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Stress is a VERY hot topic right now, and I'm actually thankful it is because in the past, I think many brushed it off and just didn't talk about it. However with new research, we know that it's not just a stressful “event” such as a divorce or a family member's terminal diagnosis that can have negative effects on mind and body. It can be chronic things such as consistent fasting, reliving childhood trauma, or as my guest today acknowledges, fast talking! It truly is unique for each person.
Today's guest, Christa Biegler, is an award-winning dietitian nutritionist, host of the Less Stressed Life podcast, and author of The Eczema Relief Diet & Cookbook. She helps health-savvy women overcome food sensitivities and fatigue without restrictive dieting to beat bloat, burnout & eczema breakouts. She lives with her unicycling husband & kids in the Midwest.
What are some things you've seen stress affect in or on your body? Let me know in the comments below!
Or, listen on your favorite app: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Subscribe on Android
In this episode:
- What is unrealized stress?
- Cortisol's impact on other hormones when you're stressed
- Being honest about YOUR stress (not compared to others)
- What's an “energy vampire”?
- Role minerals play in your body when you're stressed
- Testing options to check your mineral status
- The most valuable ratios of a hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA)
Quotes
“There's a sodium-potassium pump in every single cell. So if you have low sodium-potassium like I did on my mineral results, then you're not only struggling to get nutrients in and out of every cell, but it's a backbone to making stomach acid.” [14:09]
“With more severe skin cases, I have seen more severe toxic burden being lost in the tissue. So that's looking at arsenic, cadmium, aluminum, etc…” [27:51]
Links
Find Christa online here
Follow Christa on Facebook | Instagram
Healthy Skin Show ep. 042: How Sulfur Can Trigger Skin Rashes w/ Christa Biegler
Healthy Skin Show ep. 128: Eczema Sleep Problems w/ Christa Biegler, RD
Healthy Skin Show ep. 146: Chlorine + Bath Additives w/ Christa Biegler, RD
278: How Stress Causes Mineral Deficiencies w/ Christa Biegler, RD FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jennifer Fugo: Christa, thanks so much for being back on the show. I'm excited to talk about stress and minerals today.
Christa Biegler: Oh, I'm excited to talk about this area too. This has really transformed my life, my practice. And also it's been a minute, it's probably been a couple of, I think last time I was here we talked about topical baths for eczema or something like that.
Jennifer: Yeah. And I think we've talked about sleep, we've talked about sulfur, we've talked about different things.
Christa: Oh, yeah.
Jennifer: So I'll definitely put a link up to all your other episodes on the show notes. We were talking, since we've seen each other this past fall, a lot about stress. And I know personally that I've dealt with a lot of stress recently in terms of when this episode was recorded. And I feel like this is a constant theme with clients, but to some degree we don't always realize the level of stress that we're under. So when we talk about stress, I think a lot of people just think you have to be in the middle of a divorce, you have to be broke, you have to have a family member dealing with cancer, or you're dealing with some really chronic, we think of stress that it has to be some momentous huge thing. So talk to us a little bit about what stress actually might look like.
Christa: It can look like a lot of things. So I know we were talking a little bit off air about this, and this is kind of the vein of my existence, which is unrealized stress. There's nothing more toxic or a thing that's going to prevent someone's success more so than pretending that they don't have to worry about stress, that they don't really have that much stress, or to say, I have some, but I don't know what I can do about it. I can't really change this, et cetera. It's a very disempowered state of mind. And instead we want really an empowered state of mind. So stress of course, presents in all these different ways. Emotional, physical, spiritual, sexual, all the types of things. For example, with skin stuff, when you're itching your skin at night, it is not only a physical stressor, it becomes more of a physical stressor because it's interrupting your sleep, but it's also becomes this emotional stressor.
So everything leeches into each other for sure. But unresolved stress is our issue, I think because we have all these high performance people or people that are just making it happen. It's like suck it up, buttercup, the mentality of that. And so I'm not suggesting that we just sit in our woes, but pretending that we don't have stress is a problem. And I can use even my own example. I had done all these things to reduce stress, but still had markers of stress that were frustrating. I was having stress on my body from over-drinking coffee because it was raising my cortisol from going to appointment to appointment to appointment. So loading my schedule up with eight appointments a day and physicians, what? They have 25 clients a day. But going from appointment to appointment to appointment, that's just like life.
It's just your schedule. But when you go from thing to thing to thing without really anything in between, what was happening was it's all about the speed of my heart rate and the speed of my speech. So I realized that fast talking for me was a stressor, which seems like such a goofy thing. That took a freaking lot of self-realization to decide that the way I'd always been was a natural stressor. Talking fast was raising my cortisol, which is our natural stress hormone, our most common essential stress hormone, by the way, all of our other hormones are going to be down regulated, so your body can produce cortisol of course, right? So you're body's going to be able to push on that gas, that cortisol gas for as long as it can until it runs out. But anything that's increasing that cortisol, it could be fasting for a long time.
There're good stressors. Of course, if we take ourselves back to the beginning of time, there was times of stress, but there was times of calm. I think we just forget to have those times of calm. And so it's really quite a process to decide what does stress look like on me? How does that feel? And for me to say, oh, speaking fast and my heart rate going quickly, that was eye-opening and it took me my entire life to learn that that was a stressor. So it just can show up in so many different ways. And so pretending we don't have some, you're better off saying I've got it, I just got to find where it is, what the real problems are.
Jennifer: And one thing I was sharing with you beforehand is I find, I'll ask a client, do you feel stressed? And sometimes they'll say, well, in the grand scheme of things or in comparison to my sister-in-law whose husband is dealing with cancer or something like that, no. And they compare and feel like that your burden isn't significant enough to claim it as a stressor. What do you think about that?
Christa: I think this reminds me of a client that I had a client couple and the guy had IBD, so he had colitis, which is a really significant GI distress, really significant. On very expensive medication, using the bathroom many, many, many times a day, his life is rearranged around it. But his girlfriend had really significant gut issues that she brought to me months later saying, I didn't really think it was an issue because by comparison to him it's not. But by comparison to not having symptoms, it was really significant. But it's interesting, they say we're a product of our environment or what we're comparing ourselves to. And so do we want to be comparing ourself to that? I understand it's a point of being just humble, but I think we just have to accept, yes, I have stresses, I need to identify what they feel like in my body, inside my body.
I think so often we are like, we can't change this job or this thing or these external stressors and that is a piece of it, but we have to change how we're processing it on the inside. That's what we have control of how we're processing it internally. Some people like to stew about things or ruminate or a hamster wheel of thoughts and we were just talking about something occupying your thoughts. We all have stuff like that, something that moves into our brain and it takes up too much freaking rent free space for a while and we have to stop and say, you are consuming rent free space in my brain, you have to get it out. And it's easier said than done it, it takes a little bit of effort. But those are the things that give us back our power because we can actually do something about those things versus some of those outside influences.
And when we work on how we're internally processing that, we're in such a better control point. For example, I'd rather get up before everyone else at my house and have quiet time to myself. But if one of my kids gets up before me, instead of me just being frustrated in my heart or inside myself, I try to manage that external distraction, and try to still get my sense of peace and calm in the morning with that going on. It's a practice of controlling my inner stress cues essentially. I don't know if that answered the question, Jen.
Jennifer: It does. It's helpful to hear that because I think for anyone listening to this who has said the words I'm in comparison or in your head you're hearing that in comparison to everyone else, these things aren't really stressful, but yet you feel stressed. You can't compare how you feel to someone else because stressors hit differently. It could be eating.
Christa: Or over exercising.
Jennifer: Or even we all have things from our past that could be traumatic and you don't know how one little minor thing that maybe for you Christa might not, you'd be like, oh, okay, whatever, and you move on with your day. But maybe for me, given my past history of various things, might be a big deal and cause me to feel that type of stress and hold stress in my body and ruminate. And so should we just say because it's a minor thing for you that it's not minor for me? And I think that's the point that I just want to get across to everybody is it's okay if it's a tiny thing, I think it's how it hits and lands for you that's more important to concern yourself with that.
Christa: And comparison is the greatest suction or energy vampire of our own happiness. So comparing our own stress to someone else's really mean anything, we should just compare ourselves to our previous self. That's the only person we're in competition with.
Jennifer: Yeah, you just said something about energy vampires, and I remember in the presentation that you gave when we were speaking together back in October, you mentioned about energy vampires. And I think that everyone would be curious to know, what is an energy vampire?
Christa: Oh, well, an energy vampire is just someone that sucks the sunshine out of your day, of course. It's just the thing that you're dreading. I talked about at that time, one of my most valuable tools for cleaning up and fixing and assessing things is to draw a line on a piece of paper. And on one side I put my energy vampires or the things that I'm dreading or the things that are really consuming too much rent-free space in my brain and the things that bring me joy and I can do it multiple ways, but when I do this very simple exercise, it solves that rumination in the brain. That's otherwise just circling around, and when you put it pen to paper, there's some neuroplasticity impact that you can get when you do that and you put it down and you're like, oh, I don't need these things on this side.
I can actually get rid of a lot of those things. So for me, that's a huge piece. And slowly we just get a little bit better all the time. But I mean, I still have a long way to go and I've come a really long way in the last couple of years because I had stresses I didn't know I had, even though I'm doing this podcast that's literally titled around stress, we have these unrealized stressors and then we have basically things that show up downstream to show us that we've had stress. And I think that's the challenge is that medically, we know that stress causes all these conditions, but seeing that show up on lab testing is a different story. Right? Wouldn't you agree?
Jennifer: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think you had pointed out before we started this interview that sometimes it will show up on say, blood work or possibly maybe a stool test, but sometimes it doesn't. And one of the things that I think is a little bit harder sometimes to suss out is the mineral piece of it because minerals are so important. And so can you talk to us a little bit about the connection between being in this stressed state chronically, right? So day in, day out, and again, no judgment about, we talk about big T trauma, little T trauma, so maybe big S stress and little S stress, no judgment between those, just how it lands for you. But what happens to something as crucial as minerals, for example, when we are in this chronic state of unrealized stress?
Christa: So the reason that this came up first of all for me was that it was starting to drive me crazy. I'd have clients that had symptoms of a sluggish thyroid, whether it was little hair loss, feeling a little bit cold, just feeling fatigued. And then those are the big three really, but there's a lot of other ones over. Sluggish motility can be one. So a dead ringer for sluggish thyroid by the way is when they come off of gut protocols and then a couple of months later it just starts to come back because the motility is sluggish because the metabolism or the thyroid is sluggish. But so often you would go have blood labs done and I mean a full thyroid panel and things would look normal or not really out of range, but the symptoms were there and that was really a bother, right?
Like, oh, we have some labs for this, but they're not showing us, they're not matching the symptoms overall. So let me go to minerals and how this is related. So, essentially, when you have cortisol being elevated, our body is always compensating with different nutrients. Our body is using up nutrients to compensate for these different patterns. So when our cortisol is elevated, our body dumps out potassium when our aldosterone is being used up. So our adrenals, which sit on top of our kidneys, there are organs that produce stress hormone including cortisol. They produce DHEA, which helps control blood sugar and lipids so people can feel shaky between meals, et cetera, when the adrenals are struggling. But aldosterone is the hormone that helps us control our blood pressure. So imagine getting up in front of a crowd or giving a speech in front of a room and you're sweating bullets, that's your aldosterone really working hard to control your blood pressure so your blood pressure is not rising.
Our body uses up sodium when it's trying to use aldosterone to manage our blood pressure. So if it gets used all the time and blows through that, our sodium gets depleted, and certainly we could talk about sodium as well. Magnesium, calcium, these things get displaced, stuck in the tissue or dumped out of the body under stress, and so these are the first four core minerals. There's many, many others that all relate to each other. But when these are depleted, let me start with the first two that I talked about, sodium and potassium. There's a sodium potassium pump in every single cell. So if you have low sodium potassium like I did on my mineral results, then you're not only struggling to get nutrients in and out of every cell, it's a backbone to making stomach acid.
So what that looked like was relapse of burping. Even though I didn't have gut stuff, I was able to get gut stuff because if you don't have stomach acid, that's the fence to things coming into the body. So stress dumps suppresses stomach acid or dumps the minerals that allow us to make those things and also affects the ability for the nutrients to get in and out of the cell. So that affects healing. Potassium impacts the ability for thyroid to get inside the cell. So it's going to affect your energy and it affects your ability to get glucose into the cell. So it affects energy massively. So that's just a few of them. But it's amazing what happens. And you can't find this in blood labs because if you're a potassium and sodium look out of place in blood labs, you're probably dead or you're on your back or in a hospital, those are very rarely going to be out of range in blood, but in tissue you can see those losses.
And so that's the tricky part. We know we're losing those things. We're aware of losing electrolytes and losing these minerals through sweat and all those things. But yeah, you can really lose them through stress. And the sodium, potassium, all of those actually magnesium, all of those are really critical for the adrenal health. And so I had my mineral results done and my potassium was supposed to be a 13 and it was a one.
Jennifer: Oh, wow.
Christa: I was like, oh wow, I really dumped this. I know I'm just really waiting for you to find out what yours is here soon. So I did this test and I thought, well, this explained a lot. It was a huge slap in the face, but it told me a lot. And what you should know is that it's easy to burn the house down and hard to rebuild it. Minerals are easy to dump and hard to replete. You need to have a nice phospholipid layer, you got to have a good sodium potassium pump. So if that's all been spent under the guise of stress, even if it was four years ago, the thing is that we are pretty good at putting sodium back in, as a general population we're okay with that at getting sodium back and we're not always okay with getting potassium back in.
And then there's some nuance here that's a little bit challenging like if you are taking magnesium orally, it will stand in the doorway and so you don't have to worry about all those things. But my point is that it's easy to dump it out and to not ever get it back in and to really replete it. So I consumed copious amounts of food-based potassium for a year to get it up to a 10 in my tissue. And I really had to stop and evaluate my life because the worst thing that can happen also is people will do this test and they'll see that things are really low and then a few months later they'll add several more things to their life, they'll do all these mineral drinks or adrenal cocktails and they'll expect magic. And it hasn't really shifted because they haven't actually changed how stress is feeling on the inside.
Jennifer: So it really is in a sense a two-pronged approach. Well, I shouldn't say you can't just, but just assuming that you can supplement in some way, whether it's food or supplements, your way out of this is probably a very sharp-
Christa: It's not like having a drain in the bathtub. So if the stress is the drain and it's letting everything out and you don't plug the drain, it's an uphill battle. And I've seen it because I have retested people too soon or too soon for them, right? Three to four months, really nothing changed in their life stress wise, but they were doing food-based supplementation. And again, it just takes a long time. So I would expect it to take a solid year to really get those minerals back in. You can feel immediately better. You can feel better in immediate days or as short as a few weeks, this is where self-awareness is so valuable because if you're doing the right things, usually you're going to feel better within at least six weeks.
I want to just be really realistic. So it'll at least take six weeks, you should know that you're moving in the right direction. If not, probably not quite doing something that's really serving you very well. But the thing is, it's a longer time to get them back into the cell than it is to dump it. What was your question again, Jen? Did I answer that.
Jennifer: I think you did.
Christa: All right. Got it. I have a tendency to talk. Sorry about that.
Jennifer: It's okay. I always love listening to you talk because I've always learned things from you. And by the way, just before we go any further, I do want to make sure people know, 'cause you have the Less Stressed Life podcast, which is by the way, everyone, an amazing podcast. She has amazing guests on the show. If you haven't listened to it, I have learned so much from Christa's guests that she's had on, I mean I have been on her show too, so I mean, I'm sure you guys would appreciate the things that we've chatted about. But if you're looking for another podcast to check out, I would highly recommend Christa's.
Christa: That's the nicest thing that anyone could do in the middle of a podcast to interview, Jen. I'd like to just interview people as a full time job. So if anyone knows of that job, let me know. I'm just joking.
Jennifer: Well, so we've been talking about this test and I'm sure people are like, what test are you talking about? So do you want to share with everyone a little bit more about what type of testing we're discussing in terms of when you're looking at minerals where we're not necessarily seeing it in blood work and maybe answer why blood work isn't like… I know you said you'd be dead, but from my understanding it was that your blood work can change, it can flux in wild swings with depending on exposure.
Christa: 12 to 24 hours.
Jennifer: Right. And so it's not really looking at the store. So when your doctor comes back and is like, oh, your sodium was a little low, you shouldn't be freaking out about that per se.
Christa: Yeah, so this is the not fun part is there's a little bit of an uphill education to discuss here, but that's the whole purpose of our context here. First of all, I want to lay the land and say that I only started using this testing and this methodology as a means to continue to help people because I was like, something's missing here. I need a tool to show them the downstream effects of stress that would be nice at a low cost. And two, this dang sluggish thyroid thing that I had already described is really driving me crazy. And three, our options to look at what the adrenals were up to were salivary urinary, cortisol, free cortisol, but there could be some issues with that like long-term metabolized cortisol, by the way. So first of all, if I was doing a Dutch test, which you have to rearrange around your menstrual cycle and it took a long time to get, and if anyone had abdominal adiposity, so a little tire around their midsection that can be producing cortisone.
And so it can look like a cortisol, it can look a little skewed. So, anyway, I could always use an extra marker or something to prove to us, hey, what I want is this, but we're having some relapse situations, et cetera. So I'm talking about a hair tissue mineral analysis and way back when I started my practice, I was doing comprehensive vitamin and nutrient blood analysis using intracellular markers. So there are really only a few broad spectrum comprehensive micronutrient tests on the market and they can vary between red blood cell, white blood cells. So the difference there is the half-life and then there's the serum outside of the cell as well, which is when you go to the doctor and you have a serum drawn, it's just a handful of hours, it's not that long. It's whatever you ate that morning would affect the nutrients for that day.
That's not what I'm looking for, I'm looking for a longer term history of what's going on here. That's why your body has enough sodium in that moment. And that's why some people like a common symptom of these adrenal issues where you don't have enough of these minerals feel faint or just feel funny throughout the day or feel lightheaded from sitting to standing. It's like the body barely has enough to keep going. With this hair tissue mineral analysis, I know it sounds hokey and what's really embarrassing is back in 2008, I went to a conference to learn how to do this and I was like, that sounds weird. I'm going to just go ahead and throw that piece of paper in this pile of crap in my closet. And I was recently going through things and I was like, I cannot believe I took training on this back then.
It is incredible to me. So sometimes we're ready for information, we only hear it when we're ready for it. So I was on a retreat with friends, with colleagues and friends and we were all comparing what we do and I was getting intrigued by this mineral analysis that my friends have started doing. And you can't just look at the test and just know what to do, unfortunately. It's not like you see it and it's like, oh, you supplement with this. The cool part is that it's very food-based, but it's essentially looking at tissue from hair because that grows out at a slower rate. And so when your body is dumping these nutrients, it's got to get out somewhere so it can get out through sweat or it can get stuck or stored in tissue. And so when you look at the tissue, you're looking at a little longer term.
So there's different metrics on how to look at that. It kind of feels like the 1980s style testing. But I found what really matters is what happens with for the clients. So when I see these test results, it's very, very, very accurate for how my clients are feeling. And then we put these food-based things back and they feel much better. So that's a little bit about hair tissue mineral analysis. And I will tell you also, 'cause I like to give you the negative, I took a class on this the first time I kind of became intrigued about it. I took a class on it and it was totally overwhelming and not very applicable at all. It was like, nope, not using this, threw it back on the shelf again. So you have to sometimes kiss a couple frogs. So for me to find the right training and figure out how I wanted to use it was like I want it to be food based.
I want to reduce the amount of supplements, I want to improve these root causes of these subclinical signs of issues that I can see the symptoms for, but they're not showing up on blood tests and this was a tool or an avenue to do that. So, I mean, we like tools and avenues that kind of prove things to us. And so this gave us some opportunity. So for me it was life-changing 'cause it was like, hey, you have lost all your minerals girlfriend over time here. You went ahead and plummeted those right into the ground. So before this interview I said, Jen, let's do your mineral analysis. And so she may or may not have the same experience I had, who knows?
Jennifer: We'll see. So part of it is, so there're some pros and cons. One, I dye my hair so I've had to let it grow out. So I'm at a place now where I can finally do a little cut.
Christa: Yeah, it's totally annoying in some ways. I mean you can do it at home. So that's positive and it's not going to fall apart like a blood sample or freeze in transit or all these things that can happen when we are trying to navigate how do we want to help people with testing. But then negatives are that, yeah, you have to adjust your lifestyle a little bit to collect the specimen, which is always annoying. What if I could just have a scan of my face and it would tell me everything that was wrong? It'd be so much better. Just joking.
Jennifer: Well, one issue for me was I have thin hair and so part of me was like, oh my gosh, I have to cut off hair and I'm going to have a spot.
Christa: People have major issues with it and I get it. And I always say it's optional, you don't have to do it, it just gives me very good data around this. So I've had people not do it.
Jennifer: Well, can I ask you too, in terms of the minerals that you would potentially consider repleting, you talked about sodium, potassium, and magnesium for the most part, is there anything else that the test would show beyond those three in terms of anything?
Christa: Oh yeah, it shows. I don't remember how many, but that's just the one end of the scale. There are other ones. So if cobalt is elevated or high, that can signify issues with gut dysbiosis because it's part of B12 absorption. And so B12, of course, is a huge indicator of what's going on digestively. So there's actually four main pieces of the test, the rate of metabolism, so that's fast or slow. So you're either dumping minerals really fast or really slowly. The faster, if it's someone who really dumps them really fast, that's a very high strong, it tells you a little bit about the personality. There's two areas that I lean into more, but there's the metabolic rate, there is the individual nutrients. So I gave you three out of maybe 15 or 20. There is the toxic elements.
Now since we're on the skin show, I will say out of interest, so we all have toxic elements and burden, toxic burden, we just do. We're always going to need a love and support our liver because we live in a challenging world, we're not crazy. Just enjoy your life and support your toxic burden is how I approach my life. But with more severe skin cases, I have seen more severe toxic burden being lost in the tissue. So that's looking at arsenic, cadmium, aluminum, et cetera. So there's probably seven to 10 toxic elements. I should have the test out, but I'm just spit-balling a little bit. And then there're the ratios, so different ratios. So the calcium potassium ratio has to do with your thyroid. The magnesium sodium has to do with your adrenal one. Those are my two favorite ratios that I think are the most useful. There's a blood sugar ratio, et cetera.
But these two are the most interesting because when I see that adrenal ratio really low, those people are overly sensitive to everything. If it's less than a one, a good score would maybe be a four. But if it's under two, it's an issue. But if it's under a one, they are super compromised, totally out of nutrients and minerals. That means if you're totally out of nutrients and minerals, speaking of detoxification, you couldn't do something like that 'cause it's such a nutrient independent process. So it just speaks to, hey, you're really depleted and we're going to have to nourish, nourish, nourish, to get things back online. And the other thing it allows, so sometimes I have clients that are pregnant, it just allows me to do a lot of food-based interventions that are really specific and targeted to still bring these up. And you still can improve skin issues and other things even though you can't do intensive gut protocols.
Because if you're under malnourished, which unfortunately we so often are now because we're healthy eaters under stress, so we're just dumping all of our nutrients. So, anyway, it just helps you get that. I love focusing on nourishment, it's so nice. So individual nutrients, the metabolic rate, the toxic burden, and the ratios. There's other information, but I focus on just what's most important or most useful, or most valuable. I could continue to learn for hours about it and grab nuance, but I am thinking, what am I going to see the biggest response from the fastest, and so that's what I tend to focus on. Yeah, I don't know if that helps answer your question. The first four minerals. If you were going to work on it for a very, very long time, a year with someone just on that, it would be slow going.
But there's essentially a hierarchy. So again, you must support potassium sodium if you have to affect the pump. If those are not an issue, move on to calcium magnesium. So it's an order and then there's another set. Copper, I spend a lot of time paying minding bioavailable copper and the relationship between zinc and copper. So that's on there. Sometimes people have been taking a lot of supplemental zinc, thank you COVID protocols, and they've got a lot of zinc stuck, which is depleting their copper. Why would you care about this in skin? Copper is an important nutrient for helping for DAO, the enzyme to break down histamine. And I think that's an issue for a most skin issues.
So not having any copper gets used up a lot and it's a huge piece of iron metabolism and all kinds of things. So if you have these types of cases where it's like, man, I just can't get my iron up or I can't get this up, this has been kind of transformational 'cause it's like the building blocks of everything working on each other in biochemistry. You can't look at it the same as a B12 serum test and say, oh, she's low, give her this. It's really not like that, it's very food based, very food based.
Jennifer: And it also underscores the unique need that an individual person has because it's so easy for, I think a lot of people to get into this idea, well what does somebody else's test look like? And I'll just do whatever they did. But you do have to factor in-
Christa: There's a lot of nuance.
Jennifer: There's a lot of nuance, exactly. And I try to stress that everybody wants the cookie-cutter answer, but it's like sometimes it's not. And sometimes there may be a multi-faceted approach to how you're going to solve a particular problem. And I like that you're not just saying, oh, we have to look at the minerals. You also have to look at the stressors because you can't just, like you said, it's like trying to empty a bathtub without a drain or having the drain or the plunger on the drain on.
Christa: Yeah, the drain's just open. It's like exactly, you can dump it back in, you can keep filling the bathtub, but if you don't stop and take… It's partly a wake up call. For me it was. And I'm so glad I had that experience, right? Because one, it helped me get to the bottom of some relapsing issues. Two, it helped slap me in the face so I could stop doing some of the things I was doing. I mean, it took me a year to really reconfigure things, but I was like, I just have to, look at what it's doing to my minerals. I may love helping everyone and think I can handle this many appointments a day, but it's not serving my health. And so what's the point? Really, what's the point at that point?
Jennifer: And also, it's not just you, you've got kids, you've got a husband, you are on a farm, you've got a lot of things on your shoulders just like everybody.
Christa: Just like everybody. Yeah, just like everybody. Right?
Jennifer: But anyway, I really appreciate you for sharing this conversation because when I heard you talk about this whole big stress factor, I feel like the way we talk about stress a lot of times seems very vague, but practically speaking-
Christa: Can't do anything with it.
Jennifer: You can't do anything about it. Or again, compare like, well, I'm not as stressed compared to so and so, so I must not be stressed. This doesn't matter, really it doesn't matter at the end of the day because you're unique and you have your own history, your own traumas, your own mineral status, everything and anything going on that could impact how your body is experiencing that stress. And so anyway, first of all, I just want to make sure everybody remembers, because obviously I gave you a little plug in the middle of this, but the Less Stress Life podcast is a great spot to connect with you. Plus you have just lessstresslife.com is your website. So for anybody who's really interested in this, go check out Christa's website. And then you also have a really great informative Instagram account and it's @anti-inflammatorynutritionist. We will make sure to link to all of this in the show notes, that way people can find and connect with you.
And I really appreciate you for coming back. You're like one of my longtime guests and I feel like we're longtime friends now as a result of podcasting. And I'm really appreciative that we could talk about this today 'cause I know how passionate you are about it and I think it's something that people need to really seriously consider. And some of this is low hanging fruit to some degree.
Christa: Yeah. Go start some electrolytes. I mean, we talked about a lot of nuancey things, but what's something you can do right now? If you're in the online world, I feel it's probably just what I've surrounded myself with. But I feel like adrenal cocktails have made the gamut and they make a big difference. So go look up what that is and make your own and start nourishing your own minerals right now.
Jennifer: Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks so much Christa. I really appreciate you being here today.
Christa: Yeah, thanks for having me.
