The 3 Pillars of Autoimmune Health
I've been working with clients for YEARS to support their immune systems and live well with chronic illness and autoimmunity, and with every single person, we work through three pillars of autoimmune health to really support true healing. When we work with these three pillars it really gives us a framework and structure to work within that can be personalized to you and what your needs are. This post dives deeper into my 3 pillars of autoimmune health and the tools & knowledge you can use to support your body in both empowered and sustainable ways.
THE 3 PILLARS OF AUTOIMMUNE HEALTH
When we are starting out on our healing journey and supporting our bodies in healthy ways, it can feel really confusing on what to do and where to go. I've been working with clients for YEARS to support their immune systems and live well with chronic illness and autoimmunity, and with every single person, we work through three pillars of autoimmune health to really support true healing. When we work with these three pillars it really gives us a framework and structure to work within that can be personalized to you and what your needs are. The 3 pillars of autoimmune health are:
1. Nutrition and Digestion
2. Inflammation and Immunity
3. Stress and Mindset
We have to support digestion (where 70% of the immune system lies!) and optimize nutrition, work to understand WHY the immune system is on overdrive (think leaky gut, infections, environmental exposures, stress, etc.), and calm the nervous system to create a body and life where healing can occur and take root.
As opposed to saying, "Here's a list of foods you can and can't eat, see you back in a few months!", I take a much more comprehensive approach because when it comes to chronic health issues it's the only way to get sustainable results rather than continuing to chase quick fixes. Together we go through, step by step, looking through this lens, to support your unique body to find its path to health.
I’ve had so many people reach out to me that are interested in this pillar framework, and so I wanted to share a little more about it. It’s important that you don’t feel discouraged if you’ve tried integrating healthy changes and you don’t see them affecting your whole body or making your symptoms go away… it’s just that we need to put the various puzzle pieces together to build a strong foundation and truly understand what works for your body and your health. If this resonating with you and you're interested in learning more & exploring a new way of living well with autoimmune disease, I always offer free 30-minute discovery calls for those who are interested in working together in coaching programs. I would love to hear your story and start supporting you on your healing journey!
PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
Click here to listen in iTunes
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If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
Cultivating a Healing Mindset and Self-Acceptance with Murlene Joseph
Murlene Joseph is a Registered Nurse and Certified Health Coach. Because of her own experience navigating chronic illness, she began her coaching business Myrrh Wellness in order to support others struggling on their own healing journeys. She’s here to remind you that you’re in control of your health. You can feel strong, light, and happy. In this episode of The Live Well Podcast, we speak about the importance of mindset on your healing journey, and how to cultivate self-acceptance and self-love in order to heal.
Murlene Joseph is a Registered Nurse and Certified Health Coach. She is a descendant of Haiti, born and raised in Florida. Murlene has always loved helping people with their health, but it was her own experience with autoimmune disease beginning at age 25 that led her to health coaching and teaching individuals how to advocate and uplevel their health with small, consistent habit changes that provide sustainable healthy lifestyles.
When she was diagnosed with Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, and polycystic ovarian syndrome she felt hopeless navigating the murky messaging of health and wellness, not sure where to start feeling good again. Because of her own experience navigating chronic illness, she began her coaching business Myrrh Wellness in order to support others struggling on their healing journeys. She’s here to remind you that you’re in control of your health. You can feel strong, light, and happy.
In this episode, we speak about the importance of mindset on your healing journey, and how to cultivate self-acceptance and self-love in order to heal.
LISTEN BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
Click here to listen in iTunes
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SHOW NOTES:
0:00 Intro
8:02 - Learning to find balance
Moving away from extremes and an all or nothing mindset
Letting go of unrealistic expectations
Accepting what is
10:32 - Murlene talks about her love for food
Not denying yourself
We gravitate towards the things we love and bring us happiness
12:08 - The turning point: realizing that her body and what was happening was not something Murlene could control
Shifting mindset to being happy and being healthy
13:10 - The goal is 80-20
13:34 - Being imperfect is easier
Trying to get to perfection is a journey we will never reach
14:17 - Constant self-criticism can affect how you show up in your business
14:45 - Being authentic and honest
15:23 - It’s okay to admit that you don’t know everything
16:52 - Healing isn’t always linear
Learning acceptance
Getting up and moving forward
It’s about self-confidence, self-love and getting rid of expectations
Acknowledging that no one is perfect
19:09 - Showing up authentically in business and in sharing her healing journey
Healing also means failing sometimes or falling and getting back up
20:19 - Live is happening now and being present in this moment
23:13 - Shifting your mindset around healing
28:18 - Asking for help, listening, getting advice, and understanding that we don’t have to have all the answers
36:16 - Finding acceptance and what that means for Murlene
Accepting change which can be really hard
Accepting that we don’t have all the answers
Accepting help
Loving your body the way that it is - flaws and all
Accepting imperfections
41:50 - Having supportive people in your life to interrupt negative thoughts and emotions
44:08 - Not holding back anymore and living life regardless
47:01 - Asking yourself what you’re really willing to do to change
48:28 - Practicing humility
49:39 - Where to find Murlene
50:15 - Final thoughts & comments
If you loved this episode, I'd be honored for you to give me a rating on iTunes. This helps me to get content out to others who are interested in getting control of their health through diet, lifestyle shifts and personal empowerment.
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
Cultivating Resilience
Do you feel like everything you eat affects you negatively or causes symptoms? Do you feel stressed out and easily irritated? Do you feel like if you stay out late once or veer off of your healthy plan, you pay for it for a week?
If so, you might feel like your body lacks resilience, or the strong baseline it needs to make it through the day. Whenever we think of cultivating resilience we usually think of someone being resilient or strong in spirit. Resilience, however, can also be seen as a physiological trait. A basic definition of resilience is the ability to accommodate change. This post explores resilience and how we can begin to cultivate resilience physiologically.
Cultivating Resilience
Do you feel like everything you eat affects you negatively or causes symptoms? Do you feel stressed out and easily irritated? Do you feel like if you stay out late once or veer off of your healthy plan, you pay for it for a week?
If so, you might feel like your body lacks resilience, or the strong baseline it needs to make it through the day. Whenever we think of the term resilience we usually think of someone being resilient or strong in spirit. When we say someone is resilient we usually mean that they remain strong in the face of adversity and are able to withstand life’s challenges.
Resilience, however, can also be seen as a physiological trait.
A basic definition of resilience is the ability to accommodate change. This can be change in our lives, families, communities or change in our bodies and organ systems. Resilience can further be defined as the physiological response to change as mediated by the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system.
At a recent event I went to Dr. Jeffery Bland, the founder of The Institute of Functional Medicine, gave the example of a hummingbird to illustrate this concept of physiological resilience. When you look at the hummingbird it appears stationary, but when it’s slowed down you can see all of the hard work that’s going into keeping that bird in one place!
That’s an example of what’s going in in our body to keep us at homeostasis or a healthy baseline. As Dr. Bland illustrated with the hummingbird analogy, there are a number of different stressors that can influence our ability to stay at a healthy baseline. These can be stressors such as nutrient deficiencies from a suboptimal diet, our environment, daily stressors like a busy schedule or work deadlines, lack of sleep, relationships and support systems etc.
Whenever we have symptoms, feel out or balance or have a diagnosis of disease in our current medical system we look for ways to get rid of the disease. To eradicate the symptoms. If we have chronic sinus infections, we want to kill the bacteria. If we have autoimmune disease, we want to shut off an overactive immune system. While this approach is sometimes necessary, if we don’t also address the reason why we got the sinus infection or the autoimmune disease in the first place and work to build resilience in the body and inner terrain, we won’t actually get to the root of the problem.
If we take biologic medications to control the immune system or antibiotics to treat the sinus infections but we don’t work on proper nutrition, hydration, sleep, stress management and taking care of the body, it’s difficult to build that thick baseline for the body to be able to handle change and daily stressors of life and avoid recurrence of disease or symptoms.
So, how do we begin to cultivate this resilience?
Whenever I work with clients we put a lot of focus and attention on the critical importance of strengthening your baseline so you can eat a more diverse array of foods that don’t send you into a flare-up, work a full today without feeling like you’re totally exhausted at the end, and move your body and exercise without feeling like you have to recover for days afterward. If we try to move forward without first establishing a strong baseline, it’s a whole lot harder to achieve sustainable outcomes.
I’ve seen many clients attempt to skip over these pieces or think they’ve already done them only to find themselves stuck in a cycle of being “on or off the wagon” still feeling so up and down with their health after many years. Once we go through, step-by-step, the ways to create a strong, resilient baseline for that specific person, clients instantly see the puzzle pieces that were missing for years.
Cultivating resilience means that we work through the foundations of giving the body the proper nutrition and hydration it needs, work on how the body is absorbing and utilizing those nutrients through supporting gut health, and tone the nervous system by reducing and managing stress. We also work on mindset, who you are as the person eating the food and moving through your day, and give you all of the tools you need to feel strong, resilient, and less reactive to this wild ride that is life!
What a relief.
Watch the video below to learn more about cultivating resilience and leave a comment to let me know your thoughts on looking at resilience through this lens!
PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)
Click here to listen in iTunes
Click here to listen in Stitcher
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
Heal vs. Ideal
This post shares how we have to go through the "heal" to get to the "ideal." If we feel like "heal" is where we are going to be forever and we don't like it, we bust through it and don't spend enough time there in order to allow our tissues, immune systems, and selves time to truly heal in the way that’s needed. I hope this concept of "heal vs. ideal" will help put the health choices we make into perspective.
Heal vs. Ideal
When we're dealing with health issues we might find ourselves doing things like elimination diets, avoiding alcohol, going to bed early, etc.
We start to make these changes and then might begin to think, "Oh man this sucks! If I have to live like this forever it's not worth it!" This may then lead us to abandon all of the practices we were doing simply because we don't want to live a life of "restriction" forever.
And then we find ourselves back at square one with all of our symptoms still there, trying to find a more sustainable way to be healthy.
Have you ever felt this before? It can be so frustrating! And a cycle I see many of my clients get stuck in.
I worked with a client who had Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) who was finding that intense exercise was causing her to flare-up and have more pain. She knew she had to reduce exercise, but it felt really challenging because being active and outdoors was a big part of her identity.
Instead of taking a break from strenuous exercise, she kept pushing through her pain because she wanted to keep living her life which is something we can all relate to. What she was noticing was her pain was getting worse and worse.
In our work together we spoke about this concept of "heal vs. ideal" to help put the health choices we make into perspective.
For my client, the "ideal" place of where she wanted to be and how she wanted to live was being able to hike and do more strenuous outdoor activities. This "ideal" place is really about where we want to be which might include eating many diverse foods, being able to have a cocktail when you feel like it, exercising how you want to, etc.
What I want to highlight is that we have to go through the "heal" to get to the "ideal." If we feel like "heal" is where we are going to be forever and we don't like it, we bust through it and don't spend enough time there in order to allow our tissues, immune systems, and selves time to truly heal in the way they need.
When I work with clients in 1:1 coaching we move through the "heal" place effectively and with guidance so you can move more quickly towards the ideal - where you ultimately want to be.
To learn more about this concept watch the video below or tune into the latest episode of The Live Well Podcast!
If you are looking for support to break the cycle of feeling “on or off the wagon” and finally find more ease and sustainability in your life, I can help! I always offer free 20-minute discovery calls to see if we’re a good fit for coaching and how I can help you identify and break through the blocks standing in your way towards vibrant health. Click here to schedule your complimentary call today!
Click here to listen in iTunes
Click here to listen in Stitcher
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.
If you suffer from:
Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm
...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.
In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.
I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.
