Solutions For Worn Out High Achieving Women

Misty Williams

Thank you Dr. Michael, I’m excited for us to chat today.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Well I want people to get a feeling for the warrior that you are. Misty Williams. She spent years struggling to reclaim her health and vitality after brain fog and fatigue tailspin from life threatening complications from surgery to remove an ovarian, insist afterwards, her doctor told her she had endometriosis, the only remedies for drugs and surgery. Her labs were normal and she could google to learn more about what’s happening to her body that is so sad at 35 years old, misty started fighting for equality of life and during many more challenges on her road to healing, including an unexplained £45 weight gain. That’s what every woman wants right there, debilitating brain fog, fatigue, hypothyroidism and premature ovarian failure. And she founded healing Rose dot com to provide high performing women with the resources and communities to successfully confront the unexpected chronic health issues that women often experienced as a age. Well, you you gotta battle in front of you,

Misty Williams

Hopefully it’s mostly behind me now. But it was definitely yeah, 12 years. It’s been a 12 year journey. I wish I could say that everything is perfect in my life, but I definitely feel like I’m stable. I know I know what I’m dealing with with my body. I feel like we’ve uncovered the things that are really important for my healing and you know there I hear a lot in my community, women will say things like something’s missing. Like I’m doing, I’m doing this and I’m doing this, but something’s missing. And I feel today like I’m not haunted by something’s missing, which is really wonderful. But yeah, I think, you know, as women, we’re getting older and our bodies are constantly changing as we move into menopause. Right? So, we have new iterations, new versions of ourselves that come up and in this version, I have to work on my sleep more or in this version, I’m gosh, I’m dealing with fatigue again, our brain fog again and what’s happening and run our labs and figure it out. And yeah, so it’s kind of the journey for us.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

So what is different? I mean, you have kind of men that got their hormonal system and what makes it so challenging for women and why are doctors so inept in helping women?

Misty Williams

I honestly think there’s a lot of ignorance. You know, that’s just not part of the medical training. You know, I think there’s not an acknowledgement in the greater medical community of how significant hormone function is for quality of life for women. And so because it’s not part of their training, there’s just not a recognition that they have that whenever someone comes in, I mean, I remember being 37 years old, 38 I’m gaining this weight and I went to my doctor, my primary care doctor at the time, and asked them, you know, to test my hormones and, you know, figure out what’s going on because I’m gaining this weight. And it was like Misty women’s hormones. Wayne is you age, like it was it was no big deal to him. 

Like even if he saw low hormones on my labs, it wasn’t going to be significant because you’re getting older, and I look back and I’m like, you know, I was not 52 and my hormones are getting lower. So I just think there’s just an overall ignorance there and it’s really challenging as a woman when you’re begging for help and your doctors are basically gaslighting you. Like, everything’s fine, you’re fine. There’s nothing that you need help with. So that’s been a really, you know, what it did for me as a woman, is it taught me to find my power and stay in it. And that’s been a very important spiritual lesson for me, right? But it’s confronting at first because you think you’re going to go to a doctor and they’re going to help you be healthy. Like, that was probably my very first lesson when my body started really breaking down and I was freaking out about it going to doctors, I learned that they actually don’t consider that their job in the conventional framework that it’s not their job to keep you healthy. It’s their job to monitor your health until you reach an advanced state of disease that can be treated with pharmaceuticals or surgery. 

That’s the model. And they don’t they didn’t pick that model because there are necessarily bad people. I think there’s so many in the medical community that are well meaning and they have good reasons why they get involved in medicine. But that’s the model at large that you know, maybe isn’t quite so caring. It’s based driven very heavily by the pharmaceutical industry and how do we capitalize on sickness? And so we have a whole lot of problems in the United States especially. I know people from around the world watch these events, but in the US especially we have a systemic problem with our our lifestyles and the way that we approach health, being really contrary to actually creating it. And you asked a question, the difference between men and women with hormones. Women’s bodies are designed to procreate, We are perpetuators of the species. Light water and magnetism govern cellular functioning for all of us. But women are extra sensitive to those things because our bodies bear life. So for women we are so much more affected by toxicity by E. M. F. S. By stress. 

You know, these things that men are actually wired to handle so much more stress than women are wired to handle biologically. And so, you know, it’s the way that modern life and modern society is pushing women into these roles. Listen, I’m a strong woman and I love having a career, I love being an entrepreneur. I I love the role that I’ve kind of carved out for myself in the world, but my body doesn’t necessarily love it as much as my mind, my, you know, so there’s there is absolutely a difference in how women are experiencing this modern world compared two men and you know, we can talk about all the upstream stressors that make us six or women. What gets affected is our hormones and our hormones are the fountain of youth, it affects our quality of life. And so when our hormones are waning, when they’re when that whole cascade gets interfered with and we’ve got, you know, cortisol issues over here from your adrenal glands. And you know, for me, what I’ve actually experienced is stressors that were undiagnosed. So my adrenal function is so low right now from that. And then whatever, you know, your adrenals affect your thyroid, your thyroid creates pregnancy alone and pregnancy alone creates all your other hormones. Then when you’re stressed out pregnant alone and progesterone are shunting back over to cortisol and your home and you already have, it’s like this, it’s so vicious.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

So I’m curious, you know, you’re mentioning adrenals, you know, which medical doctor did a test saying that, let’s check your adrenals. I think it might be the adrenals, which one did that?

Misty Williams

None of my conventional doctors did. You know, I didn’t, I didn’t um start, I didn’t, I did do an adrenal test early on that. I found it as a patient that I needed and I kind of did the working to actually, you know, get a test done because I’m testing my hormones, I did a Genova complete hormone panel back in the day that’s very similar to Dutch, the 24 hour urine test for women. And but those tests also give you the uh the adrenal function too, You can see the curve, you know? And my cur I mean I’ve had a decent curve in the past. My recent Dutch. It was like pretty much flat lined. At least it was a curve in the right way. I wasn’t inverted. But yeah, my adrenal function has been super low. But even…

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Even ground as you get closer to bedtime.

Misty Williams

No, it was low in the morning and then it just got lower as the day went on. Unfortunately, I do have, you know, I don’t know if we want to jump into like amber glasses and light cycles and how that affects that curve. But yeah, I have a lot of good practices around making sure I’m not getting exposed to a lot of blue light in the evenings and that really helps your cortisol to be able to go where it needs to go so you can sleep at night. But it’s been low in the morning. I actually did a hair mineral analysis recently and started supporting more sodium. I started doing a teaspoon of salt in water every morning and I am almost complete. I’ve been taking Dr. Wilson’s adrenal support its adrenal something I don’t think it’s support. But anyway he has a great supplement that’s been really helpful the last few years. But I’m almost completely off of it now just from doing supporting minerals which is no doctor, I have a friend who hooked me up with this test and it’s probably the most important lab test. I’ve done the hair mineral analysis analysis. Fantastic. And yeah.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Yeah, Dr. Wilson is incredible. I’ve had the opportunity to interview him and yeah, he’s yeah, he’s a fascinating gentleman and yeah, just looking at that that sodium magnesium sodium potassium ratio to kind of see where your adrenals are because it’s not always the blood, you know what’s showing up in the blood. It’s not really everything that’s telling the story. Hair mineral analysis. You’re looking at the end result which is the tissue and seeing, so it’s a tissue biopsy the hair mineral analysis, that’s why it’s so amazing.

Misty Williams

It’s a powerful test. I wish like literally everyone watching your doctor may not recommend it. I’ve worked with a ton of great functional medicine. Doctors listened, not a one of them told me I needed to take this test. I was talking to my friend Martin Scott, he owns upgraded formulas, have really wonderful mineral supplementation. It’s all like nanoparticles that are hyper, like absorb ability is 98% or something. That’s crazy. But he had me do the test and then I got the results. It was he actually looked at my test results and he started describing to me how I’ve been feeling, which was like, whoa, like I didn’t tell him he may have picked up on a couple of things because we’re friends, but I really didn’t tell him like what was going on. I’ve been detoxing mold too. So the mold detoxing is like really messing with my brain function, you know, Like I’m feeling it. And anyway, I’ve been doing extra mineral support and it’s pretty much all resolved. My energy is feeling, you know, I’m pretty propped up so it’s not like I feel bad, but when you can start taking away the props and you’re still feeling great, Like the hair mineral analysis test has been really, really powerful. So yeah,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

And with that one was so fascinating. It’s not like you’re seeing a linear path to improvement, what you’re seeing are the layers of the onion, you know, so you’re seeing the compensatory layers that you’ve built up over time. And as you’re unwinding those, you’re seeing the next level of compensatory mechanism, but each time you’re removing that layer, you’re gaining energy.

Misty Williams

Yeah. Yeah. It’s been really great. I was I was actually a little stunned that like my magnesium on my test, which I think you probably see a lot, you see a lot of tests, you could probably speak to this but my magnesium was high now and I was taking a ton because I know how important magnesium is, right? Except when your magnesium is really high, that means your body, isn’t it? So either what you’re taking isn’t in an absorbable form or you don’t have. I think I’m taking P five P. Help with the magnesium absorption. There’s a lot to that idea. I mean we’re like handling all these magnesium supplements and I even do the spray and spray on my arms, right? 

So I’m getting some absorption that way. But you know if your body can’t take it in it doesn’t really matter. I think about the I mean it’s hundreds and hundreds, it’s probably at this point because I’ve been on this journey for a while taking magnesium. Sure I’ve spent thousands the magnesium at this point, you know? But yeah and you need to see if your body is actually absorbing it and and I mean that’s it’s a great test if you can find a practitioner to do that test for you it’s $52 if you order the test through upgraded formulas, I think it’s I think they double the price on it. It was Tesco. It’s still a really affordable test. But you know it’s like an easy one. Let’s get those minerals optimized, it affects your hormone production, it affects detoxification. I mean there’s just so many things, your adrenal, funk, so many things that you need your minerals for that you do that directly affect how you feel, directly affects how you feel.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

And looking at the additional looking at the minerals. You’re looking at the ratios and that tells a lot about the different endocrine system, endocrine system, your digestive system, your parasympathetic, blood sugar handling and all these kind of things. Which is I mean it’s amazing what you gain just from that.

Misty Williams

It is one of those tests to I think probably it’s a frequent repeater about to do another one. And yeah you want to do it probably about every three every three months.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

You know, as you start on the journey because then you can track and see how the body.

Misty Williams

Yeah,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Exactly. So you’re mentioning things, I mean we’re talking about going into why it’s difficult for women. Yeah. And one of the things that I think it’s important for women to understand also is you know, all the testing that has been done. All the studies that have been done. Not a lot has been done on women just because they’re complicated individuals. 

Misty Williams

Not until the late 90s did we start including women in trials and the reason that women were not included in trials is because you could take 40 men. you’re gonna get a pretty predictable set of results where they’re going to respond very similarly. You take 40 women were all over the place. Plus there’s a lot of trial variables like, you know, things that affect pregnancy and you know, we don’t want to do things that could affect women who are at childbearing years. So then it’s like, well then you use only menopausal women and but that’s a whole different. There was a lot of reasons why it was easy to exclude women, but it’s, you know, obviously terrible for women because now, you know, there’s a lot of things that you need those trials to get approved by the FDA and you know, everything else. And women haven’t been included in a lot of our issues, haven’t been haven’t been the recipient of those um great studies, right? Because you’re kind of just excluding half the population there when the issues that we deal with these women aren’t as aren’t as important to the medical community at large, which is unfortunate and it is changing thankfully, you know, we are seeing, we are seeing more attention being paid to women, but you know, I think, I think we can just be really proactive man. It’s like, I don’t even care at this stage, I’ve kind of learned a few things that are really important for us and I just go after what I need.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

So for I mean you’re an active business woman, You I mean you ran marathons, you I mean you’re you’re busy, uh go getter. And so obviously that requires a lot of energy, puts a lot of stress on you. And then, you know, for women, like you mentioned, your hormones are not as a stable, there’s a lot of things going on, you know, that, you know, women may not understand is things going on in their body. So how did you resolve? I mean, what were the steps that you took in order to be able to unravel? You know what you were dealing with?

Misty Williams

Well, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the steps I took in order.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

I looked hindsight.

Misty Williams

When I look back, let me tell you that picture. Yes. So in the community, what we tell women is you need a team of doctors that are going to support you. You need a good primary care doctor who’s going to be supportive of a holistic approach, even if he or she, maybe it’s not their full approach, meaning maybe they’re a D. O. Or maybe um they’re a really open minded M. D. Or maybe they’re there, They’re an indie, right? You know, if if um naturopathic doctors, you know, they don’t all go as deep, right? But at least they’re open minded to the approach. I think that’s super important from a primary care perspective. They don’t have to have all the answers, but you don’t want to go into someone that’s constantly criticizing. Like my mom is in her seventies and she’s dealing with all the symptoms of, you know, flabby fog and fatigue that we talked about all the time. And we are getting her on hormone therapy, we’re getting her sleeping. Like I’m working on all the things with her and her doctor freaked out when she went in and said that she was doing hormones. She’s like, you’re in your seventies, why? 

My mom has osteoporosis, which we know you need hormones to hell. I mean, there’s like, there’s so much that affirms right? But in the conventional medical model you don’t do hormone therapy for women under hardly any circumstances. So, um so you want to have a doctor who’s not gonna be like that? Hey, you want someone that’s gonna be supportive, then you want to find someone that I call them a root cause practitioner functional diagnostic nutrition. My friend Reed Davis teaches people this functional framework. It’s like a masters level course in biology and protocols and supplementation and testing, you know, like finding someone from that camp can be really helpful. You want someone that knows how to go after the root cause like, okay, let’s let’s find out what’s happening in your body. So you can support your body where it’s at. But then let’s find out why this is happening, right? Let’s test the right things to find out why this is happening. So you can find functional medicine doctors also that are trained in this. But you have to really ask them, you know, we’re talking about this before we started recording, you have to really dig to find the ones that know how to test these are the litmus tests I give the ladies in our community, if they can, if they can test and treat mold lyme and medals, they will pretty much be able to go with you anywhere, right? 

Whatever’s coming up for you, they will probably have the expertise to help you if they don’t know how to treat those three that tells me. And I know this is not only from my own experience, but what I’ve observed over the last five years in our community. If they can’t treat those things, then they don’t. They don’t really understand root cause because it is prolific. Like so many people are dealing with metal toxicity. That’s undiagnosed mold toxicity. That’s undiagnosed Lyme viruses, you know like that are undiagnosed. There’s this thought that in functional medicine means gut health and I watch the women in my community all the time, hyper focus on their gut. But if you don’t deal with that ecosystem of your whole body, right? And you’re constantly trying to get rid of those parasites, parasites feed off of metals and all these other things. So if you’re hyper focusing on your gut alone and not looking holistically, what are the stressors in my body is making me sick? Then you’re not gonna get, well you’re going to do what we call beat it back, you’re going to beat it back and it’s gonna be better for a while then it’s going to come and then you’re gonna beat it back. Right? 

So you want to have a good primary care doctor, you want to have a good root cause practitioner could be a functional medicine doctor could be um and FN. P. Um F. D. N. P. It could be a naturopathic doctor who has who has done the extra training to be able to go deep right. You don’t want to assume that because someone says I’m naturopathic or functional that they actually know how to help you. You want to ask the question. So you need a good root cause practitioner and every woman needs a good hormone doctor who can help her balance her hormones and prescribe if necessary. That could be a G. Y. N. There are clinics now around the country that are including it as part of their primary care practice. We have that here in Austin, Texas where I live a great clinic that does that there’s a lot of hormone clinics. I’m not crazy about them but they can help with, that’s all that’s in your area, you know, that we’re all they do is prescribe hormones. Women need help with their hormones. What I would say for any woman that’s dealing with any hormone dysfunction, you are best served by getting your own education. It’s going to help you navigating all this. 

Like I know we’re busy and we want to phone it into somebody else. But every big breakthrough I’ve had in my life has come at my insistence that we look at something even with the practitioner I’ve had since 2014, I love her. She was not proactive with me. I was the proactive one. I was one always coming in. I’ve been dealing with an extra £15 for about two years. I’m my partner and I are talking about getting married. I don’t want to carry that down the aisle. I don’t feel good in a body that’s carrying this extra weight. So I was like, we need to go deeper. And this is when we found the mold last year. But that wasn’t her. She would have if I would have come and I said, I’m feeling good and she would have looked at my labs and your hormones looked at, that would’ve been the end of the visit, right? So we all have to learn to step into the driver’s seat and to be really proactive about this. 

But those hormone clinics can be helpful if that’s all there is. I would be wary of over pushing on the pellets. I’ve done pellets um when people just, that’s its own financial engine, you know, and you want someone that’s going to take a little more care with you. And I think pellets can be great, pellets can also be problematic to do. And there’s not informed consent around it, There’s not informed consent for anything really. It’s we hardly ever get it, it’s unfortunate but just be careful with that. But you know, I personally am wearing an estrogen patch and I take oral progesterone and I’m taking dhe a right now to so I find that combination has worked really well for me. I used to do creams, but as basically as my system got worse, I needed something a little better. So we moved to the patch anyway.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Yeah. And like so you have kind of the hormonal, you need to do the hormonal maximization, but then also it’s not just hormones, it’s not just that component. You know, you need to look at these other root causes like you’re talking about, you need to look at mold, you need to look at pathogens, you need to look at nutritional deficiencies. You need to look at heavy metals, you know, frequently dealing with imbalances like copper zinc imbalances and aluminum and heavy metals. I mean I know that you were dealing with the silver fillings and you know, the mercury from that.

Misty Williams

Yeah, silver fillings were improperly drilled from my teeth. Two years after a surgery that I had, that kind of kicked my journey off. In 2011, I had a surgery that was botched. Had to have a follow up surgery. They removed assist from my left ovary and my left ovary in that first surgery and then had to fix it. And then two years later, so I’m already dealing with symptoms and experiencing the gaslighting or whatever. Two years later, my dentist told me that my mercury fillings were failing and had them since I was very young and he wanted to replace them with composite, which actually sounded like a great idea to me. I’m like, oh, actually really get the mercury out of my mouth, This is fantastic. He removed the mercury fillings. I didn’t connect the dots. 

But what happened is within six months I had gained 45 pounds. I had no idea it was connected to this mercury fillings. But I found out later in 2018, it was five years later I found out that, oh, he didn’t do any of the protective things that you should do if you’re removing mercury from your mouth. There was no damn, there was no protective equipment for me or for the doctor or for the hygienist, by the way, nobody was protecting themselves from the mercury. And it’s likely at that time that I also started picking up a lot of mold. I was living in this gorgeous Victorian that was built in 1892 in Nashville Tennessee where we have hot, humid summers and I probably didn’t have air conditioning in that building until the seventies or eighties. Right? So, you know, like a lot of these things I picked up and you know, hormones, I was prescribed hormones. It’s like, oh, she has premature ovarian failure. Let’s put her on hormones. But no, none of my doctors were like, why is this happening to her at 38 years old. Right? So there wasn’t, let’s peel back the layers and figure out what’s going on. It’s like, oh, hormones and, and she lost the weight and she’s doing better. Okay, go on my merry little way. So that’s the danger for women. 

I think if like hormones are amazing, I’m so glad I had them. I wouldn’t do anything different taking hormones. But I wish that I would have had doctors or had the knowledge As a patient to be really proactive about, Hey, we need to find out why this is happening to me, right? We need to find out why my hormones are looking like premature ovarian failure. You’re at 38 years old. You know, so that took almost another decade eight years to find them to find out that I had mold toxicity and you know, five years to find out about the metals, you know, the mercury fillings. So there’s just a lot, there’s a lot of layers underneath that I didn’t, I didn’t, that’s why I would say don’t necessarily follow my path because it took a long time. The tests that I think are amazing, really good blood labs. And working with someone who knows how to read those blood labs and can see they can see other pathogens in the labs because they know what pathogens due to those values. Right? So that does require some deeper training,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Some examples there of so the audience kind of recognize that.

Misty Williams

Yeah, well, there’s some, there’s some inflammatory labs markers that are more advanced, you know, that if a doctor knows that’s what they’re doing, they’re going to run that as part of your panels. So there’s some advanced inflammation and then they can see in your labs, there’s some markers that are affected by things like parasites, right? And so they’ll be able to see in the labs that these markers are really skewed and this could be parasites. You know, so it’s something that they’ll want to look into more, maybe even just start treating if they see, you know, a few different things in your labs. I mean, certainly you can just see dysbiosis. Like I had great, I had great insulin levels forever until about two years ago I started showing insulin resistance for the first time. And so you know why there wasn’t a lot changing my diet or lifestyle but suddenly I’m insulin resistant because that’s toxicity advancing. 

And I would think for a lot of people who are experiencing Type two diabetes of course your diet matters but it’s not the only thing that matters right and we hyper focus on diet. It’s one condition of a variety of conditions that are really important to look at when you start seeing these presentations in lab work. So blood work. The H. T. M. A. Test that we already talked about. The G. I. Map which is a really great gut test or you know, similar quality gut test. The Dutch test especially for women like find out what’s going on with those hormones. You can do blood labs and there’s value in blood labs. I’ve been treated with blood labs but the dutch will tell you so much more. You’ll see we were talking about the cortisol curve right? You’ll see what your melatonin is doing which is affecting your sleep at night, we’ll see if your estrogen is converting down toxic pathways or not which is super important for women. If you don’t want to get you know the variety of cancers that women can get that are related to estrogen. So the Dutch test is great and then the Oat test the organic acids test. 

You know we saw on my oat test fungus. You can see some markers that indicate molds you. We saw a lot of neurotransmitter issues on my oat test. There’s just a lot of more advanced things that a skilled practitioner if they know what they’re doing. We’ll be able to discern more what’s going on in your body. And then of course in my case, like if you start seeing in these other labs, certain markers you’re, you’re gonna want to do the mold test and the metals test and you know, but they’ll see it. You don’t have to do those tests necessarily right away because you’ll see clues in the other labs that tell you that you need to look deeper. But that’s if I would have done those labs in the beginning. Gosh, we would have, we would have seen the picture right? There wouldn’t have been like these lingering, I feel like I’m playing whack a mole. I’m doing stuff that I know is helping. But something is still missing. You know, like it was really, really important to run the right labs. And then we started really putting this picture together. I feel in the last year that I’m doing the deeper detox healing work that my body has desperately needed um for the first time, it means for an extra decade my body has had to deal with all this toxicity. And so I know a lot of Jedi hacks and strategies for supporting the body. So you feel better. But it’s not the same as being healed. It’s not the same as being healthy, right? Yeah.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

And that’s the thing like you’re saying, I mean you’re you’re you’re you’re no tools to kind of prop yourself up and they are important while you’re going through the healing journey. But they are still just those tools, you know, they are not there to be there forever. The key is to you want to resolve the underlying issues, you know like addressing, I mean, you know, silver fillings and I see this again and again, I have patients coming in and they say well I tell them when you need to get rid of the silver filling and it’s not good. I recommend this biological dentist and then they go away and I think they go to the dent biological dentist and they end up going to their own dentists because the dentists say well I know how to take out silver fillings, they’re just kind of hacking at a drilling, spewing mercury all over the place. You know, they’re breathing it in there swallowing it and impacting the whole neurological system, their gut, their thyroid and you get mercury just kind of clogging up all those receptors all over the place and just…

Misty Williams

You gotta remember for women. So this is where our mouths are like if you could open up at the top of my head, right in the middle, you see my pituitary gland which is not protected by the blood brain barrier, right? And it is directly tied into hormone regulation in my body. And then right below is my thyroid. So are for females, especially if it’s true for men too. But for females, especially, this is such a sensitive area for us. Like you’ve got to, you’ve got to think in terms of The other impact, other systems that can be impacted. I was very concerned and I know the reason why people go to their dentist is because of the cost, right? You look at how much it’s gonna cost you with your primary dentist that you’ve been taking you and your kids to for the last 10 years versus the biological dentist. There’s a big cost difference, right? So, and especially if you’re dealing with insurance, you know, insurance is only going to pay half of probably most procedures anyway. 

But people are really stuck in this insurance and it’s a trap honestly, because I can tell you a lot of strategies to how to leverage your insurance well. But the truth of the matter is until you just get out of the insurance model and just start doing the right things for your health. It’s like I feel like it held me back a little bit like I’m really resourceful and I learned a lot of these tricks and I actually teach the women in our community a lot of ways to leverage your insurance. But you just got to know that what we’re going for is healing here And this model doesn’t always have what you need to create the healing that you’re committed to. So I ended up going to American bio dental in Tijuana, which is right across the border from San Diego California. I actually walked across. It was a piece of cake. This was before C0V!D. Okay. So I think you could still walk across pretty easily, but I’m just just so you know, you would need to do a little due diligence on this. I called an Uber as soon as I got across the border in Tijuana and took me down. 

I had a fantastic experience with them and it’s like 20% of the cost of dentistry in the US and they can do it. They checked me for habitations that had an infected root canal that they removed. They remove mercury fillings. They have excellent protocols. They do admires cocktail drip while you’re, you know, having these procedures done. They did prp on my, on my sockets, you know, when they’re pulling teeth and checking for capitation and everything and they do a lot of things right. I got tons done with them and my bill was like $700 for a load of dental work. Okay, so I had like two fillings. Yes, yes. I had two small fillings done. They didn’t clean my teeth. They did all the X rays they removed and infected root canal. They checked for capitation um in 22 places, make sure I didn’t have capitation, they did the Prp stuff they did. It was all $700. Yeah. So it was very affordable compared to going to your dentist in your hometown. So if you’re feeling like, I don’t know financially if I can take on a 10 or 20,000 or plus, I mean, who knows what dental, where people have to do, it can be really expensive. It’s a great option. So worth mentioning, worth mentioning.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

I love it. I love it. And, and I love that they did the Myers cocktail. I mean the vitamin C and in addition to obviously any kind of surgery will suppress immune systems. You want to keep the immune system up and running, but also vitamin C in itself, intravenously protects the cells from mercury. You know, so it’s kind of protecting you from the mercury as you are messing with it in your mouth.

Misty Williams

Yeah, They did a great job. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Yeah.

Misty Williams

That’s what I would have known about them when I needed to have my mercury fillings removed. I didn’t know that was, that was really early on so.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

So what are some of you work then on these different things and what are some other kind of lifestyle hacks that you and that you’ve done to really try to kind of maximize your, your health and energy, you know. So you’re able to have this full active life that you have.

Misty Williams

Yeah. You know, if people already know who I am or my work, you guys know how passionate I am about sleep, I’ve done to sleep summits. The first doctor that worked with me after my surgeries, I had gone to my normal doctors and realized no one was helping me. I was mister we don’t know what causes endometriosis. You can google it. Misty your labs look normal, one doctor said, Misty even if I did know how to, even if I did run your labs, I wouldn’t know what they meant. Went to an endocrinologist, everything. I mean, I was literally, I just felt like I was being gas lit everywhere that I went, and I had a friend who is a chiropractor, his name’s Andrew, and Andrew said he’d help me. And I knew that I knew him professionally and socially, so I knew he was a really good doctor. And I knew that I was going to have to look outside of the mainstream. I’m like, well, maybe it’s maybe it’s alternative. 

Maybe I need an alternative health doctor, which, you know, Andrew was wonderful for me. You can only take me so far, one of the things that I struggle with going full alternative is you can’t really measure anything that they’re doing. Like, I don’t know if this is helping and that that was a challenge. Really challenging and confronting for me, especially because I needed measurable results, you know, and I was seeing that a lot of things were off, but Andrew’s first question to me when I gave him the full rundown, he did a big intake, just like most of these doctors will do, and he said, how’s your sleep? I’ve never been a morning person and that’s what I said. So I had a lot of stories, never been a morning person. People that get up at 5:30 in the morning, the not, not ever going to be me, I’m exhausted in the mornings. I don’t get up early, I say up until two a.m. I get my second wind at about nine and I have all this productivity for like another five hours. And he said, well, how do you feel when you wake up in the morning?

 I feel like I’ve been hit by a mack truck and listen, this goes all the way back to high school, maybe earlier than that. But I distinctly remember high school, like just mornings were terrible, you know, I have to get up really early for school and especially after I started working and I’d work until 10 and come home and not get to bed till 11 and I was having to get up at five and it was just miserable and I’d fall asleep in class and um and he said misty, he said, we can we can try all, we can do a lot of things to try to help your body and supplementation, everything he said, but if you’re not sleeping you’re not healing and I can’t I can’t help, I can’t supplement your bad sleep habits and I was so desperate at that time for something to improve that I I just did everything he said, so I started going to bed at nine p.m. I still would wake up at maybe eight a.m. Feeling like I’ve been hit by a mack truck. Like it it’s not like there was this immediate improvement, it took about six months and um and after about six months I started doing cold bats which I actually think was really hopeful. But after about six months I started waking up not feeling like I’d been hit by a mack truck. It doesn’t mean I necessarily felt amazing but I didn’t have that, I am being drug out of a stupor feeling you know, and that was kind of like whoa, wow! 

People have this experience and over time I really, I mean I’ve always worked on my sleep now, I have pretty rock star sleep. I get lots of deep sleep, wake up great in the morning, feel great in the mornings, you know, it’s it’s a very different reality for me now, but sleep is so important, we don’t talk about it enough, we don’t teach about it when people have sleep problems, I don’t know what to do. A lot of doctors and practitioners don’t really know what to tell people to do. But you can sleep is when the body heals. So if you’re spending a lot of money on doctors and practitioners and supplements and you know, sauna and red light therapy and body work and all these other things and you’re not sleeping at night or your sleep is interrupted or you’re waking up feeling exhausted in the morning or you have trouble falling asleep, you know, like all of that stuff is, is standing in the way of you creating the healing that you really want. So we can definitely talk some sleep hacks if you’d like.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

I’d love to because it’s, I mean it’s one of those things and I hear that from a lot of women is that they’re laying there and their mind just goes, you know, it’s like, it it just won’t shut down and it’s, you have that, you know, the stressor of the day, your cortisol is just just running high. And also sometimes the thyroid starts spinning at night, you know? And so so to be able to kind of calm that down and and have that restorative re generous need sleep because, I mean, you’re talking about mold, you’re talking about heavy metals. I mean it’s at night we’re detoxing and it’s at night that we are recharging our whole hormonal system, it’s at night that, you know, the pituitary losing weight, you’re losing weight. Exactly. So yeah, the weight loss does not take place while you’re exercising the weight loss takes place while you’re sleeping. You know, because the calories that are being burned to repair the body while you’re sleeping, that is what makes you lose weight. That’s where you burn calories. So sleep is key is crucial. 

Misty Williams

Yeah. So I think we have to think about sleep as being biologically tied to light and light cycle. So I think that’s probably a really good place to start the conversation. Your entire your all your cells are run off of light and magnetism. If you go back, you know, primitively before we had our modern worlds, how did biology know what to do when it was light cycles? And then the magnetic field of the earth, right? These set the conditions for life to form on this planet. So in the morning when the sun comes up and that sun hits our retina and goes back through and you know, sends signals into our brain that it’s light that begins a clock inside of our bodies. So a lot of us are waking up and these, you know, dark environments. 

The blinds are drawn curtains are pulled, you know, were inside, We don’t actually have light hit our eyes until we leave the house for work. And if we don’t leave the house for work, you know, God only knows when that’s going to be. So we’re not taking advantage of the just the natural wiring in our body to um to surge cortisol in the morning and then to bring that down as the day goes on into the evening. We also are living in these environments full of artificial light. Right? So the sun goes down, but it’s still brightest day in our houses. We have screens going, we have overhead bright lights going. And so we have this signaling these sensors all in our body, in our blood cells, in our eyes, right, that are picking up on blue light and it just sends messages back to our brain and our pituitary to suppress melatonin and we need cortisol, it’s daytime. So this is where our cortisol curve gets mixed up. If you’ve ever taken one of those tests and your curve was opposite. It wasn’t high in the morning and then dropping throughout the day, it was actually lower in the morning and then rising as the day goes on. 

If you’re like me and you felt like this surge at nine p.m. That’s a cortisol surge and that is very closely tied into light cycles. So what I do is we have lots of windows in my house. I take the dogs out in the morning, you know, we get light in the morning and then as soon as the sun goes down, I’m wearing amber glasses, the lights, we have no overhead lights on in my house. We do have some lamps, we have amber bulbs in our lamps. If you have screens, you know, there’s lots of people that will say no screen time after eight PM, which is a fabulous rule. If you do, if you are looking at screens, make sure you’re at least wearing your amber glasses, make sure on your phones, you know, we have the filtering now, the night shift filtering on our phones that will have our screens basically pull up an amber almost like a film over the whole over the whole phone that will minimize the blue light, but light is big and I have recommended the amber glasses to so many people and I have to tell you not, a single person has come back and said that didn’t work for me. I hear from people all the time. 

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how this affects me. When I started dating Roderick, my partner, he was a chronic, he had a hard time going to sleep at night and he never went to bed before, like one or two and with the amber glasses, he started going to bed between 10 and 11, which for him, you know, he wasn’t even super motivated to go to bed earlier. He just found that he was tired at the right time and of course he’s dating me and he’s hearing all the chirping about how important sleep is. So it makes a big difference in your ability to fall asleep, get rid of the blue light. So this will take us to another really powerful sleep pack, sleep in a dark room. Now people, I think if I’m wearing an eye mask over my eyes at night, then I’ve blacked the room out. But the truth is, you have red blood cell, blue light sensors and every red blood cell that’s coursing through your body, your capillaries your skin, so your skin is picking up on the blue light and when, when the cells, your red blood cells are picking up on that blue light, you’re sitting signaling back to the pituitary to suppress melatonin. You have melatonin is suppressed and it’s why we’re not getting good deep sleep at night, right? 

It’s why people, one of the reasons we find ourselves waking up a lot in the night because we are, our body’s responding to the light in our environment. You might think my room is dark. You know, it’s dark if you put your hand in front of your face and you can’t see it, that’s how you know, you’re in a dark room. So I did this exercise put in front of my face and I was like dang, I can see my hand. It was really shocking. The first time I did this, I had a smoke detector light across the room. I had there was a full moon. I had gotten room darkening curtains, which are crucial, but there was still light, it was a full moon. So underneath the bedroom door light was coming in because in the living room it was coming in through the windows right? So we had light coming in under the door the master bathroom had my curling irons that were off but they still had a little light on them, right? We had an air doctor in the room that had a light on it. Like there were lights everywhere, the alarm clock next to our beds. So you have to just basically the first night have some little electricians tape and you’re taping over lights and turning things, we just close the bathroom door. 

That’s all we need to do there. Put a towel under the main door, dark in the room. It makes like literally you will notice a difference in night one night to night three it’s like holy cow, I slept like I was dead meaning I woke up in the morning and it’s like I remember falling asleep and I remember waking up, remember nothing in between and and I was more refreshed when I woke up because I just slept so great. So a dark room is really important. Cold room is important. We set the temperature on 70. I have a chili pad on my bed which is amazing. I had an experience in May. So I live in Austin, Texas in this summer. It has been, I mean it is like since May it’s been over 100 but we’ve had 105, 108, 110. And we get humidity here. Sometimes it’s been like, it’s been like an oven and it has not let up. We’ve literally had every day June, May, June, July and the first couple weeks of august is over 100 degrees. It was crazy. And in May I woke up at about three o’clock in the morning and I could not fall back asleep now. This is not common for me by the way, I I love my sleep and I sleep great that I lay there in bed for like 30 minutes and I’m groggy. Like I obviously knew I woke up and I’m laying there and I’m like, why am I not sleeping? And 30 minutes in. I was like, I’m gonna check the thermostat now. It was set on 72. That’s what we used to set up our house almost 72 and I just bumped it down two degrees. I was asleep in 10 minutes. 

Yes, I was like, all right, well now we got to change, we’re now we sleep at 70 in the house and I think in that case it was just because it was so hot outside, it was affecting the ambient temperature even though it technically said it was 72 was feeling warmer, which I do notice in my house like the temperature, you know, it’s the same temperature in the bedroom, but it feels so much colder in winter than it does, you know, in summer because we’re just affected by the outdoor temperature too. So temperature matters, man, we need cold and dark to sleep cold and dark to sleep. So cold and dark where you’re amber glasses. It is not time at 7,8,9 PM is not the time to talk to your husband about the financial problems you’re having to have that fight that you’ve been pissed about all day. It is not the time to deal with stressful family situations. 

It’s not the time to get a little extra work done, right, because we just we ramp ourselves up when we should be settling ourselves down and some of this is just we’ve got to accept the fact that our bodies need rest and we need there needs to be the caretaker part of us that that comes in when that other driven part of us, which I totally have that driven part of us wants to drive over everything. There has to be a part that says, you know what my commitment to my health is the most important commitment in my life without my health. I can’t do all those other driven stuff. I’m not making this compromise. You know, we just we we have to have a come to Jesus with ourselves sometimes this is not the time to do it. We have to be really intentional about how we’re structuring our lives so that we can sleep at night and I can’t I am a better person when I’m getting sleep. I’m kinder, I’m more strategic, I’m smarter. I connect the dots on things, you know, I function so much better during the day when I get sleep. It’s just it’s so important practically let alone all the health stuff, you know? So sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, yeah.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

And I want to make a point of melatonin you know because obviously with light, you know like you mentioned it suppresses the melatonin production or the conversion of serotonin to melatonin. Yeah, so and melatonin for all ladies out there is like the anti aging hormone that we have. I mean they see we use peptides like Epithalin you know that support and production of the melatonin and they’ve seen that it actually lengthens the telomeres. Telomeres is directly connected them to our aging process. So, so if just for vanity alone.

Misty Williams

Yes. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Sleep. 

Misty Williams

Yes. Another thing I will say to those people in our community ask about melatonin. Some people have classification of the pineal gland from toxicity by the way that’s not protected. Like we were talking about earlier. So there’s some people that just don’t produce the melatonin that they need some people need some really good light hygiene for a while to help their bodies start to produce, but it’s like what do you do in the meantime, I did a really great interview with Dr. Christine Schaffner about this because she’s dealing with super super sick patients in her practice and she is a huge proponent of using melatonin and she doesn’t care if you have to use it forever. Because the side effects of not having melatonin and sleeping are the consequences far far greater than supplementing melatonin and your body doesn’t ever get its production up where it needs. So you always need to do it. I tend to like logically that really resonates for me, it’s like you just can’t overstate when you if you ever really study this and you see how totally important sleep is. It’s the most important part of a healing protocol. And unfortunately it’s not treated like that, but it really, really is healing happens when we’re sleeping and if you need melatonin to sleep take it. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Yeah. And yeah, it’s also people think well if I take, like you mentioned, I take melatonin, well do I suppress my own production? No, you actually don’t. So it actually will not suppress your own production of melatonin. And if you take it orally , that shouldn’t be a concern anyway and I can have patients, you know, like I do a lot of cancer as I have patients coming in and I give them like 200 mg of Melatonin a day. So it’s just something that’s so important, protective our immune system helps to detoxify heavy metals keep our, you know, as I said, anti aging, it is a fantastic hormone and we do not want to be deficient in it.

Misty Williams

One thing I will say about melatonin if this is my own and equals one, okay, in my case, every single hormone in my body is crashed, but melatonin is not, my melatonin is rockstar, It’s high, high, high and it’s, it’s it’s lifestyle, it is a lifestyle hormone, you will massively improve your melatonin production if you are aligning with light, getting rid of light after dark and bring some discipline to your sleep routine. You know, you can absolutely increase your melatonin production over time. It’s the only hormone that I don’t have to take at this stage of my journey and my numbers are really, really high. So there it’s you people, we get these beliefs like I’m not a good sleeper, I have to take the sleep aids. 

Like, you know, we get to the point where we just, we think that sleep isn’t possible for us and it’s just not true. I have had a front row seat witnessing so many women in our community turn their sleep around like story after story after story after story after story. So just check yourself on the stories you have, I’m a I’m a night owl, my story, I’m not a morning person, my story, like all these things, you know that we think we think and believe about ourselves, like just check ourselves. Like let’s call on our, on our highest self to say it is possible that we are not who we think we are and that we can have things we don’t think we can have, it is possible. So let’s open ourselves to the possibility and set the conditions so that these things can happen for us so that we have good melatonin production and we’re enjoying great sleep.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

So the in your healing Rosie, I mean in your community and why Rosie? 

Misty Williams

Rosie the riveter is the inspiration for healing Rosie. I had a great aunt named Florence who told me the story of Rosie the riveter calling the women to work in the factories everyone’s seen. Yes, yes. So my great grandparents were entrepreneurs. They lived in Columbus, Ohio, my great grandfather had a furrier in downtown Columbus, Ohio. And they had six Children. And in the early thirties I believe it was around 1933 he got double pneumonia and died. So in those days, what happened is that people in the community, there was no like child protective services, right? People in the community would come and they would take the Children, the Children would all become orphans because a mom who was not a provider would not continue raising the kids. So you think in his situation, a woman with six Children, how would she keep providing for those kids once the man died. So my great grandmother went to the man who’d been helping her husband run the business and asked him to stay on and she took over. 

This was in the 30s, there was no such thing as women, business owners, right? People women did not work in those days, it was not a thing. So she took over the family business and she raised six Children as a single mom when also being a single mom was also not a thing back in those days. So my great aunt Florence when they were calling the women to work in the factories, it was nothing for her to say. She didn’t have anything um like socio economically or culturally to overcome to answer that call to go work in the factories because her mom was an entrepreneur and provided and raised all the kids. So she was one of the first ones to go. And my great uncle, her husband was fighting in the air force, he was over in Germany, he heard that she had taken the job and he sent a letter, took three weeks to get to her telling her that she was bringing shame on the family. She must quit immediately. 

Such and hearing her, she’s four ft 10 German spunky woman, I love her. And anyway she ended up quitting to please her husband, she quit the job because her husband, which the whole thing to me is like comical, he’s took him three weeks to send you a letter. Right? So it’s so different from now. But anyway, when she told me the story, I really identified with Rosie and it connected to the storyline of these women becoming more empowered and taking these different roles in society. And this is what our whole society has become now. It was kind of an anomaly back then what happened to my family a few generations ago. But now most women work, you know and most women have careers and even if they stay home when their kids are little, they end up you know, having careers and we’ve moved into a time when we are participating in society in a completely different way and we’re taking on a different kind of stress and it’s like we talked about in the beginning of this interview, we’re taking on so much stress but our bodies aren’t necessarily designed to carry it. So what do we do? You know what, how do we heal this empowered woman who you know, we have a we have a story that all of this has been so good for women, but it is definitely not good for our biology. So there’s a real reckoning that’s happened for me in my own life. And I see it in the women in our community and there is an honoring that I have come to do of my own body and what do I need to do to take care of this temple and who do I have to be? I don’t want to say no to these parts of myself, right? I love the expression of these different parts of me in our world. But I’ve also had to see and acknowledge myself in a way that my mom doesn’t and my aunt and and my great grandmother right? 

Like they did for everyone else and didn’t pay attention to the deterioration of their bodies. And I think it’s just getting so extreme now with the toxicity we’re dealing with my mom did not deal with this as a kid, right? They ate out of the garden. This toxicity, this toxic load, you know, for decades. It’s getting passed down from mother to child invitro, right? It is, we have to see it now and acknowledge it and figure out how we’re going to heal this, this archetype this persona um and get our lives back and in turn you heal a woman, you heal a family like what women are to our society can’t be overstated. I mean we nurture and love and we’re the glue that holds it all together and we can’t just keep ignoring the toll that that’s taking. You know, there’s been a deep spiritual journey here for me.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

It’s important to recognize, I mean for a woman the toxicity that you’re dealing with the health issues you’re dealing with that is being impacted. It’s impacting three generations. It’s yourself, your Children and your grandchildren. So it’s not just for your own. It is you’re actually impacting three generations of that. And so it is really important and to take the necessary steps because here you have, I mean, I love the, you know, the women empowerment being out, you know, then and they you should be the business owner and be the individual that you want to be. And at the same time like you’re saying is that you need to recognize than that your body. I mean, you need to work harder than men, do you know, in order to be able to support you in that role. And so it’s just that wake up call that I love that you’re doing.

Misty Williams

Yeah, you can almost think of it of recovery time. Ben Greenfield actually taught me this. He as an athlete. He finally when he was younger had his labs pulled and he was really surprised how trashed he was because he was such a performer, right? And his genetically really gifted and you know, athletic. But his labs were terrible. And one of the lessons that he got was if I’m going to work out this hard, I have to recover this hard, right? If I if I want to exert myself in all these ways, then recovery is not an optional part if I want to continue to perform and be the athlete that I enjoy being right and that was profound for me like, okay, so it’s not and it’s not just you know, running a marathon or you know biking or you know hiking or all the athletic things. It’s what’s what we do to our bodies all the time. 

If I want to keep being the entrepreneur and the achiever and you know, I want to keep showing up for the women in healing Rosie and I want to keep being the matriarch that I am for my family, I have to recover. Recovery is not optional if you want to continue to be this woman in your life and so I make recovery a priority and Roderick honors my need for recovery and people in my life, you know, there was probably a time when it I got pushed back but not anymore. You know, people know this is what’s important but show up so fully. Right? So we I just think there’s recovery is not optional. We have to recover. All of us have to recover and if we are not allowing time and our schedule for recovery, we are screwed because it’s not sustainable and you know the cards, the house of cards will come crashing down.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

And with that, I mean as a woman, you are instinctively nurturing, you know, so that that’s kind of that’s hard wired in in a woman. But nurturing does not mean that you should always do things for other people, always please everybody. You need to set the boundaries for recovery so that you can be fully present when you’re present.

Misty Williams

Yeah, there’s a big lesson for me has been seeing myself because the nurturing part of me will see everybody else. I’ll see their needs, I’ll see how they’re struggling, I’ll see what they need that they don’t even know they need, right? I want to support them, champion them, give very, very natural for me as a woman and as the firstborn of four kids who my mom kind of put me in that role from a young age and um and I I loved being able to give and contribute. It’s very rewarding. What I didn’t do well is see myself and that’s been a deep integral part of my own healing, is seeing myself and putting my needs on the table with everybody else’s needs. I’ll just kinda, well, I see what everyone else needs. Let’s just pretend like these don’t exist over here because it makes it easier for me if I think that this is all there is right, I’m less overwhelmed if I’m not thinking about my own needs and then they never get dealt with and then you’re so depleted your battery gets run down and you know, there are women in our community who are they’ve, they’ve hit the point of no return and it’s sad and it’s gutting and I want to do something to be able to help those women. 

And the point of no return is where you you can’t work, you can’t function. You aren’t able to bring resources in to invest in your healing, right? You’re like you’re just trapped in this. All I can do is basically be in this body until it just completely gives out and rely on whatever goodwill and social programs there are out there. All of us should be aware of the choice that we have in this moment to choose something different for our lives and our futures and putting us ourselves on the back burner pretending like these needs don’t exist because it’s overwhelming is I mean we’re going to pay a heavy price. So at some point, all of us have to pay some kind of price, right? Making changes and prioritizing and we need to see ourselves and we need to acknowledge ourselves and make sure this person that’s giving so much to the people around us is able to keep doing that. Because what happens when you’re gone, who takes care of them then, you know? Yeah, it’s a deep question. It’s a deep the whole topic when you start peeling back the layers for women and what this journey is for us. There’s a lot to it.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Well, I so love what you’re doing. Thank you for being there. Thank you for the work you’re doing and I hope all you know, people check out healingrosie.com, all the resources, everything that is there to really help them on their journey, to understand themselves and understand what they need to do, to live an optimum life and live a full life and joyful life, you know, which, you know, which everyone deserves and they should have.

Misty Williams

Yeah, well, it’s an honor to do the work that I get to do. And I’m sure you feel the same about the work that you do to be able to contribute to the world in the ways that we do, and to elevate people’s healing and to shine a light on the things they can do to really change their life is it’s very fulfilling and I feel honored to do it and I know you feel honored to do it and you know, we’re holding a beautiful space for the people that feel called to our message. So, thank you so much for having me on today and having this really important conversation.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD 

Thank you so much. Misty, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Misty Williams

Thank you