Listen to our Gut with Chelsea Haines

Christina: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of I am Christina DiArcangelo and today with me I have my guest Chelsea Haines I'm so excited to have her on the show today and to talk about all the magic she does on a day-to-day basis welcome Chelsea!

Chelsea: Thanks Christina! I'm honoured to be here

Christina: I'm so excited to have you why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself if you don't mind and if you don't mind talking about things that are not just professional if you'd like to share some things personal that would be awesome too thank you

Chelsea: of course fantastic I uh first and foremost I'm an expat with my husband my husband and I live in Panama Central America. We moved here full time last year and we absolutely love it we were Nomads for six years truly living out of suitcases only so it's been really fun to ground down again and have a home to put roots in and dig in a little bit uh in that time I've also launched a new business I've been a certified health coach for many years and I saw a need in the health coaching industry specifically gut health.

I've launched the health agency where we merge Health coaching with functional testing it's a big gap in the functional medicine world because at the end of the day you know you can't supplement your way to optimized health so that is now my passion and my pride and joy I also have a degree in Psychology and a specialty in subconscious rewiring of limiting beliefs as well as of course a lot of gut health certifications and learning so we really are focusing on Mind Body Soul healing over here for high performing women and majority of the people that we work with are entrepreneurs CEOs even moms who run really busy households and at the end of the day are not thriving like they maybe once were and that's uh that's what we help people do and to be able to do it virtually from Central America and help people all over the world it really is a dream come true.

Christina: it is awesome. I am excited to talk to you about this stuff because you know where I sit you know on the side of the nutraceutical space right and like the understanding that you know there isn't some magic Elixir out there you know I work in cannabinoids I work in psilocybin.

I work in all these different things you know and a lot of times patients think that that's the Magic Bullet when actually it is mind body and soul if you don't have everything working together coherently with one another you really aren't living your best life so this is this is awesome to be able to talk about this because I totally believe in gut health um at spectral analytics Precision tele monitoring that's the tech company that I'm the CEO for one of the things that we are going to start analysing as patients start to come through whether it's clinical studies that we're managing um through our sister company, Aevum which is our transdermal biotech company.

It has powders and creams and all kinds of things KT Tape oral film you we've you know we're locked in on the nutraceutical side we are very interested in gut health so we have programmed the Spectral Analytics Precision Tele Monitoring Side and also the electronic data capture side for trials to be able to conduct data as it relates to gut health because you know people think they have a cold right like we were talking you were saying hey Christina I've been traveling I have a cold you sound perfect you look beautiful I can't hear the cold or the congestion but what do people normally think when they have a cold they think it's oh well it's sinuses it's my allergies it's this and that a lot of times it goes back to your gut and so what do you think about that, what do you think?

Chelsea: yeah there's even been some really interesting studies over the last few years of you know living through a pandemic and dealing with covid and when looking at the severity of symptoms between people when we also look at their microbiome so this is what we do at the gut health agency we use uh top QCPR technology to map your microbiome so we really get an in-depth look into actually what's happening inside the rainforest that is your gut and of course we could dive a little bit deeper into how to optimize that and why you might be getting sick and it really is all about the terrain you know why is your body an opportune environment for infection to thrive but when we look at the severity of different people with different microbes and their reaction to viruses our gut really  determines a lot of the outcome of sickness and it's really it's been really cool and fascinating to see especially over the last few years as we've been collecting this data and you know the reactions of people their symptom severity versus the I'll say the opportunistic or the bad bacteria versus the good bacteria ratio in your microbiome.

It really does play a huge role into um the bigger picture of your optimized Health and Wellness.

Christina: It's interesting that you bring this up because um we're in the process of in-licensing three nutraceutical antibiotics and through Ava and I was designing um some of the preliminary protocol synopsis type things and one of the things I specifically put in there purposely was micro gut biome because I want to see you know what's going on here with the gut health of these individuals because of what we just you know we started talking about in the beginning is that a lot of times people think they have a cold because it's their sinuses or allergies or what have you when in fact it's the gut the gut is in my opinion “The Hub of the human body”, then everything else are spoked out you know the heart and everything else right

Chelsea: yeah a lot of people say it's your second brain and I like to counter that and say it's actually your only brain right because at the end of the day you know the brain that lives inside our head we're pretty much operating 90 of the 97 of the time in our subconscious mind you know basic safety survival mechanisms and the way we relate to ourselves in the world around us is basically determined on our first seven years of life and how we learned how to navigate the world around us and the traumas that we experienced and that's chronic stress all you know little T Big T it doesn't matter we've all experienced traumas and in our first uh you know first seven years where we really don't understand how the world works we formulated beliefs in how the world works so we're operating in that map and then on top of that uh your gut is actually where over 95 of Serotonin is actually produced so your happy feelings are actually coming from your gut and if you're really struggling with anxiety and depression it's really interesting to consider studies based on again your microbiome and the different ways that the scale is showing opportunistic or quote unquote bad bacteria versus the good bacteria which is going to keep all the other bacteria and viruses in check I mean we are one big virus in bacteria and we all live with yeast and protozoa and all sorts of different things all over our body but we start having problems when those opportunistic bacteria can Thrive and that can only Thrive when the terrain of our body creates an environment for the opportunistic bacteria to thrive and it's actually not as scientific or hard as many of us would believe to get back to a place of homeostasis imbalance and I think that's part of our bigger Mission at the gut health agency is to unlearn a lot of what you know diet culture and the quick fixes have convinced us that we need in order to you know detox teas and certain all these diets and fads that um ultimately are only quick fixes and therefore are not even fixes at all they're just symptom management

Christina: it's a Band-Aid! you know it's like

Chelsea: it's putting a Band-Aid

Christina: I know like for example you know you know I'm in the United States I'm in the Philadelphia area and um for unfortunately when we not unfortunately when we got on sorry I don't mean to say that that way, well we started talking we were talking about things and I disclosed to you that unfortunately I had caught covid this year I went two years without it then I got it because of uh you know something I had to handle from a personal standpoint that I can't really talk about right now um only because there's some things tied to it but I will sometime soon hopefully and um I was curious after I had covid because obviously I know a lot about covid I've been working on it for two years drug development wise um specifically in the nutraceutical space you know I'm working with two companies that are have coveted treatments and I was interested to see what happened to my gut biome right so I go to Penn you know for my primary care so it's not like I go to no offense to like the smaller position groups I go to University of Penn

Primarily selfishly because I'm also a cannabis patient and they're part of the chapter 20 program here for research purposes so I don't have to fight as hard with my Physicians when I disclose the fact that I take cannabis for my autoimmune diseases um so I asked them when I went in for my long hauler visit because of course I pushed the envelope like listen I need a full blood work up I want to see the beginning of where I am metriced out and stuff but I asked them about hey I'd like to get my gut microbiome tested I'd like to see where I am I want to see how I can fix some of these long hauler symptoms I have because of the fact that I got covered and I was already you know I have a compromise immuno with the autoimmune diseases and so of course they say well you have to go to a specialist it's probably not going to be in your network it's probably going to be x amount of dollars you have to pay out of pocket now listen I already pay for my insurance because I'm self-insure because I'm you know I'm a self-funded CEO right with multiple companies so I pay for my insurance and so it's like I'm already paying a lot of money for my insurance and now I you know I'm curious about this you know and I can't get my insurance my insurance is kind of teetering and I'm like but there's lots of research out there academic to support my claim and request to have this done because I want to feel better

Chelsea: yeah we hope that this changes eventually because we are cash pay you

know the health agency where cash pay for that same exact reason you may be able to get the cost of your test reimbursed maybe but it's a rigmar it's a paperwork it's about three to four hundred dollars uh cash pay for the GI map test uh you can you can order it yourself there's websites that you can get on and order it yourself but of course your physician won't tell you that um of course here at the agency it's all included in tuition and we take care of all of it for you it's a really easy at-home test and it gives us huge insight into what's going on now my personal Journey was also autoimmune disease that's what got me into gut health

I'm grateful that I've never had to go on biologics I've never had to go on immunosuppressants to manage my autoimmune diseases and that's because I've navigated life through optimizing my gut health and really looking at those IDG markers and looking at inflammatory levels and you know at the end of the day if you are just eliminating foods because you're sensitive to a bunch of fruits and vegetables coming from the earth and that's not a food problem honey that's a gut problem.

If your immune system is attacking yourself and you're having to kill your immune system because of all these awful symptoms well maybe there's actually something happening on a deeper level that your immune system is trying to fight but it just doesn't know what it is because you know when it comes to parasites and viruses and bacteria they're very smart we've seen evidence of that over the last few years viruses mutate they're very very very smart same with parasites they put a biofilm around themselves so they cannot be found or you know you have to even do certain things to coax them out in order for them to show even on a GI map test so of course your immune system is going to go awry thinking oh my gosh whether it's you know some type of debris or or toxic load is happening in my body and your immune system is just doing what it what it does best

That's to fight the good fight unfortunately it's just a little bit confused because it doesn't know what it's fighting because those bacteria and viruses are super smart at hiding from the front end you know white blood cells

Christina: it kind of goes dormant

Chelsea: it like is undercover so to speak you know literally it's called a biofilm I mean literally a parasite that has wiggled down deep into your tissues has created a biofilm that's what we have to sometimes put some people it with certain symptoms we put them on a biofilm disruptor but we can't even do that I mean if you're not pooping every single day we're not going to put you on a biofilm disruptor that'd be like you know shaking up the Beehive without having an exit strategy and those bees are just going to go completely all hot and angry inside you know we don't want that to happen we need to make sure that other things are working and by the way if you're not pooping every day you need to call me right now I don't care how many years you've only pooped two to three times a week you need to be going two to three times per day if you're not going every single day to the bathroom and you're not properly eliminating you know even excess hormones like oestrogen in your body and especially for women as we age and we go through menopause excess oestrogen really causes a whole no there Cascade of issues in the bodies so you know if you're concerned of long-term health problems but you say oh I don't have gut issues but I've just always gone to the bathroom two to three times per week and we really need to dig deeper because though something may be typical for you it's not normal

Christina: no, migraines potassium up and down, white red blood cells fluctuating, sugar fluctuating, they're all signs that there's issues with your gut!

Chelsea: yeah and even on a simpler level than that I yes exactly mean you don't even need to go into the again the science might sound a little bit overwhelming and we're here to try to communicate to the general public like listen if you have headaches every day or if you have Painful periods or if you're not menstruating if you are if you have rashes all over your body your blood work might come back as normal

Christina: even food cravings

Chelsea: food cravings absolutely I mean food cravings are interesting so we dive deep into people's relationship with stress and how that affects their relationship with food and you know when it comes to different food cravings it can be a sign that your body is deficient in something and it could also be an emotional craving that you've learned a habit to turn to food so yeah this is where the comprehensive approach is really important because even a functional medicine doctor is not going to have the time not because they don't have the passion but because they don't have the time to sit with you and dig deep into your pains and your emotional uh relationship with yourself and the world around you

Christina: it's absolutely true so I'm smiling again because I had to go in for because it's required by my insurance to go in for physical and you know I have doctors that work with me all the time they're my doctors you know my chief medical officer specifically is who really treats me not Penn um I only go to them because I have to cross a t dot an i whatever for insurance purposes so I go for my physical and as I'm sure you could tell, Chelsea I'm very you know specific I pay attention to my body yes I'm a clinical researcher so I do have a leg up on that but I go in and I start telling him everything right this that you asked you asked me to come in you told me to tell you what was you know going on

I started going through it and he just couldn't it was like his head was ready to blow up and he's like I'm only here to do this for 15 minute they booked me and I said hold on now when I called I advised the receptionist that I needed to talk to about my long haul or some drums uh syndrome as well because I'm having symptoms and I was very clear that I needed extra time it's not my fault there was a mishap with the scheduling but you know they've got to get you in and out in and out in and out and here there was a young girl that was a resident in my session of all sessions I was like I said to her you know because she had to come and give me a tetanus shot because I was up for one of those

I really was like I better get one because I don't know what to do if I step on a can God forbid from a nutraceutical standpoint I haven't figured that out yet um so I said okay go ahead and do it but I said to her did you learn something today about patient care and how you should work with your patients and have an empathetic heart in mind they need to be conjoined it's not a separation of church and state when it comes to treating patients and she was like yes I did I said so you remember me you know not at from a clinical research side but from a patient advocacy side because I was advocating for myself because I wasn't being heard to remember

Chelsea: it's important to remember that, your doctors work for you

Christina: that's right,

Chelsea: hiring your doctors to work for you not the other way around and I think you know patient advocacy is one of those things that's gonna be it's a whole not her conversation and it's again I don't believe that there's bad doctor out there I just think it's a bad system that they're working in and they only have certain you know times and play time limits is really what it comes down to which is unfortunate because in their mind ultimately they're working for the insurance company so this is why I mean I only have catastrophic insurance I've never had uh any other kind of insurance and the reason for that is because I want my doctors to work for me so I'm cash paid period

yeah I would rather pay my doctors directly and that gives them a lot more flexibility in what they can say and what they can do and what tests they can order so when I go in asking for a full thyroid panel not just my regular T3 T4 which is probably going to come back normal but my inflammatory markers might come back high you know that it gives them the opportunity to wig a little bit more and I know not everybody has that, opportunity to be able to do that but for me it was either you know pay a thousand dollars a month and be stuck or pay 300 cash to my doctor and have them actually work for me rather than the insurance company because guess what insurance is not cheap either

Christina: no, no it's not

Chelsea: I'm a self-pay CEO too so I'm paying for it myself so it's it's just who I chose who I choose to give my money to and how I choose to do it and obviously we do have catastrophic insurance in the case of some really serious uh some serious thing and we're hospitalized for months and months at a time but ultimately you know my my daily practitioners the people who help support me in my health Journey I pay them outright and believe it or not a lot of people want to tell you this but when you go to the hospital in your cash pay usually you'll get a big cut because they can charge the insurance companies whereas if you're a cash pay you may you may not, um yeah you may not the bill will look a little bit different and I have personal experience with that too

yeah I think it's important also to kind of circle it back to gut health even because I think a lot of people think like okay well this is obviously really important like what can I do for myself you know you mentioned about like teaching a lesson and I'm mindful of the time here too but I think ultimately a huge takeaway is you know regarding gut health is it's not what you're doing for gut health it's how and it's how you're doing!

It so I'll give you an example here and you know if you if you're exercising and doing hit workouts six days a week and the whole time you're thinking oh my God I have to lose 10 pounds because that's the only way that I'm going to receive safety love and acceptance or you know if you're eating a quote unquote dogmatically healthy food like a salad but you're doing it you know while your boss is yelling at you at the end of the day if your stress levels are through the roof it doesn't matter what you're doing because if your stress levels are in fight or flight mode if your nervous system is in a sympathetic State you're not going to reap the benefits

I always say you're doing is going to be more potent when you're who you're being is in a rest and digest State a lot of people have never even heard that phrase before because we love to talk about fight or flight and the hustle in our culture but you know the rest and digest State your parasympathetic State the other 50 of the time that you're alive you know this is really where you need to be in order for your doing to even matter so if you're doing all the things but you still feel like crap and you're

still experiencing autoimmune symptoms and you're still not going to the bathroom every day but you eat healthy and you work out and you drink the water and you do all the things it doesn't matter what you do if who you're being is stressed AF then

Everything else is going to fall short of the finish line so what we help you do here is recalibrate your nervous system and it's amazing to see even in for the first four weeks of our six-month program the massive changes that people experience when they just incorporate some really easy stress relieving techniques and mindfulness when it comes to their relationship with themselves and again the world around them including food ultimately if you're if you're well I'll give it this example really just to bring it home right again the lesson here is it's not what you're doing it's who you're being right if we consider in our body it's like right what does that mean it might feel a little bit heady for a lot of people our nervous system has two states rest and digest and fight or flight if you consider the lockdown over the last few years we were essentially in one the world was in a state of Crisis the world was in a state of fight or flight so what did we do we locked down and we closed non-essential businesses that's what we did in a state of crisis if we take that same lesson and bring it into our body we have crisis and rest and digest right.

Christina: right

Chelsea: when we are in a state of Crisis our body also shuts down non-essential businesses and guess what is a non-essential business in our body

Christina: stress

Chelsea: no that is essential! what is not essential is digestion

Christina: oh! Oh!  yes that's right

Chelsea: right stress is an essential piece but if we don't have the recovery side we get locked in this state of stress right you can Google do a quick Google if anyone's listening to this what does stress do to my body look at the there's a tree that you can look at parasympathetic responses sympathetic responses when we are in a chronically stressed state when our body is in a state of Chaos we go into lockdown our body is so smart our body says “oh I don't need to worry about digesting my lunch I need to worry about running from that tiger and that tiger looks like In-laws in traffic and my boss that's yelling” at so all day long your body is not producing stomach acid or saliva in your mouth your body's not emptying your stomach properly of the food it's just sitting there and fermenting no wonder why you have reflux and you're burping and you have gas bile is not being created liver pancreas your peristalsis and migrating Motor complex the actual movement of your intestines shuts down we could go for days without eating food we can survive for weeks without food as long as we stay hydrated digestion is a non-essential business and in a state of Crisis we close the doors to that non-essential business

Christina: for me I was thinking it is essential

Chelsea: right we assume it is we assume it is but what is essential our heart our lungs and our brain that's pretty much it pretty much it so when we're in a state of Crisis blood flows to our heart our lung and our brain pretty much everything else goes if you if you're out and stuck somewhere in the Arctic the organs you know you're going to start losing your fingers and your toes first because your body is going to prioritize warmth to your heart your lungs and your brain to keep you going

yeah keep it going ultimately I mean our body is very smart which is another thing that we've been convinced otherwise so something else that we do here at the agency is we start to remind you that you can insource your knowledge we're no longer going to start Outsourcing what we think we know about health and wellness to all the quote-unquote gurus out there we are going to help redirect we're going to hold a mirror to your wisdom even this morning we just got off a group call with the members of the agency and one of the ladies said you know I got the results of my GI math test and all it did was validate what I already knew to be true exactly for high performing people oftentimes it's really helpful to see things on paper because paper so long we've been convinced that what we see and feel and know is wrong

Christina: wrong

Chelsea: Even convinced that we have to look to the professionals to know what we know right your gut instinct is the ultimate truth your spirit knows exactly what you need in order to nourish yourself so you know there's a lot of unlearning that has to happen and this is you know the big lesson again the takeaway here when it comes to gut health especially for high performing people if you're doing all the things but you still feel like crap you gotta reassess who you are being throughout

your day and yeah this is how having a health coach along with a registered dietitian is going to be really helpful because we're going to give you super little nuggets of wisdom for you to go oh now I get it

Christina: put it all together

Chelsea: then we're gonna help give you little tiny tools to start implementing slow mindful habit change that's what it's all about it's about habit change but at the end of the day if if your subconscious mind is in a survival State habit change is not even an option I'm sure Christina you have felt this way where you get in a fight and it's just black and white thinking you know if you're triggered if something happened in your life it's just Gloom and doom the body's like nope shut down.

I can't think I can't see all I know is that this sucks and I suck and I'm the worst and that's it it's very black and white if we can drop back into a state of curiosity about it all and if we can remind our subconscious brain that actually we're safe this is not an appropriate time to seek safety love and acceptance now we can start pushing the needle in a totally new way and this is exactly how we're helping people heal in six months without eliminating Foods actually it's the complete opposite we're going to start adding diversity all those foods that you say oh somebody at once told me this I got this food sensitivity test and it told me that I'm sensitive to every cruciferous vegetable out there so I haven't eaten broccoli in 18 years like yeah no wonder why when you eat broccoli you get bloated because yeah that is saying what the hell is this was this I'm not used to this.

Christina: Yes exactly! Well, thank you so much Chelsea for coming on today we could talk for a really long time about this, that just means I'll have to have you on again, but I just wanted to thank you again for sharing with us some of your knowledge and a really important lesson for our viewers and listeners to learn today thank you so much

Chelsea: you're welcome. It's how we make healing easy and it's it gets to be easy and actually reassessing your your desires in life and reminding yourself that you're worthy of everything that you desire innately worthy like you are made in the image of God like of course you're innately worthy of all that you desire and then the first seven years of life you learn something that you're still operating you're basically just a child in an adult's body and you're still trying to figure out how to navigate the world and we help you do that in a much more efficient quick and easy and guess what pleasurable kind of way it gets to be really fun

Christina: and safe you know it's safe and so I I love that so again thank you so much for being on today no problem and as we always say remember #we are the same I am Christina DiArcangelo.