395 Preventing Cancer and Healing Autoimmune, Certified Holistic Nutritionist Elissa Goodman Shares How She Beat Hodgkins Lymphoma, Cured Her Hashimotos and Helps Others Do The Same with Specific Organic Whole Foods, Nutritional Supplements, and Lifestyle

Check out IIN! LearnTrueHealth.com/coach Try the supplements Ashley loves: TakeYourSupplements.com Join the Facebook Group: LearnTrueHealth.com/group

Elissa's Site: https://elissagoodman.com/ Services/Products: -One-on-One counseling (both in-person and virtual via Zoom) -Cancer Hacks book: https://elissagoodman.com/cancer-hacks/ -SOUP Cleanse: https://elissagoodman.com/soup-cleanse/ -7-Day RESET Cleanse: https://elissagoodman.com/7-day-reset/ -Super Seed Bars: https://elissagoodman.com/product/super-seed-bars/

 

Preventing Cancer And Healing Autoimmune With Whole Foods

https://www.learntruehealth.com/preventing-cancer-healing-autoimmune-whole-foods

Highlights:

• Getting second and third opinions are important
• Emotional healing is just as important as physical healing and mental healing
• Healing cancer holistically: emotional, food, supplements, exercise
• Pay attention to what we eat and what upsets our digestive system
• Increase fiber content to flush all the toxins in our system
• Adding fruits to juices increases sugar, better to eat fruits whole
• Sleep is crucial to healing
• Increase water intake
• Avoid processed foods, go for whole foods
• Going organic is important if you have health issues but not all things have to be organic

 

In this episode, Elissa Godman shares with us how she reversed and healed her cancer and autoimmune condition. She shares that getting enough sleeps helps in healing our bodies. Eating the right foods for our body is very important. She also shares distressing helps in healing too.

[0:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love our guest today, Elissa Goodman, and everything she has to share about healing the body, preventing cancer and reversing and healing autoimmune condition. We have such a great conversation and she shares such amazing advice. So you’re going to love it.

As you’re listening, if the thoughts come into your head like, “I wish I could do what she’s doing. I wish I could help people in that level.” Consider looking into the institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s where I got my certification as a health coach. It’s a wonderful program. It is designed to be done online and paced in a way that even busy, working men and women are able to do it, are able to complete it.

I interviewed the founder of that company, Joshua Rosenthal, who’s also one of the instructors there at IIN. He shares that he designed it so that busy stay-at-home moms, while having to manage the entire household and their kids, they’re also able to get the certification and then start their ability to work with clients from home and they can write books, they can teach people how to cook, they can see clients in person. There’s many opportunities. Now, with the new legislature that’s brought into place, health coaching in 2020 will be covered by insurance. So, there’s so many opportunities. This is the fastest-growing field, fastest-growing career in the health field, in the health space.

There’s a huge demand for health coaches and there’s going to be an even bigger demand next year, starting very soon in a few months when it goes into full effect and that health coaches will be covered by medical insurance for those in the United States, which is so wonderful because health coaches make such a huge difference as you hear when Elissa shares the kind of work that she does with her clients. She describes it perfectly what it feels like to be a health coach. To use her words, she helps her clients tune, she tunes them back into themselves because deep inside, the client themselves, at the unconscious level or at the level of intuition, their body knows what it needs. Health coaches help to begin to listen to your own body’s ability to heal itself, begin to listen again to your body crying out the intuition of your body telling you what you really need. Sometimes, we have too much chaos going on and we can’t tap into it. Health coaches help us get there.

So, as you’re thinking about as you’re listening to this episode, as you’re learning from Elissa and my conversation in this interview and you’re thinking, ”I’d love to do that as a career,” call up IIN. Just google IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Give them a call. I organized a discount for all my listeners because it made such a big difference in my life. I knew I’d be talking about it. I know my listeners would want to participate and become certified as health coaches. So I got a discount. It’s $1500.00 off. It’s a huge discount. More recently, they just launched a brand new payment plan that’s a more affordable payment plan, a payment option. So if you think, “I couldn’t spend thousands of dollars.” You don’t have to. It’s about as much as a credit card payment. You can do it and because after six months of the program you’re seeing clients so you start to pay it off within six months and then the year-long program. So some people even have it totally paid off before they even graduate, which is really exciting.

So if you want to become a health coach, look into IIN. Come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and ask me and ask the other listeners who have also participated in IIN about our experience. I love to share more about my experience with you. If you have any questions you can reach out to me through Facebook or you can email me, support@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to share with you. You know what, there’s a ton of IIN grads in the Learn True Health Facebook group and I’m sure they’d love to share with you as well. So come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and check out IIN. You can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach to get a free sample class to see if it would be something that would interest you. After taking that sample class you’ll have a really strong idea as to whether you’d want to take that program or not. So go to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach or you could call them up and ask them some questions, ask them to send you some more information. Make sure you mention the Learn True Health Podcast with Ashley James to get the listener discount.

One more thing, Elissa talks about supplements. I want to let you know that my absolute favorite, favorite supplements are with TakeYourSupplements.com. When you go to TakeYourSupplements.com it’s not like other websites where you buy it without talking to someone. In fact, the only way to get them is to talk to someone. Her name is Jennifer Saltzman. I’ve known her for coming on nine years now. She’s a wonderful, wonderful health coach. She works with a variety of different supplements. These supplements are what my family and I have taken for the last nine years and I absolutely love them. They’re very high-quality minerals. A lot of them are liquid so the body absorbs them really well. They’re all plant-based and they’re all whole foods based. So they’re really wonderful.

A lot of them are very very high quality and I recommend checking it out. Talking with her, talking with Jennifer Saltzman at TakeYourSupplements.com. Just fill out your information. She’s not a salesperson. She doesn’t push. She’s not high pressure. She was never trained in sales. She is a health coach so she’ll talk to you and ask you questions about your health. It’s a free consultation. She’s talking to you for free and then she’s helping you to order the right supplements for you, for your health needs, and for your budget. They’re high-quality supplements that have a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like them, which is unheard of that’s why I love the company that she works with and the quality of then supplements which are designed by naturopaths. I love that she provides that service. She could absolutely charge for her time but she doesn’t because she really wants to help people. She believes that the more people she helps, everyone benefits.

So go to TakeYourSupplements.com and talk to Jennifer Saltzman and get on a really wonderful mineral, trace mineral. It’s life-changing. It was for me especially if you are deficient in trace minerals, you feel it within days. It feels really great. She has a liquid multivitamins so if you think you might be low in your B-vitamins, just try it. Try it for one month and see how you feel. Everyone that I’ve seen get on this supplements has had more energy and more mental clarity and it helps us and do things like make better choices like have more energy to cook healthier food, to get out there and exercise.

So if you’re wondering where you should start, baby steps, one step at a time. Elissa gives lots of great information in today’s interview. One thing that’s really easy that you can implement right now is a great liquid multivitamin, multimineral that you take every day that just helps saturate every cell in your body with the nutrients they need so that they can continue to build healthier and healthier cells. Thank you so much for being a listener of this show. It’s made such a difference in my life to participate in creating this show for you. It’s a labor of love and I love being here for you guys and learning from all these wonderful experts. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group if you haven’t already. It’s a really supportive community of health-conscious people who are looking to help each other and also grow their health themselves. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 395.

 

[0:08:27] Ashley James: I am very excited for today’s guest. We have with us, Elissa Goodman, who has an amazing story. You’re a certified holistic nutritionist, is that right?

 

[0:08:40] Elissa Goodman: That is right.

 

[0:08:41] Ashley James: Yes. We’re going to love learning from you. It’s very timely. I didn’t tell you this before because I wanted to tell you and the listeners at the same time but this interview is dedicated to my friend Barnetty who passed away on the 2nd. I was with her in the hospital. She passed away of –

 

[0:09:09] Elissa Goodman: Are you saying December 2nd?

 

[0:09:11] Ashley James: December 2nd, yeah. I was with her a few days ago. It was standing room only in the hospital, surrounded by friends. We watched her pass away very peacefully. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, I was with her. I was with her for the biopsy. I went to all her doctor’s appointments with her for the first eight months. After eight months of doing holistic medicine and she was on the really, really good path. She totally had stopped the growth of the tumor. It had just completely halted. It was a very aggressive form of breast cancer. After eight months she decided to go chemo and then after chemo decided to radiation and she regretted that so much because the cancer had completely gone away and they convinced her to keep doing chemo and radiation and then all of a sudden it was in every organ system of her body. She fought and fought and fought. She regretted so much going down that path.

It was amazing to watch the amount of fear that the doctors instilled in her and they convinced her. She said, “I just want to do, I want to stop and just see and monitor and see what happens.” They said, “If you do this it’s going to come back and we have to do radiation, we have to do more chemo.” There’s a side-effect. There is a potential side-effect. Chemo and radiation has a potential side-effect of causing cancer and the cancer that ended her life was likely that.

So there was a regret for her but she fought for four years. So when I looked on my calendar because I’ve been a little dazed recovering from losing her, I looked at my calendar and I saw that my next interview was with a woman who healed her body from cancer. I

 

[0:11:03] Elissa Goodman: That’s interesting.

 

[0:11:05] Ashley James: Yeah. You know what, the universe does that many times. It’s been serendipitous many many times. Because people book themselves, they choose the dates. I’ve had on multiple occasions where I’ll get three interviews in a row about heart health and I’m like, “I didn’t schedule that way.” It’s really neat or I’ll get three plant-based doctors in a row. I’ll get multiple kind of just the same topic. I’m sure the listeners think I’m trying to make a series on this one topic. I just invite a bunch of amazing guests to come and they choose when they book themselves and it always seems to work out. It’s funny because I’ve had listeners write me and say, “I cannot believe timing of this conversation. I was just looking for these answers.”

So I know that there’s divine universal intervention and the fact that you are my first interview since losing Barnetty to cancer.

 

[0:12:07] Elissa Goodman: Wow. It does give me the chills.

 

[0:12:09] Ashley James: It does give me the chills. I’m sure she would love, she would have loved hearing your story. So, with that, I just want all of us to take a moment to think about everyone we love and give them all mentally big hugs and gratitude because all of us eventually will not be here. That’s just life.

 

[0:12:35] Elissa Goodman: Right, right. Cycle of life.

 

[0:12:37] Ashley James: We get to determine the quality of our lives and we get to determine the quality of our deaths, hopefully. If it’s not like from an accidents but if it’s from illness we get to choose that based on our daily choices. So you’re going to teach us some amazing things today. The daily choices that we can make that’s going to improve the quality of our lives from years to come. Hopefully even the quality of our death. I was just watching last night a video, a cardiologist that passed away at 104. He stopped working as a cardiologist at 95 but the interview he did was he was 98 years old. He has been a vegan since his 50s. He ate no processed foods, no oil, no salt. He just ate whole foods. He said, “I could still be working right now but I just chose to retire so I could spend more time with my family.” He passed away so peacefully at 104. I wish that on all of us. I wish that on every listener that we are – he was gardening up until he was 104. He was healthy as a horse.

That level of quality of life. His family said he was lucid and awake to the moment he passed away. That he was completely here with us. He didn’t have dementia, he didn’t have heart disease, he wasn’t degenerating. That’s what I want for all of us. That level of health

 

[0:14:05] Elissa Goodman: That’s remarkable. I need to know that –

 

[0:14:09] Ashley James: I’ll send it to you. I’ll post it in the show notes. It’s a great video interview. I’ve seen other clips of this man but he’s one of the cardiologists, the early cardiologist who following like Dr. Esselstyn who I’ve had on the show, this movement of doctors that believe in the whole food, plant-based diet no oil, no processed food at all, no salt, no sugar. They reverse heart disease all the time. They reverse four clogs in the heart. They’re completely gone with diet. They’re going against the grain because they don’t believe that the drugs are helpful. They’ll blatantly say it and these are cardiologists, the MDs. Dr. Esselstyn is in his 80s and is still actively working as a cardiologist in the Cleveland Clinic. So we have to get, always get a seconds opinion, always look to the body’s ability to heal itself, and always believe that the body has a miraculous ability to heal itself. We just need to support it and give it what it needs.

Drugs have their place but the problem is we often will get swept up in the fear-based mentality that some doctors like to instill upon the patients. So I want to empower all of us, myself included, to always support the body’s ability to heal itself with every choice we make. I know, Elissa that you have some amazing information having healed your own body of cancer and then went on to become a holistic certified nutritionist. I know your life goal is to teach all of us how to get that level of the quality of life that we could all live to be 104 gardening in our 100s. Come one. Let’s do it, Elissa. Let’s do it.

 

[0:16:00] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Amen sister.

 

[0:16:01] Ashley James: Yes. Tell us your story.

 

[0:16:04] Elissa Goodman: Well, my story started, interestingly I talked to a lot of my clients about this too, is when I came into the world I actually had a low white blood cell count. So my immune system was compromised at an early age. I remember growing up getting sick all the time. Just everything that was out there if it was tonsillitis going around school or strep throat or mono or just constantly never getting a pass. Always feeling sick. When I was young I had to get blood shots because my white blood cell count was low so I had to get blood shots every 28 days for years. I was in and out of the hospital at an early age.

So I came into the world not strong in my immune system but I also came into the world with two parents who were very successful, very type A, were taking on the world by storm. So that culmination I feel, looking back, was hard on me because I wanted to be where they’re at. I wanted to have the energy and the ability to get the things done that they did in a day and what they’re able to accomplish, which I couldn’t because I was always tired, not feeling well. I was always the behind the eight ball. So it was really rough growing up like that even though I love my parents and I love my childhood but there was that underlying situation going on with my immunity and my emotional well-being. I didn’t feel good enough. I didn’t feel like I could keep up. I didn’t feel like I was worthy. So it was just at an early age, it was a constant battle between the two of them.

Then I actually followed in their footsteps with my job and my career. I would move to New York and worked in a fast-paced advertising business. I thought that’s what I wanted because that’s all I knew and I was always sick also with that because it was late nights. A lot of partying, a lot of just not taking care of myself. I was very addicted to sugar, caffeine, carbs. Also in the days in the 80s and 90s it was all about low-fat cookies and no sugar drinks even though it was all chemically-based. So I’m sure that didn’t do any good things for me. It wasn’t about, in those days, really whole foods and organic things. It wasn’t organic when that was happening. Even when I was diagnosed there wasn’t really organic.

 

[0:18:51] Ashley James: Right. Well, there was 50,000 or 80,000 less chemicals in our environment though.

 

[0:18:56] Elissa Goodman: That’s true. Yes.

 

[0:18:58] Ashley James: There wasn’t organic food in the 80s. Although you could go to maybe a farmers’ market or if a friend had a garden but we didn’t know what organic was in the 80s. But there was significantly less chemicals in our food.

 

[0:19:14] Elissa Goodman: Exactly. Yes, we still had food dyes. We still had some of those unhealthy fats and hydrogenated oils in our food. We still had too much sugar but you’re right. The chemical pesticides on produce wasn’t as bad. You’re right, that was happening.

So what happened was I was living in New York for almost ten years and I met husband there. We are both in the advertising business climbing the corporate ladder. Just we decided we were ready to start a family. We had gotten married and I was like I can’t see myself commuting out of the city on the train an hour back into the city for work. It didn’t feel healthy for me and also I just kind of want to get back west because I grew up in the west coast in Arizona.

So I said to him, “I really want to investigate maybe looking at California, Arizona to have a little bit of a simpler, better life than this crazy New York life that we are living.” We did end up moving to Los Angeles. At that time I ended up getting a job with Vogue magazine, which I thought was a dream job, in the marketing-sales area. Then six months after the job with Vogue magazine I ended up getting diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I always do that. My husband had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had a Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

 

[0:20:46] Ashley James: Is one worse than the other?

 

[0:20:48] Elissa Goodman: It just depends – they say non-Hodgkin’s is a little worse because it has different stages of lymphoma like large B-cell, follicular. There’s combinations of lymphoma cells that are combined for the non-Hodgkin’s where Hodgkin’s is just disease in lymphatic system. It doesn’t have the different forms. So it just depends on how far along either of these because I know people who have passed away from both.

I had an early stage but I didn’t know what my symptoms were because basically I always felt crappy. So I was getting a massage from a woman and I was sitting upright. She was massaging my neck and my collar bone and she felt a lymph node in the crevice of my collarbone. She’s like, “Wow. You’re really not supposed to have a swollen lymph node there. You should just get that checked out.”

So a week later I did go to the doctor, just a general practitioner. He felt it. I’ll never forget this moment because he felt it and he was like he’s face just went completely blank and it was like, “Oh my God. This could be cancer.” That’s what he says to me. I was just like, “whoa.” Doctor’s really don’t have a great bed-side manner a lot of times to throw that out there into your face without having further knowledge of anything. I did end up going to get a biopsy and it was an early stage of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

But just the way that I was treated along the way with the oncologist, with the general practitioner, it was very fear-based like you were talking earlier. It was like, “Oh my God. Oh my God. You’re going to have to do chemo, radiation and you haven’t had kids yet so you’re probably going to have to freeze your eggs. Do you have a donor because we might have to do a stem-cell transplant with a donor?” This was way before this was staged. It was just like, “Hold on you guys. This is way too much information for me to absorb.” I’m already freaking out that I have cancer. Secondly that cancer instills the fear that you could die. Thirdly, all of these treatments that I know nothing about really at the time are scaring the living daylight out of me.

So I had seen two oncologists. Then a friend said, “I want you to go see a radiologist at another hospital in LA.” I’m like, “Oh my God. I can’t go get another third opinion.” I was just so done at that point. She’ like, “Please, please. Go see him.” I did, reluctantly. He sat me down. It was staged at the time. It was an early stage. He asked me, “Are you happy? Do you love what you do? What’s going on in your life? How stressed are you on a scale of 1 to 10? Emotionally, what’s going on?” I was like, “Oh my God.” I burst into tears. No one had ever asked me that really. I was like, “I’m miserable. I’m in a job that’s over my head. I don’t feel very well. I never have. I have all these emotions sort of stirred up inside me. Those feelings of insecurity and not feeling good enough.” It was just the flood of emotion happening in his office and he just hugged me.

He goes, “You know what, we need to get you into therapy.” I did. I went into therapy at that time. He basically just helped me on the emotional component, which was so big. Then I jumped into reading everything I could about just healing holistically with cancer. I knew I wasn’t going to go completely go holistically but I decided to not do chemo because it really scared me with my immune system I was petrified of it. I did half the radiation that they recommended. My oncologist that I was going to fired me because he said, “You’re not doing what I recommend and if this comes back it could be lawsuit material.” I’m like, “okay.”

So I went to find an oncologist, a radiologist and he did the radiation. My gut instincts are like, “Baby, I’m going to kick this sucker. It’s an early stage. I’m going to change my lifestyle. Deal with my emotions.” That’s when a lot of things changed for me. I started juicing. There was one juice place blocks from where I live in Los Angeles. There was Mrs. Gooch’s which is Whole Foods today, which was a grocery that was so beautiful. The produce was beautiful. Things were healthier. There was a lot to offer in LA at the time. So I just dove into all that.

I went to see a naturopath. I went and got [unintelligible]. I’m an Aries. Aries kind of like they just dive in and they do everything they can and sometimes without thinking. But I was determined. I got into yoga. I did a lot. I did too much basically but I did heal. I basically healed and then I went on to have two healthy girls. Not without some complications because after the radiation because they radiated my thyroid, I got hypothyroidism Hashimoto’s. That took three-four years to diagnose. So that was a little tricky.

I had gut issues. I had a lot of stuff after the treatment. But I did have two girls and then 11 years later my husband, at 43 ½ was diagnosed with non-Hodkin’s lymphoma.

 

[0:26:49] Ashley James: Can I stop you right there? I got questions about your – so you went for chemo and radiation?

 

[0:26:59] Elissa Goodman: No. I decided not to do the chemo. I said no to the chemo and I did half the radiation they recommended.

 

[0:27:06] Ashley James: So what happened? You were like, how many sessions was that? Like six sessions?

 

[0:27:11] Elissa Goodman: Six sessions. Yeah.

 

[0:27:13] Ashley James: So you did six. What happened on your sixth? Why did you stop?

 

[0:27:16] Elissa Goodman: Well, no. I just decided – basically they wanted me to do it right. They wanted me to do 12. At six my lymph node was completely gone. I just decided that, the radiologist was on board with me with the six sessions. So it wasn’t like I was just going. I wasn’t going into the wild wild west without any help and guidance. My radiologist that I had taken on was on board with me in regards to not completely frying myself. When I didn’t need to.

 

[0:27:51] Ashley James: When you were doing the six radiation sessions that made the lymph node go away, you had also implemented all these other things at the same time right?

 

[0:28:00] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. I did.

 

[0:28:01] Ashley James: How do you know it was for sure just the radiation or you think it was a combination of everything? Or you’re like, “Okay. I’m good. I’m just going to keep doing all these natural stuff.”

 

[0:28:13] Elissa Goodman: No. I mean I don’t recommend people just going natural of course, I won’t preface that.

 

[0:28:20] Ashley James: We should always work with the doctor that we trust and get second and third opinions. It’s just the question when we do the shotgun approach, which we often do when it’s something, when it’s a serious illness, right? We want to do the shotgun approach but there’s always that question of what worked? If someone had just done radiation and not worked on all the emotions and not started eating healthy and not changed anything of their lifestyle that led to the cancer in the first place would the radiation have been effective with six sessions or they needed 12 or would they needed that and chemo and the would’ve died anyway. So the question is –

 

[0:28:59] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Good question.

 

[0:29:00] Ashley James: What really helps the body heal cancer?

 

[0:29:05] Elissa Goodman: Well now years later, many many years, I’m working with a lot of cancer clients I could tell you what does heal the cancer now. Then I wasn’t sure. But one of my favorite cancer books that came out maybe two-three years ago is called Radical Remission. Do you know it? It’s by Kelly Turner. She did her PhD for ten years. She interviewed stage IV cancer cases. They all healed holistically. None of them did western meds. She came up with ten modalities. Seven of them emotional. The eighth one was food. The ninth one was supplements. The tenth one was exercise.

So, in a nutshell, I think it comes down to when working with clients and seeing what happened with my husband who passed away a year and a half after his diagnosis and what you are saying with the fear factor, I think that what it is – we have, our subconscious is fully downloaded by the age of seven. So we operate, you and I operate today 90-95% out of our subconscious. So if we had any trauma going on in those early years and it doesn’t potentially have to just be those early years. But that subconscious is fully set on those early years. If we had death, divorce or people saying you’re not smart enough or you’re not pretty enough or could just be depending on if you’re a sensitive soul and you come into the world or people are slighting you that could be traumatic for you. There’s all kinds of things that go on in our lives when we come into the world. Maybe it’s not a safe household and parents are not getting along. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on. It depends on the person too that our subconscious is consistently sending us messages. We’re not good enough. We’re not good enough. We’re not pretty enough. We’re never going to be smart enough. It down-regulates our immune system. I think in a nutshell.

 

[0:31:14] Ashley James: Yeah. Every time we’re triggering the sympathetic nervous system response going into fight or flight, any stress or emotional, anything perceived as a threat. Even a cultural threat or a community-based threat. So that unconscious fear of being rejected from the tribe because that meant death to us. So even being bullied on social media. So it can totally emotional but that would absolutely trigger the stress response and thus affect the immune system.

 

[0:31:50] Elissa Goodman: Absolutely. I think it’s that in a nutshell or living in fear consistently. Or it shuts down the digestive system when you’re stressed as we know. Even if you’re drinking healthy juices and eating kale salads you might not absorb nutrients from that healthy food.

 

[0:32:10] Ashley James: If you’re in stress mode because we don’t digest when we’re in stress.

 

[0:32:14] Elissa Goodman: Exactly. Yeah. Liver doesn’t work properly to detox the toxins out of the system or to turn them into a safe form to get them out of the body. Yeah. Everything kind of shuts down. I lived in fight or flight my entire life. I was always in that mode. Yeah. I was still in fight or flight when I dove into all these things. I mean, honestly I feel grateful and I think I was just really lucky that I don’t which of those things really did help me. I think a combination of them did. But I think I also dove in and went on worth living because my life is worth it and I have a lot of years to live and I definitely want to live them. I wasn’t ready to go. I think that’s a big thing. I think my husband who passed away, his dad died of two of cancer of melanoma. I will never know to this day if that was in his subconscious that he just thought cancer was death and that was it. But he was in a fear-based mode for a year and a half and never got out of it. I don’t think he thought that he could live. I think there was a part of him that was like, “This is going to get me. I’m going to try not to let me down.”

The same thing happened to him that happened to your girlfriend. In a year and a half he had two stem-cell transplants, his own and a donor, which is really unheard of. Every time that cancer came back in his blood he was getting hardcore chemo. He did of fungal pneumonia. He didn’t die of cancer. He died because his immune system was compromised. So these treatments, yes they can work but I think the biggest thing we have to focus on these days is the love we have for ourselves, the self-worth we have, the honoring ourselves that we’re good enough, and that we’re worth of a really beautiful life because I think a lot of clients and myself included didn’t feel that way. I didn’t even know what loving myself felt like. When I ask my client these days, “Do you love yourself?” 99% say no. What does that look like? What does that feel like? They don’t even know.

 

[0:34:53] Ashley James: Early on when I first started this podcast, it’s way back, somewhere in the first 20 episodes, I interviewed a mental health counselor. Actually I interviewed two mental health counselors. It’s like four interviews in total. I did two interviews with each. So it’s way back in the first interviews of the show. One of them said, and it just floored me almost fell off my chair, “If you were to look at your relationship with yourself, like a relationship a couple has, you’d call the cops on yourself.” I was like, “You’re right.” He goes, “You would never talk to a love one the way you talk to yourself.”

 

[0:35:33] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. True.

 

[0:35:35] Ashley James: When we really look at it, how much compassion are we giving ourselves? We’ll self-medicate to help us feel better. We’ll binge Netflix late at night instead of giving our bodies the sleep it needs or drink wine or eat sugar or whatever way to numb emotions instead of face them. We’ll make excuses for not going to the gym or we’ll make excuses for eating out instead of eating a home-cooked meal. But if we had a child that we are taking care of we’d be like, “No, I’m not going to feed you fried restaurant food every day. No, I’m not going to let you stay up until two in the morning binging Netflix. No, I’m not going to let you eat a pint of ice cream. Of course I’m going to take you to the park so you can get a lot of exercise.” We treat other people better that are in our charge than we do our own body and our body’s in our charge as well. Then the body’s like, “The only body we’re going to have this lifetime.” So it’s like the coat we put on and we have to take care of this coat for 104 years, right? We have to make it last. We really need that wakeup call, myself included, why are we treating ourselves this way?

 

[0:37:00] Elissa Goodman: I mean, I don’t mean to laugh at it. It’s just we get on an airplane and we’re told to put the oxygen mask on first. I wonder if we’re in that situation if we really would do it.

 

[0:37:11] Ashley James: Well, that’s what they have to tell us. They actually put little cartoons on the thing that show you doing it. It’s just like because it would go completely against our instinct. We would be making sure everyone else has an oxygen mask on first and then we pass out. That makes us a danger to others around us.

 

[0:37:34] Elissa Goodman: Yes. It does. It does. I know today that with having a family and having a second family, if I’m not in a good place emotionally and if I’m stressed and not feeling well and not sleeping and all of those things, the rest of the household just really pays the price. Everybody is off kilter. Because women, yes women a lot of times and I’m not saying that men don’t, but a lot of times a woman do set the tone for the house and how happy it is, how safe it is, how calm it is. We aren’t doing that these days. We are creating an unsafe very stressful environment. We are really doing it to service to our kids and to even our love ones. I mean I think that we’re brought and we still are being brought up that we are supposed to take care of everybody else before ourselves. It’s really not okay at all. There’s no part of that that is okay. I know I still struggle with it at my age, at 59. I have never felt better in my entire life. Because I have started to take care of myself and love myself and honor myself and really be selfish but hopefully not in a selfish way where I’m disregarding the people that I love in my life. I see the benefits because I just have so much energy. I don’t get sick. I’m very mentally clear. I sleep really well. I have really beautiful intimate relationships. I just love life. But it took me a long time to get there. So my goal of course these days is to help people get there sooner than I did.

I didn’t live a healthy life for many years. But now at 59 I feel fantastic. So, I’m trying to tell and teach people like, “You can get there. Yes, you don’t feel good now but that’s not your destiny. Yes, you have cancer now but that doesn’t have to be your destiny. Cancer doesn’t mean death. Cancer doesn’t mean that your life is going to be endlessly health issues. Your body can heal itself. I mean, if stage IV cancer can heal holistically, you can heal from these ailments. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen clients heal. I’ve seen clients go in for radiation and not get radiation and the tumor shrink.”

 

[0:40:22] Ashley James: I’m sorry. Can you say that again? They went in for radiation but they didn’t get the radiation?

 

[0:40:28] Elissa Goodman: They didn’t. It was a placebo effect. It’s studies that have been done. I mean placebo is all over the place. We know that if we think we’re healing most of the time, we are healing as we are talking about with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. If we’re in rest mode we are healing. If we are not in rest mode we are not healing. So it can be as simples as that. If we are constantly pumping out cortisol and adrenaline from our adrenals, we are not in the mode to heal. Bottom line, I try to teach people that it doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a hyperbaric chamber in your house or an infrared sauna. Expensive things. What helps us heal is getting back on our body and teaching ourselves to distress whatever manner that might be. If that’s doing yoga or doing mediation or it’s doing breath work or it’s journaling. There’s some beautiful things out there these days where we can get out body to be definitely relax our central nervous system and our vagus nerve and get ourselves back into a place where we’re back into our body. A lot of times, I see my clients where their head is disconnected from their body.

So, to get us back into feeling our intuition and our gut instincts because they’re very strong because we know what to do for ourselves. We know when we’re stressed. We know when we need sleep. We know when we need better food, right? We came into the world with incredible instincts. We just lost sight of them but they’re still there. Sleep is crucial because our body resets between 10 PM and 2 AM but we don’t get to bed at 10 PM usually. We’re up until two watching Netflix or binging on the Netflix or something. We lose those four hours of resetting. We can’t regain those. That’s the problem. We can’t sleep in until ten and hope that it’s going to help us. That doesn’t work like that.

 

[0:42:54] Ashley James: It’s not regenerative sleep. Even if we did sleep in it’s not the kind of regenerative sleep we need.

 

[0:43:00] Elissa Goodman: It’s things that the stress is crucial, the sleep is crucial. We’re such a dehydrated society but then we have all these bottled water out there and all the bottled water we’re buying but we’re drinking it and peeing it out because we’re not absorbing it because we don’t have the minerals in our body to help the water go into the cells. We’re very dehydrated. We get up and we go right for that coffee in the morning. We don’t even drink water after our body’s been detoxing and cleansing throughout the night and it’s super dehydrated. Just getting up and drinking two cups of water is a beautiful thing before you drink your coffee or any caffeine drinks.

 

[0:43:45] Ashley James: That’s the catch 22 is that’s the self-medication because we are so dehydrated, lacking sleep, lacking minerals, lacking nutrients, full of stress. So then we need to self-medicate in the morning just to get started. That masks the symptoms our body’s trying to. The symptoms are the language of the body. So many naturopaths have said that the body whispers to us first. We need to listen to that language of the body. If we listen to these symptoms, for example my friend Barnetty a year before her cancer diagnosis her body started giving her some really weird symptoms. Sometimes we ignore these symptoms.

My mom passed away of liver cancer when I 22 was years old. She ignored her symptoms and she chalked them up to things like post-menopause, I’m stressed because she had just closed her business and retired early. She was in her 50s. She retired. She moved. She sold the house then moved to a condo then we sold the condo and then they moved to Florida. It was just like so much that stress. But she was chalking up all her physical symptoms. My mom was so healthy. She was always physically fit. She exercised six days a week. She did step classes, spinning, pilates, weightlifting. She took supplements. She went to naturopaths. She did all these healthy stuff and then her MD talked her into a bunch of meds to get her to go to sleep, meds for hormones, which were non-bioidentical hormones. As she was dying in the hospital, those meds were taken off the market. The hormones that her doctor had her on were taken off the market in Canada for causing too much cancer.

So maybe if she was not in a stressed state, maybe if she had taken a more easy, maybe her immune system would’ve been stronger and not have gotten cancer. That’s possible. Maybe if she had not gotten on that med and not listened to that doctor and instead maybe taken her hormonal advice from a naturopath who would’ve given her some herbs, maybe… So there’s so many maybes, right? We can always hindsight it. But her body was telling her symptoms for a long time before it led to cancer but we often will override them by self-medicating or by writing it off, brushing it off as normal. We drag ourselves to the mud and we just drag our bodies through the mud putting everyone else’s needs first and downplaying our own needs.

I was just helping a family member, take them to the emergency room about a month ago. The doctors said there, “Why didn’t you come in three days ago when your symptoms first started?” Not in a mean tone at all. He’s very nice. He just wanted to know why. She said, “You know, I thought it would get better.” He said, “That is the number one thing I hear.” He asks every patient and the number one thing people say is, “I think it might get better and I just wouldn’t want to go to the hassle of going to the clinic or going to see a doctor about it.” Because you don’t want to be that person who’s like, “My toe hurts,” and then the doctor looks at you like, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Go home.” Which some doctors might do even if there is something wrong so that’s always good to get second opinion.

But this is where listening to your intuition like you said, tap into your intuition and don’t be worried about being a bother. Some people are worried that it would be too troublesome. “I’m going to bother the doctors and I don’t need to and they’re going to think I’m silly.” Forget it. Your body has these symptoms for a reason. If your car made weird noises, you’d take it to a mechanic hopefully. It’s the listening in when it’s still a whisper.

 

[0:47:54] Elissa Goodman: Right. That’s why I was saying, intuition, those instincts because they were really strong when they were born. We lose sight of them because when we grow up we have people in our life saying, “Oh no. You shouldn’t feel that way,” or “No. That’s not the way it will happen.” We do know, I do know honestly when I’m making the right choice or not making a right choice. It doesn’t mean that I make wrong choices but I know. My instincts are speaking very loudly to me even with food now because I’m so tuned in to it because of what I do. I can drink cashew milk for instance but if I have a handful of cashews, my stomach is a mess. Sometimes I’ll just crave those nuts and I’ll have a handful of cashews and I’ll be a mess. I’m like, “Damn, girl. I know better.” But if we tap in more often than not it doesn’t mean we’re going to be perfect.

Yes. Our body is speaking to us. It totally is telling us everything we need to know. I basically love where medicine is going a bit more these days because the integrative functional naturopaths are really incredible because they’re doing blood tests and they’re actually spending time with their clients. Mind do here in LA. Finding out about the emotional well-being and their upbringing and if they’re natural childbirth or C-section because sometimes we know that the gut plays a large part in our immune system of course. Also what happens with our serotonin and our mood. Sometimes C-section babies, they don’t have enough microbiome. But they ask these questions. It’s like, “Wow. That is amazing.” Because we can go way back and see what the history is like. Is the immune system not been that strong? Is the emotional stress been intense through their life? Have they taken some hardcore drugs like you were saying? Maybe it’s the birth control pills have wreaked a lot of havoc with gut bacteria. It’s Accutane that kids take for the – even over the counter drugs: Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, they’re all causing havoc with our microbiome. Even anti-histamines are some of the worst.

So today, it’s very cool that a lot of doctors are knowing that these things have some issues and they can ask clients and I can ask clients, “Give me your history. What have you done over your lifetime? Have you taken a lot of these things?” We could kind of get to the more, to the root cause of why they’re having certain symptoms. Maybe even why they have cancer. I do believe we have microscopic cancer cells in our body. I just think that. We have toxins. We have pesticides. We have heavy metals probably and some mold and parasites. Not to scare anybody.

 

[0:51:04] Ashley James: It’s okay. We talk about parasites all the time on the show.

 

[0:51:07] Elissa Goodman: I think that they are just lying dormant there. Viruses, they lay dormant in the body and then when sort of the perfect storm happens, they can raise their ugly. That’s when these things come to fruition and you’re like, “Holy. Why wasn’t I taking better care of myself for those years?” Sometimes, people just don’t know how to take better care of themselves. They’ve never been taught. They don’t know what it looks like, right, Ashley?

 

[0:51:39] Ashley James: Right. Right. My dad was an Aries so I know he was like you. He was just, “Go, go, go, go, go.” He had this thing where he believed that the mind-body connection was so strong that when he was six, so he got a cold or a flu or whatever, he would tell his body he wasn’t sick. He would tell his body he’s healthy and he just plowed through it. He’d be lying in bed with 105 fever just delusional being like, “I’m fine. I’m just going to get up tomorrow. I’m just going to sweat it out and get up tomorrow and I’ll be fine.” He really believed in the mind-body connection, which is a mind-body connection. We can have a positive belief system about our healing. He would use it in a more negative way to deny his body care that it needed and he wouldn’t actually sit and rest. His brother, my uncle, died suddenly in our family factory. He completely shut down. His body just shut down. He got pneumonia. He needs to take six months off. That was the first time I ever saw him take a break in his life. He was just so depressed. He would go, go, go, go, go A-type personality and then he hit a wall. His body said, “I can’t handle this. You can’t keep going at a millions miles per hour and have these emotions. You just have to shut down.” So that was my example.

Then my other example, growing up we look at both our parents for lessons. So on one hand I’m looking at my dad like, “You can just rule yourself healthy and go, go, go and just eat your emotions and ignore your body. Your mind is so strong you can plow through it. Just have coffee and keep going. Who needs sleep anyway?” Then my mom, Taurus, A-type personality, slower than my dad but driven, a bull. She going to just push through slowly. She had a routine. She was fierce. She would get up at six in the morning. She would do the same thing every day: have the protein shake, do her makeup or no. She would go to the gym then do her makeup, go to work for like 12 hours because she ran her own business, then come home super late at night totally exhausted and do it all over again day after day after day.

So I watched both of them and then they’d crash on the weekends. Weekends were like they were just dead. Back then there was no internet. You couldn’t actually work on the weekends. If they could’ve worked on the weekends they would’ve kept going, right? This is my example of health. It’s just you go, go, go, ignore your body, you’re a machine and then you just crash. So when it came to like have vacation, we would take three weeks off in the wintertime because that’s when their businesses, no own was working. So thank God. No one was working so they couldn’t work because they both own their businesses.

The first week of vacation was just them totally collapsed. They couldn’t even enjoy themselves, right? It’s like, how much enjoyment are you getting out of life by just plowing through it and ignoring your body? My mom died at 55. My dad died at 62.

 

[0:54:48] Elissa Goodman: Wow. So sorry. You’ve had a lot of death around you. Whoa.

 

[0:54:55] Ashley James: I share it because –

 

[0:54:59] Elissa Goodman: And it’s too young.

 

[0:55:00] Ashley James: It is very young for me to lose my parents. They were very passionate. I carry on everything I learn from them. I’m using it as an example because we can look at our own lives and look at how we treat our bodies and look at the room for improvement because no matter how much self-care we do, I think there’s always room for improvement. There’s always blind spots. My parents had blind spots. I’m sure they would differently if they had the hindsight. They really believed they were going to live well into their 80s. Genetically, they could have. I have family members on both sides that are almost 90. Genetically, they could have done it and that’s where lifestyle comes into play. Genes are just the blueprints. The nutrition aspect, like you said, we have to have the minerals to get the hydration into the cells, right? If you don’t, it doesn’t matter what kind of genes you have whether your whole family has cancer in the history or not. It’s about the level of lifestyle and nutrition you’re dealing with now.

Obviously, you had this tragedy you losing your husband. Where did you go from there? You were obviously in shock. That was very quick to have lost him from diagnosis to his death was, did you say was 18 months?

 

[0:56:34] Elissa Goodman: Yes. It was a year and a half. Yeah.

 

[0:56:35] Ashley James: So it’s very quick and he was fighting but you saw that it is belief system. He didn’t work on his belief system. That he sort of had this belief that this is a death sentence.

 

[0:56:45] Elissa Goodman: Yes. I think that he was very type A as well and was also one of those that power through like didn’t watch his symptoms, didn’t pay attention. So there was like months and months went on where he had swollen lymph nodes on his neck, didn’t take care of them. So, yeah. I’m not that. If he had taken care of it potentially at the beginning maybe it could’ve been a different outcome.

 

[0:57:18] Ashley James: All we can do is learn. All we can do is learn from the past. We can’t hold ourselves to this regret. For so long after my mom’s passing, I blamed myself for her death, which is crazy to do for a 22-year-old. To think, “If only I had done this for my mom.” I was just grasping at straws because I guess I wanted to make sense of it and I ended up feeling guilty for her death and blaming myself. I did a ton of emotional work. I’ve spent years in the healing and gaining great perspective. I feel very healthy about my childhood, about my past and about my relationship with my mom and her death. I feel like I’ve come to a very place now because I’ve done that work. I can see that even now at Barnetty’s passing, I caught myself going into that, “I could’ve done this. I could’ve done that.” I just become the observer and seeing that self-talk and not letting it take hold of me but just observing it. Going, “Isn’t that interesting this thought process. It’s not the truth.” What do they say? Feelings aren’t facts. It’s just the thought. This thought isn’t true. It’s okay, I can have this thought but I’m not going to let this become a truth for me. I could not control her like I can’t control anyone, I can only control myself. I couldn’t have controlled the outcome no matter how much I wanted to, obviously.

 

 

[0:58:51] Elissa Goodman: Same. Same with him. That’s the same. I mean, I tried to bring in some holistic things into his regime but it was hard because the doctors were speaking another language. They’re like, “Yeah. That’s not going to help. None of that healthy food, the juicing, all that stuff. That’s not going to help.”

 

[0:59:11] Ashley James: “Nurturing the body, giving it all the raw building blocks it needs to build healthy cells. That’s not going to help. You need hardcore drugs and chemicals.”

                                                  

[0:59:19] Elissa Goodman: Right. To just demolish your body and demolish all the cells, the good, the healthy and the not healthy cells. I know. Interestingly afterwards, a girl friend of mine was into the EMFs, the magnetic frequencies. He wanted to come over the house after he passed away to actually test the house. Because we had taken an old home in Los Angeles and we remodeled it. She just have this feeling that she didn’t feel right about the, there might be too many EMFs in the house. She was actually completely right. She came over with her meter and shockingly, when we tested it on his side of the bed, the EMFs were off the chart.

We’re not sure of course exactly what caused that. I do know that we had built on our master bedroom. Sometimes what happens is his wires aren’t grounded properly. There’s all kinds of things that go on. So interestingly, yes, on my side of the bed it was normal. On his side of the bed, it was off the charts high.

 

[1:00:33] Ashley James: I’ve interviewed a few building biologists. I’ve had some handful EMF interviews. Sal La Duca was the first one I did. He’s like a PhD electrician or something. His credentials are off the charts and he has some amazing stories to share about the home and EMFs. How he’ll be invited into a home and just like you said, on one side of the bed will be cancer-causing EMFs or something similar. But he’s had some amazing experiences but he can actually explain why it happens. Because he’s an electrician or like an electrician engineer or something like that. I know I’m saying his credentials wrong but it’s very academic and can absolutely explain the science why.

That so many homes that we think we’re safe but it can be whole neighborhoods. He says the problem can actually start at the transformer for an entire neighborhood. So a transformer, I guess we’re naïve. We assume our food is safe, our home is safe, our electricity is safe. But he shares many horror stories and also the resolution of them were the transformer. The problem is outside the home but it was effecting every single home in the neighborhood and that everyone’s health was affected. If you’re again ignoring your body, you’re self-medicating with coffee and sugar and alcohol or whatever, then you’re not listening to your body. You may not realize that you feel worse when you’re at home and better when you’re away from the house.

 

[1:02:20] Elissa Goodman: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I know. I agree that all this stuff – even with the mold issues with the people homes. I definitely see a lot of that too. Thank God we’re making them aware of these things, the EMFs. Trying to talk to people about 5G which is really sort of detrimental to our health. The mold issues and let’s say the heavy metals. I’m constantly having my clients get tested for pesticides and heavy metals and molds just to see if there’s any underlying currents that we need to take care of because those underlying currents are what cause inflammation to happen and a lot of times too causes the body to go into that mode that the cells won’t actually replicate in a healthy way. Plus getting nutrient deficiency tests done to see what nutrients not just piling on all the nutrients and going out and buying all these millions of supplements that there are today with fillers and synthetics, which drive me crazy as well.

Just really finding out at the root level what nutrients you are deficient in and taking care of that. Just by doing that and doing a really a deep-dive in your blood counts, your thyroid, your adrenals, your hormones, what’s really going on with your cortisol, your vitamin D can be life-changing. In those days when I was going through all these and when my husband was going through it they didn’t do any of that.

 

[1:04:05] Ashley James: Yeah. Something as simple as vitamin D. Having healthy levels of vitamin D is a huge cancer preventer. They’re seeing that people who are chronically low in vitamin D are far more likely, I don’t know the statistics but it was shocking, far more likely to get cancer if you have chronic low vitamin D. It’s also an indication. Early on I have an episode. These episode have been bumped off of iTunes because iTunes only last for 300 and we’re approaching 400 but they’re all on my website LearnTrueHealth.com. I have an early interview early on all on vitamin D, the entire episode by a naturopath all in vitamin D.

It’s fascinating how our body makes it. I just thought it was like sunlight hits our skin and then we have vitamin D. I didn’t know anything else. That our liver’s involved, our kidney’s involved, our cholesterol levels are involved. Obviously, sunlight being that final step. Our body needs sunlight on direct naked skin but that’s if we have kidney issues or liver issues or not enough healthy cholesterol, those are all factors that need to come into play to make vitamin D levels. Then we have to look at like what if low vitamin D is not the problem but the symptom of a problem?

So coming back even before that, why is the body not producing enough vitamin D? Besides the fact that we’re not getting enough sunlight, even in the summertime people are vitamin D deficient. So what’s going on is the body deficient in the healthy cholesterol. Why is the body deficient in healthy cholesterol? Are the kidneys functioning correctly? Is the liver functioning correctly? What other the co-factors are missing? Kind of creeping back and trying to go sort of upstream, what is actually causing? Where is the beginning? What is this dysfunction? Where did it all start that has this? Because we’re just doing a blood test of something and we’re treating just take the vitamin D supplement. Well, if your underlying problem is a kidney issue or a liver issue or the low healthy cholesterol, I mean great to take a vitamin D supplement but that’s again just masking a symptom. That’s not digesting the root cause.

 

[1:06:21] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. I know. I think what it feels scary these days for a lot of people and for me too sometimes is the internet and Google. That’s very overwhelming. I mean, I know when I was going through all these I didn’t have that so it had to be searching through books or talking to doctors. Google can really screw us up. Because you can just go on and plug in what are the symptoms of low vitamin D. You have some of these symptoms and buy the vitamin D. Even go on, you know, watch me on Instagram and I’m like, “Hey, everybody. Vitamin D is really important because of these reasons.” Then a lot of my followers will go out and buy that buy that vitamin D. I’m like, “Maybe you don’t need it. Have you check to see,” like you were saying, “if you really do need it and what’s going on with you an what are the other factors happening for the reasons why you might think you might need it?”

We’ve done a disservice. There’s a [bend] through ourselves with all the information out there too because people are very confused at what direction they should be going these days and what is going to make them healthy and what isn’t going to make them healthy. That’s a whole other. The supplement market is just really out of control. The super foods that are out there. The combinations of things. A lot of them have fillers and synthetics in them that aren’t so great for you.

 

[1:07:58] Ashley James: Well, I would propose that the pharmaceutical industry is out of control and that people are desperately seeking less poisonous. Anytime that there is a demand, people are going to try to fill that demand. There’s companies that are ethical and companies that are looking to make a profit off of us because it’s the wild west out there but we want it to be. If the supplement industry was regulated, which it’s not, if it was regulated then it would be completely controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. We want to protect our ability to gain access to supplements. We just have to be educated consumers. So we have to find the supplement companies that are ethical, that don’t do skip-batch testing, they test every batch with a third-party lab, that they publish those findings. Like you said, they don’t have the fillers. That they’re willing to be that open book and show us that they’re ethical. There are out there. There’s supplements out there.

Then you go to Walmart or whatever. You go to some kind of Bartells, Walgreens whatever and you’re just like, “Oh. Here’s vitamin whatever. Let’s pick it off the shelf.” I have a friend who is doing his premed in Michigan. He in one of his classes did a really fun science experiment. They went, it was for chemistry or something, but they went out and they bought vitamin C off of every brand they could get. Any kind of over the counter so went to a bunch of pharmacies. Went to a bunch of big box stores and bought every single kind of vitamin C, every brand they could find. They went and they tested it. They had equipment that they could test the purity of it. There were brands that had zero vitamin C in it that claim that it’s a 100 mg tablet or whatever, 1000 mg tablet. There’s some that have no vitamin C that are just all flavoring. There are some that have half the amount of vitamin C. None of them were pure and none of them were what they actually said was on the label.

I know that they’ve done a study and you could Google this that they were studying gingko biloba and they found that most of them had lower levels than were published on the label and some had no gingko biloba, which is an herb. So it is buyer beware, which I agree. I think it’s coming from a demand that the consumers are sick and tired of being sick and also sick and tired of being given drugs for absolutely every symptom. We’re kind of just like blindly flailing our arms grabbing at whatever we can and sometimes it’s low-quality supplements. Then people say supplements don’t work and they’re given a bad rap, which is unfortunate because really high-quality supplements are life-changing. They have been for me.

 

[1:11:06] Elissa Goodman: Yes. They are for me too. They absolutely are for me too. I know. There are some really great ones. I’m a supplement junkie for some reason. I got into all of that years ago and just over the years I’ve love to try everything. I’m always searching the highest quality products and companies. Yeah. I do. They have been life-changing for me. Definitely. Certain supplements I feel that are important for us to take because I’ve noticed over the years with working with clients how well they do on them on some of the simplistic ones like a probiotic. I mean I think we all need a better beneficial microbiome. There’s controversies about the probiotic. Do they work? Do they not work?

I’ve seen year after year with people putting them on really good high-quality probiotics, their digestive issues go away. They digest their food better. Their weight is affected, their sleep, their mood, everything, their immunity. So there just really are things that are important out there that people should be taking but making sure that they are the highest quality.

 

[1:12:24] Ashley James: Yeah. I know the controversy about probiotics is interesting. They say that after 30 days of taking a probiotic that they couldn’t find the actual probiotics culture in the gut. Because we thought, “Just take a bottle and it will repopulate your gut and it will always stay there.” But they’re actually finding that after you complete a course of probiotics, that they don’t live much longer in the gut after we’ve taken it.

I had a naturopath, he’s in research side of things, on the show talking about probiotics. But he said that doesn’t mean they’re not beneficial. They play this amazing role in helping heal the gut. He doesn’t think that people should be on them forever and you should cycle through and take different strains. It’s helping to crowd out the bad bacteria while you’re taking it and also helping digest while you’re taking it. But then, it kind of creates this healthy space that when you stop taking it for the good bacteria. But to also accompany it with eating a variety of fermented foods at each meal, small amounts of fermented food at each meal.

 

[1:13:37] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. I agree. That’s what I do. I love fermented food. I have a cleanse that I actually cook and deliver to 100 people most months in Los Angeles. 150 people on about 3 or 4 months out of the year. For five days I put them on a reset. The morning drink is a detox sonic for your gut and it is coconut kaffir, which is fermented coconut water and it is full of beneficial bacteria. Then we have a liquid aloe vera and lemon and ginger and apple cider vinegar and a liquid probiotic. People love that drink. Their guts are so much better in five days.

Just seeing adding a probiotic and adding coconut kaffir or even the yogurts out there that are great or sauerkraut, kimchi. Those fermented foods are amazing. I know that a lot of clients don’t eat enough of the fermented stuff so I kind of have to push them more down that road.

 

[1:14:41] Ashley James: Yeah. Well. We used to eat fermented foods all the time. But now we’re kind of obsessed in the last, I don’t know, 50 years we’re really obsessed with sterile foods. Maybe it started around, I don’t know, when we learned about germs. Then we made all these cleaners for bleaching germs. Maybe we started thinking we should sterilize our food. Or right around the 1950s when we have the TV dinners. It became this idea to have package sterile foods would be really good for us. We lost that connection with living foods.

Now we’re seeing that, there’s about six pounds of good and bad bacteria, depending on the dysbiosis that’s occurring in your body, but there’s about six pounds of bacteria that are in our gut that we need. That we absolutely rely on. If we were sterile, we could not digest that the bacteria’s that’s digesting our food and helping us assimilate those nutrients. So it’s phenomenal that we are this giant petri dish. We need to support the petri dish, the good bacteria. You have mentioned –

 

[1:16:03] Elissa Goodman: We are bacteria. We’re made up of bacteria’s. So we have more bacteria in our body than we do cells.

 

[1:16:10] Ashley James: There’s more. It’s like 10:1 ratio I read. The other day I was reading about that but the bacteria cells are much smaller but it is a 10:1 ratio meaning for everyone, and we have 37.2 trillion human cells in our body and then it’s ten times more bacteria. So we are a home to these, we’re a host to this symbiotic relationship. It’s kind of like do you want to be a ghetto and have the street gangs in your body or do you want to have the leave it to beaver kind of family. I don’t know, I’m just trying to make –

 

[1:16:47] Elissa Goodman: White picket fence. The white picket fence.

 

[1:16:49] Ashley James: Yeah. We want the white picket fence. We want to be that home. We wanna have that very peaceful, no one arguing. We want all the good bacteria. We don’t want the violent gang bacteria in our body that’s creating the dysbiosis and the candida and the parasites. So we have to create that environment. Then that also directly affects our immune system which then would either help us create cancer or avoid cancer.

 

[1:17:14] Elissa Goodman: Absolutely. As well as depression, anxiety, all of the above. 90% of your serotonin is produced in your gut. Then your gut, you need that microbiome to actually absorb the nutrients from your food and also help with producing B12, which is really crucial, another crucial vitamin for the body. If we don’t have proper microbiome in our ilium, which is the lower part of our small intestine, we’re not going to produce B12. So that’s a little bit intricate. That is crucial for us with energy and mental fog and all of that.

 

[1:17:59] Ashley James: I also learned recently that 25% of our T3 is converted in the gut. So someone might end up having low thyroid hormones on their blood panel and then be put on some drug. And the doctor was just freaking looking at the symptoms, just looking at the blood test, looking at symptoms and then treating the symptoms with the drug rather than going – they’re treating the smoke not the fire. Can you imagine if firefighters only treated the smoke and left the fire burning? That’s what doctors are doing by treating symptoms and not kind of backtracking going, “Why is it that your body has less T3?”

If we could go back, what helps create T3 and is it because you’re missing the precursors? Is there something wrong with the HPA axes or the HPT axes? What’s going on? Doctors just ask more questions and try to go back further and further to the beginning, they could actually help treat the root cause. But that’s not part of their training. Their training is to deliver drugs and manage symptoms of the body. Unless you go to a holistic doctor or holistic nutritionist like yourself who gets really curious and wants to help us get to the root cause.

So if you heal the gut and that is the problem then all of a sudden the thyroid levels are normal. That person never needed to take medication for their thyroid because their thyroid was healthy. It’s just the gut was not converting the T3.

 

[1:19:24] Elissa Goodman: That thyroid medication is going to affect the microbiome. It’s going to deplete it. I know, it is really crazy. I mean, the whole thyroid Hashimoto’s whole thing is also pretty enormous. I mean, it’s sad that cancer is not getting any better and Hashimoto’s is one of the fastest-growing autoimmune diseases today, which is related to the thyroid. I mean, it is sad what is happening these days. What you’re talking about exactly what we need more of is to have people out there that are educated, that are talking the talk like you’re saying about the T3 and the gut because we’ll put on thyroid medication that’s only T4. If you have Hashimoto’s you won’t convert T4 to T3 and T3 is what is really the driving force behind your thyroid.

Even the endocrinologists don’t talk about that. They don’t even check your gut. They don’t check for celiac or what’s going on in your gut. Is your microbiome not healthy? It’s really crazy. But I think that what is great that, yes like I said, people like myself and lots of people like myself and great functional doctors and people who are really diving into all these and getting to the root and knowing what to do when someone comes in and has these issues and can do a blood panel or a gut microbiome test or stool sample or whatever it needs to be to see what is really going on at the root level. Not just taking the symptoms and band-aiding them because we’re not getting anywhere. Like I said, we’re not getting anywhere with the cancer or the Hashimoto’s or the thyroid. I mean, thyroid is just rapid in terms of the number of people. The younger generation that are having thyroid issues.

So this is really crazy and we can reverse it. I reversed it after 25 years on medication, I went into remission for Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism and my numbers are all perfect.

 

[1:21:35] Ashley James: I love it. I love it that you’re saying that because I’ve talked to so many people who say they really believe it’s a life sentence that they will have their autoimmune condition for the rest of their life. I will scream it from the rooftops, autoimmune condition is not a life sentence. It’s not like type 1 diabetes where you have to have it. That’s unfortunate we haven’t found a cure for type 1 diabetes. Maybe with stem cell therapy they’ll be able to regenerate the pancreas. It’s simply the pancreas is gone. It’s not working. Type 2 diabetes, easily reversible within three months. I reversed mine. I’ve helped so many people reverse theirs. Type 2 diabetes is not a life sentence but if you go to an average doctor, they will put you on meds and say we have to manage the diabetes and never talk about cure, never.

The average doctor will tell you that you have your Hashimoto’s for the rest of your life and just help you manage it. Tell you you have your autoimmune condition for the rest of your life, help you manage it. Now can you recreate it? I can recreate diabetes. I can go right now to some fast-food restaurant. I can eat absolute crap, change my diet and I could recreate diabetes because that’s genetically or whatever. My body is going to go in that direction if I fill it with crap. If you fill your body with crap, and I can eat the same crap food, you may never get diabetes but you may get Hashimoto’s again. You may get cancer again. Your body is going in that direction. The stressors putting stress in your body exhibits in that disease. That’s what breaks down first.

It’s like every car, if we drive for a million miles, the different parts will break. It’s just we put the wear and tear on the car, different things break. For me, my body’s going to go type 2 diabetes. That is the first thing it’s going to do if I eat crap for three months. But you can reverse it. You can 100% reverse autoimmune condition. I’ve seen so many people 100% be in remission, no longer have it, no longer worry about it. I’m glad you’re saying that today because I want those who have autoimmune to know that there is so much hope. That the body can heal itself to the point where you no longer have it. It is possible.

So after 25 years of having Hashimoto’s, did you all of a sudden do something differently to heal your Hashimoto’s and what was it? What was it?

 

[1:24:05] Elissa Goodman: It was kind of fascinating because I do love all these science aspect of things and I do try to dive into that as well. But I’m also a little bit of a – I’ve seen energy healers for ten years. I love [raky], I love just that all of the other holistic modalities that you don’t potentially have a lot of science behind it. So what happened was three years ago, I basically read the medical medium, he’s name is Anthony William. I’m sure you’d know about him. I read his first book and I put it down. I was like, “Ha. This is interesting.” He’s talking about all these viral issues in the body that lay dormant. I had chickenpox and I had mono twice and strep throat and tonsillitis and I even had shingles. So I probably had a high viral condition that’s probably laying dormant in my organs.

So I just was interested like wow, no one’s talked about that. So I did a session with him the following week. I got lucky to do one and he was on the phone and he basically over the phone said, “You have Epstein-Barr in your thyroid and your liver and if you don’t do something about it asap, you’re going to have some serious health issues.” Who knows? He just is telling me over the phone. So you take it for a grain of salt. I’m like, “This is interesting.” He puts me on a protocol to lower my viral loads. So he puts me on [biractisilver] and concentrated liquid zinc, high dose of Ester-c, lysine. Things that I knew about too that lower viral issues. Licorice root extract. I did a little bit of concentrated iodine for my thyroid. Swear to God in three months, I went into hyperthyroid mode because I was still on my thyroid medication and then basically my doctor weaned me off of the thyroid medication slowly. That’s three months to four months after doing this protocol I was like felt fantastic.

That was the beginning of my journey. I ended up finding out that I had celiac and I had a parasite. I kind of like just dove into all these and I took care of both of those things by healing my gut and by getting rid of the parasite. I stayed on his protocol for probably a year. Then I ended up just diving into more meditation. That’s when I discovered my self-love aspect. I really just tried to go down this road of what I have been preaching but also potentially not necessarily doing really well myself. I knew better and so I did. I dove into taking care of myself better. Because I was already eating really healthy. I still do. Since I’ve got into this practice I eat really well and I’m more plant-based but I didn’t really dive into the crux of what was underneath it all like the potential parasites I had and the celiac and some of the nutrient deficiencies that were happening within the body.

 

[1:27:30] Ashley James: My issue with celiac is so many people can be diagnosed incorrectly because not the entire small intestine is affected and they take a biopsy and look at it under a microscope. They’ll take a few different biopsies and they’re just, you know, guessing. Someone could absolutely have celiac and it might come back as not. So the thing is for me is, and I have been working with people for the last seven-eight years now, I get 100% of them to try no barley, wheat, rye or oats. I know a lot of people will go, “Well, there’s no gluten in oats,” or “but these are gluten-free oats.” Oats contain gliadin, just consider it a similar enough protein to cause the same damage. People who react to barley, wheat, rye also will react to oats. So many times it’s worth just taking it out, see what happens.

Oats also really spike the blood sugar. I had the author of wheat belly, who’s a cardiologist that heals heart health and other diseases by creating healthy blood-sugar basically. He’s like, “Oats are just, they’re kind of junk in that they really do raise blood sugar. They’re not really great for many people.” So anyway, barley, wheat, rye and oats. Avoid them for 30 days and then do a test day. Just eat pasta and pizza and just eat all your favorite, eat a bagel. Just fill your life with barley, wheat, rye and oats that day and see in a few days how you feel.

My husband and I, we’re going to do this challenge. This is back in 2011. We were told to do this challenge with a naturopath we were working with. That was hard because we were eating somewhat still the standard American diet. We’d already gone organic. We’re shopping the perimeter but to be told to cut that out, some people they just don’t know how to shop or how to cook without barley, wheat, rye and oats. So we said, “Okay. We’ll do the challenge. We’ll do what you said. We’ll take it out and then we’ll do a challenge day.”

By the fifth day we’re like, “We are never eating these foods again. We feel so amazing.” I lost 25 pounds of water weight. I know it wasn’t fat. It was 25 pounds of water weight from the inflammation. My husband, I don’t know how much he lost, he lost a bunch. Then our rings started flying off our fingers. We had our rings sized for us when we got married. We had been married since 2008 so they were well-fitted rings. They weren’t too tight. They were just perfect. They started flying off our hands. We decided to get them resized after a few months because I didn’t want to, what if this was temporary and the water came back? So after a few months we went to get our rings resized. I went down 1 ½ ring sizes and he went down 2 ring sizes. That’s just from cutting out barley, wheat, rye and oats.

So we were never diagnosed with celiac but we didn’t have to be. We were convinced after day 5. We didn’t even had to do the challenge day. We did not even want to do the challenge day. Since then, there’s been a handful of times where I was like gluten-poisoned either by choice or by accident. I got a tummy ache and get kind of bloated but it’s not life-threatening, thank goodness. It’s just a day-to-day inconvenience.

So my day-to-day life is barley, wheat, rye and oat-free. It’s really interesting when I eat it and I don’t know I’m eating it by accident and then I start feeling ill and then I look at the ingredients. It’s like, “Oh. Yeah.” When I was eating it every day that was my norm. When we’re eating something our body’s reacting, imagine if you eat cashews every day.

 

[1:31:29] Elissa Goodman: I know.

 

[1:31:30] Ashley James: Right. And it’s just your norm and you don’t know it’s the cashews because it’s your norm. The average person out there would eat what they’re allergic to and then take some kind of, I don’t want to say some brand names, but take some kind of drug to mask their digestive upset and just keep plowing through life and not knowing that every time they ate that food it actually disrupted their gut biome, disrupted their ability to convert T3, disrupted their immune system, put the body in a stress response, fed the wrong bacteria. Basically cultivated a stressed state for the body to create cancer and other diseases.

It’s so easy to cut something out and replace it with something else. People are like, “What do you eat? Oh my gosh. You’re gluten-free. What do you eat?” I’m like, “Anything I want. Just not barley, wheat, rye and oats.” There’s so many foods. There’s so much.

 

[1:32:25] Elissa Goodman: There’s so many other things that yeah, you can eat. I know. I know exactly. It’s so true. Like I said earlier in our call is it’s not supposed to be hard, all of this. We’re supposed to learn how to destress. We know sleep is important for us. We know that we need to be hydrated. Then when it comes to food, we know that we need to feel good after we eat. We do not to be bloated and have digestive issues. That is not normal. So paying attention to that and eliminating those that do give you the upset can be life-changing.

Just trying so hard not to eat the processed foods and going for the whole foods as much as you can is really the ticket and going organic, especially if you have a health issue. But not all things have to be organic. Just really especially soy and like you said oats and wheat that do have that [unintelligible] issues and corn, that’s usually important. Just trying to eat whole foods and real foods. I tell people that, try to teach people how to meal prep for the week, to roast some vegetables and stick them in a glass Pyrex dish and have them in the fridge.

Just having maybe sweet potatoes. Some kind of grains of complex carbs, not necessarily grains but that do have minerals in them. Roasted carrots and roasted beets and all of those things. Maybe wild rice or black rice that don’t have the gluten or sensitivity to the gut. Having those in a Pyrex dish. I go more plant-based. I’m a soy girl so I do love organic soy. Edamame or tempeh or lentils or chickpeas and having those in a Pyrex dish. Then I have them have a lot of greens and then they throw them all into a bowl and a great dressing and you’re a home run, a piece of cake. You could have that for the week setup or you can make some easy pureed soups because that’s what my cleanse is. It’s a lot of soups and salads and it’s a soup cleanse. I have recipes where it takes 15 minutes to make a parade soup. You can pull that out and make a salad and be on your way to health.

 

[1:34:54] Ashley James: You’re talking my language. Bowls. That’s exactly how I eat. I just make batches of different foods then you just pull them all out. I have bowls. That’s what I had lunch for today. Lunch yesterday, lunch today, dinner the day before. I like doing a combination of raw and cooked. So I love, love – my favorite raw foods to put, because you want the enzymes form the uncooked foods. I love purple cabbage. It is so delicious. My son, my 4-year-old who has become quite picky, also loves purple cabbage. He doesn’t like it cooked. He only likes it raw. It’s crunchy and it has this great flavor and it’s so wonderful. It’s so colorful to sprinkle on top of your food.

So I love making sure that there are some cut-up purple cabbage ready to go. I get the Instant Pot out and I make a whole thing of potatoes or wild rice like you said. Wild rice is not like any of the other rices. It’s a totally different starch. It’s non-reactive to the immune system. It’s actually the highest amount of antioxidants. I was reading an article recently that talked about that women who ate wild rice one to two times a week had a significantly lower risk of heart disease and cancer. I can’t remember the exact numbers but something like 30% or 40%. It was low enough to be like, “Yes. I now give myself permission a bit more money,” because wild rice is a bit more expensive but it still less expensive than eating out at a restaurant and very, very, very healthy. I love it. I love that.

I want to share a sauce since we’re talking about bowls, I’ll share a recipe that was shared with me, and it’s kind of been passed down from whole food person to whole food person. It’s called 3-2-1 sauce. It’s three parts balsamic, two parts mustard, 1 part maple syrup. But I don’t know anyone who likes it that sweet. So although the name is 3-2-1 sauce, it’s really more like 32.25. You just put a tiny, tiny bit of maple syrup. It does not need that much. Sometimes with a sweet balsamic it doesn’t need any. You mix those three together in any ratio that makes you happy but it’s supposed to be 3-2-1 but for me, like I said, 32.25. Balsamic, mustard and any kind of mustard you want, any kind of balsamic you want, of course always organic. Then any kind of maple syrup. Hopefully real maple syrup. Mix the three together. You can have it in a jar or something and then you take it to the restaurant with you.

If you want to eat really, really clean but you want to go out, Thai restaurant in the back of the menu, there’s a section called side dish, you can order steamed vegetables. Sometimes they have black rice, sometimes they have brown rice. You can get a whole bunch of steamed vegetables and then pour your 321 sauce on it. So good. Most restaurant will do just plain steamed vegetables. I love steamed cabbage. They often, the Thai restaurants will often do steamed cabbage. It’s so good.

I’ve been filming with one of my friends, Naomi. We both went plant-based for health reasons and have seen great results. We noticed that a lot of my listeners want to be healthier but don’t know how to cook. So we’ve been filming videos on how to cook. I’m about to launch a membership site that’s going to be affordable for everyone where they learn how to cook. I’m saying, listen, people don’t have to give up their meat. That’s their choice. I’m not a high-pressure vegan salesperson. I’m not trying to convert. I went kicking and screaming because I loved meat and now I can’t believe how good I feel when I stopped eating it. Stopped eating eggs, stopped eating meat. I already cut out dairy and I feel like a millions bucks within days of not eating meat. I could not believe. But there’s this part of my brain that was screaming, yelling going, “Where’s the meat? Where’s the meat?”

For me, I went kicking and screaming. My husband went vegan overnight and he’s coming up on his two-year veganniversary. He went from eating basically 100% Atkins all the time to zero meat. He just gave it up cold turkey. Me, I weaned off of it. Took me like two years. Now, I love cooking these foods and bowls is totally the answer, like you said.

So my thing is, we’re making all these videos to show people just how to eat more healthy food. They just add it. If they want to still do meat that’s fine. They can just add more healthy food to that. If they want to try this they can try it. I love that it’s accessible. It actually saves time and saves money to eat this way especially with exactly what you said, which is the food prep.

 

[1:39:58] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Absolutely. I have a dressing on the cleanse that’s called, it’s really called, the detox herb vinaigrette. You could put it on salads and bowls. It’s a little different than what’ you were talking about. It’s a handful of parsley, cilantro and basil and garlic and apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil. It goes into a Vitamix. It is to die for. It is so delicious. You just put a little bit of that in a bowl or your salad or even you can put it in chicken if you want to eat meat or fish. It’s so good.

You’re right to have these really good dressings in the fridge to make it all come together. There’s also an herb salt that I live and die by. It’s sea salt with fresh herbs in it. It’s called Herbamare, H-E-R-B-A-M-A-R-E. That’s also a lifesaver. You put that on to spice up any kind of bowl dish. It’s fabulous too.

There are some great things to do out there. I know. I’m definitely, I’m not total plant-based vegan but I’m 80%. I’m more of a pescatarian. I do love fish and I feel like I can’t get enough calories and enough oomph from my vegan lifestyle so I do have to add in some of the animal. Like you’re saying, my husband who passed away, he was a big Atkins guy and he was a sugarholic. He had to have sweets after every meal. A little dessert, a little sweets and then in his office was the crappy candy in the bowls.

 

[1:41:41] Ashley James: He just ate meat and candy.

 

[1:41:43] Elissa Goodman: Candy and sugar kept him going. I know. He was watching his weight with the Atkins, whole thing. He did lose weight and looked great so no one would have ever known.

 

[1:41:54] Ashley James: Which we know just call it keto. We don’t call it Atkins anymore. It’s basically the same diet with a different name because people who do Keto wrong end up just eating Atkins. Because Atkins is mostly protein and Keto is mostly fat. Most people don’t actually keto and they think they are, they’re actually eating Atkins because very, very few people eat 80% fat. They’re just thinking they can eat butter and cheese and meat. They think they’re doing Keto but they’re doing Atkins. Either one, not healthy long-term. Not a healthy long-term diet. You’re missing minerals, you’re missing nutrients, it’s very acidic for the body. We could go on and on.

I love that you’re listening to your body. That’s another thing I want to emphasize is that there is no one diet that’s right for anyone. There’s no diet dogma. You might turn around tomorrow and check-in with yourself and your body might say, “I need more fish. I need no fish. I need eggs. I don’t need eggs. I need more broccoli. I don’t need any broccoli.” It is about listening. Getting to that point where you could listen to that body and then make some adjustments and be willing to experiment. Be willing to do the eliminations. Be willing to go egg-free. I discovered, eggs were the last thing for me to kick to be 100% plant-based.

I started to get heart palpitations which was so weird because I’m like, “I am so healthy. What’s going on?” I even saw a cardiologist. He’s like, “Your heart is super healthy.” He said something really interesting. He said, “The heart is so strong and so sensitive that any stressor in the body the heart will respond to.” It could be emotional stress, mental stress, it could be physical stress. The heart is resetting. So my heart palpitations were from the heart resetting and I thought, “That’s really weird.” So then I cut out eggs and my heart palpitations went away. Then I reintroduced them and my heart palpitations came back like while I was eating them.

So, over and over again, I could basically turn on and off my heart palpitations by whether I ate eggs or not. So I just went no eggs whatsoever and they haven’t returned. That was, I don’t know, almost a year ago.

Interesting that the body will speak to us. If we listen, listen to the symptoms and then make adjustments in our diet and be willing to experiment to figure out. You know what, there was a time when eggs were really healthy for me. There was. My body really responded well to them and then there was a time that it wasn’t. So there might be a time when cashews really work well for you.

 

[1:44:27] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Worked fine. Yes. And then now they aren’t.

 

[1:44:28] Ashley James: But we have to be willing to change our belief system about food to shift. Now, what happened in your life that had you go to become a certified nutritionist? When did that happen in your life story?

 

[1:44:42] Elissa Goodman: Well, it was two years after my husband passed away. Because I really felt like I had two girls that had two parents who had cancer. So I really needed to do a deep dive into figuring out how to keep myself healthy and them healthy because I was worried about them. I really thought they’re going to think they’re going to have cancer because of us potentially in their mindset. I needed to be around for them for a long period of time because at that time, they only had me.

So I just went back to school like learning for that reason not to become a nutritionist. There was no part of me that was looking at going into a nutrition career. I just wanted to learn as much as I could about just how to be healthy and strong. Then also emotionally. How to release these traumas that we had gone through and to help the girls with all that. It was so spectacular. I mean I fell in love with it. I just couldn’t get enough of it. Still, to this day, I can’t get enough of it. Honestly, I go a little overboard of like everything that I read and investigate.

When I graduated. A friend of mine had brought this restaurant from northern California called Café Gratitude, which was a vegan restaurant down to LA. She asked me to do a cleanse together for them. So I was like, “A cleanse? What the hell is that?” But I had a marketing background and an advertising background. Their food was really healthy. So it was fun and easy. I did that. I ran that cleanse for Café Gratitude for like three and a half years.

A year after she asked me to do it for them, this macrobiotic restaurant in LA called M Café, asked me to do a reset for them. For them, similar. Their food was cooked and raw. So I did that for about four and a half – five years. Then a natural food market in LA, Erewhon, which is the premier health food store in the country. I absolutely love this place. It’s crazy out of control in terms of its prices and what’s going on in the health world. But it’s pretty cool because it has everything, the latest of everything. They asked me to put a cleanse for them too. So I did that for a little while.

So I’ve got involved in this whole cleansing world but what it was it was just really resetting your body and healthy eating for five days. Then six years ago I designed my own. The rest is history. I’ve been cooking and delivering food to people for six years. Getting ready next year to probably expand into being able to service more people. It’s all delivered in glass and it’s organic and it’s homemade. It’s just is a lot of love and nurturing goes into the food. These people just keep coming back for it and we sell out every time we do it.

So that’s really my story. I honestly have to pinch myself at the fact that I’m here and that I’m doing what I love. When I sat down on this course I never thought I would love it. But also, that does help to keep you healthy.

 

[1:48:00] Ashley James: It’s kind of sad that a cleanse is just eating healthy for five days. I mean really, “Why can’t we eat that way all the time?” I mean really. That it’s just like, “Why can’t we eat that way all the time?”

 

[1:48:10] Elissa Goodman: I know, I know, I know. I’m trying to get people to incorporate some of this food into the all the time. Because when you see how you feel after five days and you’re sleeping better and you’re stress is better and you even lose weight with eating a lot of food, it’s a lot of food we give them. Because I don’t want them to starve or be deprived. So then they hopefully get the bug and they go, “I want to feel more like this more often.”

 

[1:48:39] Ashley James: A hundred calories is nothing when you think about, people think 100 calories is maybe a snack, right? A hundred calories is nothing. But eat a hundred calories of broccoli, that’s a pound. That’s like two and a half cups. You eat two and a half cups of broccoli, you’re good. You’re good for an hour. That’s only 100 calories. So yeah. You can feel them up. Non-starchy vegetables are 100 calories a pound. Starchy vegetables are 300 to 400 calories a pound. Calories isn’t everything but it’s just like gaining perspective. If someone’s eating 1500 calories of fruits vegetables and some kind of healthy starches. That is a huge portion of food. They’re probably eating more fiber in one day than they do in one month. So they’re going to feel amazing. Fiber binds to the toxins and pulls them out of your gut, helps remove them from the body and also feeds the microbiome.

So you’re really helping them with that reset. But it’s kind of like, if you look at it, it’s kind of like we’re all alcoholics and we just stop drinking alcohol for five days. It’s like, “Here, I’m going to give you a cleanse. It’s call drink water and nothing else. Don’t drink anything except for water. No alcohol for five days.” You feel amazing – we probably feel bad for the first few days because you’re body’s like, “What is happening?” then the fifth day you’re like, “Oh my gosh. I can think again. My liver stopped hurting.”

We need to start eating healthy. This is good. This is good timing. I mean, I keep saying we, I eat healthy but I always look and go, “Why am I letting this in my life? Why am I running to that?” And I just become the observer going, “That’s interesting that I’m making that food choice. Where is this really coming from?” I think so much of our food choices are this unconscious emotional whether it’s a reward. “Oh. I did something. I had a really hard day I deserve this.” Or “I had a really great day. Let’s celebrate.” Or “I’m really stressed out. I don’t want to feel this way anymore.” We run to, we justify. That little voice in our head justifies because we’re addicted to the dopamine response, the pleasure response we get because we’re trained from kids to get treats.

I always see more infections after Halloween in people. That’s what happened to me when I was 13. I was really health from age 6 to 13 because I saw a naturopath when I was 6. We cut out sugar and cut out a bunch of food and I took supplements. I was really healthy from 6 to 13. Then at 13 I rebelled. I was very upset with my parents. I was 13 basically. I did normal 13-year-old stuff but I ate an entire bag of my entire Halloween collection of candy, an entire bag of candy in one night. That was the first time I ever needed antibiotics. Very shortly after that I had an infection that was a chronic infection that lasted from Halloween through Christmas.

To this day, I think back and I go, “How many people eat way more sugar than they used to do on Halloween then within a month they’re sick?” They don’t correlate the two because sugar – actually there’s really something interesting. I can’t remember the exact white blood cell. One of our white blood cells goes dormant when we eat sugar. It also feeds the candida, feeds the bad microbiome.

 

[1:52:17] Elissa Goodman: I didn’t know that about the white blood cell. Interesting.

 

[1:52:19] Ashley James: Yeah. A naturopath I work with, he mentioned. I’ll go figure out which one it was he was saying. But there’s one white blood cell that goes dormant when there’s too much sugar. The too much sugar being exactly what we consume when we eat any kind of sugar would be enough. But when we eat a whole food that doesn’t happen.

 

[1:52:41] Elissa Goodman: Right. Right. With its fiber intact. That’s interesting. I sort of thought all the white blood cells go dormant when we eat sugar, the crappy sugar.

 

[1:52:57] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. It definitely affects the immune system to the point where people get infections. I just wonder, we call this time of year flu season. Think about how much sugar we consume in the summertime versus right around now. We have Halloween, we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. These are four times where people on average are drinking more alcohol, eating more pie, eating more sugar, making excuses or reasons, eggnog. Just think of all the sugar we’re eating more so this time of the year than we would in April or any other time of the year. I just wonder how much of a correlation there is between the types of food this time of year and then people getting sick come January and February and you know, the flu.

 

[1:53:49] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. That makes sense. That does. Then maybe vitamin D levels going down because you’re not outside as much.

 

[1:53:58] Ashley James: Stress growing up, we’re not dealing with our emotions, we’re on our family’s.

 

[1:54:02] Elissa Goodman: Yes. Very true. I know.

 

[1:54:09] Ashley James: Having so much experience helping people for so many years, I’d love for you to teach the listeners something that we can actively do today. Some actionable homework or steps that we could take to begin to build a healthy body that prevents cancer.

 

[1:54:28] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. I would love to. So I would say that the first thing is to really tap into managing your stress. There’s some great apps out there that you can listen to. Unplug has a great one, Headspace, Calm.com. Like Headspace and Calm.com are the big ones where it can really help just relax your brain, stop thinking for a bit, not that you have to go brain dead but just to calm down the brain. I think putting one of those apps on your phone, I use Calm.com, listening to some of the music or the waves of the water just for five minutes. Is huge for the system. Absolutely amazing. Lowering cortisol levels like that is huge.

Then there’s a study that has come out where drinking even half of your body weight in water is not enough. So they’re basically saying 90 ounces of water or liquid that doesn’t include caffeine.

 

[1:55:42] Ashley James: When you say half your body weight, because we don’t want them drinking pound or kilograms of water, you’re referring to for every pound you are you drink an ounce. So if someone’s 200 pounds, they would drink 100 ounces.

 

[1:55:55] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Drink 100 ounces. Yeah.

 

[1:55:57] Ashley James: Because some people might go, “I have to drink how many pounds of water?”

 

[1:56:00] Elissa Goodman: Yes. You’re right. Ounces. It’s really important, like I said, get up in the morning and drink 16 ounces is the minimum mandatory amount. That would be life-changing. If you put a little bit of lemon in there to alkalize the body and to clean out the intestines, that also is pretty amazing. So it’s the stress, it’s the hydration. For me, what I find is really really been phenomenal in my life is I’ve been a juicer ever since I was diagnosed with cancer. I have a Breville Cold Fountain Plus, not expensive.

 

[1:56:37] Ashley James: I’m so glad you brought this up. That’s so funny. I’ve been doing research to do a whole segment on juicing. That is so funny you brought this up because I own I think every juicer on the planet except the cold press, the kind that goes in from the top. I have all the old school cold pressing ones but I don’t have the ones from the top. I’ve been watching tons of review videos trying to decipher, “Is this just a new mouse trap they’re trying to sell us or is it really better?” Is it really better to do the cold press, the slow masticating juicer with the top loading vegetable or do the old school masticating juicers work just as well?

 

[1:57:20] Elissa Goodman: I think the old school works just as well.

 

[1:57:21] Ashley James: Okay, good. Because I own like seven.

 

[1:57:26] Elissa Goodman: I juice and drink right away. So it’s really easy and it work really fast because those cold press ones don’t work very fast unless you’re going to get a high-powered one that’s like extremely expensive. Those ones that we’ve had on the market even when they’re heating a heat source still I think work just as well. I’ve seen incredible results from it. I do a lot of green juices. I just do simple juices. It’s non-expensive. I do celery and cucumber and lemon and ginger. I was doing romaine because of the salmonella I’ve gotten away from the romaine. Parsley, which is a heavy metal detoxifier and cilantro. I just thrown in these greens that are not expensive. It really is a liquid IV of vitamins and minerals into the body. They go right into the cells.

 

[1:58:25] Ashley James: You know what tastes amazing? Cucumber and lemon. Just juicing cucumber and lemon. Get four to six big cucumbers and one lemon. Juice the whole lemon. Make sure it’s organic juice. The whole lemon including the rind because of those wonderful essential oils that come out. Here’s a tip for saving money. Go to your local coop and ask if they give a case discount. I was just on the phone this morning at PCC, which is a local coop here. They’ll give us a 10% discount if we order a case. Then the produce manager, talk to the produce manager is willing to help me with case size. She’s like, “I could make a case 10 pounds to 40 pounds.” She’s willing to make it a smaller case to make it manageable. 10% off groceries, heck I’ll go for it. She’ll even help me source the freshest. She’s like really geeks out on it. So find a produce manager at a health food store that’s willing to work with you because with case discounts and buying in bulk, you can save so much money.

One of the naturopaths I studied with her passion is to help women who are on food stamps who are in need, in poverty, help them eat healthy. She shows them how to use their food stamps in a way to buy bulk brown rice, beans, vegetables. She goes, “Get a kiddie pool even if you live in an apartment. Get a kiddie pool. Fill it with dirt. Put it on your balcony and grow your own kale or grow some micro greens.” You can do it on a budget and get your greens into your everyday. Because her thing is six cups of greens no matter what every day. However you get them in you get them in you. She talks about when you’re in a budget here’s what you can buy that’s not organic kind of thing.

That buying in bulk can really save you a lot of money. I’ve done this before where I go with another family or even two families and you can buy in bulk, bulk apples right from a farmer. Find bulk deals. So if we ended up having to buy bulk broccoli or something, two other families could split it, right. That helps you save money. There’s ways. They’re creative ways. If you’re dedicated to your health and it’s the number one most important thing, we don’t let money stop us. We just get creative and figure out how to do it. It’s not that we can’t do it. It’s just how can we do it?

Building those relationships with produce manages. I have a friend, I don’t know how he does it, he’s a raw vegan. He lives on romaine lettuce and mangoes and all kinds of raw foods. He will often post on Facebook. He gets the most amazing deals. He just becomes friends with all the produce managers. He just talks to them. He’s nice to them and tells them what he does and they will give him screaming deals. Like screaming deals on big cases of food. It’s just getting creative. But I love that especially with juicing because we need a lot of it. Our Costco has a lot of organic foods. So I get the carrots by the giant bag of carrots and sweet potatoes all organic.

 

[2:01:51] Elissa Goodman: Which is beautiful. I am personally a purist so I do not juice high fruit even vegetables. So beets and carrots are no go for me because I think we get enough sugar in our diet and I don’t need to have all this sugar shooting into my bloodstream. So I eat carrots and beats and then I roast them. I absolutely think they are crucial. They’re very anti-cancer. I do six of the greens and lemon, ginger. No apple in my juices unless it’s summer and it’s super hot outside. That’s a different story. I mean, because you burn off the sugar. Definitely a little better when it’s hot like you said, not in the winter but in the summer and you’re out in the heat.

Juicing has been amazing. For the readers, upping your fiber content. Basically we need fiber to flush all these toxins in our system and we’re getting barely 15 grams of fiber and we need to be getting a minimum of 25, really 35 a day. So that fiber is crucial. Even flax and chia seeds and also all the legumes are high fiber. We need definitely to be focusing on – and even don’t know if you know, even a cup of raspberries is like eight grams of fiber.

 

[2:03:27] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s so great. If you have to strain it all in the toilet. If you have to strain at any point then you’re not getting enough fiber and enough water. If you’re not getting enough water and fiber, you don’t need to bring your cellphone to go sit on the toilet. You basically sit down, number two happens and you’re done. It’s just so fast and it’s perfectly formed. I have an entire episode on healthy poop. It was so funny to do. Dr. Heidi Semanie, the same naturopath that did the episode all on vitamin D. It’s how to have the perfect poop. Really amazing how little fiber we eat and how much fiber our ancestors ate and how much fiber we really should eat. I’ve tracked it before and now I eat about 50 grams a day.

 

[2:04:13] Elissa Goodman: Wow. That’s fantastic.

 

[2:04:14] Ashley James: I mean, it’s really amazing. I know, right? But I feel amazing. On the days that I don’t eat enough fiber, I really feel it the next day. It takes your health to a whole new level when you’re getting that fiber.

 

[2:04:27] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. It does. Absolutely. That’s really crucial and we don’t think about that. That’s the simple thing too to add and make conscious of it in your diet. I think I am a believer that animal protein, eating too much of it is a precursor for cancer. So I say, cut back on your animal protein. Eat animal protein one time a day I try to get my clients to do not three times a day. Incorporating more plant-based proteins into your diet on the other two if you eat breakfast and lunch and dinner. That’s really my take.

I think that really watching your sugar. We’re only supposed to have 25 added sugar per day. If you do juice a green juice and you put an apple in it like 16 ounces, that’s 18 grams of sugar in that one green juice. Then let’s say you have a bar like an RX bar that has 12 grams of sugar, your one bar and one juice you’re already over your sugar allotment.

 

[2:05:33] Ashley James: What if someone were to eat the apple and instead of RX bar, which is processed, what if they ate three apples a day? Are you saying that when it’s in its whole food form it isn’t considered added sugar?

 

[2:05:45] Elissa Goodman: Yes. Right. Right.

 

[2:05:48] Ashley James: I’d rather eat the whole apple.

 

[2:05:51] Elissa Goodman: Right. Yeah. It’s always better to just eat the real food always than doing anything that’s processed. Even I think with the protein powders. I know they’re super popular and I do use them in a pinch but a lot of times I try to go with maybe a couple tablespoons of hemp seeds, organic soy milk or some cashews or almonds or almond butter like real foods.

 

[2:06:21] Ashley James: Pumpkin seeds are so full of protein that you can blend them. You can get pumpkin seed protein which is ground pumpkin seeds which I’m not sure about because once you grind another see, you’re exposing the fat to oxygen and it becomes rancid. But pumpkin seeds themselves you could grind them and then add them to a smoothie or just throw them on your food. I like to do that, just a handful of pumpkin seeds thrown on the food. They’re very high on protein as well.

 

[2:06:51] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Very. They’re awesome.

 

[2:06:53] Ashley James: I really believed when I first started this podcast, it will be four years next month that I’ve been doing this.

 

[2:06:59] Elissa Goodman: Wow. Congratulations

 

[2:07:00] Ashley James: Thank you. When I first started this, I mean if listeners go back and listen to episode one and follow my journey because I’ve been on a health journey for many years before I started the podcast, I also believe we’re never done. No matter how much we know we’re never done. I’m sure if you were to check back in with you at ten years from now, you’ll be like, “I can’t believe myself back in my 50s. What was I even thinking? I learned so much.” I’d love to have you back on the show and hear the – basically old me when I first started this podcast just almost four years ago, I really did not believe that I could go a meal without meat at all. That was just, “Are you kidding me?” that wasn’t even healthy. In my mind, that wasn’t even healthy. You should eat meat at every meal.

Then I interviewed, this was very early one like maybe episode 30 it’s like very early on in the podcast, Suzanna McGee, and I still remember her name. She’s a wonderful woman. Has a beautiful accent because she was raised in four or five different European countries so you can’t quite pin-point but she just has the most beautiful melodic accent. She’s a pro-athlete raw vegan in LA actually, near Venice beach. One of the things she does she teaches tennis. She looks 20 years younger than she is. She acts 30 years younger than she is.

She talks about what she eats in a day. She swears by adding, she takes a handful of pumpkin seeds and throws it on everything she eats. She swears that. That is her protein source. She never runs out of energy. She trains people out in the hot sun day after day teaching tennis and plays tennis matches and just is go, go, go. Always with lots of energy. She swears by the pumpkin seeds, handful on everything. She always believes in one big salad a day, which she’s a warmer climate so she can do that. I think colder climates I’d rather do like you said souping. Do some soup which is just a hot smoothie basically.

 

[2:09:07] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. It is. It basically is a hot smoothie. That’s what I say too. Any way that you can get a juice, a smoothie with a green spatter or all with greens and a pureed soup because it bypasses the digestive system and get those nutrients into your cells, home run. So, that’s what I would say.

 

[2:09:30] Ashley James: Get more fiber. Get more water. Fill your body up with whole foods. Try to decrease meats with one meal a day you’re saying. You are pescatarian. You get your animal protein from fish. So people can experiment see how their body feels. It’s interesting, I just interviewed Cilla Whatcott. She actually worked on healing her breast cancer and her naturopath who’s a naturopathic oncologist did her DNA, and said, and I don’t know about these markers but she said, “Your DNA says you need meat.” She had gone basically vegan after she was diagnosed with cancer. Then she added a little bit of meat back. Nowhere near as much as the standard American diet but just a little bit. It was free range all that good stuff, organic. The chicken was very happy and lived a good life and no pesticides and all that and lived out in a field somewhere. Then she started to feel really good after adding that back which is interesting to me because some people respond very well to no meat. Some people respond very well to a little me. We don’t know until we try. We have to try.

You’re saying get to bed before ten. You’re saying fall asleep –

 

[2:10:59] Elissa Goodman: Let’s get to bed by ten. Get to bed by ten. Well, that’s the ultimate. I mean, you know in the old days when we didn’t have electricity and the sun went down, we start to unwind and melatonin kicked in. We were able to go to sleep earlier. Just try to get into bed. I mean, I got to give my clients a leeway to fall asleep by 11:00 is just what I say.

 

[2:11:21] Ashley James: But optimal. Optimal. Let’s say we all had a cancer diagnosis and we’re like, “You know what? We’re going to beat this.” We need 100% change our life. Give me the optimal. There’s no room for, I don’t know, there’s no room for just being… What’s a way of saying where it’s just like, “I want to treat myself. I’m going to go have some chocolate ice cream. I’ll go to the gym tomorrow.” What is that? There’s no room for that. We’re putting our body firs.t we don’t need that dopamine form the food. We’re going to get it in another way. We’ll go hug our family or go do something fun. We’re not going to poison our body to get some dopamine. We’re not trading our health for some dopamine high. We’re not addicts. We can do this.

So, if we were to optimize our health to completely heal our body. What would you say we should do?

 

[2:12:24] Elissa Goodman: I would say, completely optimize, the sleep is crucial. Sleep is absolutely. That’s when we reset and regenerate. We do need to calm down our central nervous system. That’s absolutely crucial. Then focus on fruits and vegetables because that’s where all the nutrients are. That is really really crucial in terms of getting that into our cells, into our mitochondria. There is a lot to all of this. Then the stress part. Just I was saying, trying to figure out how to best destress your life.

 

[2:13:18] Ashley James: It might be looking at going getting a counselor. Finding one that you really really work well with. There’s an old mentality, an old belief system that we go to counseling because we are broken or there’s something wrong with us, that we’re abnormal. People who are walking around with stressful lives go, “Well I don’t need a counselor I’m not abnormal.” That’s the old way of thinking about counseling that only abnormal or broken or mentally unhealthy people go to counselors. The new way of thinking, and I think millenials are really really adopting this because culture is change that we go for optimal health. You wouldn’t wait to get sick to go to a naturopath. You go to a naturopath and then they help you to stay healthy. You don’t wait to completely mentally breakdown before you see a counselor. Go see a counselor especially behavioral therapy where we’re looking at how can we create healthy boundaries, what kind of actual step in relationships to support ourselves and how can we get a new perspective?

I have a girl friend who’s very busy. She owns her own business. She’s a personal chef in Seattle. So she just drives around everywhere cooking for all these wealthy families who have totally different diet plans. She has a young daughter and a boyfriend so she’s got a busy life. She said on Facebook once, she goes, “Everyone asks how I keep my stuff together. How do I keep it all together because I’m always happy and I’m always on top of everything? I’m a great mom, a great girlfriend, I have a great business. How do I do it?” She goes, “I go to a therapist three times a week. If I didn’t do that, because I don’t unload on my friend, my clients, my boyfriend. I don’t unload on people. I go to my therapist and I work stuff out. That is how I stay on top of my health.” I was like, “Oh man. I love that.”

We could think about going to a therapist as a way of distressing, as a way of helping our physical body by helping our mental, emotional body. So I love that you brought that up.

 

[2:15:26] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays there’s also great healers that you can talk to and coaches and things that actually have the ability. Some really good ones that can go in and really see what kind of stressors are causing you issues to really kind of tune in to you and some of the good ones and say, “Hey. This is what I’m picking up from you. Because sometimes we can’t tap into our own stuff. Then we can start thinking about, “Wow. That really does make sense. That has been on my mind and that is bothering me. So maybe going from there to figure out how to release it from our body.

 

[2:16:08] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s great to a perspective on the blind spots. We all have them. No one’s perfect. It’s those who are in action that are going to get the traction they need. So you have so many resources available. People can work with you one-on-one. You have a book. You have a Cancer Hacks book. You have the soup cleanse, the seven-day reset. Tell us about all. Then you’re working on an autoimmune book. When’s that coming out?

 

[2:16:43] Elissa Goodman: So, probably next year. I have an autoimmune hacks pdf on the website. If you sign-up for my newsletter you’ll get the download for free. I’m actually trying to figure out how to put it in my website so you could get it for free anyway if you’re already someone who gets my newsletter weekly. But I do weekly put out a nutrition and a recipe that I test. We test a lot of recipes. I’m always trying to give out nutrition information and I’m on social media and all of that.

The autoimmune thing has been rally fascinating to me as well like the cancer was and still is because the idea that I was able to overcome the caner and then overcome the autoimmune just feels so empowering to me. I just want to be able to help people and tell people then believe in themselves that they can do it. It’s just the best feeling ever to be able to do that in my life. I’m one lucky lady.

 

[2:17:48] Ashley James: I love it. Well. You’re going to have to come back on the show when you –

 

[2:17:51] Elissa Goodman: Thank you, Ashley.

 

[2:17:52] Ashley James: Yeah. When you release your book you’re going to have to come back on and dive totally into the autoimmune nutrition protocol, which is your book that’s coming out. Did you pick a name for it yet?

 

[2:18:07] Elissa Goodman: It might be called Autoimmune Hacks just like the Cancer Hacks. So probably going to be more about my story and how I healed through the whole process. So it’s going to be more personal.

 

[2:18:20] Ashley James: Awesome.

 

[2:18:21] Elissa Goodman: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s been fun talking with you. You’re a wealth of information.

 

[2:18:27] Ashley James: Well, this was great. Tell the listeners more about how they can work with you. So your website is your name.com. It’s so easy, Elissa Goodman. Of course the links to everything else she does is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Tell us about what it is like to work with you virtually?

 

[2:18:46] Elissa Goodman: Virtually? I love the virtual. It’s shocking. I used to think I would love the in person but I’ve been doing a lot of Zoom calls and I’m probably going to go more just to Zoom because it feels like you’re right there with the person. You’re sort of like right face to face with them and it’s so fun. I really get to see their personality and also learn a lot about what I was saying earlier about, how they came into the world and what was the birth like? Then their mom breastfed them. Do they have any traumas in their life? What kind of health issues do they have and how they eat. I really do a deep dive into getting behind the psyche, the emotional components, what might be happening physiological in the body and just really finding out also what drives them? What wakes them up in the morning? What’s their passion and their purpose? All of that is what is going to tell me why they’re where they’re at.

The interesting thing is, by the end of the session, they’re telling me why they’re where they’re at.

 

[2:20:00] Ashley James: Yes.

 

[2:20:02] Elissa Goodman: So it’s so cool because it’s like, “I already knew why I have digestive issues or sleep issues.” At the beginning you’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve got that. I don’t know why that’s going on.” But we talk and we talk and then I’m like, “You just answered the reason why you have digestive issues. Did you just hear yourself? You honestly came to that answer and that conclusion on your own because your instincts were right on.” They were probably right on before the phone call but you didn’t just trust them. That’s the cool thing.

This job doesn’t feel hard to me because of that. Because just being able to tune somebody back into themselves is like watching those light bulbs go off for them and then having them institute a few things that they make changes on. Then life starts to unfold in so many beautiful ways. You’re like, “Wow. That is the ultimate.”

 

[2:21:11] Ashley James: So awesome. I love that you said tune them back into themselves.

 

[2:21:16] Elissa Goodman: Yeah.

 

[2:21:18] Ashley James: That’s amazing when we get to see a health coach and it’s just they become that reflection that also the open listening to allow us to empty out and then allow us to sort out that chaos that’s been our lives and been in our head and then start to see your lives clearly. So you are helping them sort that out just by being there listening, asking the right questions and definitely being the one asking the right questions. Then tuning back into themselves. It’s beautiful. I love that you put it that way.

Awesome. Well, the links if listeners want to connect with you, get your free pdf, make sure that they’re following you for your autoimmune book. All those links are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

Elissa, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here and also for scheduling exactly when you need to schedule. Perfect timing. I think it’s wonderful. I’d love to have you back especially for the launch of your next book. That would be wonderful.

 

[2:22:27] Elissa Goodman: Absolutely. Thank you. It was a pleasure. And I can’t wait for it to come out.

 

[2:22:32] Ashley James: Me too.

 

[2:22:36] Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? And how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business and support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program. And it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition. But from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information.

We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctors’ offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There are so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome program.

Get Connected With Elissa Goodman!

Website

Instagram

Facebook

Cancer Hacks Book

Soup Cleanse

7-Day Reset Cleanse

Super Seed Bars

Recommended Reading By Elissa Goodman

Radical Remission by Dr. Kelly Turner