Welcome to a special solo episode of Vitally You®. Today, I share the personal story of how I was able to heal both my genetic and individual health issues through research, intuition, and a holistic approach to medicine. While I grew up a happy child, I also had to experience the pain of watching my loved ones suffer from obesity and diabetes. As an adult, I was committed to a better and healthy lifestyle, but despite my natural remedies, home-cooked meals, and regular exercise, I found myself in the emergency room with a malfunctioning heart. To the doctors, the solution was a pacemaker, but by doing the work I discovered that true healing would come from addressing not only the body but the mind and soul as well. Today, I invite you to start your own healing journey, and join me every week on Vitally You to explore how to restore our mind, body, emotional and soul systems so that we can turn back the biological clock and feel younger while growing older. Are you with me?
Welcome to a special solo episode of Vitally You®. Today, I share the personal story of how I was able to heal both my genetic and individual health issues through research, intuition, and a holistic approach to medicine. While I grew up a happy child, I also had to experience the pain of watching my loved ones suffer from obesity and diabetes. As an adult, I was committed to a better and healthier lifestyle, but despite my natural remedies, home-cooked meals, and regular exercise, I found myself in the emergency room with a malfunctioning heart. To the doctors, the solution was a pacemaker, but by doing the work I discovered that true healing would come from addressing not only the body but the mind and soul as well. Today, I invite you to start your own healing journey, and join me every week on Vitally You® to explore how to restore our mind, body, emotional and soul systems so that we can turn back the biological clock and feel younger while growing older. Are you with me?
Listen to the episode on Simplecast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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[00:00:00] Dana Frost: Welcome to Vitally You®, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host, Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach, and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect: conversations about vitality from the inside out with guests experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality. And solo episodes along the way from me, where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger while growing older, this is the place for you.
[00:00:52] Hi Everybody, this is Dana, your host for the Vitally You® podcast, feeling younger while growing older. In today's introductory episode, I'd like to get personal and share the why behind this podcast, because it is personal.
[00:01:07] I grew up in the loving arms of my grandmother, Gladys. She had an outsized heart that was pure gold. I cherish many memories sitting at her kitchen table while she cooked, canned, or baked and worked around the kitchen while I sat adoringly dipping spoonfuls of sugar from her sugar bowl, and stirring them into my small cup of coffee to sweeten coffee's bitterness to my child's tongue.
[00:01:33] Her buns and cinnamon rolls were famous. Her unfinished basement was a makeshift cellar where she kept her canned garden produce. It felt really spooky to me. She was raised on a farm and had a green thumb, which she passed down to my dad. As a child, we had gardens that filled our table with fresh corn on the cob, tomatoes, oh, they were probably heirloom, but that wasn't really a trend back then, peas that became the most delectable creamed peas you can imagine. Soft, velvety, slightly sweet with a gentle crunch.
[00:02:07] As a child, the garden represented what I didn't want to do, which was to be in the hot sun picking weeds or harvesting. Years later, I realized how fortunate I was to have been raised with produce that was planted, cared for, and harvested by the hands of my family.
[00:02:25] My grandma was always a larger woman from my memory, but I watched her descend into obesity and adult onset diabetes. Her famous fried chicken became boiled, and to my child's taste buds, that was tasteless. She was never able to overcome diabetes or obesity, and we lost her way too early. Fast forward and my dad followed the same health trajectory.
[00:02:52] These are two people who had hearts of gold, generous, hopeful, fun, connectors, joy givers, earth grounded, bright lights in their communities of influence. If they would've been able to overcome diabetes and obesity, we would have enjoyed them for many more years. Watching them was my motivation for my obsession with my own personal health for decades. I had the big book of natural health remedies since the early nineties. I was always seeking natural solutions for my family's health, and I never believed the doctor knew best. I always trusted my inner knowing, and my own research. And you can ask my kids about that. Several loved the freedom of going to the health center in college, because I didn't like to take them to the doctor unless it was absolutely necessary. I raised my family on home cooked whole foods, sweets were made from scratch.
[00:03:50] All to say, I thought I managed my health and my own family's health well. And then my forties hit, and I think my genes caught up to me and I know stress caught up to me. So here I was in my forties, weight creeping up, fatigue setting in, menopause transition on fire. I wasn't sure what to do because I was already doing all the things I knew to do. I was exercising. I was eating healthy. I had a daily quiet time to keep centered in my soul and with source to quiet my mind.
[00:04:25] Well, in 2011, my body pulled a trigger and the electrical conduction of my heart burned out. I had just come home with all the kids, and we had a guest and we had visited a museum. It was in the summer. I was super hangry and hyper-focused on preparing a healthy snack. It was going to be guacamole. Before I could get dinner going. I was working so quickly that while pitting the avocado, the knife slipped and stabbed in between my fingers. This was not going to be an at-home repair job that the big book could handle. It just wasn't going to be. But remember I was still hangry, and I had guests and kids to feed. So what did I do? I cleaned it up. I wrapped my stab wound up, and I continued with dinner prep.
[00:05:15] After dinner, I called the ER to see how crowded they work. Wise woman, wise mother, they gave me the green light. It wasn't busy. My biggest fear heading to the ER was I knew I needed a tetanus shot, and I'm also not a fan of needles. So the whole idea of stitching my hand up made me queasy. I get to the ER and the nurse is doing the intake, and she pauses and looks at me, and asks me if I'm a high-performing athlete. Hm, no, I definitely wouldn't say that I'm a high performing athlete.
[00:05:50] She explains that my heart rate was 38 beats per minute, which is really abnormal except in high-performing athletes. At that moment, my stabbed finger took a backseat. Well, let's just say the tetanus shot barely felt like a bee sting, and they simply glued my wound. However, every possible instrument that could be used to measure my heart health was rapidly put into motion. There I was, my friend had taken me to the ER, our kids were at home. My husband was at a business dinner, and I'll tell you a funny inside story. So my husband, we call him when it suddenly becomes something serious. He arrives as quickly as he can get there. He whips himself into my emergency room, and you're not going to believe what he says.
[00:06:37] Now you need to remember, I was considered super healthy. I always took care of my health. No one saw this coming. I didn't even see it coming. And he proclaims, "Oh, you're fine. They just want to do the test because we have good health insurance." Okay. Mic drop. I know what you're thinking, but he's really not an a-hole.
[00:06:58] In hindsight, I had been very tired. Several weeks earlier, we had been in Turkey as a family, and I couldn't keep up with my family. I was always behind them. I always needed to stop and take a rest. The morning that I stabbed myself, I went to walk to Lake Michigan with my friend. And if you know me, you know I am Ms. Walker. I walk miles. I walk fast. I've always loved walking. Granted it was a hot, sunny summer day, but I actually had my friend walk on without me because I couldn't keep up with her walking. Now, these things could have been a big red flag, but I couldn't see them. In my mind, I was tired. It's been busy. This is just stress. These are the lies we women tell ourselves, and we miss serious health conditions. When you go to a doctor, and you say you're tired, most are going to play you down. They're not going to take you seriously because why? Fatigue isn't easily diagnosable, and there's no pharmaceutical prescription they can write up. The conventional medical community is not equipped to deal with something like fatigue, and other stress-related manifestations.
[00:08:11] Now, I'm going to save that soapbox for another solo episode. Let's get back to the emergency room. Eventually, in the middle of the night, I think it was 2:00 AM, I got checked into the cardiac floor. An hour afterwards, I had finally drifted asleep. I'm awakened for the poking and prodding. It was a male nurse, and he jumped kind of, he really jumps in surprise and he was like, "Oh my gosh, what are you doing here?" He says, "I am not used to seeing someone so young, like you on this floor."
[00:08:41] And that's a good point, because what the doctors discovered 24 hours later is that I had burned out the electrical conduction of my heart. It's what happens to women and men over 75. I was 45. Several weeks later, I had a pacemaker implanted. In those in-between weeks, they looked at many possible reasons and couldn't find one. And they rejected mine, which was stressed.
[00:09:08] So I was told, I would feel like my old self again after the pacemaker was implanted. Only I didn't. I was still bone tired, and you know what? My electrophysiologist had no real solutions. He just kept saying your pacemaker is working. You should be fine. And I swear, he acted like it was all in my head, and I knew it wasn't. This is when I began my journey of medical self-discovery. There were so many tears along the way. And I felt alone. I have to share with you that two weeks after my pacemaker was implanted, we took our oldest daughter to college for the first time. Four weeks after my pacemaker was implanted, my husband had to go to Harvard and tuck himself away for a program for three months.
[00:10:00] And I will tell you, I did feel alone. But I am so grateful because I learned so much about myself. I discovered the patterns I needed to change. I learned that I actually had even more agency over my health. I learned the holes in our medical system, and I discovered these healing modalities. These powerful alternative modalities. I learned at a cellular level the full mind, body, soul soup that everything is related. You cannot separate the body from the mind or your emotions or your own soul. If one suffers, they are all a part of the solution. And little by little, I began healing. In my quest to understand my fatigue, I discovered I was pre-diabetic.
[00:10:53] A few months later, I discovered I had adrenal fatigue. I didn't even know what that was. And I was in menopause transition. I had all these signs of menopause transition, but that was never a diagnosed by my gynecologist. I also discovered that my gut community was suffering from parasites and unwanted bacteria. Friends, listeners, I had a beautiful storm of health challenges that were all connected, and I was standing in my fork in the road. Would I allow my genetics and my current health situation to take over and command the future of my health because you know what? It didn't look good. It really didn't look good. Or would I stepped up and do the work so that I could truly feel younger while growing older?
[00:11:43] And this is why we are here today. I want to tell you that there's a bigger force than you. The universe, God, angels, your guides, whatever you believe, and they really have your back. They had my back. Over the past 10 years, I've been guided to healing modalities that I needed at just the right time. And you know what? I was ready. I was observant. I was paying attention, and I was willing each time to commit myself to my own healing journey and learn these new modalities. Your own healing journey it's on you. No one else is going to do it for you. And there were so many times that I wanted someone else to do my work, but no, I needed to do the work.
[00:12:28] I've had partners like HeartMath, in light therapy, Kaiut Yoga, and most recently, Lifewave patches. Lifewave patches activate your gene expression so that your body behaves like a younger, stronger body. But it wasn't just one thing. And honestly it never is, which is why I am here on the Vitally You® podcast.
[00:12:51] I know and have experienced that we can indeed heal ourselves and feel younger while growing older. So, let's meet up weekly and explore how to restore our mind, body, emotional and soul systems so that we can turn back the biological clock and feel younger while growing older. Are you with me? I hope so. I will see you every Sunday morning. Thank you everybody streaming love from my heart to yours.
[00:13:25] Thank you for joining me on the Vitally You® podcast. If you like it, please spread the love with a review and share it with your friends. As a thank you, for the first three months of my podcast, one reviewer each month will be selected to win a sleeve of Lifewave X39 Stem Cell Activation patches. Lifewave's X39 patch is the only product on the market that resets the body's own stem cells so they behave like younger, healthier cells without injections, chemicals, or pharmaceuticals. Experience the power of the patch on your journey of feeling younger while growing older. To be entered to win, leave a review, screenshot your review and send it to dana@danafrost.com. Or pop it into a direct message on Instagram @danafrost, vitally free.
[00:14:16] Don't miss a Vitally You® episode drop. Sign up for my newsletter on my website or Instagram Linktree. Until next time, streaming love from my heart to yours.