How I Built My Small Business

How I Cured My Two Autoimmune Conditions

• Season 2 • Episode 34

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This is my personal story and is not business-related.

It's the reason why I have taken the last month off from podcasting and interviewing... because about a month ago, I got the lab results back showing that not only have my thyroid panels been in range for well over a year now, but they've continued to move more into the ideal center of that range.

I've been off medication for over three years now.

About 17 years ago, I was diagnosed with both Graves and Hashimotos diseases (thyroid autoimmune conditions). 

For 13 years, I went down the conventional medicine route and was told repeatedly that autoimmune diseases are not curable.

Says who?

Deep in my heart, I did not take that statement as fact.

So, around 4 years ago, I decided to make it my job to figure out how to cure myself. It's been a journey, and one of the most important and deeply rewarding things I've ever done.

I'm sharing my story in case it can help someone else.

I am not a doctor and this is not professional medical advice. Listeners should always consult appropriate health care professionals. This is just my story.

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Website: https://www.annemcginty.com/

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SPEAKER_00:

Hi everyone, this is part of my story, and so this episode is a personal one, and it has just about nothing to do with business. That being said, this episode is the most meaningful one that I have put out to date. It's the reason why I've taken the past four weeks off of podcasting and interviewing. As many of you know, I've been trying to cure my own autoimmune conditions, even though the medical literature says there is, quote unquote, no cure for autoimmune diseases. To briefly recap, I was diagnosed with two autoimmune diseases about 17 years ago. Three to four years ago, I started a deep dive into my own health and figured out how to cure my two autoimmune thyroid diseases after 13 years of doctors telling me it would be impossible. It's been a journey and an important one. So this is a very off-topic episode about how I did what I did in hopes that it helps someone else out there. I've been medicine-free for around three years now. And about a month ago, I got the results from my latest blood test. And not only have my thyroid panels been in the normal range consistently for well over a year, but they've moved even further into the more ideal center of that range. I started weeping. It was a combination of tears of joy, a deep satisfaction that I finally did it, and with reflection on how much belief, dedication, and patience it took to get to this point. And I feel it. I know it. I'm much more in tune with my body now to support its self-healing capabilities. The last remaining evidence of the thyroid disease is the antibodies, which, even if you have your thyroid removed from your body, the antibodies can remain detectable for many years. My thyroid antibodies are declining. So again, the thyroid panels are all normal except for the antibodies, which are declining. I'm recording this episode for anyone listening who is suffering from autoimmune conditions. And I'm also recording it for myself so I don't forget what I did. And for my kids, in case any of them suffer from an autoimmune condition in the future. She asked again, How many endocrinologists have you seen? To which I answered, I think I must have been to more than a dozen. And every single one of them told me the same thing. It's not possible. Autoimmune conditions aren't curable. You're wasting your time, and so on. But deep in my core, I knew it was possible. Our body is an efficient system and has self-healing capabilities. We all see this on a surface level when we get a cut and the body gets to work healing that cut. I made it my job to figure it out. I wondered, why would my body be attacking its own organ? I had it tested that my brain was in fact sending the correct signals to the thyroid. So why wouldn't my thyroid be listening? My mom followed up by asking, so what was it? How did you do it? For me, it was a mix of Western and Eastern medicine, and I'll go into depth on this shortly. About 70% Western medicine and 30% Eastern medicine. At least that was my initial analysis. When you get to the end, you'll see how my perspective has since shifted. Before getting there, the following 10 minutes of this episode will be some backstory of the signs I missed followed by my experience with the conventional medical route. If you aren't interested in the backstory, then feel free to skip ahead. The rest of the episode is about how I finally cured my two autoimmune conditions on my own and without medication. I am so excited to do this, and I truly hope this helps someone out there. So here's the backstory. To start, this is how I believe I got sick along with the signs I missed. The first major noticeable symptom was after getting into a fight with someone I love. I was feeling hurt, and you know how they say people go into fight, flight, or freeze. Well, my MO is flight. I flee, hide, want space, and go into my turtle shell with a nobody's home type of feeling, or at least I used to. I held my voice in for fear of how my words may be misheard. I didn't know how to articulate how I felt, or at least I was scared to try. And I cried all night, hardly slept, and in the morning, when I held out my hands, they were trembling. It was the oddest sensation, and even though I noticed it, I went about my day and thought nothing of it. The second noticeable symptom was when I was visiting my parents in Atlanta. A group of family members jumped into a minivan and I was energized. I was talking a mile a minute and my energy was just so big. My mom, again, a doctor, got into the car and looked at me with these furrowed brows and said, There's something wrong with you. I was offended and dismissed her saying, Mom, I am just really happy. No, she said, There's something wrong. You're too excitable. Again, I remember the conversation and I made note of what she said and moved on with my day and thought nothing of it. The third major noticeable symptom was when I was in Saulita, Mexico, visiting a friend who lived up a long winding hill. I walked up and when I made it to her house, I lay down on a day bed, flopped my arms wide open to the side of me, and marveled at the sensation of my heart thumping out of my chest. It too was the strangest feeling. On one hand, I felt oddly alive with plenty of oxygen, and my reaction was to laugh at the little bumping I could see on my chest. So weird, I said with wonder as I looked down at the thump, thump, thump. I didn't realize I was so out of shape. I laughed. I had an insatiable hunger, constantly munching throughout the day, even immediately after meals, and never felt full. But I didn't think I looked or felt sick. I thought I looked fit, tan, and healthy. It was my friend, who was like a second mother, who said with concern, Annie, you eat nonstop and you're so thin. I think there's something wrong with you. In retrospect, I should have noticed the earlier signs because what I just mentioned above was my body and my cells clearly screaming to be heard. In my business life, I was getting addicted to my work because accomplishment and getting ahead financially felt both really necessary and really good. I'd think about my to-do list and strategize about growing my business, increasing my overall income, investing money and growing assets almost nonstop, and found it difficult to let down after hours. I found myself thinking about work at dinner, in bed, first thing in the morning, and it would never fully shut off. It wasn't like I wasn't having any fun. My husband and I traveled extensively on prolonged trips to countless countries together and have some incredible lifelong memories from those. So life felt great. Looking back, I now know that my inner world, though, was signaling trouble. It wasn't until I healed myself that I could reflect back and see the imbalance in my body and how much my body had been trying to communicate to me. I was overworking. The food I ate was delicious, but I paid little attention to what I ate and chose based on flavor or convenience rather than nutrition. I breathed shallowly throughout the day, and that's not uncommon. Experts actually estimate that this type of short, quick breathing is a widespread issue affecting the majority of the population. I could proudly, quote unquote, survive off of very little sleep. At least that's what I thought. And lastly, I was a people pleaser, avoided conflict, and gave space for other people's thoughts, opinions, or emotions over my own. Once my thyroid became drastically imbalanced, as confirmed with blood tests, that's when I really began to feel the symptoms, which at this point were no longer early signs, but full-blown illness that impacted the way I felt all day, every day. I do believe stress is at the root cause of most illness. But not just stress as we typically think of it. I'm talking about stress on a cellular level, the kind that affects your mind, your adrenals, your voice, or the suppression of it, your gut, your heart, and more. All of that combined with misalignment in the soul. And I'll go into that more later. So the conventional route. For 10 years, I jumped from endocrinologist to endocrinologist and took a constantly changing concoction of pharmaceutical drugs that were prescribed to keep my thyroid levels in a healthy range and symptoms at bay. Blood tests every three months, medication adjustments, and repeat. Several doctors tried to convince me to remove my thyroid, which is a vital organ, either through radioablation, which makes you temporarily radioactive to kill the gland, or surgical removal. Both options meant I'd be on synthetic thyroid replacement hormone every day for the rest of my life. That was a hard no for me until all other options were considered and explored. Medication at that point was just buying me time. Yes, it helped stabilize the thyroid levels quickly, so it still served a purpose. But artificially controlling my levels and masking symptoms was never going to bring my body back to ideal wellness. We all know the body has self-healing capabilities. As mentioned before, on a very basic surface level, we see it with cuts. With a little support, the body will heal that cut. So the journey became about getting my body into an optimal state where its self-healing capabilities could function. I didn't want to be dependent on medication forever. I wanted a real solution. I wanted to understand the root cause because there had to be a reason why my brain and body were out of sync and that my body could not find equilibrium. My brain was sending the correct signals. It was my thyroid that was ignoring the instructions and acting on autopilot. The big question was, why would my thyroid ignore clear instructions and go rogue? I knew there had to be an answer. In the appointment with the last endocrinologist I saw, I told the doctor that I wanted to try to cure my own autoimmune conditions with diet and lifestyle changes. She listened and then said, Those changes won't hurt you, so you're welcome to try, but it will never work. You may be able to improve your numbers, but it won't stick. I noticed the telltale scar on her neck from thyroid removal. I knew deep in my heart that she was wrong. I don't fault her for being wrong. I just don't think that the medical world is willing to admit when we don't know how. So I explored acupuncture, naturopaths, and integrative medicine. I learned a little bit from each one. But those modalities were costly, and I found myself getting frustrated at the need to repeatedly explain my symptoms and changing blood test results to professionals when I was the only one living in my body and aware of what I was doing each and every day. More than half of the time in the appointments would be spent catching my practitioner up. I understand doctors treat so many, and they can't memorize the internal workings of their patients. That would just be too much to ask. I was just eager to get a real solution, and the inefficiency was frustrating me. I'm smart, I can read books, studies, papers, I can track patterns, run labs, observe and feel what's going on. So I stopped outsourcing and decided to solve this myself. And now I am convinced that each person has the ability to be their own best physician. Now here is an outline of what worked for me. There's the Western medical approach, which got me about 65 to 70% of the way there. The Eastern medical approach covered the other 30 to 35% of healing. So it was really a marrying of the two. So I'm gonna bullet point some of the main headlines, and then I'm gonna go further into them. So one, healing the adrenals and learning how to regulate the nervous system and regular everyday blood circulation. Two, healing the gut and reducing inflammation. Three, dropping from the head into the heart. Four, learning to express one's voice and increasing one's vagal tone. Five, alignment of heart, mind, and gut. And six, releasing bottled emotions through somatic work. I'll walk you through each of these and then share how I maintain my health today. And remember that recovery does not happen overnight. For me, I believe it took me years of ignoring my body's initial communication that something wasn't right. So it makes sense for it to take years to get back to equilibrium. And I'm not saying one for one. I mean, I think I was sick for 13 to 14 years. Before that, I was probably sick for another three to four and didn't realize it. And then I think it took me around three to four years to fully cure my autoimmune conditions. So patience and dedication is important to remember so you don't get demoralized if you aren't progressing at the speed you want to. Your body has its own pace and has the ability to heal itself if you give it the right support. Autoimmune disease, I believe, is our body trying to communicate with us and guide us toward what it wants and needs. Thus, the North Star is supporting your body's own self-healing properties and addressing the roadblocks. First are the adrenals. I think thyroid disease is an adrenals problem that flows downstream to the thyroid. The adrenals are two small glands that are located on the top of your kidneys, and they play a huge role in your body's stress response: energy regulation, metabolism, immune function, and hormone production. So the hypothalamus in the brain is like the CEO. It gives the instructions to the pituitary gland, and from there, the adrenals, thyroid, and other glands get the instructions. This is called the HPA axis. Hypothalamus to the pituitary gland to the adrenal glands, HPA. The adrenals are tasked with maintaining a healthy release of cortisol. So to heal the adrenals means looking at your mental, emotional, physical, and environmental stressors. To approach this, for six weeks, I prioritized deep restorative sleep to really provide and emphasize rest to my body. If you do this, you will need support from your family or partner because it is hard. I aimed for 10 to 12 hours of sleep per day for six weeks. And when I couldn't sleep, I'd lay still horizontally for that amount of time per day. I used herbal teas like chamomile before bedtime, Epsom salt baths for deep relaxation, minimized caffeine, minimized sugar to prevent blood sugar swings. And I don't drink alcohol, so that was an easy one. I used mindfulness with daily meditations, often sleep ones to help me fall asleep, breath work to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest system, and used yoga and journaling. I won't lie, the first week was sort of torturous. I couldn't really sleep. I didn't feel tired, and laying flat for such long stretches of time felt so hard and boring. Week two was a little better, and I found myself drifting off more easily. By week three, I was sleeping deeply for the 10 to 12 hours a day and started waking up feeling exhausted, fatigued. And that's when it dawned on me that my sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight, felt like it must have been plateauing for a long time. Feeling the exhaustion finally surface made me understand how wired I had been. So wired that I didn't even feel that I was tired. I was living off of adrenaline and cortisol. Finally, weeks four to six, I was astounded by how much sleep I was getting. I had to gently nudge my body back into activating the parasympathetic nervous system because when the sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight response, is activated, the body's primary focus is survival, which can come at the expense of its long-term self-healing and repair functions. Now, as preventative care, I use 4784 breath work to activate my parasympathetic nervous system throughout the day, every day, focusing on the exhale. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, breathe out as if through a straw for eight seconds, and hold at the bottom for four seconds. It feels so good to breathe deeply. Deep controlled breathing, especially long exhalations, stimulates the vagus nerve, which signals to your brain that the body is safe, which in turn prompts it to slow down your heart rate and reduce levels of stress hormones like cortisol. So many people breathe shallowly and some even hold their breath for surprisingly long stretches of time while scrolling or working on a computer or on their phones. In addition to breath work, I started taking a few specific supplements that I continue to take today. There's Gaia's adrenal support, which has adaptogens including Siberian rhodiola, holy basil, and ashwagandha, and selenium periodically, which supports adrenal and thyroid function. Adaptogens are incredible because they help the body balance cortisol. If cortisol is too high, the adaptogens can help bring it down. If your cortisol is too low, it can help raise it. So adaptogens work bi-directionally by helping you bring your system toward homeostasis. So now it's not just length of sleep, but quality of sleep that is at the top of my priorities. If you are not getting enough quality sleep, I would place attention there first. Remember, it's stress on the body that you're trying to find. Where is the mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress, and environmental stress? And all of these are impacted if you are not getting enough sleep and quality sleep. So I also swapped the type of exercise that I do. I used to do HIIT training and play on a competitive adult tennis league, and both of these are intense forms of exercise. It's not that they aren't great forms of exercise, but while my body was in a state of self-healing, it wasn't the correct form of exercise needed. What my body really needed was regular blood circulation, enough to get my heart rate slightly elevated every day so that my cells could get the energy they needed through oxygen and nutrients to remove waste products and support organ function and overall health. Once again, it's about supporting the body's self-healing properties. I traded the high-intensity exercise for yoga, hikes, Pilates, and gardening. And I incorporate sauna use and hydration to increase circulation and to continue to help detox. I'll circle back to opening up the body's detox pathways in a little bit. Now the gut. After resetting adrenals and swapping exercise from intensity focused to circulation focused, I did a three-month elimination diet to tease out which foods were causing inflammation. It's called the AIP protocol or autoimmune protocol. I went with the strictest version for three months. It's recommended for six to 12 weeks, and I did the longest one because I was ready for the commitment and I just wanted to do the most I possibly could. It's helpful to put a piece of paper in a place on the fridge, listing what you can have. Luckily, there are a gazillion resources out there for meal plans, recipes, and even food delivery that cater to the AIP diet. The point of the AIP diet is to eliminate and then reintroduce foods that may trigger a reaction. After three months during the reintroduction phase, I could feel and recognize symptoms that I was previously unable to notice. Life has so many distractions. And noticing what our body is trying to tell us can go unnoticed because, well, the body doesn't talk in words. It sends signals. For example, skin issues, headache, or subtle nausea. So here's what was on my elimination list no grains, dairy, legumes, nightshade vegetables, eggs, nuts, and seeds except coconut. No processed foods and refined sugar, no neutral oils, alcohol, caffeine, or high glycemic foods. So you may be wondering, oh my gosh, what's left? Like what can you eat? I remember telling friends what I was not able to eat during that phase, and they would just stare at me and ask if I was eating cardboard. So there's actually more than you think that you can eat, and it just takes adjusting for a few months. It's not forever. Again, mine was three months. It's it's a six to 12 week protocol. So here's what you can have: organic meats, wild-caught fish, and seafood, all vegetables that aren't nightshades, berries and other low glycemic organic fruits, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil, fermented foods, bone broth, coconut milk. I found that meal planning gave me something to look forward to so that I didn't have to rack my brain with creating delicious food out of this new restricted list. I'm not that active on social media, but I did start a handle on Instagram at Healing with Lifestyle, where I share parts of the journey, including meals I cooked. Bowls became a staple in my household so that I could eliminate the ingredients I couldn't have while still making mostly one meal for my family. Broiled salmon, pickled purple cabbage, shredded carrots with lemon and olive oil, roasted broccoli, cauliflower rice, and avocado. I mean, my family loved a modified naked wonton soup that had the same delicious flavored meat from the inside of wontons with broccoli, bok choy, and scallions. After three months, I reintroduce foods one by one journaling symptoms. So now I have a list of foods that I know make various symptoms appear that I never noticed before, but for sure can now. For example, some peppers cause me to get a very dry lip rim, like I'm at high altitude. Watermelon and eggplant make me nauseous. Never noticed that before. Gluten gives me keratosis polaris, these bumps like sandpaper on the backs of my arms. And dairy makes my face break out in acne. There's so much more, but that's just to give you an idea of how the body is trying to communicate to you. It's amazing what the body will communicate to you if you know how to listen. So a lot of this journey has been learning how to listen to my body. I am now and likely forever 99% gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free. I also continue to mostly consume avocado oil, olive oil, or coconut oil unless eating at a restaurant. I aim to eat 80% veggies, 10% protein, and 10% gluten-free whole grain. With focusing on my adrenals, circulation, and gut, I was able to get my labs just barely in range. I felt progress, but I hadn't addressed everything because my body could still be easily triggered. I could sometimes still feel the symptoms arise, and I was just barely on the cusp, like I could teeter either way. Then life handed me a test I wasn't prepared for. My dad died. This is where the heart and mind came in. I didn't even know I needed to heal my heart until my dad passed away unexpectedly in early 2021. And when I say heal my heart, I mean to listen to my heart. My head loves to run the show. And that had been my life's pattern for my 20s and 30s. Grief, I now believe, is one of the keys that can unlock one's heart. Maybe childbirth is another. But with childbirth, I feel there is more of an expansion of one's heart. And with grief, I feel like it's a cracking open. I found myself searching for videos to hear his laugh one more time, or to remember the silliness in which he would play with my kids. To this day, nobody can make my kids laugh as hard as he could. Even just one silly look from him. It was his spirit, which was pure love. I won't go into the depth of the grief, or we'll be here for hours, but I will say that grief is a full body stressor. This was my first significant relapse back in 2021. My blood test results went from barely in range, as they had been for about a year at that point, to completely back out of range. Like boom, way out of range. I felt like I was back at the beginning, to the time before the adrenal reset, to the time before the gut healing, like all of that work was out the window. The hand tremors came back, the restless sleep, the heart palpitations, the hearing of my own heartbeat, the itchy skin and brain fog, the list of symptoms is very long. The good news was that this was solid data. Grief, which felt like all over the body stress, had caused my illness to come roaring back. Even though my numbers looked as if I was back to the beginning, this time the body responded to healing faster. As a way of releasing the pain and grief, I dove into what I loved so much about my dad. His compassion for other people, his love for his family, the joy he felt from a child's happiness and laughter, his connection and love for plants. He spoke to them in his garden, his fascination with learning and challenging himself, and that his soul found purpose and deep meaning from life. Grief is a form of cognitive, emotional, and deeply physical stress. And as we know, stress causes inflammation and is a trigger for autoimmune conditions. I looked for ways I could honor my dad and decided to honor him by living in his legacy, to challenge myself, to continue learning, to be more compassionate, and to pause and have more gratitude for life's simple pleasures like the smell of a jasmine flower. And that is also how the podcast came to be, which I talked about in a previous episode. I'll circle back to the podcast later in this episode because it has had health benefits beyond what I anticipated, and I will explain what I mean by that later, too. As a part of the process, I dove deeper into nervous system regulation. By talking about my dad, practicing daily gratitude, using breath work as preventative care in the morning throughout the day at bedtime. I listened to grief meditations on Insight Timer to get the tears flowing and journaled memories I never want to forget. It took about six months to get my thyroid panels back into a normal range, much faster than when I first started. But my health was a bit like a house of cards, steady until a small gust and the whole structure collapsed. And just as I thought I was back on track, I experienced a second relapse. This time, it was a specific incident in which I witnessed someone I love acting and speaking in an erratic and psychotic way. The incident made others in the room start crying out of confusion from the traumatizing situation. And I'm empathic and started absorbing other people's stress. People I love were suffering in that moment, and my heart felt tight. There was anger, heartbreak, confusion, and disbelief. In that moment, my mind knew that this is not my journey to fix other people's problems. So my mind was thinking clearly and logically. At the same time, my body was internalizing feelings that weren't my own. What I learned from my second relapse was that my head understands boundaries. But I needed to train my body to feel that boundary and not to carry other people's stress. This is still a work in progress. One therapy I used in only one time was EMDR. That's eye movement, desensitizing, reprogramming. I didn't know anything about the therapy when I tried it, but I was open to trying to process this specific emotionally charged memory that wouldn't leave my mind or body. The session was only about half an hour, and I was guided to revisit the moment and see it happening again and again and again, reliving the situation from what actually happened to what I wish happened and everything in between. By the end, I was honestly so tired of thinking about it that I didn't want to think about it anymore. And the memory no longer produced an emotion. I was able to let it go. I haven't needed to use EMDR again, but I was pretty impressed in one session. I cannot believe how much I was able to work through. What I learned from this is how important it is to fully process one's emotions. When a memory still triggers a strong negative emotional reaction, it's a sign that the mind-body hasn't fully integrated that memory. That ongoing activation keeps stress systems, the sympathetic nervous system, HPA access, more frequently turned on, which over time can increase inflammation, disrupt sleep, impair immune function, and raise the risk of stress-related illness. So safely releasing and integrating those emotions feels profoundly healing. I started to connect that healing my body and getting back to full wellness meant I would need to explore more than the Western medical approach. After the EMDR session, I was able to get my body back to wellness. Once again, my blood panels came back into the normal range and without medication within a few months this time. The length of time to get my levels back in range was continuing to shrink. That was really positive. My body's self-healing properties were more functional, so this was promising, and I was opened to the possibility that the next possible puzzle piece was to further explore the mind-body connection. I didn't quite know how, but that seed was planted. So as I mentioned, I started the podcast in honor of my dad. What I didn't expect is the process of podcasting actually became a part of my healing journey. Because of the nature of podcasting, I started using my voice. And why that is relevant is that using one's voice can improve vagus nerve function. The vagus nerve is like your body's long-distance phone line running from your brainstem down to your heart, lungs, gut, and other major organs. It's a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system. When vagus nerve function or vagal tone is strong, it means your body can calm itself more easily after stress and it can reduce inflammation, regulate digestions, heart rate, variability, and improve sleep and mood. Using your voice through speaking, singing, humming, even chanting, all stimulate the vagus nerve. And deep breathing with long, slow exhale does too. When the line is clear, signals get through fast and calm. But when it's noisy or cut, messages get delayed, garbled, or missing, and your body reacts. So at this point, with improved sleep, diet, the cracking open of my heart, and understanding more and more of myself and my body, my panels stayed in range for nearly two years. And that is when my third and hopefully final relapse happened. I got into a heated argument with a good friend while on a trip, and I felt my symptoms fire back up. I tried to use meditation, reading, and journaling, and all of the tools I knew to help keep a full-blown setback at bay. But that pressure valve was fragile. So I retreated to a quiet place to regulate my nervous system. My body was in preservation mode, and I tried to explain this to my friend, and she dismissed what I was saying with anger and shouted that I was using my illness as an excuse. And it all blew up. I was trying to express my voice and share my feelings, and they were dismissed. There was gaslighting and passive aggressiveness. And when that pressure valve flew off, I could feel a flood of cortisol rushing through my veins to my fingertips, and that sensation feels so nauseating that I thought I was going to vomit. And then there was this instant grief for my health declining in real time. Knowing the time and dedication to my healing journey was moving backwards. Months of my effort erased, and I started having what felt like a panic attack. There was fear from the physiological reaction, which was causing worry of a thyroid storm. My heart rate was pumping and I was pulling for breath. For those who don't know, a thyroid storm is a serious condition where the body's metabolism spikes dangerously high, and a high cortisol event or significant stress for someone with thyroid disease can trigger this life-threatening medical emergency. Recovery from this brought me to exploring friendships and relationships and my part in them. And it brought to life that I was living my life as a people pleaser without even knowing what that meant. The healing from this resulted in self-discovery, not just in one friendship, but in others too. I'd let other people make decisions that impacted me without letting my opinion shine. I would walk on eggshells around certain personalities, give a listening ear to others' beliefs and not share my point of view so as not to come across as confrontational or from fear of angering the other person or being dismissed. I'd have feelings and never share them. And I'd listen to others share theirs. What I learned from my third relapse was the importance of the expression of voice. Your voice is medicine. Your thoughts and opinions matter. I still don't fully know how to prevent passive aggressiveness and gaslighting from causing major stress in my body. So that continues to be a work in progress. I started wondering what else I was holding in, what else I was storing in my body. When we are influenced by societal expectations, parents, performative actions, siblings, friends, news, social media, judgment, and the other gazillion influences, there is so much noise to filter through to know what our soul really feels and wants to say. Even in my 40s, I'm still answering the questions: what do I believe and feel inside if I let go of the external influences mentioned above? Who is my authentic self? When have I had thoughts or feelings that I've bottled in over the years for fear of how they may be received? Your authentic self is the integrated version of you that exists when all external pressures, expectations, and fears fall away. It's the you that remains when you're not performing, defending, or striving. It's an alignment between one's inner values and outer actions. Letting your true self be seen, loving your true self, and expressing what is true for you is important for alignment. And addressing any stuck emotions from past hurts and memories is necessary for emotional healing. Energy consumed by keeping emotion locked away can inhibit the body's self-healing properties. And again, my North Star in curing my autoimmune conditions has meant doing what I need to do to support my body's natural capacity for healing. This is how the Eastern Medical Approach has provided the missing puzzle pieces. Connecting my heart and mind and aligning both with my spirit and soul, and living my life in alignment has been a big part. I started exploring questions like: Am I living in integrity with my values? Am I emotionally bottling or suppressing my voice? So this could be as simple as saying yes when invited to something that I didn't actually feel like doing, or spending time trying to get someone to like me instead of just being myself. Because you can try and be universally liked, or you can be authentic, but you can't be both. And I've learned that using my voice in writing, speaking, and conversation is medicine. And I will continue to use it. The fascinating, magical part of all of this is that the more aligned I have become, the more heart connection I have felt with others, the more eye contact I make with people throughout my day, and the more synchronicity I experience. The final part of healing has been somatic work. And I'm going to give you an example of what I mean by synchronicities happening in my life and also what somatic work is. I'm a part of a women's circle that meets once a month. A couple months ago, during circle, when it was my turn to talk, I stated out loud to the group of women who are all well aware of my journey. I feel like I need to do some somatic work. I don't even know what that even means, but I just feel like I'm supposed to do some somatic work. I left it at that. A couple hours later, when I got home, I picked up my phone and randomly felt drawn to call my friend Mike, who I hadn't spoken with for about three years. I originally met him backpacking in Australia and Fiji when I was in my 20s. Years ago, when he was visiting, he grilled me and my husband about how to start and run a Christmas lighting business and now has a seven-figure thriving business in Colorado. I share this only to give context because what came next felt completely out of left field. After catching up for a while, Mike told me he was currently training to become a somatic therapist and was looking for volunteers to work with as a part of his certification. Then asked if I'd be interested in doing sessions with him for free as part of his training. I was like, wait, what? It's one of those moments where it felt too aligned to be a coincidence. I said, Mike, I literally, and I told him the story of how I just had spoken this out loud hours ago to my friends and said, I don't even know what it means, and now here it is landing in front of me. We ended up doing six one-hour somatic sessions once a week. For the first few sessions, I still didn't have a full understanding of what we were doing or how it worked, but I was open, and that was key. Each session started with dropping in, settling into the body through silence and breath work and becoming fully present. I put headphones on to really zone out any sort of outside noise. And over those six weeks, I learned to tune in to the most subtle sensations in my body. A faint twinge in the lower gut, a pain point in the heart, a subtle ache at the base of the spine, or a band of pressure across my head. I was in awe of my ability to feel the inner workings of my body once I slowed down and listened and had some guidance on how. Sometimes in response to these words, I'd feel new sensations in other parts of the body, or even more emotions would surface. It was fascinating to the part of me that wanted to understand the science. Has this all been locked away in my body? Why am I still feeling an emotional response to something that happened so many years ago that I didn't even remember that I remembered? Exploring this work was deeply healing to the part of me that needed emotional release and support. So much so that as the sessions continued, I began to notice that I was sweating more during exercise and even in the sauna. I believe something shifted on a deep level and that this inner emotional work helped to reopen or clear my detox pathways. And what a noticeable contributor to healing. The body is constantly working to process and eliminate toxins from the environment, from food, and from the natural byproducts of inflammation and metabolism. Your detox pathways are the systems that carry out this elimination process. As someone healing from autoimmune conditions, with a North Star of supporting my body's natural self-healing capabilities, this felt like a major breakthrough. When someone has a chronic illness, the body is often operating in a low energy state. Its regenerative and self-cleaning abilities are not functioning at full capacity when in a low energy state. In a healthy system, when cells run out of energy or reach the end of their functional life, they undergo a natural programmed cell death that clears the way for fresh, healthy cells. But in a compromised body, this process can break down. Instead of dying off, cells can become senescent cells, often referred to as zombie cells. These zombie cells are still alive in a technical sense. They retain some mitochondrial function and remain metabolically active, but they are barely functional and worse, they drain resources from the body. Like energy vampires, they take up space and consume nutrients and emit inflammatory signals without contributing much of anything helpful in return. Sweating supports the body's natural detox and healing systems, which in turn create an environment that encourages healthy cellular turnover. I hope all of this has given you some food for thought. I want to share one more story about synchronicities because, as I mentioned, they keep on showing up in my life. This one hasn't necessarily contributed to my healing journey, but it made me feel like I was on the right track. So since my dad died, I've asked him for all kinds of signs that his consciousness continues to exist. You may have heard me speak about this in past episodes. Anyway, around the fifth week of our somatic sessions in the morning, I saw a hummingbird on a branch right outside my kitchen window. And I said to my dad telepathically, You know, dad, if you can make a hummingbird land on my wrist, I mean that would be so obvious and so amazing. And then I kind of laughed at myself, thinking, the hummingbirds are outside and I'm inside and the doors and windows are closed. Okay, never mind. That's too much. And I just continued chuckling at myself. Then a couple days later, when I jumped onto the somatic session with Mike, as soon as we logged in, he said, the craziest thing happened this morning. And I was like, what? And he goes, a hummingbird landed on my daughter's wrist. Have you ever heard of anything like that happening before? And he texted me a photo. And I put my hand over my mouth and I just said excitedly, Mike, this has meaning to me. And I told him the story. So even though that story is off topic, the meaning to me was added confirmation that I'm on the right path. To start closing here, I am not the same person I was when I got sick. How have I changed? I have a greater mind-body connection and am more attuned to the communication from my body. And emotionally, if I think it or feel it, then I do my very best to express it. At the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that I thought getting my body back to wellness was 70% Western medicine and 30% Eastern. But after processing the journey and knowing what work there is left to do, I think I got the numbers backwards. You will see progress with dietary lifestyle and sleep changes, but it's the mind-body connection and alignment of mind-body spirit, which is much deeper and more complex. And that is the part that has made my numbers stick. Here's a list of what I still do today to stay well. Regular time in nature, touching the earth and ground, plenty of vitamin D from sunlight, deeper heart-connected social connection, a sense of life purpose and meaning. Expressing my voice if there's something I feel or think, but doing so in a compassionate way. A round of deep breaths with slow long exhales, usually in series of four throughout the day. Meditation as a tool and preventative medicine to self-regulate. Removing myself from situations when I feel the cortisol starting to rise. Humming and singing for vagal tone. Movement and sauna for circulation. Limited caffeine and sugar. Five or so minutes of quiet a day where I close my eyes, put silencing headphones on, and scan my body for any sensations that may be my body trying to communicate or send signals to me. And a more relaxed pace to everyday life. My thyroid blood penals are all in the normal range and continue to move into a more ideal area of that range. TPO and thyroglobulin antibodies are still detectable, but are declining. They can take years to leave the body, so that's my final step, and there will be more tears of joy when I get there. I may even have to have a party. My body found its equilibrium and I know how to listen to it now. I don't have any more symptoms and I feel so, so good. It's hard to explain how deeply rewarding that last one is. But when you go from thinking about the symptoms daily to feeling the return of homeostasis, it is a deeply grateful and profound feeling. I've learned that your body whispers before it screams, so learn how to listen early. You can't heal in the same environment or lifestyle that made you sick. Chronic illness can teach us that our bodies are not the enemy, but that the cells of our body are trying to communicate. Quality sleep, regular movement, and the right nutrition are crucial. Double down on mind-body practices like meditation. And time and nature can help restore clarity so you can hear yourself. And by that, I mean your mind, your heart, and your intuition. Thank you for listening and going deep with me. If you have any questions, I welcome you to reach out. Have a great day.

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Anne McGinty

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