In today’s video, we sit down with Dr. Jill Carnahan. Dr. Jill Carnahan is Your Functional Medicine Expert® dually board certified in Family Medicine for 10 years and in Integrative Holistic Medicine since 2015. She is the Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine, a widely sought-after practice with a broad range of clinical services including functional medical protocols, nutritional consultations, chiropractic therapy, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, and massage therapy. As a survivor of breast cancer, Crohn’s disease, and toxic mold illness she brings a unique perspective to treating patients in the midst of complex and chronic illness. Her clinic specializes in searching for the underlying triggers that contribute to illness through cutting-edge lab testing and tailoring the intervention to specific needs.
Your host, Nathan Crane, is a Certified Holistic Cancer Coach, Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, Cancer-Health Researcher and Educator, and 20X Award Winning Documentary Filmmaker with Over 15 Years in the Health Field.
Today’s podcast is focused on Dr. Jill Carnahan’s story of battling cancer and Crohn’s disease and how she managed to thrive in the midst of these complex chronic illnesses. Visit The Nathan Crane Podcast on YouTube to watch the full podcast!
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Audio Transcript
(Note that this transcription was auto-generated so there may be some errors)
00:01:29:04 – 00:01:58:04
Nathan Crane
Welcome to the podcast. I’m really excited about today’s episode. Today we have Dr. Jill Carnahan, who is a duly board certified in family medicine, as well as an integrative, holistic medicine. Since 2005, she founded the Methodist Center for Integrative Medicine in Peoria and worked there as a medical director. Then in 2010, she moved to Boulder and opened the flat Iron Functional Medicine Center, where she is a widely sought after medical practice.
00:01:58:11 – 00:02:19:02
Nathan Crane
She has a highly sought after medical practice with a broad range of clinical services, including nutritional consultations, chiropractic therapy, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, massage therapy. That’s my kind of clinic. I’ll tell you what, all of those things in one eye kind of have to source those things separately from different practitioners today. So it’s cool to have places to do it all in one place.
00:02:19:09 – 00:02:48:03
Nathan Crane
Dr. Jill is a survivor of both breast cancer and Crohn’s disease, and she’s very passionate about teaching patients how to live well and thrive when they’re dealing with chronic illness. Her newest book is called Unexpected is a fantastic read. I highly recommend it. It’s like it’s Dr. Jill. I love how you’ve written this, where it’s very storytelling. You’re like telling stories the whole time and it keeps you super engaged.
00:02:48:03 – 00:03:16:19
Nathan Crane
It’s like the story of your life, childhood challenges you’ve been through, the things that you’ve overcome as well as like really practical steps people can take. You talk about different types of diets and then, you know, different things to think through and whether it’s mental, emotional health or lifestyle changes. But it’s not like a super analytical left brain step by step book, which, you know, I read those too, but I get way more engaged in story.
00:03:16:19 – 00:03:47:21
Nathan Crane
And I think most people do, right? Human beings, we love stories. We get emotionally drawn into to a story. We can relate to a story, especially when it’s a real story like yours dealing with cancer and Crohn’s disease and chronic illness. You know that you were struggling through as a medical doctor and, you know, realizing that the conventional medical approach maybe wasn’t going to have the best solutions for you long term.
00:03:47:21 – 00:03:55:04
Nathan Crane
And so you started seeking solutions elsewhere. So I want to I’d love to get into that with you. But but welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for being here.
00:03:55:21 – 00:03:58:20
Jill Carnahan, MD
Thank you for having me. I’m super excited for our conversation today.
00:03:59:20 – 00:04:20:22
Nathan Crane
Yeah, me too. So I want to start with your cancer diagnosis, if you don’t mind, and just talk a little bit about what that was like for you. What were you going through and what was that time in your life? You know, where were you at in your life? I believe you were already a practicing physician, is that right?
00:04:21:10 – 00:04:22:12
Jill Carnahan, MD
I was in medical school.
00:04:22:20 – 00:04:26:22
Nathan Crane
You’re in medical school? That’s right. And yeah. Can you can you talk a little bit about that?
00:04:27:16 – 00:04:43:23
Jill Carnahan, MD
Sure. So the little backstory is I grew up on a farm in Illinois. I was one of five kids. I had a really healthy upbringing, and you would think it was like the perfect place to grow up. Lots of acres to roam. And we rode four wheelers and played on the farm and snowmobile and and we actually had about a half acre garden.
00:04:44:02 – 00:05:01:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
My mother was a retired nurse, had to retire to raise five children. And so it was really a beautiful childhood. I had a great family, great environment. But unbeknownst to me, I think that the background there was that there was toxic chemicals on the farm back in the seventies and eighties. It was very common to use pesticides and herbicide.
00:05:01:11 – 00:05:18:05
Jill Carnahan, MD
The still is actually and fortunately my family’s changed their farming practices actually partially because of my cancer diagnosis. But all this I went, you know, went through high school a graduated valedictorian, went to medical school. But my heart was always that of a natural path. Like I knew that there was ways to heal the body in more natural ways.
00:05:18:11 – 00:05:44:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it’s funny because I almost didn’t go to medical school. I applied to chiropractic and acupuncture and all those kind of alternative therapies because I knew my heart was how do we optimize the body to thrive in the midst of illness? And that was my mindset. But what happened was I started applying to medical schools and in Chicago, which wasn’t too far away from my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, there was about seven medical schools, and all of a sudden I started getting acceptance letters and I thought, okay, maybe I should consider this.
00:05:44:19 – 00:06:03:21
Jill Carnahan, MD
And it was an interesting thing. It was a very deliberate decision because I knew the allopathic model actually wasn’t exactly aligned with my belief, not that there wasn’t good there. And I always say, like my job, my school’s role in the world is to bridge the gap because we have allopathic medicine where we get, you know, a car accident or a trauma or heart attack.
00:06:03:21 – 00:06:25:01
Jill Carnahan, MD
You want to be in the best medical center available to save your life. But if you have chronic illness, cancer, autoimmunity, obesity, diabetes, I could name a hundred others. We don’t have a drug that reverses those conditions. And that’s the idea. Right. And I’m framing this because all of a sudden I’m in medical school in allopathic, regular conventional school, really a brutal training system.
00:06:25:02 – 00:06:47:22
Jill Carnahan, MD
It’s still very archaic, very masculine, very driven, very kind of abusive, if I’m honest, as far as how the work our regulations came into play. But before that, I was doing 36 hour shifts at a time. I would have maybe three or four days off a month. That’s it. And it was really quite stressful. I always say it’s interesting because it was almost like they trained you to not not use the restroom, not eat, not sleep.
00:06:47:22 – 00:07:04:20
Jill Carnahan, MD
Like how could you like deny your body your needs to the best, to the most ability so that you could do the medicine. But in a way, that’s the worst kind of way to create a compassionate position, right. So all of this in the midst of my third and hardest year of medical school, I’m in my surgery rotation and we’re talking about breast disease and breast cancer.
00:07:05:01 – 00:07:27:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
So I’m like, oh, let me check my breast and make sure there’s no lumps. I’m 24 years old right before my 25th birthday, and I find a lump and I’m literally like, Oh, I don’t have time for this. I initially totally ignored it and it was like a thickening in my left breast, right under my armpit. But of course, at the insistence of my ex-husband and the people around me, they said, You need to get this checked out.
00:07:27:06 – 00:07:44:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it was like two short weeks later I had a mammogram, an ultrasound and a biopsy. And I’ll never forget and even, you know, there’s times when, like, your life changes forever and you remember, like, the color, the wallpaper, the the music that was playing. Whenever that song plays again, you’re like, takes you right back to there. You remember every single detail.
00:07:44:16 – 00:08:06:12
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah. This was one of those moments in my life where I literally, I can remember the color, the walls, the green chair I was sitting in. I get a call from the surgeon and she said, Jill, I don’t really know how to tell you this, but you have aggressive breast cancer. I just literally days, probably five or seven days from my 25th birthday, I had just turned 25.
00:08:06:12 – 00:08:26:10
Jill Carnahan, MD
And at that time at Loyola, where I went to medical school, I was the youngest person they had ever diagnosed with breast cancer. Now, sadly, since then, that’s 20 plus years later. There’s been a lot of young women in their teens and in their twenties diagnosed, so it’s sadly becoming more common. But at that time, in 2001, it was an anomaly.
00:08:26:10 – 00:08:45:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
It was an absolute shock and it completely changed my life. That one phone call. So then what do I do? Right? I believe that holistic medicine is powerful. I believe I can heal. That never changed. But here I am facing this life threatening diagnosis. And to put it in perspective, I always say everybody listening has had someone they know with breast cancer.
00:08:45:15 – 00:09:06:21
Jill Carnahan, MD
I can’t imagine it hasn’t touched every single listener, either aunt or grandmother or mother or someone you know, Maybe it’s a friend. And most of those women are diagnosed the average age is around 55. But in young women, it’s a whole different ballgame. First of all, the statistics of getting that diagnosis are one in a million. And then second, the survival rate is very, very poor.
00:09:07:06 – 00:09:32:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
And to put that into perspective, it’s I was in a group of young women under the age of 40 in Chicago, a support group for breast cancer. I’m the only one still living. So it was it was definitely a major diagnosis. So then what do I do? I ended up doing conventional chemotherapy with some of the most aggressive drugs known to mankind, just like the one of the heart toxic drugs.
00:09:32:08 – 00:09:48:05
Jill Carnahan, MD
They basically calculated the dose so they could give me the maximum dose before my heart would stop beating. And they gave me that dose. So I have the lifetime dose of that drug I can never have anymore. Another drug called CI toxin is known to induce leaky gut, and that’s a whole nother part of my story that I didn’t realize at the time.
00:09:48:05 – 00:10:06:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
But I took these three drugs. I lost all my hair. This morning. You saw a picture of me bald on the marquee and I learned a new term for bald. It’s kind of more fun to say it’s glamorous. So I would be like, I’m. It’s hairless. That’s all that means and everything. Like, I’m laborious, but I was bald, I was sick, I was malnourished.
00:10:06:15 – 00:10:07:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
I was. Yeah, that was.
00:10:07:14 – 00:10:29:08
Nathan Crane
Forever for everyone watching. Oh, here’s a you just told me about a new film. Documentary about your life. Doctor patient. And this is you on the right. Bald, obviously. Younger. Yeah. And then here’s you on the left Now, this is so this is a 2526 on the right.
00:10:29:16 – 00:10:31:02
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, That’s 25 years old.
00:10:32:02 – 00:10:32:12
Nathan Crane
Wow.
00:10:33:20 – 00:10:56:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah. It’s really. It’s even for me, like there’s a heart piece. When you put that up, it’s like, Oh, my breath almost starts because I remember that girl. And the interesting thing is, I mean, life, just life can take us in two different directions. It can either, like, date us and make us sarcastic and contemptuous and hateful or bitter or it can change our life in the most beautiful, beautiful way.
00:10:57:02 – 00:11:17:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
And the picture you just showed is a perfect encapsulation of like this horror and trauma and difficulty and really facing my own mortality that I had to do at the age of 25. And you know, what happened, Nathan, was it became the most beautiful catalyst I could have ever I wouldn’t have never wished it and I would never wished anyone else.
00:11:17:14 – 00:11:42:24
Jill Carnahan, MD
But now it is the foundation of why I do what I do with so much passion and purpose. And it’s the it was the catalyst because really, even the book Unexpected, the whole point of the book is to give people tools to take tragedy and suffering in difficulty and reframe them in a way where they can be the best thing that ever happened, even though they’re painful and even though we wouldn’t want to go through them again.
00:11:43:07 – 00:11:58:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
And that’s what happened for me. And all of a sudden I started to have a story. It took me about ten or 12 years before I was brave enough to talk about my story and sometimes to process what you go through emotionally, you have to be a little bit distance away from the story to tell it. Well, again, as a filmmaker, you know how this goes.
00:11:58:18 – 00:12:12:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
You can do you, but you can’t. If you’re in the midst of a story and you don’t really understand it, it’s not a good time to tell the story. Right. But if you’re asked to and you look back and you’re like, Wow, there was such power. And what it did is it gave me this story as like the film doctor patient.
00:12:12:06 – 00:12:31:03
Jill Carnahan, MD
All of a sudden I became the patient and I understood to a whole different level, greater than any textbook education, what it was like to face the good and the bad in medicine and the difficulties and the uncertainties and even just the greatness of the answers. I was shocked at how great the answers were as far as what should my treatment be.
00:12:31:09 – 00:12:46:09
Jill Carnahan, MD
There was no black and white. It was a lot of shades of gray, and it was really difficult. Even as a medical student who had the best medical libraries at my disposal to decide what do I do? What treatment do I do?
00:12:46:09 – 00:13:09:01
Nathan Crane
Yeah, it’s such a struggle that so many cancer patients go through. You know, I talk to cancer patients all the time and one of the biggest struggles is, well, what do I do? There’s so much information out there. There’s so many options. My oncologist is telling me one thing, my nature past telling me another thing. You know, this coaching program is telling me something different.
00:13:09:09 – 00:13:36:02
Nathan Crane
It’s like I’m confused, I’m afraid. What do I do? And unfortunately, what most people do is they go to their oncologist. Oncologist says chemotherapy, radiation surgery and the people don’t research that. They don’t look into it any further. They don’t really know the potential damage and side effects and the the real life expectancy on that in that approach.
00:13:36:02 – 00:14:01:20
Nathan Crane
And they just do whatever they’re told to do out of fear. And I say unfortunately, because it’s it’s very it’s a very shocking and very sad thing to see people go through. Right. Which is this very scary diagnosis. Hey, you’ve been diagnosed with stage four breast cancers, metastasized to the lungs or to the colon or wherever it might as metastasize.
00:14:01:20 – 00:14:16:07
Nathan Crane
You have three months left to live if you don’t do this treatment now, you’re dead. And a person goes, Oh, my God, you know, of course I have to do it right. They don’t even if, like you in the back of your mind, you’re like, I know there’s natural ways. I know there’s a holistic approach I could do.
00:14:16:14 – 00:14:33:18
Nathan Crane
I know there’s something. It was a same thing, you know, when my grandfather was was diagnosed with cancer, leukemia, and I went to go visit him. I had already been studying natural health for seven or eight years. I thought I knew a lot by that point, you know, I was like, Oh, yeah, I know, I know what I’m talking about.
00:14:33:18 – 00:14:50:19
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I, I can help anybody. And but I’d never dealt with cancer at all. And, and I had this little bit, you know, in ego about it and I went to sit with my grandpa and it was like, what do I tell her what it’s like? I know there’s things he could be doing, but I don’t know what they are.
00:14:51:03 – 00:15:10:02
Nathan Crane
I know that, you know, I could see the chemotherapy and radiation killing him, literally killing him, destroying his immune system, making his hair fall out, becoming weaker and weaker and weaker. And it wasn’t the cancer that was doing that. It was a treatment that he was following. And he didn’t know anything else than that. And he had, you know, plenty of money to to get the best treatment available.
00:15:10:02 – 00:15:27:09
Nathan Crane
And it was like I knew there were things he could be doing, but I didn’t know. I wasn’t confident in what it what he could do and what I could tell him. And that was then he passed away in 2013. And that’s what sent me on this deep mission to discover and learn everything I possibly could about cancer.
00:15:27:09 – 00:15:48:12
Nathan Crane
What causes it, you know, why do we have cancer form in the body? What can we do about it? How can we prevent and how can we heal it so that I can help, you know, not only myself and my family, but help others around the world struggling with the same challenge. And it’s like, well, yeah, once you understand what cancer is and what causes it and what we can do about it, to not only prevent it, but help our bodies fight against it.
00:15:48:12 – 00:16:13:08
Nathan Crane
Naturally. That fear, like even if I had a cancer diagnosis today, that fear is like, Oh yeah, there’s nothing to be afraid of, you know, at that point, because it’s like, Oh, I know there’s so many things I can do even to the next level. And I think there’s a deeper conversation of, you know, this fear of death that we have as human beings that people are so afraid to talk about and to discuss and to explore as well.
00:16:13:08 – 00:16:34:19
Nathan Crane
Because when you have faced death’s door right light, like you have anybody who’s been facing who has like I have, is faced death’s door and you have to grip with the fact that, you know, you could die right now or tomorrow and you accept that and you and you start to free yourself from that fear. You start to live life differently, Right?
00:16:34:20 – 00:16:53:08
Nathan Crane
Like you start to think differently about life and you start to, at least for me, appreciate life so much more. Appreciate every moment and try to live my life to the absolute fullest. And you start to think about things a little bit different way. And I think it can be a healthier way as well. And so, again, I’m not putting down conventional medicine either.
00:16:53:08 – 00:17:34:23
Nathan Crane
I mean, it certainly can save lives and and it has saved lives. And there are some treatments that, you know, chemotherapy can be effective against. You know, testicular cancer has about a 50% success rate, but most cancers have about a 97 and a half percent failure rate with chemotherapy increasing lifespan beyond five years. And that was the largest made analysis that was ever done on chemotherapy on 22 adult malignancies, saying that it only has a two and a half percent in approval of survival rate to five years, two and a half percent approval, and yet is still the number one, you know, approach the conventional medicine uses, even though we know it’s highly ineffective and,
00:17:34:23 – 00:17:56:04
Nathan Crane
as you said, can cause leaky gut and damaged the immune system and cause inflammation and actually is carcinogenic, meaning it also causes cancer. So even if that particular cancer goes away, we see this again and again where, you know, a secondary cancer can come back with a vengeance if you don’t get to the root cause of what causes cancer in the first place.
00:17:57:08 – 00:18:19:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah. Gosh, you’ve said so many important things. And it’s funny because it’s framed how I talk to patients that come to me who had that cancer diagnosis. The number one thing is don’t act in fear. That’s easy said and hard to do. But when you’re pressured and they always say if you need two weeks or even a month or so to make a decision, generally speaking, that time that you need to make a decision is not going to change the outcome.
00:18:19:14 – 00:18:39:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
And I always encourage people don’t feel the pressure they’re putting on the pressure to decide tomorrow because you’re not going to do it from a place that’s good, from your soul, from your heart of what’s right. Second thing is you take the information you’re given, make the best decision you can and decide on that day. And I did this 21 years ago, never, ever look back and say, whatever, because then you’re going to live a life of regret, Right?
00:18:39:23 – 00:19:02:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
And you must take even for me, I did Toxic three drug chemotherapy. The cancer was easy. I’ve overcome that. That’s gone since. Since that time, 20 years I’ve been recovering my body and my immune system from the chemotherapy. But never once, not even one time have I said, What if I wouldn’t have done that? Or should I? So I never I don’t regret I chose at that moment to move forward with the best information I could and said, you know what?
00:19:02:23 – 00:19:15:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
I might think differently later on and get more information, but for today I’m going to make a decision. And it’s helped me so much because I don’t live in regret. I don’t live in the past. I know I did that. It saved my life. And there’s other things. And then, like you said, what I did, I knew enough at that time.
00:19:15:15 – 00:19:29:21
Jill Carnahan, MD
I had prayer, meditation, I ate nutritional supplementation. I had massive important changes in diet. So I did all the things around it. And who knows? That’s what allowed me to survive the cancer. I don’t even know. But it’s interesting to have that perspective looking back.
00:19:30:11 – 00:20:07:05
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I think that’s that’s really insightful, what you just shared and, you know, not having regrets, not having, you know, going back to what you said earlier about like it took you years to actually come to grips with that experience of yours, is that part of your life to be able to share it with others? I mean, I had the same thing where in a different way where I, you know, grew up addicted to drugs and alcohol and I was homeless at 15 and I was in and out of jail and I was totally lost in life and angry and, you know, completely in a lot of, you know, a lot of trouble.
00:20:07:05 – 00:20:40:03
Nathan Crane
And just this this really distraught, lost, angry, addicted, you know, teenager and almost dead at 18 years old. And when I when I was 18, that’s when I, you know, changed my life, completely transformed and started diving into learning everything I could about health and working out and and meditation and cleaning my body. And I stopped all even even like Advil, Tylenol, ibuprofen.
00:20:40:03 – 00:20:58:18
Nathan Crane
It was like when I go hardcore for something, it’s like I go, All in all, I’m like, I’m like, No more drugs. Okay? Not even ibuprofen. I won’t even touch that stuff, you know, like 100%. And that was, you know, I was 18 and I still struggled off and on for a few years after that to finally get off alcohol, finally get off cigarets finally get off all drugs.
00:20:58:18 – 00:21:26:20
Nathan Crane
Like I would go on periods of abstinence and then relapse, absence and relapse. But I got better and better and better as I heal emotionally, right as I as I went into my childhood and healed my adverse events and the traumatic experiences that I had and forgave myself and forgave others that I blamed and practiced meditation and qigong and did hypnotherapy and all kinds of mental emotional healing practices, which I still do to this day.
00:21:27:03 – 00:21:50:19
Nathan Crane
But I think had I not gone through those, you know, deep, reflective and meditative and healing practices, you know, during those early years, it would I wouldn’t have been able to overcome those addictions completely. And, you know, I’m talking about addiction to drugs and alcohol and sugar, you know, processed food, fast food, things like that. But people are dealing with addictions of all kinds today that are leading to cancer.
00:21:50:19 – 00:22:22:21
Nathan Crane
Right? Fast food, processed food, high sugar, high salt, high oil foods, alcohol, Cigarets that, you know, these these lifestyle choices and habits that are completely addictive, that are leading to alcohol. Well, why do we get addicted to it? Yeah, the the physiological side and the biological side makes sense why we get addicted. But why can’t we stop eating those things or smoking those things or drinking those things is because of a deeper underlying root cause that is preventing us from fully stopping living our lives that way.
00:22:22:21 – 00:22:45:19
Nathan Crane
Right? And it’s almost always something in our childhood, whether it’s subconscious programing or it’s traumatic experiences or childhood adverse events. And so for you, what did you you know, so, so hey, I just want to take a quick second and thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you’re enjoying it so far as a special thank you for tuning into this episode.
00:22:45:19 – 00:23:09:04
Nathan Crane
I want to give you my number one Amazon bestselling book, Absolutely Free. You can go download it right now at becoming Cancer Free NBC.com. If you want to learn evidence based strategies for helping your body become a cancer fighting machine for not only cancer reversal but cancer prevention, go grab a copy of the book again. I’m just giving it to you for free.
00:23:09:10 – 00:23:27:06
Nathan Crane
You can go download it at becoming cancer free dot com. All right, let’s get back to the show. Personally, I’ve had too, to heal many of those things over the years, and I know that they help contribute to me being able to completely, you know, stop all those addictions for you. Did you have anything like that in your life?
00:23:28:02 – 00:23:52:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
100%. And I share that in the book because it’s funny, when I first started thinking about writing the book, I was thinking about environmental toxicity and the effect of environmental toxins on her body leading to cancer and autoimmunity. But I wanted to go deeper, and we talk about that in the book of like the childhood trauma, the toxic relationships, the toxic emotions, like all these things on a whole different level and toxicity maybe contribute even more than the environmental chemicals we get exposed to.
00:23:52:19 – 00:24:14:01
Jill Carnahan, MD
And my experience was interesting because I went probably seven, eight years ago to a mastermind, a great group of health entrepreneurs, and it was a great group. And I remember sitting there and the speaker happened to be really advocating helping addicts, and he was talking about drugs and alcohol and he was talking about addictions. And I kind of started tune out because for me, drugs and alcohol hadn’t been my addictions.
00:24:14:06 – 00:24:39:07
Jill Carnahan, MD
So my what I thought was then was, Oh, I’m not an addict. Right? But then he stopped and he said, All of you in this room are addicts. And he said, You’re addicted to work, you’re addicted to success, to achievement. And what you just said, the frame of an addiction, you can think of it whether you overeat or overspend or do drugs or alcohol or you work too much or all those things are just ways that we numb out the difficult emotions and the trauma that we don’t want to feel.
00:24:39:16 – 00:25:03:00
Nathan Crane
I mean, sex, sex, gambling, you know, also an addiction I discovered years ago that people don’t realize they have that I think valuable to realize if you have it is this addiction to drama. It’s like right. Like constantly having to get into fights or having to, you know, experience drama or create drama. If there’s no drama in your life, you’ll go, Oh my God, my life is such a mess.
00:25:03:00 – 00:25:26:16
Nathan Crane
And, you know, I got all this drama and and it’s like they complain about it. But then if you look at the behavior, the behavior actually is continuously creating the drama in their life. And so that’s an addiction. Like we get a neurological hit a high from that. So, you know, there’s a lot of healthier ways to do it, like high intensity exercise or sauna or jump into an ice bath, get some neuro adrenaline.
00:25:26:16 – 00:25:48:02
Nathan Crane
Europe Nephron release. It’s the same neurochemicals, but way healthier for you than getting into stressful, you know, fights, verbal fights, you know, dramatic situations. But just like, you know, you’re saying I just wanted to add that there’s so many ways that addiction shows up in a person’s life. And becoming aware of that is a first step to overcoming those addictions.
00:25:48:18 – 00:26:03:20
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah. And what I was describing is for me in that moment in the room, I was like, Oh, wait, he’s talking about me. And it was a massive aha. Because again, I had been like, Oh, well, I’m not that type of person, right? Which is judgmental and wrong and not true at all. And also when it came back to me and I was like, Oh, he’s right.
00:26:04:02 – 00:26:20:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
And I realize what happens, especially in certain types of addictions, like maybe drama, our success or achievement or work or society actually endorses that and causes it to be because it’s like an acceptable way to be an addict, but it doesn’t mean it’s right. So I had to work because part of it again, go, go, go. I wouldn’t rest.
00:26:20:16 – 00:26:31:05
Jill Carnahan, MD
I wouldn’t said I would just be always, always doing going train. And it’s just like any addiction. You get your high of achievement or some success and then you just have to do another. You know, you’re on that treadmill all all the time.
00:26:31:10 – 00:26:33:12
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I’m on that treadmill right now. Unfortunately.
00:26:35:03 – 00:26:50:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
I, I just continue to do I mean, I like a documentary last year book last year. I mean, there’s lots of and I love that. But also there’s a time and place to be resting. And what I found is when I was still when I had nothing on my schedule, which was very rare, I would actually have a little bit of anxiety.
00:26:50:14 – 00:27:05:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
And it was those feelings and those emotions of like, who am I without my success? And and what does this bring up? Is it sadness or anger? And there’s something I write about in the book called Type C personality. And this is something that is actually connected to cancer. And we are the type is that I go, go, go.
00:27:05:14 – 00:27:19:09
Jill Carnahan, MD
And we have the type C’s that are very compliant and complacent and they don’t express a lot of anger. And it was interesting because I remember the first time with my therapist after my divorce, I was talking, I said, Well, I don’t get angry. She laughed at me, of course. Right. Because of course you get angry. Of course everyone has anger.
00:27:19:09 – 00:27:40:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
But I was so dissociated from the emotion of sadness and anger at the time that I was literally telling her I don’t feel anger and it was so suppressed and stuck down. Well, now I can actually feel my body. I’ve done the work around the somatic therapies and I can tell when I’m having those emotions of and I can sit with them too, which means, you know, that’s that’s part of dealing with addiction is how do you deal with these difficult fears, emotions or traumas.
00:27:41:08 – 00:27:57:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
Maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s sadness, or maybe it’s just something really difficult that happened to you that you kind of do your addiction so that you don’t have to feel. And healing is actually been with that, sitting with that being kind yourself in the process and having love and compassion for that younger self that maybe went through something difficult.
00:27:57:24 – 00:28:21:22
Jill Carnahan, MD
And that was a huge part of my healing. In fact, as I wrote about autoimmunity and I dealt with Crohn’s right after cancer, metaphorically, autoimmunity is attack of self, right, and part of the healing. And Gabor Maté goes through this in some of his writings is you have to really find a way to love all the parts of yourself and not dissociate from those parts and accept all those parts.
00:28:21:22 – 00:28:24:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
And that’s part of the healing of autoimmune disease.
00:28:25:14 – 00:28:53:19
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s huge. And that’s one of the problems I think we have society today is like this tendency to deflect or neglect what we’re feeling because we think it’s either weak or we think it is us. You know, we just don’t have time for that. It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. You know, it’s a million judgmental reasons why someone might not want to sit with those emotions.
00:28:53:19 – 00:29:16:10
Nathan Crane
But that’s the only way that I’ve found that we can actually heal and transcend, you know, those emotional experiences, whether it’s it’s fear, it’s anger, it’s resentment, it’s jealousy, is to is to recognize and go, oh, okay, I’m feeling angry right now. Take a few breaths, stand back and go, okay, why am I feeling angry? You know, where is this coming from?
00:29:16:10 – 00:29:45:18
Nathan Crane
And just just be with it. Like like accept it and and then question it. And don’t try to judge it right away. And don’t try to push it away right away. It’s like, okay, I’m feeling angry, all right? I accept it. Like, that’s the first step. I feel like if you can just accept that you’re feeling what you’re feeling right now and do nothing else like it will, it will skyrocket you to a level of emotional intelligence that I had no idea was possible because as a kid I didn’t know how to deal with emotions.
00:29:45:18 – 00:30:12:15
Nathan Crane
I bottled them up inside and then I’d be having a conversation with my parents. They just be asking me some regular questions. I just burst out crying and I didn’t know why. And I remember sitting there one day and my my parents were talking to me about something and it was a slightly serious conversation, but it wasn’t anything that was like I wasn’t like, in trouble or I wasn’t you know, it wasn’t anything that I should have been necessarily afraid of or sad about.
00:30:12:15 – 00:30:29:14
Nathan Crane
It’s just a conversation having with whatever 12 year old kid. And also I just burst out crying and I didn’t know why. And then I felt ashamed and my parents like, Why are you crying? And then, like, I felt ashamed to be crying. I didn’t know I was crying. And I just I had no idea. I was like all this bottled emotion just stuck inside.
00:30:29:14 – 00:30:33:17
Nathan Crane
It’s got to come out eventually, you know? It’s it’s got to come out somehow. And it either you.
00:30:33:17 – 00:30:47:04
Jill Carnahan, MD
Don’t deal with it, it’ll come out. An illness like that’s that was the story I it will literally manifest in illness and for me I always live from the neck up so I would always analyze and think about it. And that’s not a great place when you need to feel. I had to learn to like go into the body.
00:30:47:04 – 00:31:02:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
Because when you have anger, when you have sadness, you learn your patterns. For me, you might have like a tightness in the chest for anger or upset stomach, for sadness or for each person is different. But you can start to identify these somatic signs, like your body will tell you your body is so intelligent and you just listen.
00:31:02:17 – 00:31:24:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
But often, at least for me, and it sounds like for you too, when we suppress, we get so dissociated from our actual physical body and sensations that we aren’t even paying attention. We aren’t even aware of the sensations. But those are clues. And nowadays if I get angry, I’m like, Oh, oh wait, that’s anger. Like, you know, I was like this funny recognition and then I can express it in whatever way that’s appropriate.
00:31:24:16 – 00:31:30:20
Jill Carnahan, MD
But it’s really relearning to be in touch with your physical body and listen to those messages that it gives us every day.
00:31:31:06 – 00:32:01:15
Nathan Crane
Well, we know, you know, we know emotions and and let’s say emotional disconnection, living in a in a constant negative, emotional state. We know that that emotional energy can lead to cancer and other chronic diseases. And in fact, a lot of the top medical literature says up to 90% of all chronic diseases actually due to stress are related to stress.
00:32:01:22 – 00:32:18:13
Nathan Crane
And because the our stress, yeah, whatever is just stress, you know, it’s like everyone has stress. Well, yeah, we all have stress. The question is how do we deal with that stress and what do we do about it and how do we mitigate it? And we’re never going to eliminate stress from our lives. You know, I was talking to someone the other day.
00:32:18:13 – 00:32:43:23
Nathan Crane
It’s like driving on the the freeway here in Jacksonville is really stressful. And and they’re like, yeah, I just want to go live out in the country. I’m like, I want to live in the country to actually like that seems very, you know, something I’d love to do outside the city. But if you are just running away from the city to go live in the country because you’re blaming all of your stress from driving through the city and you don’t have any way of dealing with that.
00:32:43:23 – 00:33:00:00
Nathan Crane
Right. You don’t have any way of of eliminating that stress from your body and from your emotions. You’re going to go out into the country and something else is going to stress you out. It’s going to be a hot day and the A.C. is going to break. You going to be without A.C. for like a week or two weeks.
00:33:00:00 – 00:33:16:07
Nathan Crane
And how are you going to deal with that stress? You know, your water pump is going to go out, Something’s going to happen. And there are always things in life, no matter where you are, the most beautiful place in the world, you could be in Cancun, Mexico, and you are going to have stressful situations come into your life.
00:33:16:07 – 00:33:46:18
Nathan Crane
And so you will never avoid all stress like people. Please get that clear, right? Like you can’t run away from stress. It’s always going to be there. You can you can reduce things that lead to stress, but you will never eliminate it. What we have to learn how to do and I’d love to hear your some of the solutions that you have for the stress in your life, what we have to learn how to do is to recognize when we’re feeling stressful and then have some immediate tools that we can implement to eliminate that stress from our bodies.
00:33:46:18 – 00:34:22:18
Nathan Crane
Right. And there are some very powerful things that we can do to transform that stress. And all it takes is the awareness of it and then some practice and we can go from a sympathetic state, which we know leads to cancer and other chronic diseases. If you’re in a continuous sympathetic nervous system, state fight or flight, you know, adrenal response state, you know, day in and day out, hour after hour after hour, you’re down regulating your immune system and you’re you contribute chronic inflammation of the body and you’re allowing, you know, things like cancer and heart to take over or you’re in a parasympathetic state where you are up regulating your immune system.
00:34:22:18 – 00:34:37:07
Nathan Crane
You’re in a more calm and relaxed healing state and you are allowing your body to regenerate and rejuvenate continuously. And so I’ve got great practices I can share, but I love to hear, you know, some of your best, you know, stress reducing practices.
00:34:37:21 – 00:34:59:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, I love that discussion because this is this is where the rubber hits the road and this is maybe the most important tools for your own health and wellness and probably far important than a vitamin D or supplement you’re taking in, even though this can be really helpful too. It’s interesting because the title in book is Resilience Finding Resilience through Functional Medicine, which is kind of this core way of looking at the world that there is root causes and then we can reverse trajectories in health and healing.
00:35:00:02 – 00:35:23:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
But it’s science and faith through science and faith. And that could be also thought of as like right brain left brain, masculine, feminine science. Faith is like these two sides of any issue. And I love to frame that because I definitely have a belief in God and have a strong spiritual practice. But not everybody listening Will and that’s okay because I believe faith is also the way we deal with the inevitable uncertainty that life throws us, which is like what you were just describing was stress.
00:35:23:15 – 00:35:47:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
Stress is from hand cilia, research decades ago, novelty, unpredictability, threat to ego, sense of control. And we’ve just had that with pandemic, with movies, with all kinds of crazy, right, novelty. It’s all new we haven’t experienced before. Unpredictability, totally unpredictable threat to ego or threat to health. Anything which could be cancer, could be Crohn’s, could be any health issue or threat to our own identity and sense of control.
00:35:48:03 – 00:36:08:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
And so I’d like to frame faith as a bigger concept of, again, for me it is religious. I believe in God, but for many people it isn’t. And that’s okay. It’s how do we deal with uncertainty? And if we have this preference, like I want to get to this certain spot in an hour and I’m stuck in traffic and I can’t control that, that stresses us out because we have this preference, this idea of what should happen and it’s not happening like we want it to.
00:36:08:24 – 00:36:35:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it stresses us out. But guess what? We have a choice. We have a choice that, okay, if we just let things happen and we allow and we surrender to the flow of life, which will inevitably bring uncertainty and change and lack of control and all those things, if we’re like grabbing on and we have this idea of how life has to be and how it should be and exactly what time of every moment of the day is supposed to be like, we’re really, really planned, which I am very organized in and planned out.
00:36:35:18 – 00:36:49:02
Jill Carnahan, MD
But if I hold you tightly to that and I don’t allow for the uncertainty and the unexpected, that’s what’s stressful, right? But I have a choice on that. So I can let go and surrender and I can also let go of preferences, which means, you know, I wanted to look this way. I want it to be this way.
00:36:49:09 – 00:37:10:01
Jill Carnahan, MD
You can do that and still achieve and have a goal and have a plan. But if you look in for the book, I had this plan in 2015. I wrote in my journal, I’m going to publish and write a book next year. That’s 2016. Here it is, 2023 My book is published and out after, whatever, seven years. But it’s interesting because we had that preference within.
00:37:10:01 – 00:37:32:10
Jill Carnahan, MD
I allowed the Divine and the world and my life to happen as it did. And it’s a much better timing and much better book than it ever would have been in that time. But that was me surrendering to this inevitable uncertainty and having faith that it would work out. And so that’s why I bring this in, because that takes away the stress when I wake up in the day and I’m like, I have X, Y, Z on my agenda and I hope it goes that way.
00:37:32:10 – 00:37:50:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
But I’m also like, what else could happen? Like, I have that childlike wonder of like, what if something unexpected happens? And then when something does happen unexpected, even if it’s like, I might have a flat tire or I’m stuck in traffic, I’m always thinking about, okay, this happened, I can’t change it, right? What if there’s something really cool here for me?
00:37:50:11 – 00:38:12:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
If I watch and look? So you can change that perspective. And instead of having this frustration and anger because things aren’t going your way, you shift that to be like, What if I’m supposed to talk to someone that’s going to change my attire for me right now? You know, this is things that randomly happen. And so often if we have that perspective, the random events that we didn’t expect are some of the most beautiful, magical things in our days.
00:38:12:06 – 00:38:34:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
And we get this unexpected meeting with a neighbor or whatever. And so for me, that’s part of the stress. And then there’s the practical things toxicity is part of our world. And so whatever we do to bring down emotional, relational and elemental toxicity every single day is really important. And we can go in January and go to the gym and do a 21 day detox, but that’s no longer good enough.
00:38:34:11 – 00:38:54:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
So part of the stress is stress detox. And I am such a fan of incorporating daily habits that work for you. For me it’s an Epsom salt bath at night before bed. It’s my EMF mat. Usually sometime during the day it’s having plenty of hydration and water. It’s going on a walk every single day if possible. It’s these, and they’re very simple.
00:38:54:19 – 00:39:17:21
Jill Carnahan, MD
It’s clean air, it’s clean water, it’s clean food. But you can figure out for you what works. And for me, those are some of the things that de-stress me because I know I have these things that are built into my schedule, my program that really reduce my stress, prayer and meditation often if I have the time in the morning, which is probably four or five days out of the seven, I’ll make sure I have those 30 minutes of either journaling, meditation, prayer.
00:39:18:01 – 00:39:34:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
And my day always goes better when I start that way. And I could talk about 101 different things, but you have to find out for you what’s going to be doable, what’s going to be sustainable, what’s going to be a habit that makes a difference for you and what really for your physiology. Some people would be like Epsom salt baths don’t work for me.
00:39:34:13 – 00:39:36:09
Jill Carnahan, MD
For me, that’s a game changer.
00:39:37:14 – 00:40:07:02
Nathan Crane
Hey, I just want to pause a second. Ask you, are you enjoying this episode so far? Are you getting good value from this content? If so, then I know you’re going to absolutely love healing life at healing Life dot Net. You get exclusive and premier access to hundreds of the top world’s doctors experts. Cancer conquers and survivors. Exclusive interviews that I have done with all these experts and doctors that are not available for free online.
00:40:07:02 – 00:40:29:04
Nathan Crane
They’re only available at healing life dot net. So not only do you get access to all of those, but you actually get to speak with these doctors and experts and ask them any question you want about health and healing. And this is available exclusively to healing life members. You can try it out for free. Go to healing life dot net and you can start your free trial there.
00:40:29:13 – 00:40:54:17
Nathan Crane
And whether you’re interested in learning more about detox or cancer, diet and nutrition and nutritional science, about diabetes, about heart disease, autoimmune disease, anti-aging, longevity, all of these topics are covered in depth, and more are continuing to be added at healing life. And again, you get to talk to these doctors yourself. So I invite you to set up a free trial at Healing Life dot net.
00:40:54:17 – 00:41:17:12
Nathan Crane
And I hope to see you over there. Now, let’s get back to the show. Yeah, Yeah. I’m reminded of a couple of things. One is the acronym HALT. Right. So, like, if you’re like, why am I so stressed out? You know, think about the acronym HALT. Are you hungry? Are you feeling angry? Are you feeling lonely or are you feeling tired?
00:41:17:12 – 00:41:31:22
Nathan Crane
Right. Or are you feeling all four of those? And then life is going to really suck in that moment. You know, the big is, you know, sometimes it’s just like, man, I just need some nutrition. Like, I need to get like this morning I worked out and it was like by the end of the workout, all of a sudden I just like I was starting to bond.
00:41:32:12 – 00:41:54:18
Nathan Crane
If someone came and talked to me in that moment, I would have been like a little bit standoffish because like my brain energy was just, you know, that totally left my body and it was like I needed some carbohydrates, I needed some protein, you know, So like, okay, quick protein, drink, boom, you know, some orange juice, like I needed something, you know, eat a banana and have some coconut water, whatever.
00:41:54:18 – 00:42:14:11
Nathan Crane
Get something into your system, you know, obviously, healthy choice is always the best choice, but get something into your system to just help with the hunger part. If it’s if it’s hungry, that’s an easy thing you can fix. But if it’s angry and lonely, those are things that we need to spend more time on, right? Those are things we need to focus quite a bit more on.
00:42:14:11 – 00:42:36:04
Nathan Crane
And then if it’s tired, well, obviously we got to do all the things we can do to improve our sleep. But there’s two other. So I wanted to share two things that came up as well. There’s two concepts I learned early on that I think I think you’ll resonate with deeply, and it helped me so much in my life.
00:42:36:04 – 00:43:02:19
Nathan Crane
When you talk about faith, the two concepts are, the first one is the the universe is always conspiring for you for your benefit, or you can replace the universe with God. God is always conspiring to to help you for you for your benefit, right? Always trying to work in you, always trying to create things to help work in your favor, not against you.
00:43:02:20 – 00:43:19:11
Nathan Crane
A lot of people have the belief that everything’s against me. The world is against the universe against me, God’s against me, right? God doesn’t listen to me, etc. It’s like if you if you actually hone in to this belief, which I did really early on and I don’t I may have learned it from Wayne Dyer, you know, 17 years ago.
00:43:19:11 – 00:43:38:22
Nathan Crane
I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I’ve heard it again and again and again. And it takes repetition and it takes paying attention. Right. But the universe is always trying to support you. God is always trying to support you. And the second concept is everything happens for a reason. And I know people for I heard this a million times, but like, do you really believe it?
00:43:38:22 – 00:43:57:15
Nathan Crane
Because if you really if you have faith in that and then you see it show up again and again and again and again, just like you were talking about, then you start to believe it and then eventually you know it to be true. You know, for me, early on, it was just like it was just the faith of like, Well, yeah, that sounds good.
00:43:58:08 – 00:44:13:20
Nathan Crane
It sounds like a great concept. I hope it’s true, right? It was just like faith. Like faith is kind of like I think it Well, faith is beyond hope, right? Like faith is more like belief. Yeah. But for me, early on, those concepts were like, hope. They were like, Yeah, they sound great, and I really hope that they’re true.
00:44:14:03 – 00:44:40:16
Nathan Crane
And then things would happen and they would struggle and things wouldn’t work out. And then all of a sudden the very last minute I stayed focused and then things would work out. I could pay my rent, which like from some magical thing, I had no money to pay rent, and then all of a sudden some magical thing came and I paid rent on the very last day like I had I had like one of those experiences in, like just a couple of short years that made me absolutely believe these statements and know them to be true.
00:44:40:16 – 00:44:45:11
Nathan Crane
And now, today, it’s deeper than faith. It’s a knowing, right?
00:44:45:13 – 00:45:03:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
It’s an absolute love that you said that because that’s true. If people are listening, you’re like, Oh, this sucks. I don’t believe it. I don’t you don’t have to start with belief. You just have to repeat it enough and show up enough that your subconscious starts to shift. And I’m like you now. There is nothing that could take away my faith That good is going to happen, that I’m going to be okay.
00:45:03:06 – 00:45:21:24
Jill Carnahan, MD
That’s part of resilience is like, you know, and I know no matter what life throws at us, we have the experience and the belief that we’re going to be okay and that we have the answers. And it might be difficult, but we’re going to figure it out. And I didn’t have that many years ago, but over time and time and time and repetition, which is what you’re explaining, you start to really realize it’s true.
00:45:23:10 – 00:45:48:10
Nathan Crane
Yeah. And it’s the experiences that you have. You have to start somewhere and just start believing it and telling it yourself. And then the experiences that you have start to validate it. And then the more validation you have, you just know to be true. Same thing. So with your book I the same thing with my documentary on cancer, it was it was supposed to be done in like a year or a year and a half and went through a whole bunch of crazy experiences.
00:45:48:18 – 00:46:14:14
Nathan Crane
I had a metaphorical tornado, hurricane, avalanche, all hit me in my life and businesses all at the same time. And all of a sudden that film got put on the back burner for like three years. And then all of a sudden I got this intuitive hit. It was like, It’s time to finish the film. Yes. And what was amazing was over that three and a half to four year period I had, I had become different.
00:46:14:14 – 00:46:50:18
Nathan Crane
I had become someone different. Right? Like every few years, Like, hopefully you’re growing People tuning in hopefully were growing all the time mentally, emotionally, you know, we’re getting better in all ways, spiritually. Hopefully we’re becoming better and growing and healing and becoming more, you know, evolved spiritually and so when I went back and looked at the concept for the film, which we had already spent like 100,000 plus dollars on producing and writing and scripting and editing, I went back to it and I go, I’ve got to start this over from scratch.
00:46:51:07 – 00:47:18:15
Nathan Crane
Yeah. And and I went to Sedona and sat down and in a weekend, wrote a whole brand new script just out of complete inspiration and then reached out to the entire team on the project and said, Thank you guys for helping get it this far. I need to take this. I need to finish this on my own. And I and I literally edited the entire film myself and it was like in it completely turned out totally different than the original vision.
00:47:19:00 – 00:47:41:17
Nathan Crane
And I did. I still believe to this day that it turned out significantly better than it would have had that not happen. And had I not gone through an avalanche and hurricane, tornado and all that crap I went through in my life at the time, you know, it wouldn’t have gone that way. And then the film came out and then it you know, it won like over 20 awards and it’s been seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
00:47:41:17 – 00:48:00:04
Nathan Crane
And people love the film and. Right. So it was like it was I just knew, okay, it’s time to start this. I need to do this. It’s going to work out perfectly. And I just trusted and followed the process and finished it. And to your point, that’s not always easy, but the more we process it, easier gets you.
00:48:00:11 – 00:48:17:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
That’s exactly why I wanted the book. I thought I had it all buttoned up, everything, and then I went through a difficult divorce and some traumatic relationships, and all of a sudden it sort of environmental toxicity. This became about this bigger issue, which we’re discussing. The book today is so much different than it would have been. And not only is the audience more ready, I mean, our world needs hope.
00:48:17:13 – 00:48:35:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
Our world needs the message that you and I both bring. And even five years ago, I don’t know if there would have been that readiness for the message. And then I wasn’t ready. So like, God had to transform my life and take me through some tornadoes and hurricanes. So understand, like I had no idea that there was like three more chapters being written, right?
00:48:35:20 – 00:48:51:10
Jill Carnahan, MD
And now that I see it all done, I’m like, Oh my goodness, this is such a better end product than it would have been when I thought it was right. So I think one of the points you and I are bringing is we have this timeline, we have what we think is best, we have what we think we should, what kind of relationships, what kind of life, what kind of work, what kind of timeline.
00:48:51:23 – 00:49:09:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
And we can grab on to those and will really tightly. But if we surrender and we say, okay, I still have this vision, I still I’m going to work hard and do everything possible. I’m still going to show up every day, but I’m going to release my timeline to a greater divine universal purpose. And what happens then is magic.
00:49:09:06 – 00:49:19:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
Like literally magic happens and it’s totally not usually what we expect. And the stress comes from hanging on, right? From from making it or trying to force it when it shouldn’t happen that way.
00:49:19:12 – 00:49:36:23
Nathan Crane
Exactly. Exactly. I’m going to be late. Yeah. Okay. So what? You’re going to be late, You know, like. Like. Yeah, We try not to be late. Try to be on time. We have other people’s times, like. But you’re few minutes late. The world still goes on, you know, But I can’t do It was like I’m going to be like, Yeah.
00:49:36:23 – 00:49:50:14
Nathan Crane
And then you just get, you know, and it’s it’s like, that’s the simple things everyday that lead to stress, right? Just time, just time for people. But the big things, like you’re talking about these big projects, Oh my gosh, can, can stress you to a cancer diagnosis.
00:49:50:14 – 00:50:10:23
Jill Carnahan, MD
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly back to the helping. These are the things listener’s like. These are the things that you can take one thing from it. Again, I love supplements, I love nutrition. I do that every day in the clinic. But this stuff, this mindset and thinking and belief and the power of really changing your reality based on how you what you believe about the world.
00:50:11:08 – 00:50:15:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
This stuff is powerful. It’s quantum leaps beyond the physical reality.
00:50:16:06 – 00:50:38:16
Nathan Crane
Yeah, we know today. I mean, we’ve known for thousands of years our ancestors have the power of the mind and the power of belief to to heal anything. But now our modern science is catching up and proving it to be true from a scientific, you know, understanding it at a deeper scientific and biological and quantum level. Like how does our belief actually affect our physiology?
00:50:38:22 – 00:51:06:21
Nathan Crane
How does our belief change our neurochemicals and how the neurochemicals actually change our immune system? And what’s our immune system doing to help heal the body like we now know that that your thoughts literally can change the entire world within your body? And can you help determine whether you’re going to live to 80 or 90 with no diseases or die at 55 from, you know, a cancer diagnosis?
00:51:06:21 – 00:51:31:17
Nathan Crane
Like we know that the thoughts are so powerful and the power to to manage our thoughts should be, you know, I used to think early on when I really got into natural health, like I went through these phases of like, oh, it’s all body, it’s all the body, it’s exercise, its diet, it’s nutrition, it’s supplements, it’s all the physical and a little bit of mental, emotional, spiritual.
00:51:32:13 – 00:51:56:12
Nathan Crane
And then I dive deep into, you know, meditation and chanting with Hari Krishna’s and sound healing and doing, you know, our Vedic practices and doing all kinds of ceremonies with Native Americans and sweat lodges and meditating with master Buddhist monks for hours and hours and hours and hours. And then I go, Oh, it’s all mine, everything’s mine. Nothing matters of the body.
00:51:56:12 – 00:52:32:04
Nathan Crane
It doesn’t, you know, it’s like you don’t even need the body. It’s all mind and emotion and spirit. And I went through these phases like multiple times and then eventually came to this place of, like, all of It’s important. All of it, Right? The supplements, the diet and nutrition, exercise, the the mental, emotional, all of it’s important. But I am still at this place now where like to me, the mind, the mental, emotional and spiritual realms of our lives, if we put 70 or 80% focus there, we’re going to have way greater success with our health.
00:52:32:23 – 00:52:51:19
Nathan Crane
The physical 20 or 30%, you know, we’re going to have great success with the physical, but the opposite. If you put all your attention on the physical and nothing on the mental, emotional, spiritual, we see, we see people often don’t get better that way. They do all the supplements, all diet, all the exercise, all the sauna, all that stuff.
00:52:51:24 – 00:53:13:01
Nathan Crane
But they have this deeper underlying trauma that’s continuously leading to stress. There’s continuously causing chronic inflammation of the body, is contributing to the disease and all this other stuff. It’s helping, but I don’t think it can or will help as much as if we really go deep into the into the mind and emotions and spirit. What are your thoughts on that?
00:53:13:12 – 00:53:33:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
I could not agree more. It’s interesting they interview Jeffrey Wright, anchor who wrote Cured and he he’s an Ivy League grad who talked about you probably have seen his work and he started he was a very, you know, kind of a skeptic analytic and said, well, I’m going to try to look at this stuff. And what he found is there was this was all cancer patients mostly, but there was a few autoimmune and other things.
00:53:33:13 – 00:53:50:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
And they had all different diets and they had all different backgrounds. And So there wasn’t like a one size fits all for diet or exercise and nutrition. And some of them didn’t have the best diets, but they all had this thing that we see in the blue Zones, which is Dan Buettner, his work. And it’s purpose and meaning that’s greater than themselves, like they have some bigger purpose.
00:53:50:17 – 00:54:11:04
Jill Carnahan, MD
Meaning, again, I feel like that spiritual, but it could be on any wavelength for you listening of it, you know, fits into your mindset, but something greater purpose, community and connection. All of them had this connection to community, to friends, to family, to true relationships that allowed us to actually feel connected as human beings. And most of them ate plants as part of their.
00:54:11:04 – 00:54:28:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
But they had all different varieties, you know, they had some of them did he meet? Some of them ate more carbs. Some of them eat more. In some of them, these are places where they’re blue zones, where the the large amount of people who live over the age of 100, some of them, their primary thing was like tubers or soy or things that we would traditionally maybe say aren’t the primary thing.
00:54:28:18 – 00:54:45:15
Jill Carnahan, MD
But it didn’t matter because their connections, their higher purpose and meaning, those things were really, really shifted. And I would do the same thing as you years ago. It was all about what do I do with function as and what do I do with nutrition? How do we heal the body? How to heal the gut? I became a gut expert after I Crohn’s disease and that’s all important.
00:54:45:22 – 00:55:04:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
But this other level relationships, trauma, addiction, everything we just talked about, this level is where the power is. And so I agree with you. I would say like 80, 20 or 75, 25, somewhere in that range, the mind, the body, the spirit, I think, has more power than just the physical. But you can’t ignore the physical.
00:55:04:08 – 00:55:37:20
Nathan Crane
Exactly. That’s the part that’s the problem is if we ignore one or the other, like percentages are just whatever. Right. But like, if we think if we only focus on one area and never focus on the rest, you know, EDA, like I see people today and it’s actually it’s it’s a major disservice to to the young people today where you see these so-called health guru influencers who are jacked with, you know, six pack abs and they’re, you know, in their thirties or forties and they’re on YouTube with millions of followers and saying, oh, yeah, you want to be healthy like me, you can eat whatever you want.
00:55:37:20 – 00:56:00:04
Nathan Crane
I eat snickers and candy bars and eat ice cream. And Darren’s like, you know, it’s like, yeah, you can look that way because you’re managing your macros and you’re working out. It doesn’t mean you’re healthy. Anyone can look a certain way on the outside. It does. It has nothing to do with health. You know, you have to check, you know, if you want to see if you’re truly healthy.
00:56:00:11 – 00:56:20:02
Nathan Crane
Right. Check all your inflammatory markers, check your insulin and check your CERP and check all these other areas, because I guarantee you, keep eating that way for a long period of time. You know, you are creating an environment for disease to show up in the body. But they’re just you know, people get focused on the looks and go, oh, they look amazing.
00:56:20:02 – 00:56:37:02
Nathan Crane
They look great. I want a body like that. And it’s like, Well, yeah, you can get a body like that with some basic fundamentals of understanding, but are you actually healthy? Are you actually happy? Do you feel good about yourself? Do you wake up happy every day? Are you doing what you love in life? Do you have a purpose and meaning in your life?
00:56:37:02 – 00:56:56:10
Nathan Crane
I think that’s the biggest thing, at least in my life. And what I, I feel is so important for people today is to find a sense of purpose, you know, And that doesn’t have to be saving the world or some huge thing, but find a sense of purpose. Do something that gives you meaning and purpose of it’s volunteering.
00:56:56:17 – 00:57:22:15
Nathan Crane
If it’s, you know, contributing to to the well-being of animals or the planet or, you know, doing something in your neighborhood, find something that you look forward to doing every day, whether you get paid for it or not, because that sense of meaning and purpose will drive you forward through the really hard times and contributes to a mindset where you feel good about yourself, right?
00:57:22:15 – 00:57:29:10
Nathan Crane
And when you feel good about yourself, you are releasing neurochemicals that are leading to health and healing in the body.
00:57:30:05 – 00:57:50:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, I love this concept. One whole chapter is called Supercharge Healing through Flow. So if you’ve ever read my highly texts, me or Stephen Cutler’s work on Flow, this is one of my favorite things in the world. And flow is just this optimal state of neurotransmitters. You can see you have high dopamine, serotonin and and, and oxytocin and kind of the perfect storm.
00:57:50:20 – 00:58:04:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
And it’s those times when if you’re a musician, you’re like, lost in playing music and all of a sudden three or 4 hours of class have passed, or if you’re like a rock climber or a skier or a surfer, you mean an athlete, and all of a sudden you’re not even thinking about the movements of your body. They’re just coming naturally.
00:58:04:13 – 00:58:24:22
Jill Carnahan, MD
You’re doing kind of superhuman events and feats because you’re so in that flow. Your body just knows what to next. And there’s not a lot of thought cognitive, cognitively and literally. This place is where prefrontal cortex actually shuts down because as we talked about earlier, the prefrontal cortex actually what judges and says, oh, we should or shouldn’t or stop or go or don’t do that or don’t do it like that.
00:58:24:22 – 00:58:42:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
It’s that that judge in our head when we can get that prefrontal cortex to tone down, we can just experience life in the present moment. And it’s I’m thinking about this because you started with purpose and meaning. We were both talking about that and the ways you get into flow or find something that gives you great purpose and meaning, dedicate some time to it without distractions.
00:58:42:06 – 00:59:04:24
Jill Carnahan, MD
Turn off your Internet, turn off the alerts on your phone, be present, and then make the challenge level. You want it to be challenging enough so that it keeps your attention, but not too challenging that you quit or not enough challenging that you’re bored there. So is this perfect challenge level and usually it’s something kind of new. Maybe you’re learning a new skill set and like I said, it could be art, it could be writing, it could be creativity, it could be music, it could be listening or playing music.
00:59:04:24 – 00:59:31:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
It could be a sports thing. And for me, I feel like flow can optimize our human performance and also our health. Because, number one, if I’m in my clinic with patients, I have collective flow. When I’m sitting there completely present with them, listening to them, I get ideas and plans and ways to help them heal, that I would have never had, had I not been completely engaged and engrossed and present with them, because I’m literally feeling them and listening to them and asking the questions and ideas and things to help them here come from.
00:59:31:11 – 00:59:49:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
I don’t even know where, but I know I’m in flow because it’s these things that I would have never necessarily thought of or had I not been completely present. And the other thing is, if we can harness this in our lives of finding meaning and purpose, things that give us joy and do more of that and get into flow states, I hundred percent believe this helps our physical health as well as our mental health.
00:59:50:02 – 01:00:13:08
Nathan Crane
Yeah, yeah. And it’s I mean, like I said, it’s it’s being proven more and more through science today. Exactly that and how it works and why it does. But what are some of your favorite things to do that like get you into that flow state. What are some things that you do personally that just bring you so much joy and happiness and doing them well?
01:00:13:08 – 01:00:31:02
Jill Carnahan, MD
I’ve got two sides of me. I like this harness, this little girl like color, and I play and I dance. Then I listen to music and I go hiking, that’s that side. And then I have this, like, dopamine junkie and I have a motorcycle that I love to ride. And people are surprised about that. I been rock climbing before and had some pretty great experiences.
01:00:31:02 – 01:00:49:23
Jill Carnahan, MD
Rock climbing. I love to snow ski and go pretty extreme on that. So those are kind of my more dopamine adrenaline junkie adventures. But really it’s interesting because I tend to find that time in nature is probably my biggest inducer and it could be many different scenes, but things that just are magical and beautiful and I can be with friends.
01:00:49:23 – 01:01:02:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
I love that, but I actually love that alone. Time Sometimes my greatest creative thoughts come when I’m walking. It’s funny because the book I had always known my heart when I was going to write. I like to write. I can write on the screen, no problem. But I felt like there’s going to be an easier way to get this message out.
01:01:02:21 – 01:01:26:00
Jill Carnahan, MD
And I would probably half of my content, I would hike and I would dictate the stories and I would literally just talk through them. And there’s something about the way speaking came out more authentic. It’s not always that way for everyone, but for me. And then I would dictate and write it and edit it. But about half of the writing I did in the book came from walking in nature and dictating stories into my microphone, in my in my phone and recording.
01:01:26:15 – 01:01:44:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s super smart, because when you’re out in nature and you kind of like just, you know, walking, enjoying the beauty like you get, you can get some really deep insights right? Yeah. In the shower to the showers. One place that’s pretty, you know, I don’t get them in the shower anymore because I take cold showers. So it’s like, yeah, you’re like.
01:01:45:15 – 01:01:59:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
You know, and then even why that is and that’s a preferential thing. So when we have something that like we garden, maybe we love to garden, we’re just out there gardening showers like this. What happens is in those places we have enough of a routine that we can let go of a plan or whatever, and we actually shut down.
01:01:59:08 – 01:02:15:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it’s actually a way to kind of get into flow creativity creatively because our prefrontal cortex was shut down. It’s just amazing to me how that I mean, I love the brain part of it because in the shower or doing something that doesn’t take a lot of like me, we shoot baskets and we’re just like not really paying attention.
01:02:15:18 – 01:02:34:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
We don’t need a lot of thought into it or gardening or coloring. And then all of a sudden we get these creative ideas because that prefrontal judge has been told, you know, to shut down. And I just find it fascinating because that judge, we all know when I talk about that, you listen, you guys know what that is when you’re like, oh, that’s stupid or you shouldn’t do this way or whatever, we can get that to shut down.
01:02:34:09 – 01:02:36:00
Jill Carnahan, MD
That’s where the brilliance comes in.
01:02:36:14 – 01:03:10:11
Nathan Crane
Well, and that proves that we are not only about survival of the fittest, as so many people have thought since Darwinian theory for so long. Right? Because if it was only survival of the fittest, we wouldn’t have these designs in our brain that literally not only allow us, but are are designed for us to enter into these higher states of consciousness where we get completely out of anything related to survival or fear or flight or any of these things.
01:03:10:11 – 01:03:40:15
Nathan Crane
And we have these these profound insights and these thoughts and these visions and these ideas and these. Right. Everything we see today came from a came from a thought. It came from a vision, whether it’s this microphone or it’s your electricity and a light bulb or anything. And I remember, you know, a really early spiritual teacher of mine teaching me this when I was like 17 and, you know, helping me realize that every single thing started with a thought.
01:03:40:15 – 01:04:07:19
Nathan Crane
And that thought eventually manifested into something physical. Well, we we’re designed to enter into that flow state. You know, we’re designed to experience that joy, Like you said, your gardening, all of a sudden you just start having, you know, or painting and you’re painting and all of a sudden you paint some kind of masterpiece that you just had no idea that you could do such a thing or whether you’re exercising or playing basketball or something.
01:04:07:19 – 01:04:30:09
Nathan Crane
Right? And you get into these states of just like, Wow, I just felt so amazing for the past 2 hours. So it just that right there, if anybody needs proof that we’re way beyond just our survival species, right? We’re just here to survive now. We’re here to thrive. We’re to thrive and to enjoy life and to find the things in life that bring us joy.
01:04:30:09 – 01:04:57:12
Nathan Crane
And to your story, you know, I think that’s so incredible what you’ve done in your own life is you have, you know, through challenge, through hardship, through cancer, through Crohn’s disease, through all of these challenges, as you have come out of that and will come through it and beyond it and discovered the things in your life that truly bring you joy and share that with other people, which helps other people and bring I’m sure brings you joy when you know that you’re helping other people.
01:04:58:07 – 01:05:17:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, there’s probably no greater joy. I always said if even just one person reads it and their life is changed or transformed, I’ll have done my job. And granted, I certainly hope more than one gets changed. But it’s really that idea that really transformation is possible and that we all know. So I would say it’s my story, but it’s really the secret is everybody has a story and it’s not really about me.
01:05:17:16 – 01:05:33:02
Jill Carnahan, MD
My hope is that someone will read it and see themselves reflected in the journey and then have ideas on how they can feel that same empowerment and resilience. And like you said at the bottom, at the at the core, the joy that we can get through life even in the midst of suffering.
01:05:33:12 – 01:05:46:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask you about so when you when you had your cancer diagnosis and then you were doing chemotherapy, did you do surgery? Also the surgery radiation or just chemotherapy? All of.
01:05:46:18 – 01:05:47:09
Jill Carnahan, MD
It. All of it.
01:05:47:16 – 01:06:01:15
Nathan Crane
You did all of it? Yeah, that’s right. I had multiple surgeries. Yeah. So how long was that process for you? And and you said you were doing a lot of natural therapies during also or just after.
01:06:02:08 – 01:06:14:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
During to the Ms.. Not advice of my oncologist. I went to get conventional wisdom. It’s funny because I have to be careful because I’m like, say, I don’t want to tell you to disobey your doctor, but I did. I like, why.
01:06:14:19 – 01:06:19:05
Nathan Crane
Disobey your doctor if you if you fight?
01:06:19:05 – 01:06:38:04
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, I did. I mean, because I talk about no antioxidants doing chemo. And I was like, screw that. I’m going to do vitamin D. I’m sorry, but a CoQ10, there’s a now, even now, I’ll. I’ll cancel patients and I’ll work with their oncologist. I never I never claim to treat cancer. I’m not an oncologist. But like, you know, there’s so well, there’s such a collaboration and.
01:06:38:04 – 01:06:52:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
So many patients get stuck at feeling like they have to choose sides or be stuck in the middle of these things. And you don’t. You can. Actually, I really designed my own therapy. That’s what it came down to. I ended up I had the biopsy and then I had to have another surgery to get that all the margins and everything.
01:06:52:14 – 01:07:07:06
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it was a lumpectomy. And with lumpectomy at that time, it was considered you needed to get radiation. Well, I looked in the data on the radiation and there was no survival benefit. Surprise, surprise, Like I would I do this external beam radiation that’s on my left side to hit my heart and maybe damaged my heart after chemo.
01:07:07:06 – 01:07:29:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
That could damage my heart if there’s no survival benefit. So it was slight decreased risk of recurrence, but no survival benefit. I was like not going to do it. But what I ended up doing is seeking out this guy who was doing experimental, Dr. Kosky, who was doing an experimental thing called breakthrough therapy. So we we drove up to Wisconsin, which was a couple of hours away from Chicago, and he literally put tubes in the breast after another surgery.
01:07:29:17 – 01:07:50:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
And then he put a radium beads right into the center of where the tumor was. So I only got radiation kind of from inside out. There’s something now that’s really common. At that time, this was called brachytherapy or now there’s a mama site. It’s much, much more common. At that time it was completely experimental and I begged him because he had a study of like 55 to 65 year old women who are very low risk.
01:07:50:23 – 01:08:10:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
And here I come in, it’s like I’m almost guaranteed to not survive. And I would totally mess up his study. But we begged and pleaded and he said, okay, I’ll do that. That was actually my first experience with a doc was like, I want to be like him. Like he went way outside. The lines were outside the box of what should been conventional to treat me because I felt like it would save my life and I felt like it did.
01:08:10:21 – 01:08:35:07
Jill Carnahan, MD
So I had radiation and then I had six rounds of incredibly aggressive, toxic five if you say toxin and doxorubicin and that actually Robeson massively cardio toxic, that’s a toxin. I later found literally one of the mechanisms action is to induce leaky gut. And so it’s no surprise then with this genetic predisposition towards Crohn’s and this gut level, this drug that cause leaky gut.
01:08:35:07 – 01:08:39:23
Jill Carnahan, MD
Six months after I completely finished all the therapy, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
01:08:40:05 – 01:08:45:09
Nathan Crane
Oh, wow. And was that now? That was probably very painful then at that time.
01:08:45:09 – 01:09:05:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, it’s funny because that was in my I was kind of living in the neck up and I was denying all my body and I got through all the radiation, chemo. I was so sick, went right back to rotations again. I grew up in this kind of German stoic pull up by the bootstraps, don’t complain family. So all I knew was just to push and go and drive and ignore my body and medical school just to reinforce that like said, it was brutal.
01:09:05:14 – 01:09:27:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
You were like taught to not sleep tonight, eat to not pee, to like, not have physical needs. And again, that’s so unhealthy for any of us, let alone a doctor who’s supposed to have compassion. So we had to relearn all that stuff. But because of that, I went right back to rotations. I should have probably taken a lot more time off this whole cycle of all that that I just described was nine months and I went right back into rotations.
01:09:28:10 – 01:09:47:14
Jill Carnahan, MD
So it wasn’t long at all. I was bald, I was sick, I was running fevers. I never told anyone, like unless you were dead or in the ICU, you had to report to work as a resident. There was no allowance for being ill. And so, yeah, it’s really crazy because how can you have a compassionate position when you are denying your own needs, suppressing your own illness?
01:09:47:14 – 01:10:08:04
Jill Carnahan, MD
Like not even acknowledging like that does not create compassion and empathy and thank goodness. I always feel like I clung to a shard of compassion, empathy. I never lost it, but so many doctors do and they get out and they’re kind of jaded and they’re sarcastic and they’re like, you know, because of that education. So I was running fevers, doing my rotations, not telling anyone.
01:10:08:04 – 01:10:26:12
Jill Carnahan, MD
I was very malnourished, very sick, loose stools, bloody diarrhea, just a horrible pain in my belly. And one night I’m in the E.R. taking a patient’s blood pressure and I pass out cold and I end up in emergency surgery for an abscess. I wake up the morning and the surgeon came into my room and he said, Jill, you’ve got Crohn’s disease.
01:10:27:07 – 01:10:44:12
Jill Carnahan, MD
And I ended up the next couple of days seeing a gastroenterologist. And he was like, is incurable. You’re going to have it lifelong. You’re going to need immune modulating drugs. You probably need steroids right now. It’s likely you’re going to have part of your colon removed over your lifetime and he was just, you know, no hope at all.
01:10:44:18 – 01:10:59:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
And the last thing I said, you’ll get a kick out of this because right before I left, I said and I was very sincere. I wanted to do whatever was in my power. And I said, Doc, does that have anything to do with this? Is there anything I could do with my diet? He did not pause. He just said, Don’t die.
01:10:59:18 – 01:11:17:01
Jill Carnahan, MD
It has nothing to do with this. But that was where I went from my head to my heart, because my body and my heart knew this. That can’t be right. I mean, I was just a lowly third year medical student and I didn’t have a lot of nutrition background, but my heart and my intuition said there’s no way that diet has nothing to do with Crohn’s and I’m going to prove him wrong.
01:11:17:08 – 01:11:34:24
Jill Carnahan, MD
And this is where that stubborn DNA came in and I went and. I searched and looked for answers and I came across Elaine got a specific carbohydrate diet, and I was willing to make a change. And I did. And I wasn’t cured. Within two weeks, but within two weeks of changing my diet, my fevers were gone, my abdominal pain was gone.
01:11:35:05 – 01:11:43:07
Jill Carnahan, MD
I felt like a new person. And I knew at that moment, diet absolutely has everything to do with autoimmunity in general, but especially with Crohn’s and colitis.
01:11:44:06 – 01:12:01:05
Nathan Crane
Wow. That’s I mean, such an incredible story. I mean, the fact that you’ve made it through all of that and where you are now, obviously very healthy. And I want to talk some more of that love for you to share a little bit more of the timeline and some of the other things that you’ve done along the way to heal yourself and thrive.
01:12:01:22 – 01:12:22:00
Nathan Crane
But what you said is so common and it’s sad that it’s so common. I talk to cancer patients all the time who. You know, if they ask their oncologist, say, hey, does diet have anything to do with cancer? And the immediate answer is no. Diet has nothing to do with cancer. If It did. Everybody would just change their diet.
01:12:22:00 – 01:12:53:06
Nathan Crane
It would be so easy. I’m like, Oh my God, it’s all right. It’s such a it’s so sad that our medical doctors who are supposed to be, you know, considered the smartest people on the planet, they’re not taught any of this in medical school. And it’s it’s sad because they could be brilliant, so brilliant in helping their patients if they actually knew the causes of autoimmune disease, the causes of cancer, the causes of diabetes, a cause of heart disease, they actually knew the causes.
01:12:53:06 – 01:13:17:01
Nathan Crane
Like we know it’s there. It’s in the literature, it’s clear, right? Diet is a big part of it. Stress is a big part of it. You know, toxicity is a big part of it. Disconnection and relationships, disconnection from us, sense of purpose in life. We know all of these things contribute and can be very correlative and in many cases very positive.
01:13:17:09 – 01:13:33:18
Nathan Crane
If they were taught this in medical school, they could save so many people’s lives. But you know, the ignorance is just nope, has nothing to do with it. You know, follow this plan or you’re going to die. And that’s what people are told every day. And out of fear, they do it. And, you know, it’s it’s just sad.
01:13:33:18 – 01:13:57:15
Nathan Crane
It’s sad because, you know, we know that the pharmaceutical companies have a stranglehold. The information that the medical students receive in school, you know, because they fund the information that goes in the textbooks, they fund the medical schools, they fund everything about our so-called health care today, which is really sick care. It’s not health care. Right. As you said, these doctors are not trained on health and how to be healthy for themselves.
01:13:57:21 – 01:14:17:01
Nathan Crane
They’re put through much stress and lack of sleep and poor diet and, you know, all these things just through medical school and then in internship and then in, you know, actually becoming a doctor and working late through the nights, all these kinds of things that are not about supporting health at all. And I mean, you know, doctors are amazing, don’t get me wrong.
01:14:17:01 – 01:14:44:17
Nathan Crane
Right. And you said the same thing, like they’re doing incredible things for people saving lives, especially when it comes to, you know, acute trauma situations. But when it comes to chronic disease prevention and reversal, unfortunately, our medical doctors in conventional medicine today have no idea what to do about it other than drugs, radiation and surgery. And these are not great tools for chronic disease.
01:14:44:17 – 01:14:47:23
Nathan Crane
They’re just not. And the evidence is proving that to be true.
01:14:49:02 – 01:15:08:16
Jill Carnahan, MD
So true. I talk about incurable doesn’t mean there’s not a cure. It means that there’s no drug to treat that condition. That’s like the stark statement in book. And it’s so powerful. People are like, Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s true. Right? Because you’re right, it’s very pharmaceutical driven. And just like now with function and my toolbox isn’t drugs and surgery which play a role.
01:15:08:17 – 01:15:24:24
Jill Carnahan, MD
There’s a place for those. It’s much, much bigger. It’s a mind, it’s body and spirit, it’s environmental toxic load, it’s decreased infectious burden and deal with these things through diet, lifestyle, mindset, nutrition and all the tools we have. And then all of these other biohacking things you and I talked about, you know, even light therapy and sound therapy.
01:15:24:24 – 01:15:41:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
And there’s so, so options. And each of these things has an impact on our physiology. And a lot of these things can actually reverse. Like I talk about reversible autoimmunity now. That’s like not considered true in traditional medical school, but I see it over and over and over again.
01:15:43:02 – 01:16:09:03
Nathan Crane
So what what are all the things you changed in in your diet? Let’s start with diet. Once you had the Crohn’s diagnosis, you said you went to the specific carbohydrate diet or other things and within two weeks you saw incredible results, incredible benefit. And then, you know, are you today have zero Crohn’s flare ups symptoms completely zero.
01:16:09:12 – 01:16:11:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
Point zero hundred percent gone.
01:16:11:18 – 01:16:15:21
Nathan Crane
100% or so. So the incurable thing, obviously.
01:16:16:02 – 01:16:16:22
Jill Carnahan, MD
Right, Right.
01:16:17:04 – 01:16:18:18
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Has obviously been cured.
01:16:19:03 – 01:16:38:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
So I’m going to go back on the fire because I grew up steak and potatoes and lots of fruits and vegetables. It wasn’t a bad lifestyle. But looking back about age 14, I became a vegetarian. And again, nothing wrong with that. But I look back in the why and the why was I didn’t know it, but I had low stomach acid so meat was hard to digest and I wasn’t treating it because of that was stomach acid.
01:16:38:11 – 01:17:04:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
I had a very severe B12 and zinc deficiency. So all those things combined to make me not enjoy the feeling of having meat my belly because I couldn’t digest it. Right. And when you have a zinc deficiency, you actually have your kind of abhor or not like the taste of meat. That’s actually part mnemonic for zinc deficiency. So it’s no wonder that I basically went I tried to do vegetarian, but at 14 I didn’t know what I was doing and there was no precedent in my family for vegetarians because we grew up on a farm and it was steak and potatoes kind of the life.
01:17:05:01 – 01:17:28:23
Jill Carnahan, MD
So everything was crazy and I did the best I could. But what I ended up doing as I gravitated towards a car battery and and we talk about cancer and sugar and you know the story there. And so I was eating way too many carbs. And I also I didn’t know, number one, I had the genetics for Crohn’s this nobody to gene what it does is it takes the normal back to you and your gut If you have permeability, those bacterial proteins can leak into the bloodstream and create this lipopolysaccharide.
01:17:28:23 – 01:17:49:11
Jill Carnahan, MD
That’s the coating. Endotoxin me a big word, but all it means is that those coatings of the bacteria in the blood create one of the most inflammatory responses in the body. This has been linked to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, insomnia, low testosterone in men, mood disorders, and I could name 20 other things. It’s really, really common as an underlying metabolic inflammatory trigger.
01:17:49:11 – 01:18:10:05
Jill Carnahan, MD
We even saw in COVID people had worse outcomes when they had metabolic endotoxin here. So unbeknownst to me, I had this abnormally aggressive response to those normal bacteria that go back and forth between the gut and the bloodstream, and that can lead to damage of the intestinal lining, which ends up being Crohn’s. And then the second thing I had that I didn’t know is I had a high risk gene for celiac.
01:18:10:11 – 01:18:29:04
Jill Carnahan, MD
And as a 14 year old, when I ate, I ate a lot of carb and a lot of gluten. Didn’t know any better. So from 14 to 25 before I was diagnosed with cancer, a little over ten years, I was going downhill with my diet thinking. I was being really healthy. And it’s funny because I remember I talked about in the book like, you know, maybe 14 to 16, I felt puffy.
01:18:29:04 – 01:18:47:10
Jill Carnahan, MD
I thought I was never overweight. I was always a healthy, normal weight. But because I was eating gluten in the wrong foods, my belly was puffy, my skin my face looked more puffy and I thought I was fat. Like I had issues know around that, too. And looking back, it was all inflammation. And I think of these young girls that are maybe thinking they’re not healthy and it’s really the kinds of things that are eating.
01:18:47:16 – 01:19:11:12
Jill Carnahan, MD
So when I hit 25 and I got cancer and I got Crohn’s, I started looking at diet and I realized, oh, this vegetarian diet for me and my genetics and how I was doing, it was almost killing me. So I shifted. The first thing I needed to do was, a specific carbohydrate diet. And the reason that works, it was a link actually that first found her daughter had colitis and she found a pediatrician who had been doing this diet for inflammatory bowel and IBS.
01:19:11:12 – 01:19:30:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
And she said, Why not try it for my daughter? Well, she healed her daughter from colitis through this diet. And this diet takes out these disaccharides like two sugars combined or monosaccharides that are the fuel for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and small intestinal fungal overgrowth. Now, here’s the thing I learned that so important about Crohn’s that many doctors, many patients don’t.
01:19:30:19 – 01:19:59:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
The antibiotics we check to see severity of Crohn’s in a traditional lab are anti yeast, anti carbohydrate antibodies. So what we know is yeast and bacteria in the small bowl are huge triggers for Crohn’s and colitis and IBS. It’s probably 80% of the cases. So what I did was they changed my microbiome. I took out all the sugar, all the carbs, I went gluten free and initially I did a specific carbohydrate diet, which I still believe is probably the best starting point for Crohn’s and colitis or inflammatory bowel.
01:19:59:13 – 01:20:20:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
Since then, what I’ve been on is more of a paleo. I’m grain free, I’m completely reprocessed, refined, sugar free, no gluten, no dairy, no egg, no sorry, no corn, no sugar, no alcohol. And literally for 21 years I’ve been completely I don’t feel restrictive because I feel so well when I. Well, but I’ve been off of those foods for a these last two decades and completely.
01:20:21:12 – 01:20:45:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
But what I did is I did multiple tests, organic acid stool test. I looked at the microbiome, I shifted that bit by bit and we think probiotics are helpful. They are. But diet is what changes the microbiome and diversity is king. So having multiple strains and species and things that are diverse, I always compare it to back in Ireland when there was a potato famine, all the farmers were like, Oh, this is a great type of potato seed, and they all grew the same crop.
01:20:45:19 – 01:21:04:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
And then there was this blight that knocked out all of the potatoes because it was all the same type of potato. It’s the same thing with your gut microbiome. If you don’t have diversity, you don’t have resilience. So what I’ve done over the past 20 years is restore my microbiome, increased diversity, spore probiotics, immunoglobulins butyric acid or short chain fatty acids and eating.
01:21:04:17 – 01:21:27:18
Jill Carnahan, MD
I have a it’s funny because when I say paleo people think I eat meat, actually little meat. I eat chicken and fish. I don’t eat red meat. Tons of plants, nuts and seeds, healthy oils like olive oil. I don’t eat any processed oils or no processed foods. And it’s transformed my body and my microbiome. And I think that actually helped not only the Crohn’s be completely cured, but I think that’s kept me from cancer as.
01:21:27:18 – 01:21:28:00
Jill Carnahan, MD
Well.
01:21:29:04 – 01:21:52:15
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s amazing. You know, sometimes that’s all it is. Sometimes there’s just one culprit in someone’s diet. Let’s say someone’s on whatever, whether it’s vegetarian or vegan or paleo or whatever diet they’re on, and they’re having all kinds of gut issues and health issues. Sometimes literally, it’s one culprit. It’s corn, right? And like corns and everything. So you try to avoid it, like if you like.
01:21:52:19 – 01:22:13:10
Nathan Crane
So I realized like corn was my body was not happy with corn. And so once I cut it out like, I like, you have to be so diligent with that one thing because we went gluten free years ago. Just the research I did on on gluten and especially how the wheat is completely changed today from what it was 100 years ago and so on and so forth.
01:22:13:10 – 01:22:33:22
Nathan Crane
Even organic wheat today here in the U.S. is not the wheat that, you know, our ancestors were eating. It is so different, so modified, so changed. You know, it’s protein. The protein of the gluten in the wheat today is like totally different than it used to be. I think that’s part of the problem with with gluten and people’s dyes today.
01:22:34:14 – 01:22:59:04
Nathan Crane
But All right. So you go gluten free. All right. Well, everything now is ten years ago, it was harder to, like, get gluten free stuff. Today, everything’s gluten free. But what do they replace gluten free with? Replace it with corn, corn starch and corn meal. Right. So let’s say you have issues, but you go gluten free, but you’re still having stomach issues, you’re still having digestive issues, you’re still having inflammation, whatever, and you don’t know what it is.
01:22:59:04 – 01:23:21:00
Nathan Crane
It could just be the corn, for example. It could just be one thing. But if you can get those culprits out of your diet and then do, like you said, eat way cleaner, obviously organic. You know, I’m a huge proponent of organic as much as you possibly can. You know, you grew up on a farm with pesticides and, you know, you feel that that contributed to your cancer diagnosis.
01:23:21:00 – 01:23:48:21
Nathan Crane
We know pesticides can lead to cancer. So that’s a pretty easy, you know, theory or assumption to make. But eating lots of vegetables, right. The vegetables are the part that I think most are missing in their diet today that have the anti-cancer properties, the polyphenols, the antioxidants. Right. The neuroprotective properties of heart disease, protective properties, you know, the dark leafy green vegetables, the cruciferous vegetables, your broccoli.
01:23:48:21 – 01:24:02:02
Nathan Crane
Then bok choy is know, you know, these are these are the vegetables we need to have in our diet every single day. And, you know, spinach and celery and lettuce, people people just throw lettuce out like, oh, there’s nothing that great about less lettuce is a superfood.
01:24:02:19 – 01:24:04:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
US have some of the best.
01:24:04:09 – 01:24:21:01
Nathan Crane
Yeah, yeah. Right. And it’s like you make a simple salad dressing at home and eat it up or put it in a blender and drink it if you know, if you don’t like eating salads, but getting those. You know, one thing I’ve been doing lately is just getting the raw broccoli, the small broccoli heads, and just dipping it in an organic hummus and eating it like that.
01:24:21:01 – 01:24:40:20
Nathan Crane
It’s so good. And you’re getting the fiber. It’s the diversity of the microflora, right? People saying, oh, I’ve got I need probiotics. My bacteria is out of whack. You know, they said, I’ve got some gut issues, so I’m going to buy probiotics. And what do they get? They get a probiotic that’s lactobacillus bacillus, and it’s like 10 billion.
01:24:41:04 – 01:25:10:14
Nathan Crane
You know, one strain. And that’s all they do is take one strain of a probiotic or eight strains of a probiotic and think I’m fixing my microflora in my gut. You’re not fixing it with a single strain of probiotic. You simply are not. You need hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of strains. Right. And you only get that, as you said, from eating a wide variety of whole foods, of real foods, nuts and seeds and, you know, legumes and vegetables and fruits and berries.
01:25:10:23 – 01:25:15:24
Nathan Crane
Right. And that’s what creates that that diversity for for the microflora. So that’s.
01:25:15:24 – 01:25:32:13
Jill Carnahan, MD
Exactly right. And I love that you said that. I want to emphasize that because people think getting even like 100 billion strain of probiotic, you could actually be doing the opposite and creating monoculture. If you’ve eight strains and you’re taking sacrifices, which means you’re actually decreasing diversity. The only way we get diversity is through food and through plant fibers, these things.
01:25:32:13 – 01:25:49:22
Jill Carnahan, MD
So I love that you said that because probiotics are great, they have a place and there’s good data on some of them. And I’m actually getting more and more a fan of spores. There’s many companies, many kinds out there. But the spores are the only ones that have dated actually induced some of these species that are keystone strains like Akkermansia or Pico bacterium, Netsky.
01:25:50:03 – 01:26:01:07
Jill Carnahan, MD
These are a keystone strains that indicate diversity. And there’s no evidence that lactobacillus and bifida bifidobacteria increased diversity spores do. But food is where it’s at. Absolutely.
01:26:01:07 – 01:26:27:21
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Yeah, food is where it’s at. And like I said to, you know, there’s nothing wrong with taking a probiotic, but if you’re overdoing one strain and then you’re not adding in diversity in your food, you know, that’s where people get out of balance. And, you know, I really like fermented food, you know, kimchi, even just like a little bit each day, like a little bit sauerkraut, a little kimchi, you know, some let’s see, what are kombucha do?
01:26:27:21 – 01:26:49:11
Nathan Crane
A little bit kombucha. No computer usually is pretty high in sugar. So, you know, you might not want to drink a lot of it, but a little bit, I actually get a there’s a shot you can get. It’s just like it’s a bottle, but you just take like a swig of it. That’s like a kefir like a kefir probiotic that’s very low in sugar, but it still tastes really good.
01:26:49:23 – 01:27:09:19
Nathan Crane
And just take a swig of that, like some kind of, you know, I think kimchi is probably the best or sauerkraut because you’re getting the the good bacteria in the fermented vegetables at the same time. So you have the food for the bacteria, which the food is the fiber, right? Like they eat the fiber. Our bodies don’t eat the fiber if people don’t know.
01:27:09:19 – 01:27:32:01
Nathan Crane
Right. The fiber in the vegetables and plants that we eat is for the bacteria. That’s their food source. And so that’s why we need it. So if you’re eating potato chips and, you know, pasta all day long, you’re not getting a pizza, you’re not giving the food that your bacteria need to survive, like they’re not getting enough food and then things get out of whack, whack.
01:27:32:01 – 01:27:37:22
Nathan Crane
And then you end up with a, you know, Crohn’s disease diagnosis or cancer diagnosis. And these things are primarily preventable, aren’t they?
01:27:38:15 – 01:28:00:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
Yeah, preventable and reversible. And, you know, I’ve said a lot of times autoimmune disease starts in the gut because we have this genetic predisposition we can’t change. We’ve environmental triggers like gluten or chemicals or toxins, and we have the gut immune interface. That’s where we have the most control. And I could do a whole two hour lecture on that, but that got me an interface that results in health based on our foods that we eat, decrease toxic load and all the things we’ve been talking about.
01:28:01:08 – 01:28:24:00
Jill Carnahan, MD
And it’s funny, though, even more than that, I’ve been you mentioned and wheat in the US, I feel like our soils are actually reflecting their microbiomes. And so lately I’ve been talking about even going further than just the gut because gut is reflected by the health of our soils and our soils are also becoming depleted and they’re becoming more heavily used with glyphosate or other chemicals which destroys the healthy microbiome of the soil.
01:28:24:00 – 01:28:43:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
And we’re starting to see that reflected in our gut. So it’s kind of a big deal. And now again, with glyphosate traces on things like organic wines in California, so like you can’t away from this, but you need to still try to do the best you can with organic and keeping out those chemicals because they absolutely affect our gut and predispose us to autoimmune disease.
01:28:43:08 – 01:29:01:20
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I think I think the the only real long term solution is to get back to growing as much of our own food as we can in small communities. You know, if you know, like I live in a neighborhood here like, you know, starting a little community garden, we have like a little small garden in the backyard right now.
01:29:01:20 – 01:29:23:19
Nathan Crane
We want to have a permaculture food forest. You know, when we get more land, that’s that’s the vision. But I think, you know, like the victory gardens we had after World War Two, you know, where 50% of the entire country grew their own food in, you know, 50% of the food source was grown basically by families in backyards.
01:29:23:19 – 01:29:42:12
Nathan Crane
You know, like that’s the way that we take control of our food sovereignty. And our health through diet and nutrition is by, you know, having our own food. And then we know what goes in it and we know how to take care of it. And if you choose to spray chemicals on it, well, then that’s your own fault.
01:29:42:12 – 01:30:02:20
Nathan Crane
You know? But at least, you know, if you’re growing it and you’re you know, we have a garden tower in the backyard, which is fantastic. Like, so instead of having eight eight foot garden beds, it took up quite a bit of space. You can have 50 plants in this single, you know, amazing single tower. And it’s got food composting in it.
01:30:03:03 – 01:30:18:06
Nathan Crane
And we put the worms in it. We put our compost in there. And so, you know, all of that, it makes compost tea, all the nutrients, and we pour that on the plants. And then, you know, the worms are constantly, you know, aerating the soil and pooping in there and creating, you know, good nitrogen and good health for the plants.
01:30:18:06 – 01:30:37:17
Nathan Crane
So like when I go out there and cut some fresh greens and put in my smoothies in the mornings, I know I’m getting the healthiest, the most nutrient dense vegetables that I can into my body. When they’re coming for that, I know they’re way healthier and more nutrient dense than what’s coming from the grocery store. And so no, we can’t survive on that one thing.
01:30:37:17 – 01:30:39:00
Nathan Crane
But you can do.
01:30:39:05 – 01:30:54:09
Jill Carnahan, MD
Start and we can all do our part. Even for me, I have a condo with a balcony, but I grow the herbs on my balcony, everything I can in those boxes out there. And so many of us are used to even I’m guilty of this too. I want my blueberries and strawberries all year round. Well, they don’t they don’t in my culture in Colorado.
01:30:54:09 – 01:30:54:21
Jill Carnahan, MD
Oh, you know.
01:30:55:10 – 01:30:56:16
Nathan Crane
I know that sucks.
01:30:57:00 – 01:31:13:07
Jill Carnahan, MD
Fruit, right? So I know because I love these things. But you even even that if you can eat in-season eat locally, grow whatever you can, even if it’s just starting with herbs and nowadays with your condo apartment, you can get these hydro plastic, you know, gardens and you can do things that we never used to be able to do.
01:31:13:23 – 01:31:35:04
Nathan Crane
Yeah, exactly. Oh, it was really great getting to know you and more about your story. And you know, you’re you’re amazing. I mean, just what you’ve gone through and where you’ve come from and the the the joy and the light and the wisdom that you radiate. Sure. Your patients are very lucky when they get to work with you.
01:31:35:13 – 01:31:40:02
Nathan Crane
And I appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast. So thank you so much.
01:31:40:18 – 01:31:42:01
Jill Carnahan, MD
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
01:31:42:10 – 01:32:02:06
Nathan Crane
And where can where’s best place where people get a copy of your book Unexpected? Highly recommend it. As I said, it’s a fantastic I love how you’ve just written it. Like a lot of storytelling in here. I really think it’s a fantastic book. I encourage everyone to read it where they get a copy of it.
01:32:02:18 – 01:32:19:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
Thank you so much. Nathan Reed. Unexpected dot.com is where you get all kinds of free bonuses, but you can get at Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Anywhere you buy books, go your favorite. And if you’re going to support local or smaller retailers, please do so. Get it anywhere you want. It’s on Audible, it’s on Kindle, it’s on regular hardcover.
01:32:19:20 – 01:32:32:19
Jill Carnahan, MD
But do come back to read dot com because I’ve got a free coloring journal help you get into flow. I’ve got a free lecture on message activation, which we didn’t touch on but is becoming more of an issue for more people. And I got a free chapter that’s recorded that isn’t included in the book.
01:32:33:12 – 01:32:36:10
Nathan Crane
And that was www.readunexpected.com.
01:32:37:02 – 01:32:37:17
Jill Carnahan, MD
Exactly.
01:32:37:20 – 01:32:40:19
Nathan Crane
Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
01:32:40:19 – 01:32:41:08
Jill Carnahan, MD
You’re welcome.
01:32:42:03 – 01:32:42:21
Nathan Crane
All right. Take care.