Episode 402: Beyond Systems Biology: The Missing Link in Functional Medicine
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
So many people bounce between specialists, run every lab under the sun, and still feel stuck in the same symptom loop. What if the problem isn’t missing data, but the way we’re looking at the body in the first place?
In this episode, Erin is giving you an exclusive sneak peek inside the Funk’tional Nutrition Academy Open House, where she breaks down her model of intuitive functional medicine.
Erin explains why healing requires more than labs and protocols, how nervous system patterns shape our symptoms, and why self-trust might be one of the most overlooked pieces of root cause care.
In this episode:
Why chronic illness is often a breakdown in communication between body systems instead of a single root cause
How practitioners can help clients rebuild self-trust and reconnect with their body’s healing intelligence
The surprising role of interoception and how trauma, stress, and conditioning can distort how we interpret signals
Erin’s framework for combining lab data, nervous system work, and intuition in root cause care
Resources mentioned:
The Funk’tional Nutrition Academy Open House ends March 24th. Join us for FREE live classes.
Applications are now open for Funk’tional Nutrition Academy, our 14 month clinical mentorship + training program.
Are you a practitioner? Get your exclusive invitation to the FNA Open House.
Subscribe to Erin’s Substack for a no-nonsense space about health, entrepreneurship, and manifestation.
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This is one of the chief problems that we're seeing with healthcare. We have different specialists who focus on one area rather than understanding that disease is really a loss of communication and a loss of interplay between all areas of the body. So there's just a huge lack of understanding of how these interrelationships work, and that's why it can be so hard for our clients to break out of chronic conditions, chronic illness, or chronic symptoms. Welcome to the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call intuitive functional medicine, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self-trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Hi friends, today we are going beyond systems biology and we're talking about the missing link in functional medicine. This is actually a live class that I taught just last week for our FNA, the Functional Nutrition Academy, open house. It's the first time that we've done this. It's still going on. It's 2 full weeks of opening our doors to live classes so practitioners can come in and get a feel for the school. And this class, like I said, we taught last week and it got some really, really great feedback, so I figured I would release it here as a podcast episode. We did have more of a Q&A discussion at the end of the class. We cut that part out, but the whole class is here for you to listen to.
Just as a reminder, we are currently in FNA enrollment. We open enrollment twice a year, and we are keeping enrollment open through the end of the month or until all seats are filled. So if filled out an application, definitely do that. You can schedule a discovery call, get all of your questions answered, and get yourself ready for our spring cohort. Another little quickie announcement I wanna make is I am officially on Substack. A request that I've gotten a lot over the years is to release these weekly podcasts in written form as a blog, and I just have not had the bandwidth for that over the past 8, 9 years, but now I do. And so I am starting to release that on Substack. On Substack, I really like to talk about kind of like what's going on in my mind, how I make decisions, what I'm thinking about.
It's a little bit more personal, and that's what I'll continue to share. But I will also start to share some of these podcasts in written format if that's of interest to you. And if you're like, mm, the last thing I need in my life is another social media platform, I totally get it. That is how I feel about so many. That's why I'm not on Threads. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on YouTube. YouTube, like, no, but Substack just hits different.
I don't know how to explain it. You just have to like check it out for yourself and see. It is like slower pace. It's like more grounding. I don't know. I love it. So we will link up my Substack in the show notes. So if you wanna catch me over there, you can do that too.
All right. Without much further ado, here is the class that I taught last week. I hope you enjoy it. So this is our official first open house for FNA. We've never done this before, so I for on. I'm very, very excited. We have over 200 people signed up for this, and I think maybe close to 250. So we've got a lot of classes.
If you can't make it live, you can catch the replay. Those are going to be available to you. I always say like catching it live is kind of a vibe, but if you got to watch the replays, those will be made available to you. So just make sure you're checking your emails because we'll be sending those out promptly. So this is our 6th year of the Funk’tional Nutrition Academy. We graduated our very first cohort in 2021. Rachel was in that cohort. She's here with me today.
Like I said, you're going to hear from her in a minute. Not only is she the lead clinical mentor of FNA, but she's also lead practitioner here at The Funk’tional Nutritionist. So it's just awesome to have her here. Since this is an open house, I wanted to give you a really quick overview as to what this school is all about. I'm going to assume that you guys that are here, you probably listen to the podcast or you follow me on social media or some combination of the two. So you've probably heard me talk about FNA quite a bit. And rather than just tell you what FNA is all about, we really wanted to show you. We wanted to showcase what it's like inside FNA so you can experience it for yourself.
You can experience the different aspects of it, what it's like to be part of this community, what it's like to learn from us and grow with us. So that's kind of the rationale behind this open house. With that said, I'm just going to do a really quick overview in case people are like, what's FNA? So FNA is the Funk’tional Nutrition Academy. It is our 14-month practitioner training and mentorship. And we always, when we're talking about it internally, we always describe it as 4 different programs in one. We have, of course, the educational curriculum and the content. And I will say that it's pretty in-depth education. I mean, we do have a lot of students and grads here, so you guys could probably weigh in on this more so than me.
We designed the curriculum for clinical mastery. This is not just the basics. This is not just the foundations. And I say that because that's one of the biggest questions that we do get. A lot of practitioners come to us and they already have some sort of functional nutrition or some sort of functional medicine training. Certainly not everybody, but a lot do. And so the big question that they have is like, is this just gonna be a repeat of what I already know and what I've already learned? And I think we can pretty confidently say after training MDs and NPs, RNs, RDs, RDs with their master's in functional medicine, PTs, health coaches, like everybody, everyone walks away feeling pretty wowed by the education that they receive. So is there gonna be some overlap? Hopefully.
You know, hopefully if you've done another functional medicine training, there'll be a little bit of overlap, but we really, really pride ourselves on going really in depth. We actually, just as an aside, went through a recent hiring process, and I've talked to a lot of colleagues in this field who run their own practices and are expanding, and one of their frustration points is that they're seeing a lot of applicants explain that they have some sort of functional medicine training, but they just don't have the ideal level or expertise or experience in lab interpretation and pulling all of the pieces and parts together. And so that's why you'll hear me say piecemeal education oftentimes leads to piecemeal results. And it's why FNA is as long as it is because we really want you to feel super confident, have some clinical mastery when you leave this school. So the first one is the education. The second one is the mentorship, both group mentorship and one-to-one mentorship. And this is where the clinical application really comes through. Experience is a game of reps.
So the more you do, the better you get. Like with anything in life, it applies here too. And so this is where you really get to build those reps and build your confidence and do it with a security blanket. Do it with a, like a little security net. Maybe that's what I meant to say, because you might feel like you're punching above your weight, but you have clinical mentors in place to make sure that you are not expanding faster than your skillset is. Because we also, you know, wanna maintain integrity as we practice this. The third part is the business and the mindset coaching. This is really where I shine in FNA.
You do this with me and, you know, everything that you see here, I built from scratch, from the ground up. No investors, no partners, just like little old me, just like a hope and a dream. Now, obviously we have a phenomenal team, but before I built what we have today, you know, I just had to earn my first $25K and then my first $50K and then my first $100K and so on and so forth. And I think the beauty of the FNA business modules is that they walk you through like the whole trajectory. I started building these business modules in 2020. Those are not ever gonna be deleted. So you get to follow along with like my whole trajectory, my whole come up story. And I love that.
And then of course we have the community and I know that a lot of programs kind of sell community almost as an afterthought. It's like, and you've got the community. That's not what's happening here and folks from our actual community can weigh in on that. Would love to hear. We have a bunch of people here, so definitely feel free to jump in and kind of weigh in if you are part of the community. Our community is like a true community. We have practitioners that graduated 5 years ago that are still with us. They mastermind together.
We have former grads that come in and teach continuing education classes based on their expertise. It is awesome. So that's why we say it's like 4 in 1.. So that's my whole spiel. That's my whole pitch. That's what we're doing here. And that's me telling you about the program. And now from here on out for the next couple of weeks, you just get to experience it.
Today we're going to get into systems biology or beyond systems biology, the missing link in functional medicine. What I will tell you is that typically we have 3 live classes a month. So it is not this hot and heavy all of the time. If you're like, This is a lot. How am I gonna do this for 14 months? Do not worry. It's not this intensive. We really like condensed everything into 2 weeks for this open house specifically. Okay? So just keep that in mind.
It's not gonna be that much of a heavy lift for the next year and change. Again, gonna assume that if you're here, you are familiar with me and my work, so I don't wanna spend any more time talking about myself, but we will most likely have time for some questions at the end of this. And if you have any questions about me, or my story or my journey, I am more than happy to share. I'm an open book, so definitely ask at the end. But for now, I will go ahead and pass the baton over to Rachel.
Rachel:
Thanks, Erin. Hey everyone, I'm super excited to connect with all of you. I'm Rachel Heinz. I'm a registered dietitian and a certified functional medicine practitioner. And like Erin mentioned, I was in the first cohort of FNA. It started in 2020. So it's an awesome full circle moment to be mentoring other practitioners within the program. It's one of the favorite parts of my job.
And the two main areas where I provide mentorship within FNA are the clinical Q&As. Our next one is next Tuesday, and these are the group live calls. So the students submit their questions ahead of time, we come together as a group to discuss. And then the other aspect of mentorship that I provide is one-on-one support through office hours. And These are 20-minute sessions. We meet to chat about your clients, cases, labs, or any topics that you're looking for more support with. It doesn't have to be client-related. And one of the reasons I love these mentorship sessions is I'm really able to connect with the students, to connect with all of you one-on-one, and I'm able to just see how much each of the clinicians grow and progress through the program.
And Honestly, it's the improvements to clinical confidence. It's one of the areas where I see students grow the most. And so it's super exciting. It's super amazing. The program is 14 months, and so we just see students progress a ton throughout this timeframe. And if you have any additional questions about the program, the structure, if you are a good fit, or any nitty-gritty questions for the remainder of this month, you have the ability to book a discovery call with me and we can connect one-on-one to just answer any questions you might have. So yeah, I'll pass it back to you, Erin.
Erin:
Cool. So here's what I'm going to call my Canva crash out. I have a lot of FMA students here, so you guys know I started using Canva to make slides, I don't know, like a year ago, year and a half ago, because you can make really pretty slides, you can brand them. It's like a whole thing. And when you share them in a setting like this, you can also see notes. So I love that because I like need notes to stay organized or I would be here for like 4 hours with you guys. But every single time, I don't know if you guys have ever used Canva slides to present, it's like I literally have to write out the instructions for myself and then be like, step 1. I don't like— it can't handle it.
So you'll watch me like have a little mini panic attack. It might take a couple of minutes and then we're just going to get right down to brass tacks. So if you ever are like watching me on Instagram and you're like, wow, she has her shit together, I do not. But we do it anyway. All right. So here's what we're going to talk about today. The missing link in functional medicine. And this is really what I have dubbed intuitive functional medicine.
My subheading for this changes like daily. Today, I'm— the subheading is real root cause care that remembers the parts of you medicine forgot. So intuitive functional medicine is really what we're going to get into today. This is how we practice. This is how we teach. And this is a lot of what we'll get into in FNA. I just want to echo what Rachel says. If you are here and you're wondering what the next step is, if you haven't applied, make sure you apply because that is the first step.
We have to just approve your application and then you can get on with a discovery call with Rachel to talk through everything like, is this the right fit for me and how could this help? And then step 3 is obviously to enroll. Hello. And then we officially kick things off April 1st. So we leave enrollment open all the way to the end of the month or until all seats are filled. That is how we do it. So just know that that is the timeline. Timeline of things. So make sure to get your application in.
And with that said, we're gonna jump in so you can get a little taste-a-rooney of how I teach, how I lecture. Sometimes I say swear words. I'm gonna do my best not to today, but I might have already slipped. So apologies in advance, maybe earmuffs. I'll try to give you a heads up if they're coming down the pike. So I'm gonna steal from Walt Whitman. I'm a bit of a poetry and literature buff, so I will oftentimes drop quotes and prose in, but you are large, you contain multitudes. This is why a fragmented, compartmentalized approach to health and healthcare doesn't always work out so great.
Chances are if you're here, you already know that. I don't need to tell you that. This is what so many of your clients are most likely experiencing, or maybe you've even experienced this yourself. But this is one of the chief problems that we're seeing with healthcare. We have different specialists who focus on one area rather than understanding that disease is really a loss of communication and a loss of interplay between all areas of the body. So there's just a huge lack of understanding of how these interrelationships work. And that's why it can be so hard for our clients to break out of chronic conditions, chronic illness, or chronic symptoms. I recently taught a workshop to the Yoga Medicine Conference where I talked about the gut and the pelvic floor, but I'm like, I'm going to use the same slide.
So it says there's a bidirectional relationship between the gut and the pelvic floor, because there's a bidirectional relationship between everything in the human body. So like, no matter what we're talking about, this applies. Pelvic floor dysfunction is oftentimes, almost always, more of a systems issue, not just a local one. But again, we can say that about everything that's going on. It's usually not just a local issue. It is usually a system webs issue. I remember I had this mentor back in the day, and he said this, and I like always remembered it. This is probably 8 years ago or more.
He said, if you're not comfortable with webs on top of webs and systems on top of systems, then you should not get into this line of work. Because the human body is really, really, really complex. But I think that's the beautiful part of functional medicine and a systems biology approach, that it gives us a lens and gives us a framework to work within so we can understand that interplay. And it's not so much that like one one thing is causing another, but more so that they're all influencing each other all of the time. This is probably the quote that I have quoted the most in my career, and it's from Gabor Maté. He says, the more specialized doctors become, then the more they know about a body part or organ, and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides. This quote is a huge driving force behind every single thing that I do, everything that I teach, and everything that I My whole career I've been advocating for this whole human care. And so that is really why I call what we do and how we practice and how we teach intuitive functional medicine.
So let's back up a step and just talk about functional medicine, because I do believe that functional medicine becomes a partial solve for the problem that is fragmented care. It takes a systems biology approach, which acknowledges that there's there's interplay between all different aspects of the body. I joke that functional medicine loves an axis, loves an axis. We've got the HPA axis, the brain-gut axis, the liver-gut axis, the gut-hormone axis, and more. You know, we can access anything. So it really offers us a lot more insight into a root cause approach because it helps us understand the interplay between all of these systems, but also the underlying environmental and physical drivers of illness and imbalance in the body. So if we understand them, if we have tools and resources to uncover them, then we also can correct them and address them, ideally before it progresses. And so I think that's why so many of us come to functional medicine and why we love it.
And then we can layer on psychoneuroimmunology. This is one of my favorite, personal favorite fields of studies. And this really takes things a step further by acknowledging how the psyche in the mind, in our emotions, interact with and influence the nervous system and our hormones and the immune system. None of these are separate systems in the body. The philosophy of psychoneuroimmunology basically says that it's one mega system, one super system. And so I think if we can take functional medicine and layer psychoneuroimmunology on top of it, neuroimmunology into it, it gives us a little bit of a bigger playing field, but it can still fall short, in my humble opinion. It can still fall short and keep people in a symptom loop if it doesn't acknowledge this next part, which is the real axis is you. You are the plumb line that runs throughout, that everything rotates around.
You are essentially the super system. And you are made up of a physical body, of course, but also a nervous system, a mental body, an emotional body, an energetic body, and even a spiritual one if, if you want to go there. And so this is why I call what we do intuitive functional medicine, because it's really bridging the physical body with all other aspects of you. And I think for true root cause approach, for true root cause resolution, this is what we need to tuck and roll into. And I say this as somebody who's put autoimmunity into remission and then also worked with a lot of clients. I think this is really the missing link of a true root cause approach. So what I'm not saying, because sometimes this can be a little bit misunderstood or misinterpreted, what I'm not saying is that we throw out all of the work that we're doing for the physical body. I run a program called Manifest Your Health, and I had a client of Manifest Your Health say to me that the reason she was attracted to the program is because so much of the content that she was taking in was like, pick a lane.
Either you're working on the physical body and you're doing the functional medicine labs and you're doing the protocols, or you're doing the nervous system regulation and the breathwork and the energy work. And she's like, I just wanted something that put it all on the table for me, like a one-stop shop. And that is what your work represented to me. So I am not saying throw all of that out. We do not have to throw out one whole paradigm in order to build a new one. And I do not know why we are so committed to that belief, like pick a lane, it's one or the other. For me, I'm like, I like a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this, and then we get to blend them all together. So there really truly is a third way where everything comes online together.
And in my experience, if we put it all on the table— mental healing opportunities, emotional, energetic— emotional twice, yeah, it's that important. I guess I wanted to so nice, I put it twice, and physiological healing opportunities. I think the true magic, and I've seen the true magic happen when we get to combine them all. So it's never positioned as an either or. For me, everything is an and also. And what I have found is that especially, this is especially, especially true with chronic symptoms, chronic conditions, chronic illness, less so for the acute stuff. If somebody's coming to us and it's like, my belly, I went on a trip to Mexico, my belly hurt, hurts and it's been hurting for 2 months and we pull a GI map and we find, you know, something going on, we're like, yeah, this makes sense. Like, you might not need to like work through your mommy and daddy issues.
Like, we're just going to treat your gut. You're probably going to be fine. This is really for the chronic ongoing stuff. The clients that come to you that are like, look, I've tried everything, you know, like I've worked with other functional providers, like nothing's moving the needle, or I get a little bit better and then I fall back to my old patterns. This is kind of what I'm talking about. And this is who we're seeing a lot, lot, lot. So I think if we're only addressing health from the physical body perspective, we're going to miss— potentially miss some big important stuff. And it's this exact stuff that is keeping your clients or you in the hamster wheel of healing.
So I think this is a recurring missing link in healthcare. And I will say for sure in conventional medicine, but honestly, also on the functional side of things too.
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Element offers a no-questions-asked refund, so you can try it totally risk-free. So just as a recap, functional systems biology, root cause resolution, understanding how all parts work together and influence each other. All good. Intuitive. We're gonna layer this on, and the definition of intuitive is a natural ability or power to know something without any proof or evidence. And so when we're talking about this, this, part of this is your intuition as a practitioner. So we're going to get to that in a little bit. But really more so the way that I see it is our bodies all hold sacred wisdom.
The body is honest, the body doesn't lie, the body is a truth teller. And the body also has an innate ability and capacity to heal itself. That is true for all of us. And my whole goal is to bring people back home to themselves to be the expert on their own bodies, to learn how to self-source more than we're outsourcing, because the body knows what to do. And for those of you guys who are coming back to Friday's class, definitely come back. We're going to talk about gut-brain access and all sorts of fun stuff. We're going to unpack that concept a little bit more. But bodies know how to heal themselves.
And the way that I see it, our jobs as practitioners are to just figure out the way that our clients are interrupting their process. So I always hold the belief when I'm sitting across from somebody that your body knows how to heal itself. We might be doing some things to fudge that up a little bit, and that's what we're doing as practitioners, like showing our clients how to get unstuck and unblocked. And then when we combine the two, the way that I see it, it's kind of like where the science meets the sacred, you know, where science gets to meet self-trust. Remember, we're not throwing out one whole thing. We're like, science isn't real, forget that. We're just saying it all gets to come online together. So intuitive functional medicine is really predicated on you knowing you, learning to learning to speak the language of your body, understanding the calls coming from inside the house, trusting yourself, self-sourcing answers, leading you back to your own inner healer.
So all of this sounds amazing, right? Like, who doesn't want this? I want this. Who doesn't wanna help their people do this? I think we all want more of this. But when we say this, we also have to recognize that there are some pretty significant things that can impact impact the ease at which someone can access this. And that's where really what we're going to drill into today. So this might be a history of trauma, this might be chronic stress, this might be societal and cultural programming, this might be their own unique health history. But I do want to spend time here today because unfortunately, I think this is being missed a lot and our clients can suffer when it is missed. So this is the big thing that I want you to walk out of here today by kind of like really anchoring in. So I said self-source over outsource is something that I say a lot, and that's really one of the core tenets of intuitive functional medicine.
We teach our clients— our goal is to teach our clients to self-source as much as, and eventually hopefully even more so than they outsource. So teach them to look inside for their own internal cues, their own internal knowing. A really small, basic, simple example of this is like rather than somebody looking to an app or an influencer to tell them how much to eat, they look to their own hunger cues. That would be a really basic example of this premise. And again, all of that sounds great in theory, like, oh, just listen to yourself, just listen to your signals, just self-source those answers. But we also have to know, understand, and address the fact that people, in particular women, men have been taught, trained, and conditioned to be selfless. So there's the rub. Telling women that you just have to trust yourself more doesn't always cut it.
To borrow a Geneen Roth quote, it's like throwing people to the wolves. Here's the quote: the most difficult part of teaching people to respect and listen to their bodies is overcoming their conviction that there is nothing to respect, that they can't find any place in them that is whole or intact. And so when they hear me say relax, when they hear me say trust yourself, they feel as if I'm asking them to throw themselves to the wolves, banishing them to the wild and ferocious brokenness. So our female clients in particular have been taught to not trust themselves, not to trust the signals coming from their bodies, their hunger cues, their cravings, not to trust our connection to nature, moon cycles, menstruation cycles, perimenopause, menopause. We have found ways to pathologize stigmatize just about every single thing that is happening within a female body. So society at large does this, diet culture does this, the medical establishment does this, social media does this. We are being hit with this message a lot. Medicine has a very long, sordid history of telling women that their experience isn't valid, it's not real, and it doesn't matter.
So we're taught and conditioned to trust external over our own intuition. This happens in medicine. This happens in a lot of other places too. There's this parentification, I know better, like I have the answers, not you. And that really reinforces the idea that the solution is always outside of us. So we constantly go outside of ourselves to look for the solution. An example of this, I've used this before. Gosh, I'm trying to think of how long it was.
It was a long time ago because I couldn't order labs for myself. So a long time ago, and I suspected SIBO based on symptoms, and I went to a gastroenterologist and they pulled a SIBO lab and I was positive for SIBO. And I asked the gastroenterologist, I said, like, should I consider a low FODMAP diet? This is, again, way before SIBO was a thing and way before low FODMAP diet was a thing. And she just looked at me and it was the most condescending tone. And she's like, how do you know about that? And so it's just this idea that, like, I hold the wisdom, I hold the power, I hold the authority. This is not information for you to have, know, or access. This is information for me to deliver to you when I think it's appropriate. So this, it creates this almost like power struggle where we reallocate the power from within ourselves to outside of ourselves.
On social media, I had somebody say, it was a med student that said this to me, I'm sorry that happened to you, but anecdotal evidence is not evidence. And in my world, it actually is. In my world, I'm not waiting for a white paper to back up somebody's lived experience. I believe our clients when they tell us something's going on inside of their bodies and inside of their lives, because when we echo this sentiment, what happens is that we're also— there's a sidecar of us saying your experience isn't real, it doesn't matter, and it doesn't count. And unfortunately, the more we hear this message repeated to us, the more it compounds and the more we encode it as absolute truth. Curious if anyone here is hip to the recent polyvagal theory drama. This is a really great example of what the story that I'm trying to paint, the point that I'm trying to paint. So recently, last month, yeah, I think that was in February.
So last month, there was a paper published in Clinical Neuropsychiatry. Oh gosh, I don't think I'm saying that right. It doesn't matter. It's a big journal and it was published, okay, by Paul Grossman and 38 other colleagues like co-signed on it. And the title of the paper was Why the Polyvagal Theory is Untenable. And it really declared this theory scientifically invalid and lacking in evidence, which is a big deal because this is used in a lot of nervous system work. This is used in a lot of somatic work. This is used in a lot of different types of therapy.
And I also think it's like kind of important to note that Grossman has been like pretty anti-polyvagal theory for like a solid 20 years. He's been like coming for Dr. Stephen Porges, who is the founder. Dr. Stephen Porges is a neuroscience, and he developed this theory, polyvagal theory. And he actually published a rebuttal in the same issue arguing that they kind of misinterpreted his work. And like we're arguing against things that the theory doesn't even purport. So since I'm like very, very big into nervous system work and neuroscience, I really dove into this one a lot, lot, lot.
And what I was most curious about is not like the hot takes from different people, but more so the comment sections of the post. So I just dove into the comment sections and the biggest thing that I paid attention to and saw were all the different types of therapists who came forward to share that they have been using this theory as a lens, as a clinical roadmap for years with great success. One therapist was like, I've been using this for 25 years, and I've helped thousands of clients. So I guess for me, when I see something like this, if the question is, is polyvagal theory valid? Do we answer that question by saying, well, what is the white paper research Or do we potentially answer that question by asking how many people has it helped? So for 25 years, if it has been able, this lens, this framework has been able to help thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives, potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, does this paper even really matter? So I will leave you with that question. I know my answer. Answer. So in our model, lived experience gets to be evidence as well. Functional medicine, you guys, we know this, it's all about finding the root cause.
We're like clue detectors, right? And so many clues can be found in someone's story. And our clients come to us with all sorts of vulnerability. You know, if you've ever been to a practitioner, you know, you get this. It takes a lot a lot of guts to share what's going on with you, especially if you've experienced medical gaslighting in the past. If you've been told that your experience isn't real, that it's all in your head, it takes a lot of guts to open up again. So they're coming to us like with their whole chest, sharing what is real and what is true for them. So the way that I see it, if I require evidence-based research to back up what someone is telling me, that is immediately going to close them down. It's going to create a rift in the dynamic, a rift in the rapport, we're gonna lose trust, right? They're gonna close down even more, and no healing is possible when someone is that closed down and closed off.
And sometimes you can even see it in their body language. They're just literally like closed in on themselves, closed down, like they're sending all of the messages like not available for this. Yeah. And so it can be like a process of peeling back layers. The fastest way to close them in is to to be like, I don't believe you. Right? But that— and not that we would say that verbatim, hopefully, but the messages that we send, you know, the messages that we send are more than just the words that we say. So the way that I look at it is I have to believe the person sitting in front of me. And I do believe that lived experience gets to be evidence as well.
And that is a core tenet of intuitive functional medicine. It does not mean, though, that we throw out evidence-based medicine. Like, we're done with you, we don't need you anymore. It's— we don't reject it, we don't delete it, we don't have to throw out that. It's not an either-or, it's an and also. We're also listening to people.
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The big issue here is that when your point of view is erased or invalidated, you learn to silence your internal point of view. If we're constantly being told that our experience isn't real and it doesn't matter, this creates and reinforces lack of trust in ourselves. And this is how so many of your clients are walking around right right now, today, in real time. When we cannot trust ourselves, we have no choice but to reach out to external authorities and external data points. And this is why, part of the reason why so many people go to social media for answers.
And it's like, you know, I'm part of this too. Like, we can kind of tease people for getting their answers or their health advice from wellness influencers. Where else are they supposed to go to get the information if they can't trust them? Themselves, and their doctors aren't really providing much support in answers. It's like, where else can they go? But we know that that can be kind of a slippery slope. So another word for internal point of view, or POV, is interoception. Interoception is your body's awareness of its internal state. It's the sense, one of our senses. We have all these senses— hearing and sight and smell and taste.
This is a sense that our body has of its own internal physiological state. Our interoception Interoception is the ability to be aware of this internal state and our internal sensations in the body, listening to cues coming from inside the body. Now, different people have different levels of interoception. And if you kind of drifted away and you're multitasking, this would be the time to come back to me now, because this is a big one. What happens, we have the insula, which is part of the brain, and it's the brain's primary hub for interoception. So I'm sure many of you guys will talk about this when we talk about the gut-brain axis, but we have messages coming from here and signals coming from here down. And then we also have a crap ton of messages coming from the body up to the brain. And that is communicating to the brain and the central nervous system, hey, here's what's going on here.
Here's what's up. But some of these signals go through the insula, and they basically mix it up with emotion and with past experiences to create meaning. So the insula integrates signals with emotions, with context, with memories to create subjective feelings, not objective, subjective feelings. So we can have the same interoceptive inputs, and they can be either interpreted as safety or as danger based on your perception, based on your beliefs, based on your history, based on what has happened to you in the past, based on how emotionally charged what happened to you in the past was. And so the signals coming from inside the house, so to speak, are not always tied to objective reality. So our sense of safety, for example, is a completely subjective experience. It has nothing to do with our actual reality. And so, like I said, our past experience— this can be chronic stress, this can be trauma, this can be chronic pain— can impact the accuracy in which we interpret these signals and how that information is relayed to the brain.
And when we have a history of chronic stress, trauma, chronic pain, and we're hearing all of the time these messages that like, you're not to be trusted, this is just going to further compound this. So we can see people, and I, I know that like probably like 90% of you guys are going to look at this list and start like thinking of clients like this category, this category, but we can see people with deficient interoception, and then we can also see over active interoception. So deficient interoception or low interoception is kind of disassociating from the sensations inside the body. So they might feel numb, or they might feel cut off, they might feel disconnected. This tends to be more associated with a depressive state. And it is most likely an adaptation from a traumatic time where the mechanism to get through it was to not feel these sensations. I had a client years ago who had a history of severe severe abuse as a child. And I'd be like, how do you feel? How does that feel? And she's like, I literally can't feel anything from the belly button down.
She's like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question. I don't know how to feel it. And she actually ended up in the hospital. Rachel, you probably remember this one. She ended up— it wasn't Rachel's client, it was mine. But I called Rachel in a panic with a bowel obstruction because she literally, she couldn't even feel the sensations that something was wrong down there. So that's an example of how deficient interoception shows up.
Up. Overactive, this is where we tend to see more of like our hypervigilant clients because they become hypersensitive to sensations. They fixate on them. This was me for sure for a long time. They associate with something negative happening. So like the signals are coming up and they're like, bad, bad, bad, problem, alert, alert, alert, something bad's gonna happen. It's linked to fear circuitry in the brain. It tends to be more associated with anxiety.
This is what we can see with IBS, this visceral hypersensitivity. A lot of folks with visceral hypersensitivity, with IBS, feel like normal sensations— there's always going to be movement in the intestines, there's going to be a little bit of gas, there's going to be food moving throughout— that's all normal. But folks with IBS tend to perceive that as painful, and it tends to be linked up with fear. And the body is like, the brain decides like, okay, this is actually pain. So same interoceptive signal, signals that somebody else sitting next to them might have, but they interpret those signals as pain, bad, something bad is happening. So I say all of this and this feels relevant because yeah, we want to get our clients to trust themselves, but this can absolutely be a process of peeling back the layers of conditioning. So we can do this through coaching. We can do this through building rapport.
We really need to be able to recognize like, hey, is my client operating in one of these two extremes? And there are certain practices that can help to train interoception. We're not going to get into that today because time, but I do want to talk about what you can do. I believe in what I've seen, one of the ways that we can teach people to self-source is to showcase that we trust them to make decisions about their own body. This is like something that we're pretty big on here in our practice, but also how we train our practitioners in FNA. So We're referring back to the patient or to the client, like, how does that feel to you? How does that sound to you? What do you think about that? Where do you want to go from here? What feels best? How does your body feel? Okay, we have these two paths that we could go down. Does one seem better than the other? We're kind of like putting the ball in their court sometimes, because there's a fair amount of research to say that what a clinician says about their client's health and ability to feel really impacts somebody's health and ability to heal. So it stands to reason that if we can model to them that we trust them, over time we could help them retrain those self-trust muscles. But in also, there is a fine line between outsourcing to our clients as a way for them to access that self-trust and completely overwhelming them.
And like throwing them to the wolves, to use that Jeanine Roth quote again. We can definitely overshoot here. If we're constantly deferring to the client, we can overshoot. And so back to this, some people are coming to us to be their guides, and if they don't trust themselves at all, if they're more on the deficient side of things and we're saying, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? It's gonna create a little bit of wobble there. It's gonna create a little bit of friction, a little bit of panic. If somebody's in more of that dissociative dissociative state, like that shutdown state, that question is going to like really overwhelm them. And they might not have the ability or the capacity or even the know-how to open up and explain to you that like, this is too much for me and I don't know, and I don't know how to answer these questions. So they're just going to shut down further.
They're going to go deeper into their shell. We don't want that to happen. On the flip side, if they're in that more overactive state and we're like, how do you feel? How do you feel now? How do you feel now? How do you feel now? That might push them further into their own pattern, they might continue to hyperfixate on their feelings and just reinforce those same patterns. So we do kind of have to discern and to know and to kind of gauge, hey, like, where's our client operating at? There has to be a titration process. This is true for anything that we're doing with the nervous system. More is not automatically better. Just like throwing somebody into the deep end of the pool, even if that's what they say they want. I am somebody who's like, throw me into the deep end.
Like, how we do this as quickly as possible. I did a podcast on this, like, I know how to put myself on a gut protocol, you know, like, I know, I was like, yeah, fuck that, I'm just gonna go all the way in. And I had all these reactions, because I just threw myself into the deep end of the pool. But that's more physical body stuff with the nervous system, more is not automatically better. Because we all have our own physical, mental, cognitive, emotional limits. And so we have to recognize when our clients are in their stretch zone. And also recognize when they are tipping into overwhelm, like too much, too fast. Growth happens in the stretch zone, so it's okay for our clients to get a little uncomfortable, to titrate, to like microdose that discomfort.
That's okay. That is actually where we grow. That is how we change. That is how we evolve. We want enough challenge to promote adaptation without pitching them into to overwhelm. So really being able to assess where our clients are in their self-trust journey is so huge. And then together we can work to really build that self-trust up. This is what I really believe, because over time, Rachel and I have talked about this a lot.
Over time, you do kind of just build up these like intuitive hits when you're working with somebody and you're like, it's a mold issue. I know it. And you don't have any like actual rationale to justify. You're like, I feel it. They're just— you feel a little moldy. And I really do think that comes with our own self-trust. And I think reps build self-trust, they build confidence. But like over time, and this is probably frustrating to say to brand new clinicians, like you don't need to like close your eyes and meditate on what's wrong with the client in front of you, you know, but over time, you do get these intuitive hits and you learn to trust them, but really your intuition starts with you.
And that intuition can only land— that clinical insight, that intuitive insight can really only come online when you're fully present. So it really, really starts with you. This starts with everything that you're doing outside of the appointment. I can tell you how to curate a really, really excellent one-on-one appointment with a client, I can't tell you how to live your life outside of this. This honestly starts with your ability to be emotionally regulated, to be fully grounded, to be fully present. I always say your power is in your presence. Like, imagine if I was here trying to teach this class fully distracted. You would feel that if my mind was elsewhere.
You would feel that. You would sense that whenever I'm somewhere, I'm locked in 10 outta 10. Like I'm fully here. I'm where my feet land. People can feel that. So if you are really busy thinking in your head about how your client is going to react, how they're gonna respond, if you're thinking about past mistakes, if you're future tripping, if you're thinking about like anything else that's going on other than just holding space for the client in front of you and what they're talking about, you're not fully present, you know? And so you do have to be fully dropped in to allow that intuition to land. You can't hear your own intuition if there's so much static buildup in your head of your own thoughts, of your own concerns, of your own anxieties, of your own worries. So I always recommend all practitioners have some type of practice themselves.
I always have a grounding practice before I teach any call or before I meet with any client or before I work with anybody to just kind of like drop in. And then I have other practices throughout my day and my week as well. Last slide. In summary, as an intuitive functional medicine practitioner, I see the value in external objective data points like labs, and also I see equal value in our clients' own internal data points. So much of what we teach you guys in FNA is labs. It's how to know what labs to run for your clients, how to interpret them, how to effectively communicate all that information to your client with clarity and precision, but also not overwhelming them, how to organize the data from labs into effective care protocols. But it's also this— it's everything we talked about today. We treat the human being behind the data.
We're addressing the data, but we're also recognizing the human being behind the set of data points. And ultimately, I think what we're really trying to do is lead people back to their own inner healer.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Functional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.