it wasn't built by eating one salad or one tray of veggies, right? One workout doesn't make you healthy, and one missed workout doesn't make you unhealthy. I'll tell you a story. This is funny. I recently went to Colorado to visit two of my sons, and my youngest son was making reservations for us to go to dinner one night, and he was going to introduce me to his girlfriend, and so he calls me up and he says, "You know, I have this reservation for 830, and I'm really excited for you to meet her. And I said, 830 at night, 830 p.m. and he says, "Yeah, what did you think? And I said, "Who eats at 830 at night? And obviously, I'm somewhat joking, but somewhat serious because I'm in bed at 830 at night. I'm done eating, and he he asked me, "He's like, well, what time do you eat, Mom? And I said, "Well, I try to be done eating by five or 530, because I go to bed at eight 830, you know, and I want to have a period of time in between eating and going to bed, so that my body can digest its foods, so I'm not laying down, getting heartburn, or that my body is is not trying to digest while it's also trying to detoxify and restore my system, right? And it's funny, he says to me, like, "Who does that? More people eat at 830 at night. Who does what you're saying? And I said, "Well, someone who's had a cancer diagnosis, so she's trying to align her lifestyle with the needs of her body and support its ability to heal. And he's like, "Oh, great, yeah, play the cancer card. Okay, I'll change the reservation. But I left and I said, "Honey, don't change the reservation. I'm truly just giving you a hard time, because the fact is, this is my life, and these are my boys, and I love them, and I want to spend every minute I can with them, especially because they live out of state. So one night of going to dinner late, of staying up late and talking with them after dinner, I'm not going to cut off something that supports my healing because it's just filling my body with love, because I have a regimented schedule. Right, one night, two nights, it's not going to be the end of me. So we have to be able to see that health and healthy and supporting healing, all of this is on a spectrum, and we have to find balance. But it's truly the 1000s of ordinary choices we make over the days, over the months, over the years. It's the consistency that we incorporate into our life that determines how well we feel and how well our body can function. So we have medicine, and it can destroy cancer cells, and thank goodness for that.

Laura Lummer 17:48
But medicine doesn't build muscle, it doesn't improve your sleep, it doesn't strengthen your relationships, it doesn't teach you how to manage stress, it doesn't help you discover your purpose in life, right? Those are things you have to participate in. Those are choices. Those are part of healing. So, does medicine make you healthy? It's a question I'd like you to answer for yourself. And so, when we ask ourselves, "Am I healthy? I think that it's important to say, "Well, what evidence am I using to answer that question, am I healthy if I base it only on a diagnosis, or am I healthy if I'm looking at my energy, my sleep, my mood, my digestion, my resilience, my joy? Because all of those things I believe tell us something about our health, and it's not just me. There's lots of studies that talk about the metabolic markers in our bodies that are so much healthier when we have these good things in our life and these good habits in our life. So whether you've never had cancer, you're newly diagnosed, you've completed treatment, you're living with metastatic disease, I'll leave you with this to think about, I believe that disease is something medicine diagnoses. That health is how well your body is functioning. The healing is the ongoing process of supporting that health through the choices you make every day, because those choices matter. They do not have to be perfect, and outcomes are not guaranteed, but because they influence the quality of your life and the way that you're living today, they're very, very important choices to look at. So I want to present this question for you to contemplate: If you believed your health was something you could influence today, regardless of any diagnosis, what is one choice you would make differently? And when I think about this topic, I think about a program I created called the Feel Good Reset. And if you want help with this, really connecting to yourself and to your health and to the needs of your body. Go to my website, thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com, and check out the Feel Good Reset, because none of my programs are based on giving someone strict dietary guidelines. They're all based in things like asking ourselves questions, like I presented here in this episode, in looking at the thoughts you have about your relationship with yourself, your relationship with food, and understanding what your body is asking of you, and what it means to feel good, and what it means when we don't feel good, and sometimes excuse that as just a condition of a busy life or a certain age. But in the feel good reset, I present many different options and ways to look at health and ways to look at supporting your wellness, along with journal exercises of asking how you think about this or how you can incorporate certain things in life. I don't believe that living a healthy life is based on willpower or discipline. I believe that it is based on your decision to treat yourself well. I believe that it is based on your decision to treat yourself as a priority and make the time to give yourself what you need to fill this beautiful body with healthy food, to move it on a regular basis, and all of that comes back to one thing: what you believe you're going to do with your 168 hours a week, where you're going to invest those hours, and that will come down to what's most important to you. So go to my website, thebreastcancerecoverycoach.com. Up at the top, click on Coaching and Programs, and you'll see the Feel Good Reset along with some other self-paced programs that I have out there to support your wellness and support you creating and living a life that's better than before breast cancer. All right, friends, I will talk to you again next week, and until then, be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care.