889: Reducing Inflammation and Addressing Autoimmunity With Heather Gray

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I am back today with Heather Gray to talk about reducing inflammation and addressing autoimmunity. If you missed our first episode together, we got to talk deeply about the topic of detox and how to do it correctly, what to avoid, and various ways to support the body in this process. And in this episode, we build on that conversation going deeper into topics like chronic conditions, Lyme disease, mold, autoimmunity, and their shared link of inflammation.

And she has quite the incredible journey and story with this having recovered from several of these things herself, even with, as she explains, limited genetic capacity to detox. And this showed her ways that she now is able to help countless clients on their own journeys of recovery. I feel like the really hopeful part of her message is that even sort of with the odds stacked against her, she was able to see massive improvement, even in just a span of a few months by optimizing certain factors. And she explains what those were today.

So we talk about the roots of this inflammation, how to address it correctly, how our modern lifestyle sort of sets us up in opposition to nature and how this doesn’t set us up for success when it comes to healing and so much more. Heather is a functional diagnostic nutritionist and bioenergetic practitioner who specifically specializes in supporting clients with chronic and complex conditions, including those that she herself navigated and recovered from. And she really loves getting deep on the root cause of symptoms and helping her clients take control of their health journey, which is shown in her incredible results that she has with clients. So let’s join and learn from Heather Gray. Heather, welcome back. Thanks for being here again.

Heather: So much fun. I’m so excited.

Katie: Well, if you guys missed it, we had an amazing first conversation all about detox. Got to debunk some myths related to detox and talk about how to support our bodies in effective and sustainable detox. And I feel like that was an amazing foundational conversation to get into more nuance today on the topics of inflammation and autoimmunity and recovery from sort of chronic conditions.

And unfortunately, I know from researching you, you’ve gotten to experience many of these things and to recover from them. So you speak not just from learned knowledge, but from direct personal experience as well. I feel like for this conversation, if you’re willing to share some of your personal story is actually incredibly relevant. If you don’t mind kind of sharing the long journey with all of the different sort of chronic things that you have been through.

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll start just a little bit, you know, recap of the last one, but I won’t, I won’t, I won’t say that very long. So I was basically born full of shit, right? Like I had a very early age was very constipated, hindsight’s 2020. That was the year my uncle committed suicide. My grandmother died of breast cancer, and I was being raised by alcoholic addicts. I’m pretty sure that kicked on my celiac gene right around that time. And I was most definitely eating a standard American diet. Like there was nothing real or alive about any of the food I was eating. I was brought up with, this is a part of a balanced breakfast. Bullshit. That was diabetes in the making, you know, cereal and juice. You know, toast.

And so, you know, fast forward a few years, I was also living in a moldy house. And by the time I was 13, I was the perfect host to get Lyme disease. And I say that because most people are still so cause and effect when it comes to healing. They’re like, I got bit by a tick. I got Lyme disease. Or I just got cancer because it’s in my genes. And I try to tell people there’s something that was in play five years, 10 years, 15 years before you actually got sick or you got a symptom. It’s not usually that black and white. If you got bit by something, you had something. There was a reason that you were more susceptible because otherwise everybody would have Lyme disease. Because mosquitoes carry it. You can get it sexually transmitted. You can bed bugs, you know, ticks.

But I was, like I said, set up for it with the celiac. You know, I had a leaky gut. I was a very angry, angry kid, you know, so there was a lot of emotional stuff. So obviously tied to my liver, you know, Chinese medicine ties anger to liver stuff, also very much so with Lyme.

So I got bit by a tick when I was 13. By the time I was 15, I had my first suicide attempt and was in the psych ward. And again, another round of let’s throw band-aids at symptoms, you know, let’s get her on antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, but nobody was trying to figure out why this 15-year-old wanted to off herself. So pat me on the head, send me out the door. I’m back again at the age 18 with another suicide attempt. Same thing.

So fast forward many years, I’m now 34. And I’m needing to be talked off a ledge again. I’m not doing well. A friend of mine says, you need to go see this doctor in Denver. I’m like, why? No one’s been able to figure it out so far. Like, why? But I go, and within five minutes, she gets a twinkle in her eye and goes, have you ever been bit by a tick? I said, yeah, when I was like. 13? Why? And she goes, I think you have Lyme disease. I was like, okay.

So the reason it wasn’t caught a lot sooner is because there’s a misnomer that when you get Lyme disease that everybody gets a bullseye rash. And there’s studies out that show only 30% of people get a bullseye rash. And I did not get a bullseye rash. You know, my mom was a nurse at the time too. So it completely went under the radar. I knew if I would have gotten the rash, it would have sent up some red flags. I would have gotten on the appropriate amount of doxy for the right amount of time and end of story, right? But that wasn’t the case.

Like I said, so by the time I got diagnosed with everything, I had Lyme disease, mold toxicity, heavy metals, parasites, three autoimmune diseases, and I was a hundred pounds overweight. And needless to say, I was not functioning very well at all. You know, my kid was nine at the time and I just felt like death. And so that was kind of the beginning of my healing journey when I finally got diagnosed with everything back in 2013.

Katie: Yeah, well, it’s quite the journey for you. And it sounds like you truly got to experience sort of the gamut, like all of it, which now lets you sort of speak from probably both empathy and experience when you work with people, and probably, I would guess, drives your passion for the work that you do in a major way.

I feel like I, like I said, in the beginning, this topic is so relevant, because I know many of the people listening are women, and many like me have been through some form of autoimmunity, or maybe still are in that experience. For me, I’ve talked about it before, but I had Hashimoto’s in the past, and was told that was a lifelong diagnosis, and not given any tools to really help that process through conventional medicine, other than they were, I was told I could take thyroid medication for the rest of my life. And thankfully, there were voices like yours in the world that gave me hope that there were other options besides just that black and white, you will take medication for the rest of your life and never recover.

So I would love to delve into some of the pathways through which you found healing and that you now work with other people to find healing as well. Because as we talked about in our first episode, obviously there’s genetic components, there’s personalized aspects of this for each of us. And so there is some trial and error of figuring out what works best for each of us and the human body in general, there are some like universal generalities that are also things we can build on when we’re doing that experimentation.

So maybe to start with, walk us through what were the things that helped the most in your recovery? And then also what are some of the key strategies you bring most often when working with other people?

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. You know, so there’s a couple, there are some commonalities. And so those are genetic components. Those are environmental components. Those are toxins, right? And then there’s trauma. And I find that usually when people have that lovely, perfect combination, it’s like, you’re the perfect host. Congratulations. I was so pissed after my second, you know, I was, I was just recently watching the Dark Side of Comedy on Hulu and it’s about different comedians and I’m watching it and I’m noticing the threat of trauma, you know, and I, like I said, I just recently became a standup and I’m actually pretty good at it, but I was, I was pissed that after my second suicide attempt, you know, why I wasn’t, you know, just given like, Hey, you’re an honorary comedian now. Like nobody told me the connection between trauma and some of these other things that make you more susceptible in life, right.

And so part of it was, so the FDN, the functional diagnostic nutrition, that’s the certification I have. And they really do hone in on, the basics, right? Like make sure the detox pathways are working again, mine weren’t right. I wasn’t sweating and I wasn’t pooping. So there’s two out of the three major detox pathways that weren’t working properly with me. And one thing we didn’t talk about on the last one was my favorite was coffee enemas besides sauna, but that’s a whole nother story.

You know, so we have the dialing in diet. I wasn’t eating real food at the time. I was a hairstylist for 15 years before I became an FDN. You know, also a very toxic environment to work in between the chemicals, and I was a smoker and a hairstylist and notorious of having blood sugar issues because we’re trying to like fit in food in between clients and, you know, not slowing down. You know, so there was a lot of things that, like I said, really set me up and Americans in general for this fast-paced fake world to be sick.

You know, so it was dialing in those basics, making sure I was in bed by 10 o’clock. So that way my liver and my brain had time to detox at night. You know, making sure I was eating more real whole food and getting rid of processed stuff. You know, if you don’t recognize an ingredient on a label, neither does your body, which is going to cause inflammation. Period. End of story. If you do not recognize an ingredient. You know, so it was changing the way that I ate. You know, your lifestyle of convenience is part of what’s killing you. Like, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

And so many people get really frustrated with me. When I’m telling him these things. And, you know, I tell them it’s one small change a month if you have to, right? Like try not to get overwhelmed with looking at the great big picture, you know, like two changes a month, every month, you’ll be amazed at how different your life is after a year. And you can look back and go, wow, you know, I can’t believe I made all those healthy, amazing changes.

And it helps too when you do, you start feeling better, right? Like after, all it took was like three months, literally, of taking some supplements, changing my diet, making sure I was getting to bed on time, coffee enemas, so making sure I was pooping regularly. And man, within three months, the horrors of my life, like completely turned around in such a short period of time. It was so amazing. The body is so resilient. It’s just brilliant. I love it. When you take away the stuff that’s a burden on it and you give it what it needs, it’s just fascinating what can happen.

Katie: Yeah, I love that that’s part of your message as well. And something people are probably tired of me saying on here, but I’m going to say it again, is that like at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And I feel like that mindset is important for us to be in the driver’s seat of our own health, but also because that puts within our power all of the daily habits that can affect the most change, like you just explained. And like you, this is a core belief I’ve come to is that the body is infinitely capable of healing, and that is always its goal. And so if it’s not, it’s simply giving us a message in either something it needs and doesn’t have or has and doesn’t need that it’s asking for us to listen to.

And when I reframed how I thought about symptoms and when I reframed how I thought about disease and when I stopped saying things like my body is attacking itself because I had autoimmune disease and realized that if my body wanted to kill me, it could do it instantly. And it was actually working in my best interest at all times. So if I started listening to it, we might get farther than if I was going to continue to try to fight it.

And I love that you brought up some, really practical tools. One I have not gotten to talk very much about on this podcast is coffee enemas. And I know that even when you work with people, you probably maybe get some pushback when it comes to coffee enemas because this is outside of maybe the mainstream and the norm. But I would love to just do like a brief explanation, if you don’t mind, of where to start, where to even learn more about these for people who have maybe only ever heard of them and thought, nope, that’s not for me.

Heather: My ex-husband used to get so pissed off at me because I was like, when you start to become an FDN, it’s part of the program. Like part of going through FDN is you become your first client, right? There’s a couple labs that you do on yourself and you go through the program. And going through the program is coffee enemas and they require it or, you know, they suggest it for at least three months. And at the time, I was so damn sick that if you told me to jump, I asked how high, right? Which I find that a lot of people I work with haven’t gotten there yet. So I do get a lot of pushback. It was actually part of my welcome gift to everybody that signed up with me in the beginning, but nobody was using it. And so I got, it was a little disheartening. They’re so easy to do.

They’re so inexpensive and their health benefits are just ridiculous. Like the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. So I was saying my ex-husband, because I would be at like a party at a barbecue and I’m literally talking about coffee enemas to the girl next to me. I just wrote a bit in my comedy about coffee enemas. And I sing a song about, you know, the best part of waking up is putting Folgers up your butt. But I say, no, no, don’t put Folgers up your butt. That stuff’s toxic. There’s a special kind of coffee for that.

But it’s just, like I said, especially the numbers of Americans that are constipated. People don’t realize it’s really, really bad to be constipated. Like, we kind of poo-poo it off. But constipation is so sick. You know, you’re recycling spent toxins, you’re recycling spent hormones. Like there are so many issues that come to being with constipated and your health stuff.

So I even still, after all these years, it’s part of my weekly regimen. I still do one coffee enema a week just to make sure that it keeps help, you know, helps my support my gallbladder, helps support detoxing my blood, helps, you know, remove excess stool, you know. So I, yeah, I absolutely adore coffee enemas.

And it’s sad that people are so reluctant to try them because like I said, they are one of the quickest, like low hanging fruit to helping somebody feel better fast. Again, go low and slow. I made that mistake, you know, on the back of the special coffee, it’s a three tablespoons, no problem. Start with like one teaspoon and slowly work your way up to three tablespoons. Because I think that’s too, so people, there’s that learning curve and then it gets messy, and it doesn’t work properly. So then they throw their hands up in the air and go, that’s not for me. No, you just didn’t do it right. You know, like again, there’s a nuance to, to it, but I absolutely adore coffee enemas, and I think they’re just amazing.

Katie: And you also said something that I think provides so much hope, which is that from just a few months of implementing these things, you started feeling drastically different. And I feel like that bears repeating because I know when I was in the kind of thick of autoimmunity, I felt like I was never going to recover, and I was exhausted and it felt like nothing was helping. And so I feel like that message alone can inspire so much hope.

And you mentioned supplements and sleep as also being sort of core pillars of that initial early recovery. And I can echo that from my experience as well. I was very gentle with myself, even for that first year of recovering from autoimmunity, where I slept so much. I did not do any hard exercise. It was very gentle with my body and let it recover.

I think sleep is probably the single only factor that no expert has ever disagreed with the importance of on this podcast. We can debate the macros that we should consume or the best supplements, but nobody argues that sleep is not important. So obviously that’s a big key. But can you speak a little bit more to anything that helped with your sleep or that was especially supportive of your sleep during that recovery process, as well as if you’re willing to share some of the supplements that seem to help you the most.

Heather: Yeah. I mean, that was getting back down to the basics. I did not have good sleep hygiene. I didn’t even know that word existed. I didn’t realize, again, humans are diurnal and we’re very cyclical and there’s things that mother nature puts into place that like signals to our body. Sun goes down, right? Temperature also then goes down at that time. We have artificial light. We’ve got our homes heated. And so our body misses these signals, you know?

So I work with my folks, I tell them, you got to get off, you know, your electronics for an hour or two before bedtime, wear your blue blocking glasses or have, you know, blue blocking screen on because that blue green light disrupts our body from starting the melatonin process, you know, helping to put us to sleep. So then we wonder, we’re like, I just, I go to, I feel like I’m tired and I go to bed and I just lay there. You didn’t start off the symphony, right? It starts off a pattern.

And so turning down the temperature at night, right, right before I go to bed, about an hour before I go to bed, I turn down the temperature. I put on my blue blocking glasses. I might take a few, because I know that I’ve just naturally have, I’m more susceptible to gut issues, and that’s where a lot of our melatonin is made. And so I’ll take melatonin, you know, about an hour before bed. And then I start like this, this whole sequence in order. And by the time bedtime rolls around, I’m literally like crawling to bed. Like I can barely keep my eyes open. My head hits the pillow. I’m out solid eight hours. You know, I, I look at my score the next morning. I love these trackers, you know.

Making sure that you can turn off the Wi-Fi at night, make sure you can turn off the Bluetooth. It actually helped. There’s like three things that I have people rule out before we can actually really, I mean, we’ll start working together, but they still need to rule it out. One of them is sleep apnea, because if you’re not getting enough oxygen at night when you sleep, like the best supplements, the best diet in the world is not going to help you. Ruling out mold and ruling out cavitations and all three of those things I personally had to deal with.

I’m actually having surgery next month to deal with my wickedly deviated septum and I have pregnant turbinates. And so my oxygen was dropping to like 83% at night, which is ridiculous. Like it’s brain damage level and I don’t snore. So I never in my life have been told, never did I suspect sleep apnea until I got one of these rings and then started doing sleep tests. So sleep is, I mean, sleep is my religion. Like you’ve got to dial in sleep.

And if you’re having a hard time, a lot of times, again, just getting back to those basics and the basics would be getting light on your eyes, natural light first thing in the morning, believe it or not, because that helps kick in that circadian rhythm. That’s the word I was missing earlier today. The rhythm, right? There’s a rhythm to nature and us as humans, we’re trying to buck the system and we’re paying for it. Like we can’t, do not pass go to not collect $200. We’re built this way for a reason, and we’ve got to live in rhythm with nature. And so yeah, getting sunlight on your eyes first thing in the morning actually will help reset your circadian rhythm from being around so much fakeness. So there’s a few little, little free tweaks that you can do, you know, and add in a pair of blue blocking glasses and man, wow. You got your recipe for a beautiful night’s sleep.

Katie: Yeah, I think back to how you said in the beginning, what was it that addition by subtraction kind of like that often it’s getting rid of the stuff we don’t need as being the big factor rather than adding in complicated and expensive things, or at the very least getting those foundational things in place first.

And I think of the camping study, I believe it was called that I read about one time that even just a few days to a week in nature away from artificial light was enough to completely like sort of reset and realign someone’s circadian rhythm, even if they have been, you know, sort of only entrained to artificial light for years and years. And so I just think of how rapidly in an incredible way nature can sort of realign our systems when we let it and how far we have come from that in the modern world when we’re able to literally exist without ever interacting with nature.

And I would say this is one of the recurring themes I hear over and over in different ways and in different approaches on this podcast is, you know, spending more time outside for the light, spending more time outside in a garden for the microbiome benefits of interacting with the earth. Getting the fresh air out that, as you explained, is often less polluted than indoor air because of all the things we add to our indoor air. Going for a walk rather than going to the gym, simply living in alignment with nature. And the more that we’re able to do that, I would say that’s one of the areas of compounding when it comes to health is like anytime we can spend in nature, we’re getting a very high ROI for that time spent.

Okay, so I feel like that covered a lot of the foundational things. And you work with people from sort of all kind of backgrounds and working through all kinds of health conditions. What are some of the other strategies that you feel like come up most often or are most helpful, probably especially for women, since many of the people listening are women?

Heather: It would be the mindset piece, and it would be putting yourself first, right? Like, especially moms, we have a hard time hearing this. We’ve been conditioned to put everybody else’s needs before our own. And I sound like a broken record with this, but I’m always, those cliches that become cliches without a reason, you know, you can’t pour from an empty cup, you know, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, but that is especially true if you’re trying to heal because you can’t pour from an empty cup and you have to put yourself first.

And so that and the mindset stuff, slowing down. I had a client who worked with me for a year and a half, God bless him and even after that year and a half, I was so disappointed because he was like, my anxiety is through the roof today. What supplement can you blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, did you get out into the sun? No. Did you get your feet on the ground? No. Did you meditate today? No. Have you done your breathwork today? No. No, I’m not going to suggest another supplement. Like, people are not taking. they’re kind of poo-pooing. They’re dismissing because it’s easy, right, the simplicity of it. So it can’t work, right? It’s not a pill. It can’t work.

But when you dial in these foundations, like I said, a lot of times that is where the miracle, that’s where the magic happens in taking the time. And I, you know, sometimes I still, so like this last week, you know, I’m a podcaster as well. I work with people online remotely. I spent like three days in a row in front of my freaking computer, did not get outside, did not get moving. I was so angsty, bitchy, felt kind of nauseous. My brain wasn’t working, and I couldn’t figure it out. And then I just, it was like a moth to the flame.

I just had to get outside. I sat in my yard outside with my face towards the sun, 10 minutes. And it was like somebody, you know, clear, you know, they, they brought me back to life. Like it was amazing. 10 minutes on the ground in the sun, all those symptoms went away. I felt like I had the, all the energy drained for me. Like I was exhausted and 10 minutes on the ground in the sun. It was just incredible.

And I know better. I know better, but again, you know, it gets away from us. We’re kind of in this grind culture and produce, produce, produce. And, downtime, pleasure time, fun time is not as, is, doesn’t have as much weight in this culture, you know, so definitely making time for play, making downtime, and putting yourself first are absolute crucial keys to healing.

Katie: Agreed. And not enough talked about along with that sort of inner work and emotional piece you referenced in the first episode, the book, The Body Keeps the Score, that was also very foundational for me in kind of reframing how I thought about those things. And I think until that point, I had sort of thought of the mind and body as sort of separate things that while they might be able to sort of like help each other in some ambiguous way, we’re definitely not directly connected. And that book totally changed the paradigm for me and helps me to really like approach that with an entirely different viewpoint.

And like I’ve said before, that was actually my most pivotal piece, or at least the one I had ignored for so long. That was sort of the final one that let all of the physical things I had been doing for years finally actually have an effect on my body physically. But like you, and as you explained so well, when I was stuck in fight or flight, there was no capacity for rest and digest and healing because my body very much thought it was fighting. And so I think this piece, especially for women, like you said, you know, like driven women, first women, there’s many of us that very type A in society, and then we end up with autoimmunity. And you might know this stat better than I do, but at a rate many times higher than men when it comes to autoimmunity.

Heather: Yeah, I don’t have the exact number, but it’s quite higher than men affected by women, which is sad. Testosterone is another reason. Testosterone is actually very protective. And men have the higher testosterone. And then, like I said, just the different cultural norms and the values in this world is really set up for the kind of the grind, driven, focused. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t, what’s the word I’m looking for? It doesn’t value the feminine way of doing things as much in flow, creativity, nurturing, downtime, collaboration, right?

So, you know, then you take women and have them do things like men. It’s also contributing to a lot of the sickness in women, right? Because we’re not built to work like men. That’s just not how we’re wired. And so, yeah, yeah. Getting back down to the basics, like I said, it’s absolutely life changing.

Katie: And on that note, I feel like, like I said in the beginning, I feel like your message and your work has so much hope because when I was first told I had autoimmune disease and I was told it was a lifelong thing, I felt like I was struggling to find resources and certainly anyone who could help guide me on that path. And while, like I said, I believe we are each our own primary healthcare provider, I think the best outcomes happen when we get to walk that journey with someone who can give us the specific knowledge to kind of shorten that path and make the road a little less uphill, which is what I feel like you do for so many people.

So for anyone listening who maybe is in one of those chronic conditions or has autoimmunity of some sort or Lyme or is recovering from mold, I know you have so many resources available and that you work with people directly, but where can people find you and work with you? And I will, of course, link to this in the show notes as well.

Heather: Absolutely go to renegadehealthboss.com, my website on there. There’s a page for the courses. I have a gut inflammation course that’s just coming out within the next week. I have my foundations of health course. I have a healing light meditation. So it’s a guided meditation, you know, $10, 15 minutes, you know, going through the different areas of the body and helping slow down and get out of fight or flight. You know, so like I said, they’re kind of prerequisites to working with me because I need to know that you, you know, have got a grasp of the foundation before we start, you know, working. I found that you need less quote unquote treatment, that you need to let a lot less support when you dial in on these foundations first. So I don’t let people pass go, you know, don’t collect $200. Like you’ve got to dial in those foundations.

And then from there, if there’s still stuff that’s kind of lingering and left, then I dig deeper and you know, become your, your health detective, you know, helping put missing pieces and missing puzzle pieces in the play. Cause like I said, a lot of times it could be mold or sleep apnea or cavitations. But yeah, it’s amazing what can happen by just putting in those foundations.

Katie: Amazing. Well, all of those links will be in the show notes for any of you guys listening on the go. I’m so grateful that we met and that we got to have these conversations because like I said, your message to me inspires so much hope as someone who couldn’t find these resources when I first had autoimmune disease. And I think your message is so important of not only is healing possible, but it sometimes can be much more rapid than you might think. And certainly maybe it’s not a lifelong condition, even if you’ve been told that. So Heather, I’m so grateful for the work that you do and for your time and for everything that you’ve shared today. And so glad we finally got to have this conversation. So thank you so much for being here.

Heather: Thank you so much.

Katie: And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.