Hope and Nourishment for People with Endometriosis with Katie Edmonds

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:00:03) – Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi, and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. Today, I’m excited to share with you my interview with Katie Edmonds of Heel Endo. As we navigate through our conversations about endometriosis, I want you to tune in to this conversation to think about how endometriosis can really be a transformative opportunity.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:01:30) – Katie is so glowing with her passion for this work because it’s what she’s lived. It was her actual experience, and as she improved her fertility by thinking about on a mind, body and spirit level, how she could nourish herself, stop the restrictions and restricting, and focus on nourishment and building cellular health. Starting with the nervous system regulation and the story she tells about being in an isolated cabin and one book popping up to pique her interest about nutrition and nourishment was, I think, such a beautiful metaphor for the fact that how connected to nature we live, how connected to ourselves we live, is part of the healing journey. No matter if you or your client are dealing with endometriosis or any other chronic illness, and those connections cannot be overstated, I don’t think we talk about them enough. Yeah, sure, there’s the checklist of anti-inflammatory things to do. There’s the checklist of exactly what supplements to take to optimize your egg quality and all of that. And while those are popular formats, because it is helpful to know a little bit of like what to do if we think of this and we take a little bit of a step back to the 3000 foot view, and we think about how illness is potentially an opportunity, not one I like.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:03:07) – I’d prefer these opportunities to come more easily, but honestly, the challenges of life are also an opportunity to connect with nature and to connect more deeply to ourselves. And her story is a really beautiful example of that. So enjoy this conversation. I’ll see you on the other side. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. We have a great guest for you today. Welcome. Welcome to Katie Edmunds of Heal and Doe. So this month here on the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast, we are diving into all things endometriosis. Katie is an endometriosis author, educator and nutritional therapist. She wrote the four week Endometriosis Diet Plan and Heal Endo, which is an anti-inflammatory approach to healing from endometriosis. She lives on the north shore of Kauai, next to the biggest mahogany forest in the United States. That’s a great fun fact. And she lives with her loving husband and her two miracle children. She is absolutely passionate about helping women with endometriosis. So welcome Katie.

Katie Edmonds (00:04:28) – Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:04:31) – So like many people in the world of endometriosis advocacy, education, information, client support, often our journeys started with either a client journey or personal journey. Tell us a bit about your story and what inspires you every day to get up and do this work?

Katie Edmonds (00:04:55) – Absolutely. Yeah. You’re right. So many of us really were at the bottom of the barrel, you know, especially in the. Health from, I guess, the advocacy to, you know, people who were like on their proverbial deathbeds, a lot of us and found something that made us better and became so passionate about that. And for some people with surgery, for some people it was like a change of careers. Some people it was, you know, nutrition or lifestyle or they became a doctor coach in one way. And so what mine was, was actually it was finding diet and lifestyle, which for me was the thing that optimized my body so much. I say I was so surprised to find remission of endometriosis. I’m surprised because no one told me that was possible, right? It was.

Katie Edmonds (00:05:35) – This is like ten years ago. I’m really, really suffering and the only thing I hear is there’s no cure. This is the mantra. There’s no cure, there’s no cure. And of course, there’s no cure for any chronic disease, right? There’s no cure for cancer. There’s no cure for autoimmune diseases. There’s no cure for acne, for heaven’s sakes. Right? But for some really bummer of a reason endometriosis has tagged on this no cure phrase. And it really stuck with me. Like in my heart. Like there’s no hope. And it was such an unfortunate thing to really feel. Plus, I live on Kauai, so in our entire state there’s no excision specialists. So I was looking into excision. I saw below the belt and I had never heard of excision before. You know, I’m in my later 20s at this point. I’ve been dealing with endometriosis for 5 or 6 years and like my solution has arrived, I start looking for a surgeon and it’s like $60,000 to fly to mainland, you know, to stay for the pre-op, the post-op, the second follow up and pay for the surgery out of pocket.

Katie Edmonds (00:06:30) – And I’m like, oh my God, that’s down payment on a house. I don’t have that money. So for me, I kind of like had to put the endometriosis thing aside. I really just believed it was going to be with me. It was a horrible thing to accept. But I did want to have babies and I was not conceiving. So at this point I say I was really stuck in a chronic disease state without realizing it. I just thought I had this disease is incurable thing, but I did want to have the babies and the doctor for my previous surgeries. Just the ablation surgery with my local ob gyn who delivers babies and does your pap smear and, you know, just try to give me surgery on my endo unsuccessfully. But he said my fallopian tubes were open. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be getting pregnant, which is very frustrating. You know, I think in our whole world, our fertility news comes from, you know, ninth grade, when they tell you if you sneeze, you’ll get pregnant.

Katie Edmonds (00:07:19) – So do everything you can to not get pregnant. And all of a sudden it’s like we’re having sex without protection. I’m going to get pregnant right away. And it didn’t happen. And he’s saying the endo isn’t the problem. So in my head I was like, well, maybe there’s something I can do here. And I have this like really big moment. I think maybe some women can relate to. So I became a hyper perfectionist about diet. I had read, you know, maybe dietary changes could help my endo. If you cut out 100,000 foods and become like the strictest, most perfect, like if you’re not getting better, you’re just not doing the diet good enough sort of thing. And I think a lot of us with endometriosis are high performers. We’re overachievers, we’re very sensitive. We want to be perfect and do everything right. You know, people pleasers, all these things right, trying to recover from this myself. But I was doing the plant based diet, the almost all, you know, vegetarian to vegan.

Katie Edmonds (00:08:07) – I wouldn’t touch saturated fat. You know, animal products would disgust me. Stuff like to this extent. And I was so sick with no energy telling everyone how healthy I was. Right? It was such a strange duality. I was living without putting it together. So we have these mountains here in Kauai, and we have a cabin up there and there’s no service, no internet, no cell reception. And I’m a book nerd, so I bring all my books up there and I go up for the weekend, and there is I forgot all my books and I’m like, oh crap, what am I going to do? So I scour the cabin and there’s not a single book except for one, and it’s Weston Price’s nutrition book, and it’s sort of like the universe put it in front of me in a place I couldn’t escape. Yeah. So you talk about Western price? Probably a little bit.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:08:51) – Well, sure. I mean, I certainly understand that research from a long time ago now in terms of essentially traditional whole foods whole, even animal based foods, kind of the it’s so the foundational research of the Western Price Institute is about kind of looking at traditional diets, including things like everything bone marrow, organ meats, whole dairy.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:09:19) – And it’s certainly a lot of vegetables, fermented vegetables. It’s a very traditional whole whole foods diet.

Katie Edmonds (00:09:25) – Exactly. And that’s I think a lot of us in nutrition world, you know, you take Western price. We know it’s this information with a grain of salt, so to speak. You know, keep moving forward with it. But this is the first I’d ever heard about quote unquote, ancestral nutrition. And he studied these people who are still living outside of the realm of modern industry. And they were eating literally the foods I thought would kill you. They’re eating. The whole book is like raw dairy products, copious amounts of raw dairy. And I’m like, salmonella, botulism. I can’t believe these people survived, you know, and organ meats. Oh my God, that’s where the toxins are stored. That’s the dirtiest part of the animal. Oh, like bone marrow and bone broth and tons of. Saturated fats and fermented foods. And I had like a visceral reaction to this book, but I couldn’t stop reading it.

Katie Edmonds (00:10:08) – And I think there’s a part of me that was like, they’re doing everything wrong. Look at me. I’m doing everything right. It was that perfectionist coming forward, but I could not stop thinking about this book. Once I left K-o-k and it sat in me and I started to think, you know, I wanted to be an anthropologist major. I ended up doing global studies. I traveled internationally, so it made sense. I was like, wait a second, these people weren’t dying in droves and they didn’t have chronic disease. They were literally dying from a cut, you know, like an infection. Yes, like those types of acute things. But they weren’t living in this chronic disease state like I’ve tried everything else. I have never tried this. Why don’t I go for it? It was like the most insane thing little vegan Katie had ever thought of doing, you know, incorporating organ meats and seaweed and had raw milk. And I say within six weeks of changing my diet, I actually felt the clouds lift of my chronic fatigue.

Katie Edmonds (00:10:58) – So for me, it was this almost profound religious experience. It changed me so much. And diet was by far the only thing that helped change the course of my endometriosis. But it was the first thing I ever felt like I was actually regaining cellular health and moving out of the disease state. It was taking a step, and from there I did thing after thing that would help my fertility. As my fertility returned, I was so shocked that all of my endometriosis symptoms disappeared. Every single one. I was so shocked, you know, I didn’t think that was possible. And then Jesus wasn’t curable. It’s going to be with me forever. I couldn’t afford that surgery. So for me, and this is not also to say no one needs surgery. Many people do need surgery. I’m on the very lucky bandwagon of living in a place where there’s no surgeon that I ended up not needing surgery, I got pregnant, I have two babies that I conceive naturally now, and my endometriosis has never come back different than the cure, right? Because if I went back to this diet and lifestyle of high stress, fast moving, fast paced, high perfectionist, lots of plant based processed foods, alcohol, coffee, all the things that I was doing, and a lot of us do just in our normal society, it’s very normalized.

Katie Edmonds (00:12:03) – I would get all those symptoms back, I have no doubt. But the way it is now, it’s totally in remission. And that’s a very long winded answer to why I’m so passionate about what I do.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:12:14) – Well, I really like that answer because I think, you know, having worked in endometriosis related nutrition now for, gosh, 14, 15 years, it’s a very interesting journey that individuals have to go on. Now, I personally don’t have endometriosis, but I’ve worked with probably tens of thousands of patients with endometriosis in my career and certainly, you know, tens of thousands shifting nutritional patterning. And I think what you said at the beginning is so important because there’s this idea that there is a perfect endometriosis diet. And I was actually trying to write my book about that for years ago. But the more and more and more I’ve worked with so many different clients, and then kind of went through my own immune related disease process with having long Covid, the last three and a half, four years.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:13:09) – What you start to understand about nutrition is that there are these principles around how to kind of nourish the body, and then there’s genetic variability, and there is sort of this trial and error that can be helpful. You know, we obviously have to stay within the range of like actual food versus ultra processed foods, things like that. But on an individual basis, the specific components of the nutritional plan can vary. And we can actually begin to understand what those are. We can get into that in a minute. And it’s interesting to consider that your stress about having to be so perfectionistic about the diet may have actually made that worse anyway, like no matter what you were eating, would you agree?

Katie Edmonds (00:14:02) – Absolutely, absolutely. And I was there too. And once I felt so much better on this ancestral diet I started to become very obsessed about it. It becomes this, you know, the zoning and this was the thing then.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:14:14) – It’s like the new obsession.

Katie Edmonds (00:14:15) – It was, it was, you know, the new thing that was going to get me.

Katie Edmonds (00:14:18) – And what that comes back to a little bit is when we’re talking about holistic medicine or functional medicine, sometimes we think we’re very avant garde, but because we were raised in a Western medicine allopathic society, it actually almost always comes back to allopathic medicine. And you’re using now nutrition like a treatment like it’s the drug, right? Rather than we need to step out of that allopathic model and say, we are not doing something so specific here, which is very hard when you’re a patient that wants, you know, like we grew up on Cosmo, the ten things that are going to get you this, the ten things that are going to make your hair look good. And we want to know the ten things like, those are my most popular blogs, like, here’s three very specific things to do, rather than here’s a very generic genre blog about how endometriosis behaves. And. How we can, you know, help try to reverse that, try to regress those lesions. And so that’s like the model we want to go to is basically the tools that create full body health are the things that are going to allow your body to heal from a chronic disease popular disease state.

Katie Edmonds (00:15:16) – But when you’re stuck in the allopathic model, you’re not actually changing how you behave in the world or how you move through the world. You’re keeping your same rigidity, but you’re changing that idea of taking medication and you’re replacing it with, I’m doing a diet and this diet is going to get me better. And if I’m not getting better, I’m not doing it well enough. And I think this might exist very specifically like most pronounced in the gaps world. And I’ve never done gaps. But I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I get reached out to maybe 5 to 10 times a year by women who say my Gaps practitioner says I just need to be more strict on the Gaps diet, and that’s why my endometriosis symptoms aren’t going away. What do you feel? And these are from women with all sorts of gaps. Practitioner’s not the same one. So there’s that thought out there like oh, it’s an autoimmune disorder. And therefore if you just calm the immune system, it’s going to go away in endometriosis.

Katie Edmonds (00:16:01) – A lot more than that, right? It involves the pathological growth of abnormal tissue, which is so different than calming down an immune system attack specifically. But, you know, back to your point. I read this book. I think it was Rob Wolfe’s book a long time ago, and he had this great example called. It was the Pizza and Beer Diet. I don’t know if you were familiar with that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:16:21) – I haven’t read.

Katie Edmonds (00:16:22) – That it was one part of his book and it was so cool. He talked about someone who he had worked with, or maybe it was Criss Cross or one of them, and he had worked with this person, and they were so just pigeonholed and the diet thing and they didn’t feel, well, quite they’re very sick and just cutting out food after food. And they felt so isolated, couldn’t go out with friends. And then eventually this guy is like, I’m trying so hard and I’m not getting better, so why don’t I give up? And this is kind of like me.

Katie Edmonds (00:16:48) – I’m like, effort. I’m trying so hard to be perfect on this diet and I’m not getting better. So I’m going to eat liver and raw milk. If it kills me, so be it, you know? But this is what this man did. And he went out and started having pizza and beer with his buddies and his symptoms disappeared within a month. So you can’t say, well, it’s psychosomatic. You know, part of it might be, but you do literally create that disease state we talk about, right? Like your body is primed for disease in every way. So it’s not like you’re creating the symptoms in your head. The symptoms are very real. And they’re measurable, right? You can diagnose disease living in the disease state. And then once you move out of it, the measurables are gone or diminished. So it was just a profound story. Like pizza and beer isn’t going to make you the healthiest person. But what does is being in a happy, loving, social, lovingly, emotionally supported state.

Katie Edmonds (00:17:35) – And that’s a really big part of the endometriosis journey. To be sure, in any chronic disease.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:17:40) – I really love that. I think we absolutely share that perspective in the sense that, you know, for our seven step protocol, right? Step one is always nervous system regulation. And the research very clearly shows in general, for complex chronic illness, smokers with friends are healthier than non-smokers with no friends. So so, you know, that’s sort of a Iwe mantra over here at the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. And I think you said a few things that are very valuable. Number one, you can’t perfect your way to healing because diets are not like medication. I think that whole food as medicine thing is well-intentioned, but nutrition is so much deeper than just the micronutrients, macronutrients, you know, anti-inflammatory factors of a given diet. There’s the social connection. There’s the pleasure and taste and nourishment of the food. There’s the cooking. There’s kind of history and memories that are evoked from eating food and all of that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:18:46) – And so that you’ve mentioned a couple times this sort of like disease state versus that healing state, which from my perspective, that really comes from the nervous system. So would you agree with that?

Katie Edmonds (00:19:01) – Absolutely. And, you know, because I’ve gotten so far. And then even though I’ve gotten so far, I feel like whenever there’s a big stress in my life, I have some sort of a setback. My father died in two months later, my beloved 14 year old dog died, and I developed acute pain, like where my duodenum is, you know, and I’m like, oh my God, am I dying now? You know? And I didn’t put it together that there was this emotional component to it. And it was they got the endoscopy, I got a colon, I was doing all these things. And I started to finally realize, like, I was living in back in that disease state, and it was other things that were popping up besides endometriosis. And this is really important, especially for people who have surgery.

Katie Edmonds (00:19:42) – And maybe they get better, but then they develop lupus, right? Or miss. They’re still in the disease state and maybe their lesions are removed and they feel better from endometriosis, but they develop another chronic disease and another because they are living in that disease state. So that was absolutely me. And I started to go deep into the research over the past year of actually understanding the nervous system, because I was taught in so much of our taught that you’re either in rest or digest or fight and flight, and for the fight or flight, it’s almost like you give credit to things outside your body for why you’re in fight or flight. So I’d ask clients, are you stressed? And they’d say, oh no, I’m not, because I don’t have a stressful job. I have a supportive husband. I go on walks and they’re telling me all these external things. But when you start digging in, oh, yeah, I’ve had chronic anxiety since I was a little kid. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m very nervous about these things.

Katie Edmonds (00:20:30) – Sometimes I have panic attacks and, you know, you realize the fight or flight, it makes it seem like it’s just something that comes and goes. And if you’re not in a panic mode, then you are not stressed in some way. So I started to change the way I talk about it, and I think it’s a helpful way. It was really helpful for me, and I think it’s helpful for others that I try to think of it as a chemical physiology makeup. So can chemistry being cortisol adrenaline and norepinephrine. And these are your three stress hormones right. And they course through your body whenever you’re you’re not just like stressed about work. Let’s say you’re ruminating about how annoying your friend is. Your roommate is how they didn’t do the dishes again. Now you’re late for work. You’re stuck in traffic. You’re unhappy at work, you don’t like your job. You don’t like your thighs. What are you going to do about nutrition today? Right? It’s like those on and on. Your brain won’t stop or, you know, you’re depressed.

Katie Edmonds (00:21:23) – Maybe. You know, that’s sort of like the revved up side or the depressed side where nothing is feeling good. There’s no joy, there’s no motivation, there’s no anything there to keep you in. What I would call dose chemistry and dose chemistry is aka parasympathetic rest or digest. But I don’t like rest digest because I would think, well, I’m resting all the time and I still feel absolutely awful. I’m sitting on this couch, right? Like I’m resting. And why am I not digesting it like I’m so bloated and I can’t digest it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:21:53) – Right? I’m resting, but not digesting. Yeah.

Katie Edmonds (00:21:57) – Exactly. And so when you realize you’re actually it has nothing to do with what you’re doing or you’re sitting on a couch resting like what your inside physiology is. So dose physiology is dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Any of those sort of things that you can be in can chemistry sitting on the couch doing nothing. Or you can be in dosed chemistry sitting on the couch doing nothing. You can be in canned chemistry, cleaning your kitchen.

Katie Edmonds (00:22:21) – You have to clean your kitchen every day. If you’re like me, if you’re cooking Whole Foods or you can be in dosed chemistry, right? It’s actually your physiology inside your body. And I, you know, the amount of ruminating thoughts I can create in my brain is like, oh, my gosh, I could just be a factory, you know? I can kick the dead horse to death for years, so to speak. And I think many of us can. And it’s hard to actually get out of that loop without retraining. But the first thing, just to understand that that itself is keeping you in the chronic disease state, that very specific thing, because the second you move out of that, I didn’t even know how it was possible in some ways, to take a walk without overthinking things unless I was constantly distracting myself, which then creates ADHD like tendencies. Right? You’re always listening to podcasts or music. You can’t just be. And that was me. So the canned chemistry is what we want to totally move out of.

Katie Edmonds (00:23:12) – That’s the chemistry that holds us in chronic disease state, whether you’re resting all day long and, you know, quote unquote digesting or even if you have a very high stress job, you have to figure out how to stay in dose chemistry whenever you’re not dealing with the things that you need to deal with, that can be more high intensity.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:23:29) – Yeah. So I think a few things that are illustrated by your experience and the work that you do with your clients is that, first of all, endometriosis is a complex chronic disease. We don’t know of a quote unquote cure, but we do have multiple paths to complete symptom remission or at least significant symptom remission, whether or not someone has access to surgery, if they do have access to surgery, sometimes it can accelerate that process. Sometimes it makes it. A little more complicated, actually, because then you have to deal with the sequela, you know, the recovery from the surgery and, you know, just the impacts of surgery itself. But for many people, that can kind of get us either a next, deeper level of healing, a more complete level of healing, or accelerate the process of healing.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:24:18) – But if you can’t access surgery, depending on your health system, your financial resources, I think it’s a really important message for women and their practitioners that there are multiple, multiple tools for getting people into full or partial, complete symptom remission from endometriosis for a long period of time. Now, it may flare again whether or not you’ve had surgery. If you experience something stressful like the death of your father and your beloved dog at the same time, you know, really, really important kind of stressor to your physical body, which then impacted your area of vulnerability right around your intestinal area, which may or may not still have some endometrial tissue. We don’t know. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s not active and symptomatic and impacting your fertility. So there is that hope for every single woman and practitioner watching this who might be frustrated or listening to this thinking, there’s no way I can have this cure of a surgery when that’s not necessarily the case. And sometimes there are these flares, and then this first step, or at least one of the really foundational steps towards that state of healing and or remission is that balance, where you’re in an actual restful state neurologically in your mind and your thoughts.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:25:44) – So what are some of the things, from a practical standpoint, that you do with your clients to help them be living in that dose chemistry, in that we call it calm aliveness based on poly vagal theory, whatever it is, where they’re like actually really resting and digesting. What are some of the tips you have around that?

Katie Edmonds (00:26:06) – First of all, you’re really good at summarizing everything. I feel like I can just talk and talk and you’re just making it so succinct. So thank you for that. Okay, I want to interject a little bit right now, just because, you know, you’re talking about the hope and how remission is possible with or without a surgery. You might need it. You might not. Partial remission, this no cure thing, I wish it would be left. I think it’s really important to know that endometriosis is not always progressive, and I think this leads to some of the constant fear of the nervous system. And this was me just terrified that if I stopped what I was doing, which I thought was perfection oriented, my endo would overgrow.

Katie Edmonds (00:26:47) – So I almost felt like I was doing everything to keep the floodgates in. And what we know about endometriosis is actually pretty fascinating. So there’s research that shows on humans, not on mice, and it comes from studies that look at women, either through visual imaging for things like deep endometriosis that you can use MRI or from surgical visualization. And what it shows is that there’s four different studies. So arrange that endometriosis may progress in 7 to 37% of those with endometriosis. But the stabilization rates. So the endometriosis is not growing, it’s not progressing. Or regression rates, meaning that it’s shrinking actually range from 63% to 93%. So what we see is that the majority of women with endometriosis may actually be more likely to have stabilized or regressive endometriosis than progressive. And statistics, I wish, was so much more prominent in the endo world. I think there’s this fear that if people read that, they won’t take it seriously or doctors will say, oh, it will just go away, it’s more likely to go away.

Katie Edmonds (00:27:52) – This takes no focus off of the fact of how serious it can be, and how you don’t want to be in that 9 to 37%. But it’s so hopeful when you’re saying, well, how can someone have remission and endometriosis if it’s always progressive? Well, it’s not. The majority of women actually don’t have progressive endometriosis. And in fact, a healthy body has been shown to clear endometriosis lesions. So microscopic endometriosis lesions have been seen in very healthy women and they appear and disappear. This is the job of the body. A healthy body that’s not in a disease state can take care of those things. So if you’re in the 10% of women with endometrium, your body hasn’t done that. It’s become a chronic illness, right? This is why it’s not a genetic disease. It’s a chronic illness developed from multiple factors. But to know that there’s hope there, at least that for me, helped calm my nervous system in a big way, saying, oh my gosh, I don’t have to worry so much about it progressing because that worry itself is debilitating, especially when you want kids, right? Because if you don’t want kids, it’s a quality of life, you know? But if you do want kids and you don’t know if it’s going to get worse or not, it’s a big worry.

Katie Edmonds (00:28:56) – So always keep your eye on it. But that’s just for the hope out there for any. When listening to this, it says, okay, now I can maybe take a breath of relief.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:29:04) – I think we should really emphasize that perspective because I think of endometriosis and again, not to irritate anyone’s nervous system, but at some level, from an immune system standpoint, endometriosis behaves like a non-cancerous cancer, right? Absolutely. Everyone has cancer cells growing in them at various times, but for most people, those cancer cells do not convert to cancer. And that is because the immune system has the capacity to surveil and clean up aberrant cells of all kinds. And so I think that’s really, really valuable information that we have clear research in humans showing that endometrial lesions can be cleared by the immune system when the immune system is healthy or at least stabilized. We’ve absolutely had data on that, gosh, since like 2007, using an anti-inflammatory such as pick notional or other similar anti, you know, polyphenol type of nutrients which you can get not necessarily from supplements but from food.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:30:10) – So I love that. I think step one of nervous system regulation is knowing that your body, even if it has endometriosis, may be able to self stabilize or resolve that in up to 90 plus percent of the cases. So that’s a very motivating statistic.

Katie Edmonds (00:30:32) – Uhhuh. Part of the premise of the whole first part of my book is understanding what endometriosis is, because it’s a kick in the butt when you’re told there’s no cure and no one knows anything about it. And that’s absolutely false. Like, I can’t tell you how 100 you know, how 100% false. We know so much about endometriosis, so much about it. I’m excited as the research keeps coming out. But we have thousands of papers coming out every year now, with so much of them on important treatment options, which absolutely include things like diet and lifestyle and integrative care. So it’s very hopeful. And this is what my book aims to do is say, look, there’s gaps in what we know about endo, but this is what we know.

Katie Edmonds (00:31:11) – And exactly as you’re saying, it behaves like a non-cancerous cancer in many ways. You can have an endo like cell and it never develops into endometriosis. So when you hear you’re born with endometriosis, it’s not true. Exactly. You can be born with an endometrial cell already placed outside of the uterus, and a good example is in the deep cul de sac. They found 10% of fetuses had either misplaced endometrial cells or already endometrial. So with some epigenetic and genetic alterations right there. But out of those 10%, only about 40% of women end up getting endometriosis in that area, meaning 60% of those women, their body prevented it from being activated. Like you’re saying, the immune system’s job of either clearing an aberrant cell or managing it so it doesn’t activate it into endometriosis is right there, and that is the direction that we want to go and look at is saying, well, what’s up with this? 60% is basically 60% of bodies prevent it from happening in the first place. About 60% of bodies are either stabilizing or regressing.

Katie Edmonds (00:32:11) – Endometriosis. What’s happening here? And this is what you’re saying. We actually have a lot of research and a lot of it is on animals at this point, namely because it’s not because it doesn’t work, it’s just because of the visualization. So I used to hear diet and lifestyle doesn’t work. There’s no proof, but it’s not because they’ve looked at it and research and said, oh, it doesn’t work. They can’t look in a person open you up surgically before and after giving you some supplements and see what happened. Right. So with the new imaging technology, it’s going to be great because, you know, now they’re finally able to image things like even superficial endometriosis lesions as this comes down the pipeline and they get better and better. It’s going to make research abundant of what we can do. You know, by applying these approaches of an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle, moving out of the nervous system dysregulation state, how much can we see lesions shrink and regress? How much can we see people reclaim their quality of life? I’m really excited by all of this that’s going to come out there.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:33:07) – Well, and we’re also seeing technology in Europe for sure. There’s always since I’ve been in this field, 25 years of research looking for biomarkers that, you know, don’t require surgical diagnosis, don’t require even imaging diagnosis, which can be challenging. But, you know, we’re getting closer and closer to having biomarkers, which can then kind of show you if you have the disease or not. In a more sort of broad spectrum perspective. And even if you had it, I mean, Dimitrios has some genetic underpinnings, but I think that distinction between being a genetic disease versus having some genetic influence is really important. I have a client right now who has a identical twin sister who does not have endometriosis, and she does. So now we look at okay, digestive system and immune. So we’ve talked about nervous system. Just knowing that you have some capacity to at least improve your quality of life, put into remission or settle down your symptoms with endometriosis with some tools that you have yourself, diet, lifestyle, all of that is nervous system calming.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:34:16) – Then what is your next step? Sort of clinically take us through the process that you would take your clients through, or that your book walks people through into some of the most important practical perspectives or strategies people can start to use if they really do lack. You know, it’s very hard to get access globally to really good endometriosis care. You know, people can work with you and I, but we often have very full schedules and all of that is available. But difficult and surgery is difficult and expensive to access. So if someone is just like, okay, for the next three months until I get my appointment with whoever, what can I do to start giving my body that capacity to shift from that chronic disease state to a more recovery state in the way that you did when you were, you know, just like, oh, well, I’m not getting surgery, so what can I do?

Katie Edmonds (00:35:15) – Yeah. Right. Well, like I said, for me, you know, the tide that seemed to raise all ships was diet.

Katie Edmonds (00:35:23) – And then was the first thing that I encountered that, you know, it’s like if you’re on a high sugar, high refined carbohydrate diet. Or even I consider myself a very healthy vegetarian. I wasn’t eating tons of processed food, but I was eating so much fruit and chocolate and quinoa and basically a high starch diet. Just a mountain of starch. So not high carbs. So not only did I have malnutrition, I was totally undernourished. Significant nutrient deficiencies which absolutely contribute to symptoms. For example, zinc deficiency. Right. Just reversing zinc deficiency make well your endo pain like that. Not for everyone. I’m not saying it’s a thing, but for some people the zinc deficiency and I was severely zinc deficient. Everyone look at your fingernails. If you have some white spots on your fingernails, you can say hello to zinc deficiency. And if you are a vegetarian or vegan, you guaranteed have those unless you’re supplementing. So there’s that nutrient factor and the blood sugar dysregulation goes with it. So in my research I actually discovered that blood sugar dysregulation is so much more than just symptoms of stress with endometriosis.

Katie Edmonds (00:36:28) – It might actually progress the disease itself. You know, it’s thanks to two different things I’ll just gloss over just so we can.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:36:37) – Make sure there’s more in your book. People can dive into it there.

Katie Edmonds (00:36:40) – Yeah, yeah, maybe I’ll just say blood sugar dysregulation. There’s points. There’s high glucose and high insulin. And then you have the plummet right where you have the stress hormones. So your canned physiology when you’re at your low, but when you’re at your peak, having high glucose leads to incredible amounts of free radical formation right at the site of your endo lesion. I explain why in my book it’s a little technical. We don’t have much time left, but the high insulin, it does something else. When you have high levels of insulin and endometrial lesions, actually have their cell metabolism messed up a little bit, and they produce a lot more lactic acid than a normal cell in order to make more lactic acid. They actually use insulin. So any time you have a little bit of insulin, they’re making more lactic acid.

Katie Edmonds (00:37:20) – If you have a lot of insulin chronically, they’re making a ton of lactic acid. And what that does is it actually creates this like lactic acid invisibility shield over the lesion that prevents the immune system’s cleanup crew from seeing the lesion. So they don’t see it. It’s sort of like invisible. And this is actually the exact same mechanism that happens in cancer. And why they say sugar feeds cancer is because cancer has that same lactic acid metabolism issue. So you can say sugar feeds endometriosis. And in a more very specific way, blood sugar dysregulation feeds endometriosis. Because I thought I was low sugar for a long time because I didn’t eat quote unquote sugar, but I was eating honey. And, you know, all the starches that turn into sugar. So glucose and insulin, that blood sugar. So in the diet that I was on, I don’t like calling it a diet as much because it sounds very dogmatic. But my set of lifestyle choices is ancestral nutrition, the deep nutrition. I was filling my cells up.

Katie Edmonds (00:38:12) – And you don’t fill your cells up on these starchy foods, right? They’re not nutrient dense options. They’re fine, they’re healthy. But if you’re going to eat, you know, I’m really focusing on things like the organ meats, the protein, the seaweeds, low starchy vegetables, tons of those for antioxidants, butter, the fats. Then you don’t have as much room for those carbohydrates. So as a byproduct of what I was doing, I was balancing blood sugar with realizing it. And it was something that was part of, oh my God. I didn’t realize that was one of the things I was also keeping me in canned chemistry was my diet, you know? And now I do see kids too, that are bouncing off the walls and their parents are saying they have ADHD and they feed them this high starch diet. And it reminds me of me being a little neurotic, you know, ten years ago. And I’m like, I’m just kind of neurotic. But I was just having this crazy blood sugar roller coaster all day long, and I didn’t realize how connected it was.

Katie Edmonds (00:39:01) – You know, I was so disconnected from my body and how foods made me feel. So the nutrient density, the blood sugar dysregulation issue. And then the third component that I talked about, these are the three pillars that I like for diet is just antioxidant rates and that antioxidants I think we talk about them a lot. But what they do is they stop free radicals. Free radicals are what creates scar tissue and adhesions. They are the reactive oxygen species. You have got millions of them in your body if you have endometriosis. So this is something else that frustrates me a little bit. That’s not talked about more in endometriosis realm, that if we want to stop progression, which we do, everyone wants to stop progression no matter where you’re at. One thing that you need to do is start eating a ton of antioxidants, or consuming them in some way in order to stop the endometriosis as much as possible, which is progress partly through all these free radicals. So what research has shown is those of us with endometriosis might need 54 times more antioxidants than someone with low inflammation, right? That’s the rate that all of a sudden progression stops or the pain stops or the symptoms stop.

Katie Edmonds (00:40:06) – So to think about it from that level, you might have a friend who doesn’t eat that many antioxidants and she’s fine. You need to make it the focus of your life. And I think this is a little bit where the vegan vegetarian thing gets taken over. Like, okay, we’re just going to eat a ton of vegetables and fruits, but actually animal products have the antioxidants in them as well. A really important as well as iron, which if you’re low in iron, your antioxidant defense system plummets. And. So many of us are really deficient in iron as well. So I’m a really big proponent of animal products as well as locally sourced as much as possible fruits and veggies just for this is a complete nutritious diet. So those are the three pillars that I like to talk about. And if you look on my Amazon book reviews not to like push my four week diet plan, but just to show there’s people there who say they did that for a month and their symptoms disappeared. Right. And this is like the people on that side of the spectrum.

Katie Edmonds (00:40:59) – That diet for them would be one of the biggest things that they needed to come back for cellular health. And it might impact some people more than others. I was desperately malnourished, so it helped me so much. But you can see that just shifting diet like that can impact symptoms so much.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:41:15) – Yeah. Well, and I think what you’ve really defined is that no matter what individuals kind of diet protocol that they choose, it has to include certain components. A certainly a very high density of antioxidants. So that’s all your colors, your leafy greens, your mushrooms, your red bell peppers, your beets, your, you know, all the colors, colors, colors. But we have to do it in such a way that’s relatively low carbohydrate and low sugar. So if you’re going to choose fruit, you’re going to be choosing things like berries or smaller, you know, melons or stone fruits, things that are more antioxidant than sugar. So sort of low glycemic fruits, if you will. If you’re going to occasionally have chocolate, that’s fine.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:42:08) – Have the really high percentage of dark chocolate, which is almost bitter, not sweet, and again, in very moderate amounts because the amount will matter then because of blood sugar stability. That’s where we need really nourishing beneficial fats. So if someone is having trouble with their saturated fats or they want to be more vegan, they’re fine to do some coconut oil, some avocado, some more olive oil. And if they have that flexibility, they can also have butter and, you know, unsweetened yogurts and really good quality cheeses. Like there’s a place for this because I think it’s the same thing with animal proteins, animal products from, you know, well sourced farms and things like that. Less from factory farms and whenever possible is going to give you that depth of nutrient density, iron protein bioavailability, which you also need for blood sugar stability. So there’s a lot of flexibility within that. There’s not sort of one dogma that you need to do, but because you give that flexibility in your sort of step by step protocol, you’re thinking about helping people add more nutrient density versus like, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, which can trigger that nervous system reactivity.

Katie Edmonds (00:43:33) – Yes. And go back to the allopathic thing of treating my disease by removing these foods. And that’s where I was at. So I was terrified. If I added in red meat, my endometriosis would grow all over. But yeah, that’s the whole premise is to rebuild cellular health cell by cell. So it’s not a protocol or a perfection. It’s what do you feel best eating? And it might take you like a year or more to get there. Because part of it is like tuning in to this ancient lost conversation of just knowing how your body feels. I think when I had endometriosis symptoms, I was reacting so hard to my body. I talk about this terrible thing that I did. I actually started taking 800mg ibuprofen when I woke up every morning like a multivitamin, because I wasn’t sure if the pain was going to come. I didn’t know I was so out of tune with my body and my menstrual cycle. I had no idea what was going on. I just knew half the time I was in a lot of pain.

Katie Edmonds (00:44:28) – So I just take this ibuprofen and now I am so in tune with my body and I don’t think in an annoying way, but I can, you know, I know in the morning when I wake up how my energy level is and I feel if I like start to need iron, like, oh, I actually should eat some liver this week, I’m feeling a little down. Need a little bit more B12. I start to know the foods that energize me, and I know the foods that when I’m not that hungry, will keep me feeling light. And when I really need to feel satiated, we’ll satiate me. And those foods for me are going to be different than you, Jessica, and, you know, different than people listening. Which is so hard when you want to be told what to do. But again, it’s this whole pattern, right? Like I say in my book, eat whole foods, like as a first step without doing nitty gritty. If you’re eating a lot of things in boxes and bags, stop that and just eat whole foods, right? Like, don’t worry about, you know, necessarily the fruit or the grains are too much blood sugar to start cooking at home, and you will have hopefully a good shift in that direction.

Katie Edmonds (00:45:23) – And once you get good at that, you know, then start to nitpick, like, okay, I’m still having like crazy blood sugar issues. Maybe I’ll stop eating two. Cups of rice and I’ll eat like a half a cup of rice. My taste buds are changing, and now I’m open to eating, like a little bit more of this broccoli or collard greens or whatever it is, you know, working with your body. Because to heal from a chronic disease and get out of the disease state, it’s not a crash diet. It’s like over many years. Like I say, you need to rebuild cellular health, so you have to be consistent with it. You can’t crash diet every month, you know, on and off and on and off, like, you know, Weight Watchers or something. You have to change your taste buds, change your perception of the world and your place in it and your perception of the kitchen and cooking. If that’s like something that’s very intimidating, let’s just start with watching some cooking shows, you know, or Michael Pollan or, you know, salt, fat, acid heat by Samin knows like there’s some really great people who just talk about cooking for the pleasure of cooking and just start to get familiar with that comfortability of moving through the world without, like an exoskeleton of rigidity and hanging on by a thread can be really helpful as you move forward and start to let those things go and nourish every part of you.

Katie Edmonds (00:46:34) – Know your body and your soul at the same time is important. A lot of us didn’t grow up in a cooking culture, right? And I know I grew up in a culture of calorie counting. It was the 80s, so I kind of grew up afraid of food. And it was a very weird thing to transition into my absolute love and appreciation for what food gives me without knowing my calorie intake every day.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:46:55) – Yeah, I think that’s so important. And I think that that message of just feeling nourished, knowing what that feels like, waking up, maybe knowing what you might be missing because a lot of people with endometriosis are going to have, you know, heavy cycles for a while while they’re in this transition that can cause iron deficiency, you know, just and as you said, changing your tastes, because if you grew up in a culture of processed foods, you know, those foods are deliberately engineered to be a certain taste profile that will shift. But I think that if you take this really as a journey, as an exploration, as a pleasurable exploration, and, you know, look, if there are a few things you don’t like, like you don’t like liver, well, hey, we can do peptide bio regulators of the liver.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:47:45) – Like there are ways I don’t.

Katie Edmonds (00:47:46) – Like liver either, by the way. I still of course I don’t enjoy.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:47:49) – Honey and there are supplements for almost anything you just absolutely hate. And that’s fine too. So I think it’s just really this beautiful. I think how you’ve done this is to help people walk through a reconnecting with themselves rather than being like, okay, I have this disease that I have to like, treat instead. It’s like, okay, I have this disease that’s a part of my genetic vulnerability and potentially my immune and nervous system and digestive system vulnerability right now. But it doesn’t mean that it always is going to be like this. I can learn to shift my body into a more healing state, and then it has a lot of tools that can clean up that oxidative stress, that can balance that out of balance. You know, chronic stress chemistry and food is a nice way in for people. And if that doesn’t feel like the nicest way in, there are other nice ways in like you’re talking about in terms of reconnecting with your nervous system.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:48:55) – Think rewiring your thoughts. And each of these things plays a really important role in that path to recovery.

Katie Edmonds (00:49:04) – Yeah, there’s so many more to that is like and it’s, you know, with limited time, you know, just taking the chemicals out of your life. It’s a direct correlation between the creation of an underlying cell and these chemicals. Like when we say, I used to think like, well, how did that endo like cell get in my body? Did an alien just put it there like I don’t understand and it like, is your body. It isn’t. You know, most likely an endometrial cell misplace or your normal body cell turning into this endometrial like cell with these alterations. And a lot of those alterations are thanks to chemicals. So that’s easy thing of moving chemicals movement. I have a whole chapter in my book on movement and even something like you mentioned having really heavy periods with those with endometriosis. I do, you know, as a last touch on, I want to say, part of a really healthy way to help regulate a nervous system.

Katie Edmonds (00:49:47) – If you have those endo periods that are infamous, right? Super heavy, life altering, crippling pain, I would say please consider and chat with your doctor about birth control, because in the holistic world, and I think a lot of people probably listen to your podcast, women are absolutely against birth control. But when you think about it, not as a long term Band-Aid, but as a solution to stop that period. So you use birth control, skip the sugar pill, or get seasonal or whatever it is. You know, where you’re waiting every three months, and then you get a period that is lighter. There’s less intensity because it’s not a real period bleed, or it’s a pill bleed that can help calm your nervous system. Because, I mean, you know, I told my husband, like, imagine if every three weeks you had to go to battle and be stabbed in your prostate with a knife over and over again for a few days, and you’re so exhausted you can’t leave your house because you’re bleeding so heavily from the wounds.

Katie Edmonds (00:50:42) – Like. And then it was over and you had to recover. And then you have about two weeks and then it happens again. Right? Because you have three weeks in between. We’re even longer. Like, that’s not fair to you. And I don’t feel like that is very conducive to allowing the body to get into that dose chemistry. So if you’re on the fence about birth control and you know, whatever your reaction is, just as food for thought as part of a healing journey, I think that people who really they’re in that sort of endo world with those absolutely menstrual related intense symptoms, it’s a great consideration to help calm everything down for a while.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:51:18) – Yeah. And I think this is where the nuance comes in. You know, when you’re individually optimizing your body’s health. We have really useful medical tools. Everything from excision surgery to birth control pills to even pain management, medical pain management. In some cases, IUDs like these tools on an individual level can be really, really helpful, especially if they’re utilized deliberately for certain situations, for certain periods of time.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:51:48) – And so there doesn’t have to be that all or nothing like we were just talking about before we started. You know, a lot of our work is now working on helping women who have endometriosis navigate and other chronic conditions navigate perimenopause and menopause. And it’s the same conversation over there, like women with endometriosis should never get hormone replacement therapy. But I would disagree with that, because sometimes women with endometriosis also need help with cardiovascular health. With severe symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, with brain neuroinflammation. So you know that more nuanced conversation really does have to be had, because certainly birth control is not a curative treatment for endometriosis, hormonal birth control. But exactly as you said, it can absolutely shift your quality of life. That will allow you to have the energy and capacity and focus to be able to do any of these other things. So you’re not, like, tossed around like a tall ship all the time.

Katie Edmonds (00:52:49) – Yeah, that nuance is important. And, you know, it’s kind of a good thing to just recommend so many of us peruse online, you know, Instagram.

Katie Edmonds (00:52:57) – I’m a big kind of a public hater of social media, but like as part of it too, like looking online, there’s so many endo advocates and endo people that are exceptionally dogmatic about things. And I would say if you are on social media and you see someone being very dogmatic, always take it with a grain of salt, like even things about Lupron, which you know, is a terrible has class action, lawsuits and stuff. I do know two clients who had zero problems with Lupron, and it was the one thing that helped them. And, you know, you feel like a traitor to the endo community saying stuff like that, like everyone’s going to come down. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter what works for you if it works for you, right? And you need to find the balance in your quality of life without listening to all the noise. You know you can take ideas, but when you see someone who’s out there with tons of dogma, you know, consider following someone else.

Katie Edmonds (00:53:50) – Say, what’s with all this dogma? You know, you see what worked for you and you’re espousing that. But that’s not fair to the whole endo community because there’s no endo community. It is a one size fits all. Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:54:02) – It’s like, yeah, we’re like.

Katie Edmonds (00:54:03) – A billions of different people in this world. Some of us have endometriosis. And how does that look? If you’re like Lakshmi in India or Sarah and England or like me in Hawaii, like it’s different and we have to understand who we are and what our cultures are and what we have access to and what we need and just to lighten that load again, that serious, heavy dogma of no cure. This is what you do. This is what you don’t do. Like that doesn’t exist. We just need to heal our cellular selves, right? By making stronger, healthier bodies and then using the tools that we need in addition, such as maybe a surgery, maybe some pharmaceuticals. You know, endometriosis should not be the disaster it has become and part of the infighting within the community or the medical realm.

Katie Edmonds (00:54:43) – Not taking it seriously and not giving us diagnosis is all so unfortunate. But you know, as more information about endo becomes more available and on chronic disease in general, we can start getting places like, I shouldn’t have had to suffer for ten years. You know, everyone out there who’s suffering right now should not be left suffering. We should know what this disease is. We should know how to treat it. Because while there’s no cure, there’s many treatment options. Just like cancer, there’s no cure. There’s many treatment options. Luckily, you know it won’t kill you. Cancer will kill you. My dad did die of cancer. With endo, we have a lot more time to get it under control or to work with it. So, you know, I know it’s awful, but I feel like part of my role as I’m just trying to give hope to the community that it’s something to reach for. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:55:26) – Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that, Katie. I think part of moving us in that direction as a community of practitioners and people living with endometriosis are these nuanced conversations which in the era of social media algorithms, you know, promoting people that do have more dogmatic perspectives? We have to keep having these nuanced conversations because on an individual basis, people with endometriosis need to choose practitioners, providers, health coaches, people on their team who think in a nuanced way and don’t just prescribe a one size fits all perspective.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:56:05) – So thank you so much for being here. Share with everyone how they can find your book and follow you, and continue this nuanced conversation with you going forward. Yeah.

Katie Edmonds (00:56:17) – So my website is Heal Indo. Com it is a free, pretty comprehensive resource for everything integrative. So it’s less the medical side, more just the diet and lifestyle side. Tons of free information there. My book is on Amazon. If you go to my site you can click there. But the book is heel endo. So it’s kind of easy to remember. And my Instagram is heel indo and I’m not very active there. I’m trying to pull people away from the social media realm because boy, does that trigger your nervous system dramatically. And I try to like not put it there so no one wants to go and see what I’m posting. But that’s where I’m at. And yet you can email me from my website if you are interested. I don’t have room for clients. I’ll say that right now, but the book does explain, you know, gives you a pretty comprehensive roadmap.

Katie Edmonds (00:57:03) – Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:57:04) – All right. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your journey and your wisdom and your insights and perspective and everyone, I encourage you to go read Katie’s website. Don’t necessarily follow her on social media. If you want to be just quietly, slowly reading that’s better for your nervous system and read her book. That’s another way to do it. And thanks again, Katie. We’ll see you soon.

Katie Edmonds (00:57:26) – Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:57:28) – Jessica. Thank you. What a gift! Thank you so much to Katie Edmonds for sharing her stories, sharing some really interesting and hopeful research about how powerful our bodies are to truly heal no matter what the complexity of our complex illness, even endometriosis, which is a very, very difficult disease. I just really enjoyed that conversation and I hope you’ll take away from it. Number one, a few specific things you can implement right now into your practice or into your own healing journey, and to that idea of a metaphor that I spoke about in the introduction to this episode that, you know, a healing journey can be nourishing experience when we change how we approach it from, you know, thinking of quote unquote food as medicine to thinking of food as cellular nourishment, and then not just food, but also spending a little time in a cabin in the woods.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:58:39) – I mean, literally, if you can, without Wi-Fi, that’s even better. More nature exposure. Like, what are our cells craving? What are our client cells craving? What are your cells craving? It’s a really important thing to think about, because that’s where the depth of healing really begins on a literal cellular level. And if you want to learn exactly how to implement this kind of holistic, integrative, root cause cellular healing strategy in your practice and get certified for it, get the confidence to actually do this work in your clinical or coaching practice. Please join our Endometriosis Certificate program. This program deep dives into all of the specifics that Katie was talking about, into the research, into to a wide variety of tools to support root cause healing for women with endometriosis, whether or not they have access to surgery and if they do have access to surgery, how to help them prepare for and recover from those surgeries. So Join our Endometriosis Certificate program will put the information of how to do that into the show notes.

Dr. Jessica Drummond (00:59:54) – You can follow us as always at Integrative Women’s Health. You can follow us as always and learn about all of our programs at our website. Integrative Women’s Health institute.com and follow us on Instagram for all of the latest updates, research tips, tricks, all of it at Integrative Women’s Health. Thanks so much for joining me today with Katie Edmunds of Heal Endo, and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients. Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.