In this episode of The Thermo Diet Podcast Jayton Miller sits down with Theresa Piela. In this episode, Jayton and Theresa talk about a wide variety of topics concerning the mental aspects of healing the body, how the gut impacts our thoughts, Theresa's journey towards healing her body, eft tapping, and more! Check it out and let us know what you think!
Facebook Group and Fanpage -
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Channels: - Christopher Walker ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTA1... ) - UMZU Health ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2IE... )
Instagram: -
@_christopherwalker ( https://www.instagram.com/_christophe... ) - @researchcowboy ( https://www.instagram.com/researchcow... )
Theresa's Website - https://www.livingrootswellness.com/
Full Transcript:
Jayton Miller:
Welcome back to The Thermo Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Jayton Miller, and today I have a guest on the podcast by the name of Theresa Piela, otherwise known as Living Roots Wellness on Instagram. She has a phenomenal story and we go into some of the details around the mental aspects of healing and some of the challenges that she's faced and some of the things that she's learned along the way of healing herself. So I'm really excited for you guys to be able to listen to this podcast. There's a ton of golden information inside of this podcast. So without further ado, let's get into it.
Jayton Miller:
How's it going today, guys? I'm here with Theresa ... Okay. Can you say your last name for me?
Theresa Piela:
Piela.
Jayton Miller:
Piela. How are you doing today?
Theresa Piela:
I'm doing well. How are you?
Jayton Miller:
I'm doing very well. So for the listeners out there, do you mind kind of telling them your background and how you came into this area of health?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah, so I guess I didn't realize I was even in the health field because I was so in the mud of trying to figure out what was going on with my own body, and for so long, I thought it was normal. I remember feeling pretty off, as early as second grade was when I started to feel like something wasn't right. But I assumed that everyone kind of felt that weight of fatigue and just low energy, low moods, and it kind of snowballed from there. The older I got, the worse I fell and I kind of just kept going, like most people. They just kind of put their head down and I was just focusing on school and kind of surviving. I think, yeah, just over the years it really started to worsen, and what I thought was my first way out was getting into things like Prozac to help with my depression and my anxiety, and that was the only option that was presented to me from my Western doctors and kind of blindly fell into that.
Theresa Piela:
That was, I think, kind of the first challenge on this journey where I blindly took something and then started to feel even more off and started to feel not myself, kind of numb. All of a sudden I was sleeping well and I was feeling a little bit better, but not entirely alive and things from there got a little bit more intense. In college I had a stress fracture, that was interesting. Started to get testing, found out I had severe osteoporosis and all sorts of other issues. Then that opened up the door to testing in general, and luckily I had a really supportive mom that had already been starting to dive into the world of chronic illness because there had been some Lyme cases in my family. That's when that portal opened up. We started doing Lyme testing. I came with a bunch of infections like Bartonella, Babesia, Chlamydia pneumoniae, I think, is what they call it, all sorts of tick infections, parasites, the classic heavy metal, really high levels of heavy metal, mold in the urine, the classic hypothyroidism.
Theresa Piela:
All of these crazy things. Food sensitivities to everything, and when I started collecting those binders of lab tests and, again, feeling my body almost breaking down, it was at this point where it wasn't a matter of just pushing through it anymore. I was barely able to make it through the day because my energy was just non-existent and my food reactions had become so intense. So I had weaned off of the Prozac ... and cut me off at any point. I find myself not really telling the story often, so it's not as succinct as I'd like, but anyways. I weaned myself off of Prozac and that's when I stopped sleeping. As you know, sleep is where the body repairs, you rejuvenate, all those wonderful systems kick back in and kind of enter this state of delirium. But that's when I started really diving into the research myself. So both a curse and a blessing, I guess. From that time, really, it's been kind of trying to figure out what's been leading to what, and I've spent many, many years going down rabbit holes where I thought I'd find the answer.
Theresa Piela:
First I thought it was ... it's a Lyme, great. We'll kill the Lyme with really high dose antibiotics and all of these antiparasitic drugs and dah, dah, dah, dah. At a certain point, the body breaks down even more so then I'd take another route and say, "Oh yes, it's the candida and it's the mold. Let's do some culation, let's do some sauna therapy, let's take care of that." So long story short, it really got to a sensitive point when I just was getting so, so sick. My body dropped to 79 pounds. I was just emaciated and barely able to function. I would spend the day in the bathtub just kind of surviving, and this is a little graphic, but I had lost complete gut motility. So I would basically spend my entire day doing rounds of enemas just to get the matter out of me that I wasn't assimilating, I wasn't absorbing. And then ... Wow, the Carnivore Diet is what kind of led me to Ray Peat and Danny Roddy's work.
Theresa Piela:
I met another fellow carnivore that had very similar health issues, kind of hitting a point where the body just started breaking down and Carnivore served as a stabilizing factor for both of us. Then he started telling me a little bit about Danny Roddy's work and Ray Peat, and my sister on the side had also found huge benefit from Kate Darien's work and Ray Peat in general. So I was a little behind in starting to see that as a possibility, because again, I was so reactive to every food. Even when I was just eating beef and egg yolks and butter, I was still having huge histamine reactions to that where I'd kind of have to lay down and be out for the count for the day. But something about the inspiration of Ray's work and starting to realize that I had this kind of invisible community of other people that were starting to sort out their own health journeys, something about that gave me hope.
Theresa Piela:
I started really focusing more on the brain rewiring aspect, knowing that yeah, my body was breaking down, but what did I have control over of pulling in the stoic wisdom at the same time to really give myself something to latch onto where I didn't take my suffering personally. Yeah, I think it kind of snowballed from there. Just starting to really experiment still, quite sick still, pretty disabled, but slowly crawling out. Yeah, that kind of brings me to now. I, last year, dove into colon hydrotherapy, training to get certified because I really, really think that the function of the gut is so intricately tied with our ability to feel healthy and to have a normal and functioning immune system and everything in between and just our moods in general. So yeah, I really firmly believe in that. Also credit a lot of my life to that simple tool for really helping kind of the sickest cases at least stabilize so they're not completely sick. So hopefully that answered your question in a kind of circular way.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So what was kind of the first high leverage factor that you utilized and then how did that kind of go into the metabolic nutrition and stuff like that?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah, so the carnivore approach, I think the high protein diet, all of a sudden ... I remember waking up, it was two days in of switching cold turkey to 100% meat. Two days in my brain fog had gone away and the extreme bloating I had been experiencing for the last 12 years of my life started to go down. So that gave me a little kind of spark of inspiration and started to dive more into liver function and how important protein is and just different amino acids and the effect on the body. Honestly, then I started to research the effects of caffeine. Again, I had been told by my doctors and all of my healers and specialists to absolutely stay away from caffeine. It's the devil, it's poisonous. If you have any kind of autoimmune condition or Lyme's disease, anything you could ... Never have this. But Ray's work really opened up the idea to using it as a pro-metabolic tool.
Theresa Piela:
I think starting to have very, very small micro doses of coffee actually allowed my body to have a leg up and not have such an intense immune reaction and allow my body to actually utilize the glucose as I started to add it back in very, very slowly. Because as I transitioned off of carnivore, I started with small amounts of maple and just ... At first, again, I was having extreme reactions to carbs. My body did not know how to handle it, but coffee really started to help. So that, I think, opened up the portal. I'm trying to think if there ... It felt like an exciting time because all of a sudden I was like, "Whoa, I feel like I'm having a second chance." I started to feel energy come back into this body that had felt so just kind of lifeless. I felt like an empty sock and my world was so sepia tinted because I just, again, did not have ... I wasn't absorbing my nutrition and then the brain kind of shuts down with everything else.
Theresa Piela:
So from there, I mean, I'd always been into experimenting, but I just kind of started to play around with the different pro metabolic and Ray Peat inspired meals and added in the carrots and I think, as funny as that sounds, the carrots were game-changing. Again, my sister was the first one to bring this up to me and I kind of wrote it off because I didn't really believe something as simple as carrot fibers could be so helpful because I've been trying for years to help my gut. It was ravaged from all the parasites and the treatments and the antibiotics and all these toxic supplements I had been taking. Then lo and behold, adding in the carrots started to normalize my gut functions, that I wasn't just in the bathtub all day, I could suddenly be out and about and start thinking, "Wow, what do I want to do with this life?"
Jayton Miller:
That's awesome. So one of the things you mentioned is that the cloud kind of went away. Can you kind of elaborate on that and talk about that experience?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. I guess anyone that's experienced kind of constipation or brain fog in general, you start to realize that if you're not releasing all this endotoxin, all of the bacterial byproducts, just fermenting food in your gut, if that sits for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven days, you start to feel like a different person. Again, I sort of took that for granted as a kid. I didn't think about my gut health at all, just carried on with the day what I wanted. But as an adult, when my health was really at a sensitive point, when I was having reactions to everything, it felt like I couldn't win. I'd eat something very simple and the next morning wake up with the most intense flu-like reactions, like living in this crazy cloud where I couldn't even think clearly. It literally feels like you're kind of clawing through mashed potatoes and I would always get relief through the enemas or the colonics.
Theresa Piela:
But again, it didn't feel like a sustainable way to live a life. I didn't want to live in a bathtub. But when I started to regain that gut motility and not have such intense [inaudible 00:12:18] reactions on Carnivore, that again gave me another kind of blossom of hope where I realized, "Wow, okay, yes, this diet is not ideal, but I have evidence that things can improve. I have a stable ground where I can start to research and figure out what are the safest foods I can start to add back in right now while my gut is kind of leaky."
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. You also mentioned the things that you can control within your mind. Can you kind of go into how that played a role in your healing journey and kind of some of the tools that you utilized?
Theresa Piela:
Okay. So I think, and maybe you can relate to this and maybe some people listening can relate to this, but when you've been sick for a while, your brain rewires, and part of that is kind of the impact of trauma, where your brain is looking out for you. It doesn't want to experience pain so it almost starts to package up and close off the world, trying to avoid danger. Maybe the brain gets stuck in these loops of thinking about worst case scenarios and how I'll never be healthy, how it's always going to be this way. Again, when you wake up or spend your entire day sick, it's so hard to even imagine a possibility where that isn't the case. So you sort of get stuck in this catch 22 of seeing the world as you are.
Theresa Piela:
When I realized how intolerable that was to me and that I could start to change my perspective, even the slightest bit, it's almost like I had to think in a pro-metabolic way, even though my body was so sick, just to get out of that learned helplessness. Because so much of that, too, is realizing that, yes, the brain is responding to the toxic body, the body will heal with time, but if you were repeating these same old patterns of thinking and living with that same kind of, "Woe is me, dah, dah, dah, dah, how come everyone else is sick?" My thought patterns were so, of course, toxic, and those completely impact the way we digest and function. Sending off the stress response just with our thoughts, I think is something to really pay attention to. So it was really kind of taking charge of that and realizing, "Wow, I want to enjoy my life. If my body's not going to be healthy, at least I can start to train my brain to think healthy."
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. What are some of the practices that you implemented in order to kind of break those loops that you had going on?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. So one of the first things I started practicing with someone I still work with today was EFT tapping. Again, have you heard of this?
Jayton Miller:
I've heard of it, but I've never talked to anybody who's actually utilized it.
Theresa Piela:
Yeah, okay. It's one of my favorite tools and I kind of rolled my eyes at it at first. I'm like, "What? You want me to tap on my head while I say things to myself?" But I think with kind of traumatic loops and dysfunctional thinking, we logically know that it doesn't feel good to feel anxious or to feel depressed or to think in these kind of rigid and dark ways. But the brain can't get out of that if that's all it knows. So when we can kind of sneakily get in there in ways that aren't really utilizing the normal entry points in, more of just any way that you can. It's more of like a sematic approach. That's when I noticed things starting to change. So the tapping and I can tell you more about this after, was, I guess, another one of those sneaky ways to start to challenge these beliefs and these conditionings that we've accumulated over the years.
Theresa Piela:
Maybe because of our sickness, maybe because of traumatic events in our past, or even just the way that trauma is passed down from generation to generation and find ourselves maybe hypervigilant for a reason that isn't related to our experience. All of those factors. But that's my favorite tool. And then something called DNRs. Have you heard of that?
Jayton Miller:
No, I have not.
Theresa Piela:
That inspires a lot of my work too, but it's really, again, honoring the fact that so much of disease is due to the kind of limbic system getting stuck in these faulty pathways where the body might be reacting to things wisely. Because say you had a mold exposure in the past, every time you smell something slightly moldy, your whole nervous system is going to send off alarm bells because it doesn't want you to be in danger. But with any kind of chronic sickness or chronic illness, those patterns really get amplified and they get stuck. So it's more of these tools of shifting the brain to be less reactive and almost teaching the brain that it has an option again. It can choose to suffer and freak out, or it can start to visualize and really imagine different stories and feeds into the neuroscience approach of realizing that the brain doesn't really know the difference between reality and imagination.
Theresa Piela:
So it's kind of like taking the brain and tricking it ... Yeah, really fooling it into thinking that there's a possibility. Then all of a sudden it realizes, "Whoa, it feels good to feel good. It feels good to think that something good could happen in the future," because you could spend your time planning for the worst and really imagining a future where everything is terrible and we're all just sick and lonely and not doing anything very interesting or, "Wow. What if we're kind of collaborating and having fun and exploring and skiing and spending time with loved ones?" That's a very available story that I think a lot of people who are really sick and disabled at home forget that is a possibility too.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. How does that actually work?
Theresa Piela:
So there's a lot of different techniques within the DNRs or the tapping communities, but I'd say the essence of it is really just reminding the brain to shift its perspective. Noticing those faulty loops of the past that might assume the worst, that might kind of be hypervigilant, that might be down, all of the pathways that ... You can think of the qualities that just don't feel good in life. Say you wake up and you don't feel very energized, a kind of dysfunctional brain might say, "Oh my gosh, it's always going to be this way. I'm not going to have energy to do what I need to do. Oh, I'm supposed to be on a podcast today. How am I going to do this? My life sucks. I've always been sick." Versus, "Oh, okay, great. What can I do to feel better right now? Oh, wow. This caffeine paired with some grass fed milk will really help my thyroid function and then I'll be able to think better and, oh, wow, what a great opportunity to interact with someone new."
Theresa Piela:
It's sort of subtle, but it really is starting to shift the brain continually over and over and over again until the new default mode is something positive and kind of rooted in the sense of possibility and not in doom and gloom and rigid thinking.
Jayton Miller:
That's awesome. So it's kind of rooted in the potential that the being has.
Theresa Piela:
Yes. Even just seeing kind of the black and white of sick versus healthy, when you imagine that healthy state, anything's possible. It's so much about play and spontaneity and interacting with the environment in a way that novelty just fits right in. There's that desire to see, "Wow, what can I experience there?" And that is exactly it. I think in terms of getting out of that really sick state, if the body is going to take the time healing, because sometimes with toxicity and just really chronic issues, that does take time to reverse if we've been living in a really dysfunctional way. But if we can start to really get the brain almost a couple of steps ahead of us, it's like the body wants to follow. It's like, "Wow, I'm thinking that I'm going to be out skiing these mountains. Oh, I better start to rev up the engines on those cells and start to dump all of these gunky toxins out and let the body start to catch up with that."
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So in your journey, was that kind of the case where you had to put the mind in a place that was kind of better than your current circumstances?
Theresa Piela:
Exactly. Yeah, because I was still noticing how almost the majority of my thoughts were so toxic and it wasn't surprising because I had so little energy, especially still in the beginning stages of Carnivore, I felt better, but I knew that wasn't the life I wanted to live. I knew I still had very little energy and I was an athlete when I was younger and being so fatigued that just walking outside was all I could do for the day and seeing 80 year olds on their jogs and young people smiling and laughing, it felt like I was living in this bubble of doom. But it's like I really made that choice where I realized I need ... This is almost the last straw here. I hadn't found any help really with any of the Western medical or even kind of the fringe medical approaches, so this felt like my best option. I had heard of other people that had started to make changes with more of the brain rewiring aspects. So, yeah, it felt like a little nugget of hope that I latched onto and it turned out to be really promising.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. Did you notice that with your mind here and your body here, every time that your body kind of took a little bump up, it pushed the mood even further up than what it was?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. It's like when you get some evidence that, "Whoa, maybe you do have a little bit of control here and that maybe life can open up and you can start to see those possibilities feel bright and feel beautiful, absolutely." I think it's kind of that catch 22 state where sometimes you just need the smallest bit of ... not false hope, but evidence-based hope that yes, you can heal, these success stories could be you too, and that was part of the game changer for me when I started to really practice that. Notice when I would start to lose hope in my brain and say, "Wait a second, why can't I believe that this is possible for me? Hundreds of other people have healed. I'm nothing too special."
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So whenever you are interacting with other people, what are some of the biggest things that you see them struggle with in order to get to that point?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. That's a really interesting question. I'm sure you think about this too, but when someone is such a low metabolic state, they are in that catch 22, where they can't even think better than their environment because they are so in it. It's like that fish tank analogy where the fish just knows the water they're in. I think that's where it's helpful to ... When people do really actually hit rock bottom there and they've tried everything and they realize, "Well, I've tried all these rigid healing diets. I've seen all these specialists and I'm still not better. I'm going to take a leap of faith." But I think it's kind of also the willingness to let go of who someone thinks they are. Like, "I have this disorder, I have that. I've always been this way," and stepping into, again, that possibility that, "Huh, maybe I can change."
Theresa Piela:
Part of the tapping and the brain rewiring that I find so helpful is that it gives the brain a little essence of, "Whoa. I feel like a different person. Interesting. Can I follow that for a second? What would happen if I keep practicing the more energized, more vital, more fertile, more creative version of myself? What will happen if I can sustain that?" And not a bright siding way. We can't pretend that we're healthy and that we can just get on with life when the body is completely toxic, but we can start to imagine and see that evidence start to build on its own. So yeah, really, I think the biggest roadblock is when people are so stuck in who they think they are or the idea that aesthetic is the most important thing.
Theresa Piela:
I sometimes think that some people will be so overly focused on how they want their body to look and forgetting to listen to what their body actually needs, and not really listening to the cues that, yeah, if your body is really sick, it might be the best option to rest even though your brain wants to keep pushing. That's something that I definitely dealt with as more of a Type A competitive person that liked to do things. I liked the kind of endorphin rush of feeling like I could be out and about adventuring, but letting that go and just saying, "Whoa, okay, my body is dictating a slower speed," and kind of making friends with that. That was a huge, huge paradigm shift for me.
Theresa Piela:
So I think that can definitely relate to a lot of people that want to kind of hurry up and heal versus, "Okay, let's slow this down. What can we enjoy in this moment? Even if you're stuck in bed all day and disabled, what can we start to enjoy right now? Wow. These sheets are really soft. Whoa. I get to read all my favorite books," and kind of build from there.
Jayton Miller:
Or listen to your favorite podcast.
Theresa Piela:
Or listen to your favorite podcasts. Exactly. Even better.
Jayton Miller:
Have you heard of Eckhart Tolle?
Theresa Piela:
Oh my goodness. I'm so glad you brought him up. So that was one of the first books that someone gave me back in college. That, again, started to open up my brain a little bit and that was again right when I wasn't sleeping so it did start to imprint in a very curious way. What makes you think of that right now?
Jayton Miller:
So in The Power of Now he talks about, and within the stoic philosophy as well, they talk about the dis-identification from the egoic mind and being able to step back and observe our mind for what it is and tapping into that present moment. I think that that is very important.
Theresa Piela:
Yes, and I'm really happy you brought that up too, because when I started to really get to know the nature of my own mind and realizing that I could watch these really dysfunctional doom-based, anxiety-based, panic-based thoughts and say, "Oh wow, the observer of that is actually kind of relaxed and peaceful and doesn't really care what's happening in my life." That opened up this sense of peacefulness and almost a sense of ... sort of a sense of humor with it all. It could be a really terrible day where I was so brain fogged that even finding words felt impossible and just getting to the kitchen to make some coffee and breakfast was like ... that was the triumph of the day. When I could just watch what my brain was doing exactly like Eckhart Tolle mentions, it's almost like it opened up, again, another sense of possibility in the way I could interact and perceive in my world and notice that I could find some fun, even just in my very small world of trying to just get a little bit better.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So whenever you are trying to ... So for me personally, I'm an over analyzer. I overanalyze everything constantly and it helps with a lot of things, but for most things it's not very beneficial. So how do you tend to get out of your mind and back into your body?
Theresa Piela:
That's so interesting. Well, it depends what I'm over analyzing and where it's taking me. So I can also relate and I think with an overactive brain, if it's going more down the path of anxiety and future forecasting, like, "Oh, this is going to happen. This might happen. I better dah, dah, dah, dah, dah," stopping that, literally just watching those thoughts as if I'm watching a movie of those thoughts, literally watching them stop and finding something in the present moment to come back to. At first, when I was in a very, very dysfunctional state, sometimes it was something as simple as, wow, noticing the texture of the counter and kind of zooming in on some very, very basic detail of life. I think sometimes the breadth is something that's ... It's talked about so much and not in a meditative way, but really bringing that overactive mind and letting it focus on something that's already happening and seeing how much you can expand the awareness of that.
Theresa Piela:
So it comes back to that brain shifting again and tricking the brain saying, "Whoa, okay, I see what you're doing. Oh, wow. This is a very familiar habit. Oh, yes. The over-analyzing again. Oh, let me use that same kind of hyper-focus of thinking and put it on something else that is either neutral or pleasurable." So also just finding something in nature to start to hyper-focus on. This is something I would notice. I'd be out on my little walks, trying to think about the next step, kind of feeling like, "Wow, my body was shutting down. What am I doing with this life? What is the point of this? What do I need to learn from this?" Those kind of cycles. Then I'd say, "Whoa, stop that. That's not helpful." Literally watching those thoughts stop and refocus on the crows. They became some of my biggest allies in this healing process.
Theresa Piela:
Just watching the crows and letting myself get so consumed in their funny behavior, picking up trash and flying around with their families and doing sort of goofy things. And using that, again, as a reminder to see the brain's potential that it can sort of get out of control, but we can also use it as a tool. We can harness that and place it somewhere else and let it grow from there, because it doesn't have to be just placing it on something neutral or beautiful. You can say, "Okay, I'm clearly suffering in this over analyzation of whatever topic the brain has decided to be important. What is truly important to me? Wow. My partner is really important to me. I am going to think more about that and kind of let the brain over analyze how wonderful of a person he is," dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Yeah. That's, I think, the biggest tools I still use daily.
Theresa Piela:
I mean, it's a never ending process really of realizing ... It's that ceiling analogy you used. It's like you make some progress, you're like, "Whoa, what's next? Oh, I still have this slightly dysfunctional kind of anxiety based loop? Okay. Let me see if I can tweak that and use it in a more productive or peaceful way," whatever feels like it would enhance your experience of being you, being a human.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So were there any kind of external or environmental factors that you noticed kind of elevated your way of thinking or just you took it out and it made a significant impact?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. So the sun has always made a huge difference for me. I feel so much better in the sun and now we know why. Wow, it has so many different factors, aside from just the immune boost and the vitamin D, but the body works better with that kind of heat source. It's like, "Your thyroid isn't working well? Great sit in the sun and you'll feel a whole lot better." So that made a big difference, and when I first moved out west to California, I noticed I felt better. It was easier to keep my thoughts in places that felt good with the sunshine, versus classic New England weather, where it's dark and gray and cold and rainy and kind of humid and moist and moldy.
Theresa Piela:
And also a sense of peace and quiet in nature. Again, huge difference and people always talk about nature therapy and forest healing, but for someone that maybe has a bunch of disorders and diseases and their nervous system is kind of frazzled and fried, it is so beneficial to get out somewhere where stimuli and then the literal noise can soften and letting the body almost calm down by removing something.
Theresa Piela:
Then I'd say the biggest one that I am so grateful for is moving to high altitude and feeling literally like a different person. I know that air quality back where I was living in California was pretty dismal. Our whole town was on fire so most of the time we were inside with a HEPA filter, but we'd go outside and come back and kind of brain fogged. I was having trouble discerning, "Whoa, what's a symptom and what's being caused by this dismal air quality?" Then when we moved to Colorado, it's like, "Whoa, the world opened up." What I thought were these kind of old, lingering symptoms, maybe a Lyme flare up, something that I didn't really have control over, got so much better.
Theresa Piela:
So I think if anyone's really, really struggling to heal and they're doing all the brain work, they're doing all the pro-metabolic tools and really changing their lifestyle, if they're still not at a point where the body feels like it's really making progress, that might be something, if they're fortunate enough, to look into. Because I think the high altitude just allows everything to work better. A lot of bacterial infections can't survive at high altitude. It's amazing to me. Mountains are such a gift,
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. One of the theories that I've had previously about that, because I noticed that, and you'll probably see this in Colorado, is that most of the hobbies that people have outside has to do with reaching a peak of some sort. So whether it's rock climbing or skiing or hiking, they're always trying to get to the highest point of elevation that they can. I think that it has to do with the electromagnetic frequency of the earth and the way that it has the ability to physically pull down the reductive stress hormones in the body. So the actual electrical charge that the stress hormones have, they're in a reductive state and I think that the magnetism of the earth literally begins to pull them down-
Theresa Piela:
At a faster rate or a more significant force than if we were at sea level?
Jayton Miller:
I would say so, yeah.
Theresa Piela:
That's so interesting. I have not thought about that. Wow. Then pairing that with just the ability of the thyroid to work better at higher altitude and then the bacteria not being able to survive and then the carbon dioxide retention, it's like you have these beautiful snowball effects where ... Yeah, and now I'm imagining someone at the top of a peak feeling so grateful, but also just feeling good and of course that has synergy. So yeah, I love that. I want to look more into that.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. I would say a good place to kind of take examples from is Tibetan monks or the monks in the Himalayas, because they're always at the peak and you hear stories of them living to 150 years old, just these outstanding numbers. I think that's one of the things that it has to do just because they're relatively stress-free, both from a psychological perspective and a physical perspective.
Theresa Piela:
Yeah, and that ties back into what we were talking about. If physically your body's under significant stress, start to harness the psychological stress, see if you can kind of smush that and compost it and let the body catch up. It's all about, "Okay, we know the world is stressful, we know our bodies are having to process things that are significant, but if we can lessen that load even the slightest bit, wonderful."
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. Well, I think that is the extent of the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you'd like to tell the audience?
Theresa Piela:
You know, I don't have any messages.
Jayton Miller:
Where can they find you on social media and your website and stuff like that?
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. I'm at Living Roots Wellness and livingrootswellness.com, trying to always bring in something interesting. So whether it's a recipe or just kind of a blind spot in healing, that's been my approach, to see, again, the ... Really wanting to help the people that feel like they're doing everything. They feel like they've tried everything in the body, body or the brain, anything in between isn't shifting, time to start getting creative and really the idea of becoming your own expert and having a little bit of fun in the process, I think, is a huge thing that's so easy to forget as you get kind of hyper-focused in wanting to feel better. It's so hard to feel fun and playful when you're super sick, but that's almost part of the way out too. So it's, again, with that brain rewiring, start doing the things you'd be doing when you're healthy, within reason, start thinking in ways that a healthy version of you would be thinking and really let that integrate with time. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Jayton Miller:
I would say one tip that I've noticed is try to game-ify everything. Just gamification of your entire life helps tremendously.
Theresa Piela:
Yeah. Well, I kind of think of my days that way. If I find myself getting a little bit too serious about something, I have to, again, stop myself in the same way I'd stop those kinds of hypervigilant, loop-based thoughts and say, "Whoa, what needs some play here?" So gamification, that's a term I haven't heard, but I love it
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. Well, Theresa, I really appreciate you being on here. I appreciate your time. For all of those you listening, make sure to give her a follow on Instagram and check out her website. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you haven't already, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe and leave a comment down below if you want us to cover a different topic.
