The Energy Fix Episode 110 - FINAL.mp3
2025-04-17
Transcript
0:00:40 Tansy Rodgers: There are moments in healing that feel like hitting the bottom of the ocean floor, where it’s dark, it’s quiet. Everything in you whispers this might be it. But sometimes that’s exactly where we find the crack of light, the turning point, the shift. You hear about that all the time. You have to hit rock bottom to really make that huge transformation. And today’s guest, Jen Sinclair, knows that moment well.
0:01:10 Tansy Rodgers: Her story is one of heartbreak and healing, of addiction, chronic illness and mental health struggles, followed by a soul deep transformation that began not with a magic pill, but with the smallest decision to try something new, to believe, maybe for the first time, that she wasn’t broken, just waiting to come home to herself. And in this episode we get raw about what it means to reclaim your mental, emotional and physical health naturally, and why giving up isn’t the end of your story.
0:01:48 Tansy Rodgers: Jen shares her incredible path from psychiatric meds and chronic pain to this beautiful place of joy, freedom and a thriving life she never imagined was possible. If you really are enjoying this podcast and you are enjoying this episode, make sure that you jump on over and hit subscribe, leave a positive review and let others know that you are loving it as much as you are. I really appreciate it so much.
0:02:21 Tansy Rodgers: Now, before we dive into Jen’s story and we talk all about health and wellness and her journey and what she found to be so valuable, let’s talk about what’s opening up for you and what is on the horizon this week. In the work that I’m doing, there’s a couple things I want to emphasize before we get into this conversation. So first, the Energy Alchemy Circle, my monthly soul sanctuary, is officially closing its founding member doors tonight at midnight on April 22nd. So if you’re living listening to this when this episode comes out, the doors will be shutting tonight.
0:02:58 Tansy Rodgers: If you’ve been circling the idea of sacred community and energy healing and functional wellness and support that really meets your your nervous system where it’s at right now, this is the time to jump in. So head to tansyrogers.com backslash membership to join us before the portion portal closes. And yeah, you can find that link down in the show notes. And then on Thursday, April 24, I will be co leading another sound and crystal Reiki healing session with my colleague and friend Jill O’Leary.
0:03:35 Tansy Rodgers: We do this in person once a month in her Healing Arts studio in Lititz, Pennsylvania. So this is a really great time. If your body feels like like it’s been craving a reset, like like your energy’s been scattered and you need to just hone it in. Come and soak in the sacred sounds of sound healing and the vibrations of crystal Reiki. It’s such a great time to relax but then also commune with other like minded people.
0:04:08 Tansy Rodgers: And I will be at the Hershey Gem Jewelry and Rock show this Sunday, April 27, and at the May Day Metaphysical Market in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Saturday, May 3. So that this is, this is market and Expo and fair season coming up. I am going to be all over the place and so pay attention because if you want to come out to one of these shows and say hi and meet with me live and shop jewelry and shop crystals, that’s the time to do it. So yes.
0:04:43 Tansy Rodgers: So we got two that are coming up here in the next two weeks. Both are perfect if you’re ready to really dive in and to feel the energy in your hands from the crystals and the jewelry and connect with like minded souls. I love when people come by and say hi to me and you know, just connect with me face to face. That’s my favorite, favorite part of it. So if you do come on out, make sure that you come and say hi.
0:05:08 Tansy Rodgers: And then one more thing I want to renounce. This is not for me in particular what’s going on in my work. This is really just as a highlight because last week’s conversation with Rachel Pastor and Tiffany Heard really lit something up in this community. And so many of you reached out and messaged me about the 30 day microdosing experience that I mentioned. And I want to highlight the again because if this is something that’s been interesting to you or you’re really curious about this leg of healing or this type of healing, this would be a perfect time for you to dive in and connect with that. Because especially if you’re a beginner, you’re going to have that opportunity to have face to face coaching and connection and being, being taken through in a more supportive way.
0:06:02 Tansy Rodgers: So that’s still happening. If you’re curious, you can go back and listen to that episode, but I will also drop the link down in the show notes so that you can jump on over there and get your hands onto that. The 30 day microdosing experience does start on May 1st, but they say that if you want to have all your supplies ahead of time, you’re going to want to make sure that you get yourself into the group or into the experience by April 28th.
0:06:36 Tansy Rodgers: So yeah, so just be mindful of those times because that does make a difference. It’s ending here soon. All Right now it is time to meet Jen, connect in with her incredible story and her words of wisdom and just, just really hear what happens when a woman decides that healing gets to look different. Let’s dive in.
0:07:01 Tansy Rodgers: Welcome to the Energy Fix. Jen, I’m so happy to have you here today.
0:07:05 Jen St. Clair: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
0:07:09 Tansy Rodgers: You know, I learned about your journey through another guest who is your husband that just came out just the other week here. We, he just came out on an episode here on the Energy Fix and I was so fascinated by your journey that I couldn’t wait to dive into your journey with you on your own interview. So thank you for being here.
0:07:32 Jen St. Clair: Well, thank you for having me. Yes, he loves to share my story. So, so, and they get me to share my story. So it’s more tag teaming at this these days.
0:07:42 Tansy Rodgers: Well, it’s a fascinating one. And I feel like this first, the first question that I always ask my guests, I feel like this is so perfect for you because we’re going to be talking a lot about the stages, your journey, the seasons of your, of your life that you’ve gone through. We’re going to be talking a lot about that. So I want to know right now where you’re at at this point, this season of your life. Is there a word or a phrase that you’re really embodying right now to keep you on your path, to keep you moving forward?
0:08:15 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, so I actually have two kind of. I have a friend that’s an intuitive healer that at the beginning of every year she offers to do a word if you want one. And so this year I almost always do one every year. And this year her word that she gave me was fortify, which I thought was really interesting. And I had to sit and think about that one for a few minutes. And as her description is, was great of why she described it, but then I added a little to it.
0:08:44 Jen St. Clair: For me, fortify is to strengthen. And so a lot of it is strengthening the things as you learn, as you hear my story, you’ll see that I’ve learned and grown a lot. And I feel like it’s kind of just fortifying those things that I have learned and really solidifying them in my subconscious, in my conscious life. And then the word that I actually had for myself was elevate. Because again, I have learned and grown a lot.
0:09:13 Jen St. Clair: And especially through the last five years, my life seven years ago was completely different. And even five years ago looked completely different than what it does now. And I feel like I’VE gone. Growth didn’t quite cut it because I’ve gone through a lot of growth in the last five years, and now I feel like I’ve hit this level where it’s time to basically level up and elevate, to start really taking on what I think I’m meant to do.
0:09:40 Jen St. Clair: And being here, doing this podcast is one of those steps. This is not necessarily my comfort zone. My husband loves to be in front of an audience and a microphone, and I am very content to stand in the background and say, good job, honey. So. So, yeah, this is. This is pushing me a little bit more outside of my comfort zone to try and elevate and hit those goals that I believe I can do or that I’m capable of.
0:10:08 Tansy Rodgers: Well, and you need to have strength. You need to fortify yourself to be able to elevate in the first place.
0:10:14 Jen St. Clair: Right, right. On so many different levels, on physical level and emotional and mental. And so, yeah, so those are kind of the two. They. I felt like they tied really well together when she gave me that one, and I’d already had the other one, so, yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at.
0:10:29 Tansy Rodgers: Okay, so let’s take that just one step deeper.
0:10:32 Tansy Rodgers: You know, when it’s.
0:10:34 Tansy Rodgers: When we’re going through these struggles, when life feels hard, when you’re trying to make changes that maybe is not very. It’s not very easy or comforting to your soul because you don’t know the other side of it. Right. Like, what do you. How. How are you really staying focused to staying into that path of fortifying and elevating when life can seem really scary.
0:11:03 Jen St. Clair: For me right now, I. I can look back. The jump from where I was to where I am is. Is huge. It’s like Grand Canyon level of a change. And so I. But I’m still very. I don’t live in the past, but I’m still very well aware of where I came from and what I dealt with. And I do. Nothing’s perfect. I still have moments where I get stressed and I get sad and. And I do catch little things creeping back in. And so it’s just kind of staying vigilant and recognizing and staying. You know, just because I’ve gotten to where I am, I can’t just pretend like it’s all gonna just stay there automatic without the work. Right. It still requires the work. And I. I don’t want to stay where I’m at now either, because it’ so fun to grow and move past where I was that now it’s like, well, how much farther can I get?
0:11:55 Jen St. Clair: And that was so not a mindset I have ever had in my life. And so now it’s kind of more just a challenge to myself to see what I really am capable of doing. And so yeah, it’s just kind of staying vigilant and, and as an unusual. And I, I dealt with addiction in my life and, and I look at addiction the same way. I’ve been clean for 15 years. But I will never, you know, let myself believe that it wouldn’t take much for me to end up back where, where I came from. So.
0:12:28 Tansy Rodgers: Well, all right, let’s, let’s pull the curtain aside of the proverbial house and look inside. Let’s talk about this journey. I mean, you had a journey of intense struggle that really led to this beautiful, incredible transformation. So can you share with us this journey that you’ve been on and the beginning stages of your story?
0:12:49 Jen St. Clair: Sure, yeah. It’s funny, as I, as I was writing out things to do my bio and that I’m making a list of all of these things and I got done and I looked and I’m like, this doesn’t even look like, this looks like a soap opera or something. This doesn’t even look like this should be one person’s life. And it was. And then I was like, this is really sad. Like this is, this is what I, what my life was for so long.
0:13:16 Jen St. Clair: I started struggling with depression when I was. Well when 12, 13 was actually when I was put on medication. And I’m 51 now, so that’s, you know, way back. I was put on Prozac. Like the first year that Prozac was introduced to the market, I had a eating disorder at the time I was anorexic, struggling a lot with depression and actually was, had started self harming and so right out the gate. Pretty young, you know, just barely hitting my teens.
0:13:50 Jen St. Clair: Struggled a lot with all of those things. And my poor mother, I have two older siblings at the time and they didn’t deal with any of that stuff. And so my poor mom, she just was at a loss of what to do because, and I get it, you know, you have a kid that’s, that’s, that’s cutting, that’s not eating, that’s crying and sad all the time, not going to school because they’re sick. You, you really don’t know what to do with that.
0:14:22 Jen St. Clair: And so at the time the answer was antidepressants and Prozac, like I said, was just on the market and that’s what they put me on to begin with.
0:14:32 Tansy Rodgers: How old did you say you were when you got put on to Prozac?
0:14:35 Jen St. Clair: 13.
0:14:36 Tansy Rodgers: 13, yeah.
0:14:38 Jen St. Clair: Yeah. So way back. And pretty much from then on, I had a little bit of a period in my late teens, early 20s that I went off of antidepressants, but pretty much from that 13 to about 45, I was on. I was medicated with some sort of ssri. I ran the gamut on pretty much everyone that was out there. So.
0:15:05 Tansy Rodgers: Which must have been really challenging for a teen girl to be on the ssris. So consistently when hormones are fluctuating and all over the place.
0:15:17 Jen St. Clair: Right. Yeah, for sure. And I do look back and wonder. I mean, obviously there’s degrees of how much hormones affect things. Right. But I’m sure hormones were playing a big part as we, as I look back at my health history now, knowing what I know, I also was very. I have a lot of ear infections of baby, lots of antibiotic use. And what we know now about the gut brain connection, my gut microbiome was probably pretty messed up from a very young age, which I’m sure contributed to a lot of the mental health stuff, if you really want to get into it.
0:15:53 Tansy Rodgers: We.
0:15:54 Jen St. Clair: I haven’t actually tested, but we’ve been treating me as if I’m MTHFR for a while now. And with. And that’s where we’ve seen some significant shifts as when we started doing that. So I think there was probably some of that type of stuff genetically going on too that was playing a part in the background. I think there was. There was a bunch of things that contributed that took me to a little bit next level than what my siblings had been, but I’m sure hormones definitely were. Were a part of it.
0:16:25 Tansy Rodgers: Well, and MTHFR also affects somebody’s mental health as well.
0:16:32 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And I’ll get in. And hopefully we can get into that a little later because it was actually when I made some diet shifts that a lot of the mental health issues completely disappeared. And I. We believe 100. That had to do with MTHFR.
0:16:51 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah.
0:16:51 Jen St. Clair: And getting certain things out of my diet and certain things into my diet. So.
0:16:56 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. So you, you were 13 years old, you got diagnosed with depression, you were put on Prozac, you had the self harming, you weren’t eating. What else was going on? What, what happened after that?
0:17:12 Jen St. Clair: I got, I mean, high school, lots of drama. I lost a lot of. By my senior year, some of my best friends weren’t so much best friends. Anymore. I was really difficult, and I can acknowledge that I was really difficult to be around. I’m sure it’s not fun to be around someone that’s, that’s moody and sad all the time and struggling and all of these things. I. I graduated when I was 17 and I moved out of my parents house pretty quick after that.
0:17:43 Jen St. Clair: I didn’t have a horrible relationship with my, with my parents, but I was definitely, like I said, my mom didn’t quite know how to handle me. Sometimes I was a little bit the black sheep of the family. And so I was just ready to get out and do my own thing. So I moved out when I was 17 and I guess at that point I fell in with what a lot of people would refer to as the wrong crowd. Got a little bit into using some street drugs at that time.
0:18:09 Jen St. Clair: And that actually is the period of time where I went off of my SSRIs. During that period. I didn’t care about going to doctors and all of that obviously through that point. So I spent about five years kind of in that world. I ended up getting pregnant with my oldest son. And that was kind of my wake up call that I needed to get my life together and get out of the situation I was in. And so I moved from the town that I was living in at that time to a different town and basically just became a single mom with my son.
0:18:44 Jen St. Clair: I was twin. I had him two weeks before I turned 22. So I was basically 22 at that point. And that’s when the things really started to crash again. I ended up back on SSRIs because my. And I’m sure a lot of it, there was a lot of postpartum, I’m sure, going on during that time. But once I had him and he was a little bit of a difficult kid, they actually told me when he was 5 that he was going to be bipolar because his behavior was so all over the place. They’re like, we can’t officially diagnose him. But this is what. Which just then confirmed me that everything going on with me was just genetic and there was nothing that could be done about it. And we all just had to learn how to cope and deal with it.
0:19:30 Jen St. Clair: And so I ended up back on SSRIs at that point. And that’s when my anxiety attack started about age 23. That’s the first time I wore a heart monitor because I was sure something was wrong with my heart. And they came back and told me it was anxiety. And I was like, really? Anxiety can do that to you. And actually relapsed a little bit into the self harm and those types of things. Eating issues and that again during.
0:19:58 Jen St. Clair: During my early 20s. So it was a lot of up and down. And I did end up meeting my. My husband at the time where I’m. I divorced him, but my husband at the time I met him and married him and we basically lived our life. I wouldn’t say it was a great marriage, but I. And I was just medicated through. Through it with the antidepressants. So that was kind of just the basics of it. And then in the middle of that, I did end up. I did have some health issues.
0:20:35 Jen St. Clair: Well, I had a lot of health issues going on. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. They tested me all the time for like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis because I had all these symptoms. I had irritable bowel, ibs, really bad. And so I had all of these little health issues. Some of them were diagnosed, some of them they could never like. I had all the symptoms, but the tests didn’t come back. So I was dealing with all of these things. And then I did have some crime. I have discus some disc issues in my neck and that ended up getting me on.
0:21:08 Jen St. Clair: They put me on opiates. Sorry for that. And that became a whole different beast. For about eight years I ended up highly addicted to opiates. And I can remember the first time I went into the doctor and them saying, hey, we have this great new drug that works on opiate receptors. It’s not addictive. And that was OxyContin. And I did end up switching over to Lortab, but I was doing like a handful of ten Lortab tens a day.
0:21:44 Jen St. Clair: I take them all at once. And that was my life for about eight years of a pretty severe addiction to pain pills that culminated in a suicide attempt and an overdose and ending up in a. In rehab and the psych ward for a week. And then all the fun withdrawal symptoms of coming off of that. And in the middle of all that, my marriage was falling apart. My. My husband had had an affair that he had told me about.
0:22:18 Jen St. Clair: And part of that was that’s where the crash came because I was so drugged out that and so numbed out between the SSRI and the opiates that I just couldn’t deal with life. And so when life actually finally hit me, I. I didn’t want to deal with it. So we went through all of that and I came out of rehab and that will be 15 years ago this August, they told me when I left that I had a 90% chance. We had a little family meeting before I could go home with everyone, and they told my family that there was a 90% chance that within three months I would be back in there.
0:22:58 Jen St. Clair: And I’ve never relapsed since. And so I’m very grateful that I made it through that. I’ve lost a lot of friends. I’ve worked a lot in addiction recovery since then, and I’ve lost quite a few friends that just haven’t been able to pull themselves out. So I did manage to get away from. From the opiates, but during that time, they diagnosed me with bipolar. And so then they added in the mood stabilizer to go along with the SSRI.
0:23:30 Jen St. Clair: So that was my life for about 10 years. And then about five years after the overdose and all of that, my, my. My husband and I, at the time we decided we’re going to try and work things out. We stayed together five years. And then when things just weren’t. They weren’t getting better. And so at that point when it was pretty mutual, we were both like, yeah, this needs to end. And so. And I was in a much better place to cope and deal with that.
0:24:06 Jen St. Clair: So I got divorced almost 10 years ago now and still was pretty. I was still pretty all over the place. And, and the divorce, even though it was mutual and I was ready for, was still really hard. And it just fed into my negative self talk and the depression and all of the negativity that I thought about my life and everything else. I had a. I had a relationship shortly after my divorce that fell apart like most first relationships after divorce do. But that, again, it just. It just compounded everything. It just really just reinforced all those negative beliefs to me.
0:24:52 Jen St. Clair: And so I was in a pretty. I wasn’t at a suicidal point, but I was definitely. My. My mania would hit and I would put myself in some very precarious situations. My depression would. I’d get depressed, but it was never to a suicidal level at this point. I did recognize. I mean, I had four kids and now I was a single mom. And so I needed to be there for them. So that was. That was a good driving force. But it’s still.
0:25:22 Jen St. Clair: What they didn’t see in the background was pretty ugly at times. And so that was just where I sat. And I really had no intentions of getting back in a relationship at that point. I had convinced myself it would never work and nobody would want to deal with me, right? Nobody in their Right mind. And so that was kind of where I was at at that point. And my kids. One of my kids convinced me to get on an online dating app. I made it. I lasted a week. I just really didn’t want to be there. But I will say this. In that week, I met one person, and that one person happened to be Jared.
0:26:03 Jen St. Clair: And it was really funny. The first night we talked. We talked for hours, and I literally dumped everything on him. I gave him the. All the dirt, the suicide attempts, the addiction, everything. Basically saying, keep your distance. You know, this is your one chance to bail on this. But there was this really. It was really interesting because we. We connected instantly. Not as, like, love interests, but best friends.
0:26:32 Jen St. Clair: We instantly became best friends. And he. He, at that point, challenged me. Jared grew up very differently. My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. I worked as a CNA for years. Everyone expected me to be a nurse. I just didn’t like the hours, so I didn’t want to do that. But very Western medicine. And so the only route that I had ever heard of or known was medication. Jared grew up very different. He grew up in a health food store and had never. He. He didn’t even know what aspirin was until he was, like, 15.
0:27:07 Jen St. Clair: He’d never been to a doctor till he was around that age because he’d sprained his foot. So he had a very different view. He. And he basically told me that first night that I wasn’t bipolar. And he really ticked me off when he said that. And I argued with. I’m like, I am bipolar. I’ve been diagnosed. I take meds. I can’t live without my meds and all this. And. And he basically said, you are not bipolar. You have some symptomology that fits a diagnosis that they call bipolar, but you are not bipolar. And I never really realized how much I had embraced that diagnosis as my identity.
0:27:47 Jen St. Clair: And so that. Even just starting to recognize that, started some mind shift because I realized that I really had made it who I was. And it was an excuse for a lot of things, a lot of behaviors and. And things that I didn’t want to have to face.
0:28:04 Tansy Rodgers: Let’s talk about something that I’ve seen over and over again in clients. You’re doing the breath work. You’re cleaning up your food. You’re meditating, journaling, stretching, detoxing, healing. And still something feels off. You’re tired. Your mood swings make no sense. Your body is puffy or inflamed, or your brain can’t string a thought together and you start to wonder, what am I missing? Sometimes it’s the environment itself.
0:28:35 Tansy Rodgers: Not your mindset, not your diet, but what’s literally floating in the air around you. Mold and mycotoxins are super sneaky. They don’t always show up as giant black spots on a wall. Sometimes they’re hiding in your laundry, your couch, your vents on your food, and they’re slowly wearing down your immune system, your nervous system, and your spark. That’s where super stratum comes in. It’s like clearing energetic debris, but for your home.
0:29:07 Tansy Rodgers: It uses advanced plant based science to wipe out mold spores, purify your space, and help your environment stop working against you and start working for your healing. Because it attacks those mycotoxins at its root. If this hits close to home, trust that nudge. You can jump down into the show notes and click the link for suprastratum and start breathing a little bit easier again.
0:29:40 Jen St. Clair: That’s not a comfortable place to be put in.
0:29:43 Tansy Rodgers: Well, and one of the questions I even wrote down as you were talking was, do you believe that it was bipolar or was it not knowing how to regulate? Or maybe your health was just dysregulated and therefore the symptoms were coming up. And it sounds like you and Jared had that conversation.
0:30:01 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, well, that conversation took a while to get around to. He threw out, you know, that initial. This isn’t who you are. This is symptoms that you have. That conversation in depth followed over years to come. But at this point, no, I don’t believe that. I. And, and I actually, I’m not convinced. I, I kind of am more convinced that people are more like I am. They have symptoms of something that they now call bipolar and the symptoms are 100% real.
0:30:36 Jen St. Clair: It’s not, I’m not, I have them. I’m not saying people don’t have these symptoms. I’m just not convinced at this point anymore that the diagnosis is accurate was what they say it is. I think there’s a lot of contributing factors that go into it. I think there’s a lot of deficiencies that we have in our, in our bodies and our diets. I think there’s a lot of toxicity that we have. And then, yeah, just. Even our hormone hormones and our genetics do play some part, but I don’t think they’re the be all end all.
0:31:12 Jen St. Clair: I think we can learn to regulate those. And then I do think some of us. Jared is the type. He. Everything is cup full or half full to him. It’s just his personality type. He doesn’t get depressed. He doesn’t. And I threw that at him a lot. I’m like, you don’t get it. You don’t experience this. And he’ll admit that he doesn’t. He’ll get sad sometimes. And he’s never dealt with depression. He’s never dealt with anxiety on a level that you have to wear a heart monitor.
0:31:40 Jen St. Clair: And so some of it I do, I think, is personality, too. My personality tends to, for whatever reason, have a harder time seeing the brighter side of things at times, and I have to work a lot harder at that than he does, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be. Be changed, so. And the mindset shift was a big one for me. That one took a lot of work. And that’s actually when I talk about, like, fortifying and elevating that.
0:32:09 Jen St. Clair: It’s probably more in the mindset realm that I need to do that than anywhere else. So.
0:32:14 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. You know, I was thinking back as you were telling your story. The. The. The level of damage that opiates have done for people and their lives. I mean, not even just taking people’s lives, but.
0:32:35 Jen St. Clair: I mean, family.
0:32:36 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I. Of course, death is the worst end all be all. But in the same breath, when you. When you make it through and you have this wrecked life, sometimes that may feel even worse because you’re still living through it. Right.
0:32:53 Jen St. Clair: You still. You still have to figure out how to repair that damage. Yeah.
0:32:56 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. Wow. I mean, the turmoil and that. The turmoil, but then also the damage that it probably did on your mindset and where you felt that you could even go at that point must have been just devastating.
0:33:14 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, Well, I. I tell the story, you know, I would take a handful of pills, and I’d go to bed, and I’d feel my breathing starting to get shallower, and. And I would think to myself, this is it. I did it this time. I took too much. And. And then I’d think about my kids, and. But then I’d fall asleep, and I’d wake up the next morning, and I’d do it all over again. And so coming out of rehab, it was. I had to really work on, you know, my.
0:33:40 Jen St. Clair: Especially my two youngest girls, they hadn’t really had a mom for. For the majority of their life. My two older boys, they saw a lot more than. And. And understood a lot more than what my younger girls did. And so there is. There was a lot of guilt to work through in that department, too, of. You know, I been a really crappy mom. Forget the marriage and being a crappy wife. And, you know, the marriage was both sides.
0:34:10 Jen St. Clair: It’s not an excuse for that. My ex cheated, but I also was very disconnected. Right. I. I was in a whole different world with the opiates. And so it’s not to excuse behavior or anything, but it takes two for sure, to cause the problems. And, yeah, trying to amend that afterwards was just it. And. And at one point. And that’s why at that point, it was like, the marriage is done. Like, we. We tried. There’s too much damage at this point.
0:34:40 Jen St. Clair: And. And it was time to recognize I needed to focus on being a mom and repairing that damage over. Repairing the damage with my. In a marriage that wasn’t going to make it so. Which was a hard decision because I took that commitment very seriously, too. And the last thing I wanted was. Was a divorce. But I was at a point where I could focus on one thing or two things, you know, staying clean. And then it had to be my kids.
0:35:09 Jen St. Clair: And so that’s. That was kind of the direction I ended up going with it.
0:35:13 Tansy Rodgers: But looking back, was there a particular moment that you realized that you weren’t broken and that healing was actually possible for you?
0:35:23 Jen St. Clair: What.
0:35:23 Tansy Rodgers: What was that shift?
0:35:26 Jen St. Clair: There had been a few little things, honestly, the fact that I had stayed clean and not relapsed like they had said I would. I do have a little bit of a stubborn streak in me. I don’t like to be told what to do or what I’m going to do. And so there was a part of me that wanted to prove everybody wrong. And so I think that having that a little bit behind me helped for sure. But I still felt pretty broken. It was like, okay, I.
0:36:00 Jen St. Clair: I can hang on to that because that’s something good I did, but the rest of me is still pretty broken, if that makes sense. Like, I’ll hang on to this. I managed this, but I didn’t really feel like the rest of it felt like, way too big. Like, in your mind, your mind being broken just feels like something that opiates are an outside source. I guess I could look at that as a way that I could put up defenses to keep that out again. But in your own mind, I didn’t. I didn’t know how to put those defenses up at the time.
0:36:30 Jen St. Clair: So I still was struggling a lot. The cyclical thinking was a big issue for me, and the stories I would tell myself that I could get myself so worked up, and it wasn’t even true just by thinking, you know, what if or this could I tell myself these stories and my kids would walk in and I’d snap at them, and it wasn’t. They hadn’t even done anything, but it was because of this life I was living in my head that.
0:36:56 Jen St. Clair: And I did that a lot. That I didn’t realize how much I did that until I started recognizing it and then trying to work myself out of that.
0:37:05 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s been shown, and you’ve experienced it, that mental health and addiction are so intertwined. Right, Right. What do you wish more people really understood about the connection between trauma, emotional pain, addiction? What. What do you experience? What do you wish more people could really wrap their heads around or even that it was. That was being talked more about?
0:37:33 Jen St. Clair: Oh, man, that’s a big one. Well, try. Yeah, well. And I was gonna say the trauma part of it. So I didn’t even include. During. In the middle of all this, my. My ex husband’s brother, who we were very close with, died by suicide. And the two of us were the ones that found him. And that was obviously. That was the most traumatic thing I’d ever. It was horrific. It was gory. It was all of the things. And that just obviously I just shut. He shut down emotionally, and I just drove into the pills. That. That really was when the. The addiction ended up in a much darker place and much. Had more heavy use.
0:38:14 Jen St. Clair: And so. But we didn’t talk about it. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And everybody saw my addiction. They knew I had pain, so they didn’t want to say anything. So it was this silent, you know, it was the secret that everybody knew, but nobody wanted to talk about. And. And I don’t blame people. It’s uncomfortable, but I do wish people had probably. I think the best thing that Jared ever did was straight out the gate was just challenge my thinking.
0:38:44 Jen St. Clair: And it did make me mad. And I’ve been in that position. I challenge people’s thinking sometimes, and they get really pissed off. They don’t like it, and you might lose the. They might not. They might get mad at you, and they might not talk to you, but they also might think about it. And it may not take root right away, but the seed has been planted. And you can’t recognize a problem if you don’t. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t recognize a problem.
0:39:10 Jen St. Clair: Recognition and acknowledgement is the very first step to fixing anything. And so I think, honestly, for me, the core of it comes down to talk about it. Talk about. And I hate to say you have to do it with diplomacy. But I think challenging people’s beliefs until they can challenge their own beliefs. I challenge my own beliefs now all the time, getting curious. And my question, every day, almost. Well, every day, at some point, I ask myself, could I be wrong about this?
0:39:39 Jen St. Clair: Am I wrong? Jared does that one. That one became a big one for both of us, actually, is just asking ourselves, am I wrong? And sometimes I come back and I’m like, nope, I got that one right. But there are times where I’m like, okay, what is a different perspective on this? And I have to. You know. And then I can look at it, and even in that pause, I can start to see things, and my mind starts to shift a little bit.
0:40:07 Jen St. Clair: So, honestly, I think one of the first steps for people is to be open and don’t take everything so personally. Like, if someone challenges you, it’s not because they’re trying to be mean. More often than not, they’re trying to help. So. And yeah, then connection. I think being connected, when you deal with mental health issues, addiction issues, you tend to isolate a lot, and that just compounds the problems.
0:40:35 Jen St. Clair: Because then again, you’re stuck in your head more.
0:40:37 Tansy Rodgers: So do you think that you would have been receptive if somebody came up to you and talked and challenged you at that very beginning stage?
0:40:50 Jen St. Clair: Probably not. I know. So I say that. But I. Because I had heard things, so I could. So this is a funny one. And Jared likes to tease me about it. When we first met, I told him how much I couldn’t stand Tom Cruise. And a big part of that. Well, I’ve never. Even. Back in the day, I would. But a big part of that was Tom Cruise’s rant. If anyone remembers that from years ago on. I don’t even remember was it Ellen or he had another one with.
0:41:21 Jen St. Clair: I can’t remember. I actually watched the other one just the other day. He went off on mental health issues and SSRIs. And I. Yeah, I was like, he has no idea. He’s full of it. And now I listen to him, like, man, he nailed it. But so, no, in the moment, because. Because I didn’t know there was another. I didn’t know there was another viewpoint of it. And to me, he was just. And part of that, I think, is because he was a movie star out there lecturing people. And I just don’t.
0:41:55 Jen St. Clair: I don’t care for that. So I think it needs to come from a loving place of someone close to you that cares about you. I think it’s really hard to have just some abstract person tell you that what you’re doing is not working isn’t right. That doesn’t go over with anyone very well. Right. But like I said, at the same time, you need to plant those seeds and have those. You can have those diplomatic discussions and say, hey, maybe have you thought about this? Or what about this is a possibility?
0:42:26 Jen St. Clair: And I heard this story. And one. That’s one of the reasons I want to tell my story, is because I absolutely was in that hardcore. Jared describes me as Gollum with my as with the ring, as is. How I was with my medication when we met is like, my precious. I’m never giving up my medication. I don’t think it was quite that extreme, but that’s the way he perceived it. And there probably was some truth to that because I really had convinced myself that I would never function without meds until he started challenging me on it. And he’s like, this is you on meds, I guess.
0:43:02 Jen St. Clair: He’s like, you’re all over the place. You. You make me dizzy. Like you’re hiking a mountain in Peru by yourself one day and you’re in your closet crying the next day. He’s like, what are you like without meds? So. And so as I kind of stepped back, I realized I wasn’t nearly as stable as I. Yeah, it really was that. That was kind of one of the next questions when I really stopped and looked at it. I’m like, I’m not that stable and I’m taking the meds religiously. And so I guess in my head, I decided I’d be way worse if I didn’t have them. But when I really kind of stepped back, I’m like, well, yeah, suicide’s the next worse. But am I gonna really hit that point? Because I’m all, I’m. I’m not great where I’m at.
0:43:50 Jen St. Clair: And so it was just some of those things. And I started learning as because we became such good friends. He had his podcast and radio show. I started working for him about a year after we met. And so I started learning a lot more about the natural health world and how the body works as a whole instead of just trying to pick it apart into little pieces and treat something. And a lot of that, like, it just made sense to me.
0:44:20 Jen St. Clair: The whole gut brain connection made a lot of sense to me. And. And my antibiotic use and my history, it just connected a lot of dots. And I started thinking, oh, maybe there’s. And he’d show me the studies and I’d be Like, well, maybe I need to be a little more open to looking at some of this kind of stuff. And so that was kind of the first. That was my intro was him. The first time we ever met, he took me to dinner. The first time we met in person, he took me to dinner. And at that point, my IBS was awful.
0:44:53 Jen St. Clair: And I can’t remember. He shares this story every once in a while. I can’t remember if he shared it with you, but I had a few bites of my food, and he, being as forward as he is, was like, what’s going on? You know, you all right? And I. And I just said, my stuff. I can’t eat. I really had gotten to a point where I just didn’t eat because it hurt so bad every time I ate. And I was running to the bathroom, and I didn’t want to run to the bathroom in the middle of. Of a date.
0:45:18 Jen St. Clair: And so he’s like, well, let me take you back to the store. I can help you with that. And I. I had used a few supplements here and there, but nothing. They were like, from the grocery store. Nothing. I didn’t know really anything about them. And he brought me back, and it actually was one of his formulas back on track, which is probiotics and digestive enzymes. So take this home, take it tomorrow when you eat, and let me know what you think.
0:45:42 Jen St. Clair: And I texted him the next day and was like, holy crap, this is the first time I’ve eaten anything and not been sick. I’m not running the bathroom. My stomach isn’t cramping. And so he was pretty smart in his first introduction because he gave me something that I had results with, like, immediately. And so. And. And the thing is, too look at anybody, you know, with mental health issues, I find. I dare you to find me one person with mental health issues that doesn’t deal with gut issues.
0:46:11 Jen St. Clair: It just doesn’t exist. And so my first experience with a supplement was a positive one. So that opened the door to me being a little more willing to give some of those a shot as I learned more about them. So supplements for me was my starting point. Taking a pill is easy, right? I’ve been doing. I’ve been taking pills my whole life. And so just taking a few more pills wasn’t a big deal to add in. They. And whether I believe they were going to work or not, that’s an easy, easy thing to start with.
0:46:45 Jen St. Clair: And so that was for my journey, starting with supplementation, filling in some deficiencies that I had was. Was the first Step. And I don’t think I’ve said this a lot of times. I needed that as my first step because once I filled in some of those deficiencies, I. My brain started to actually work. I feel like it started to work a little bit better. I wasn’t. I was still on the SSRIs, but I was thinking a little more clearly at the time. And so as I. And then as I was listening more and more to his podcast, then I started thinking, maybe I can get off of these meds.
0:47:26 Jen St. Clair: And so that was a whole other adventure. Getting off of. Getting off of the mood stabilizer and the antidepressant. I don’t. I tell people, don’t do it the way I did it, because I want. The part of me wanted to prove Jared wrong. I wanted to go off my meds and show him what a mess I was. But there was also a part of me that was really curious as to how I would do. And he had put me on what he calls his vital five, the five supplements he thinks everyone in America, most adults in America could use, and they’re omega 3s. And the studies show for mental health, that high dose omega 3s is the most beneficial. So I was doing like 3 grams and above of omega 3s a day.
0:48:17 Jen St. Clair: Spore probiotics. I. He put me on and then the digestive enzymes to help soothe my stomach every time I ate, because nobody feels good mentally when they’re not feeling well physically. And then magnesium. And then he had his multivitamin that had methylated. He. His vitamin has methylated B and folic or folate in it, not folic acid, which at that point in time, we weren’t even thinking about those types of things. But he put me on his. Those things along with a high dose of turmeric and cbd, because I still was. I mean, I was on opiates for a reason, right? Pain was a legit thing.
0:49:03 Jen St. Clair: And I would get these knots in my left arm, shoulder that I couldn’t use my arm sometimes. And I have bulging and degenerative disc and all these things. So I. Nerve pain. So the pain was still there. So we had to bring the inflammation down. And so those were basically what I was on. And as I. The longer I stayed on those, the more clearly I kind of. My brain was getting a little more. And that’s when I decided I would wean.
0:49:29 Jen St. Clair: I didn’t tell him for about the first three or four months. I.1 thing about my personality is I. When I. When I get interested in something I’m all in. Which was part of the problem with the bipolar diagnosis. I was diagnosed with it and I dove into that diagnosis. I knew all, everything about it and, and I am one of those that I would get my medication sheets and I would read them cover to cover. I knew all the side effects. For whatever reason, I dismissed a lot of them and was like, well, that’s just what it is. You have to deal with that.
0:50:06 Jen St. Clair: But I also very clearly understood the dangers of going on and off of antidepressants. And I had ran out before and knew how sick I got, even just missing a day or two. And so I knew to take the weaning process very slowly. It took me almost a year to wean off of both medications, but about three months in or so, I was like, I probably should tell somebody what I’m doing just in case things go off the rail, somebody has some idea of what’s going on.
0:50:41 Jen St. Clair: So I told him at that point. And he was both a little annoyed with me, but also really excited that I had made that decision. And I wanted it to be my decision. I didn’t want to be doing it because he told me to or. Or I thought he. I thought he thought I should or whatever. And so at that point then he really kicked up, making sure my supplementation was on point and that I was, you know, doing it every day and added a few little other extra things here just to manage symptoms and that.
0:51:13 Jen St. Clair: And so about 11 months later, I think it was just under a year, I weaned off the last of. Of the. And I’d been on lexapro for probably 12 years, 12 to 15 years. I was trying to remember exactly I’d been on Lex Pro. That was the one I had been on the longest. And then the Lamictal is another. That was the mood stabilizer that I needed to be really careful coming off of. And so, yeah, about 11 months in, I kicked those.
0:51:42 Jen St. Clair: And I can remember him asking me a couple months after I finally had got off of them how I was feeling. And I told him it was the first, the clearest my mind had been in since I could remember. Like, I didn’t realize just how foggy. Foggy is the only word I can really think of, just how foggy my brain was on a daily basis and then how numbed out I was it. And that sounds really weird because I still had these highs and lows, but this middle ground was just really.
0:52:13 Jen St. Clair: It was. It was either one extreme or the other with this kind of numbness in the middle. And so, yeah, it was. It was weird to kind of start having feeling again and then having to figure out how to regulate that feeling. And I was still. I mean, I was up and down for sure. Not as bad. It. Maybe it was. It was probably comparable, actually, to being on the meds. I maybe a little less, only I could think clearer.
0:52:44 Jen St. Clair: But I always say that’s where I had to start, because our next step, my next step then was mindset. And I couldn’t have done the mindset if my brain had been as foggy and in the place, which is why I wasn’t really receptive to things before. I don’t think my brain really was capable of figuring out what I needed to figure out at that point because of the deficiencies that. The lack of omega 3s, those types of things, the problems with my gut that was affecting my brain, I do think there was a real physical barrier going on there that kept the mindset aspect from being a reality until I fixed that.
0:53:21 Tansy Rodgers: And so I want to highlight a few things here. So first off, I know before we hit record today, you talked about your three main pillars, which you’re going to be moving into. Number two, number one, supplements, number two, mindset. We’ll talk about the third one here in a moment. But you talked about these three pillars. And I just. I want to go back to the point when we were talking about planting the seed, you said you got to plant the seed. And, you know, I was thinking as you were talking, regardless if somebody is going to be receptive or not to this information coming in, to being challenged, it’s important to continuously plant seeds in their psyche, because just like you, eventually it’s going to for a lot of people, not everybody, of course, but for a lot of people, it eventually will start to maybe have them questioning themselves, questioning what they’re doing, maybe seeing things with a different set of colored glasses on and, and. And being able to shift, even if it’s just slightly.
0:54:29 Tansy Rodgers: So I think, you know, for anybody listening that knows somebody that is going through a challenge like this, just being gentle, depending on the person being gentle, or maybe straightforward and just planting those seeds and saying, hey, I love you. I care about you, you know.
0:54:48 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, definitely.
0:54:49 Tansy Rodgers: And the other piece, too, that I think is so important to highlight here is that you said that it was easy for you as a starting point to do supplements because you were used to taking pills.
0:54:59 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, right.
0:55:01 Tansy Rodgers: And so meeting yourself, meeting somebody at that place of the least resistance is so important, and for you it was taking Supplements, because, hey, I’m a pill taker. I’m good. I got this.
0:55:15 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, I got this. I don’t even need to know what it is half the time.
0:55:20 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, how fortunate to have met somebody. And I don’t believe in coincidences. I think that it was meant to be that you met Jared at the point that you did because he was that person. Person, that voice that could make you start to shift. And he also had the resources that you needed at that time to literally shift your life.
0:55:44 Jen St. Clair: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, Jared and I both. And there’s a whole story behind that. And previous to us meeting and all that and me putting it out there, what I wanted, if I was ever going to do this again. And basically I gave God an ultimatum. And the funny thing is, is when I met Jared, I didn’t think he checked like a couple of these boxes, but I didn’t think. I’m like, okay, well, you didn’t give me what I wanted, so where I found a best friend, which I’m like, this is great, I can deal.
0:56:14 Jen St. Clair: And at that point that’s all I wanted anyway. And so. But I had. Yeah. What I got beyond that was so. No, it’s. It was way more than just coincidence, for sure. That’s a whole different topic. But yeah, it’s. He came in and just gave me this whole different world that I didn’t even know existed out there. Yeah. And. Yeah, but the. It did start with and, And I think he recognized and he. Well, he says that all the time. He’s like, it’s really easy to get people to take pills.
0:56:48 Jen St. Clair: We’re conditioned to take pills in this society for the most part. And so for me, that was, that was definitely the starting point.
0:56:59 Tansy Rodgers: Jen, I’m curious if you have some advice for somebody who maybe is wanting to explore alternatives like you did with the supplementation, but is absolutely terrified of life without pharmaceuticals.
0:57:13 Jen St. Clair: Yeah. Well, I know this is going to sound really self serving, but Jared’s podcast, he. He covers. I’ve actually done five shows with him telling my story. We broke it down. We do an overall of kind of the history and where I came from. We. The next one is on supplementation and we get in a little more specifics of what I supplemented and how. We talk about how I weaned. In one episode. Episode four is the mindset stuff that we did. And then the last one we just recorded a couple months ago was on diet changes.
0:57:49 Jen St. Clair: But beyond that, he’s been talking about Jared’s niche is educating on how to use supplements, whether you get them from us or somebody else. It’s just trying to educate people because they are. It’s overwhelming. I would have had no idea where to start or how to do this without having him. And so the great beauty of that is he has a show on all. He’s talked about SSRIs and all of that for years. He’s talked about high dose omega 3. He. His specialty is gut health and probiotics.
0:58:22 Jen St. Clair: It’s. I, it’s amazing. I can still sit and listen to him after seven years of talking about probiotics and gut health. And it’s still fascinating to me. So honestly. And he’s, and that being said, he’s not the only one out there. There are lots of podcasts and places that you can go to find information these days. It’s way more available. But like you said, you know, I was annoyed at Tom Cruise, but I’d been hearing little things like that over the years enough that when Jared presented it too. And I’m like, this guy seems really smart and like really nice. Like maybe he knows something. I don’t know. You know what I mean? Like it’s this build up and even if it’s annoying and they’re mad the first time, especially in the world today because it’s being talked about a lot more.
0:59:13 Jen St. Clair: You know, the studies on SSRIs and placebos is way more readily available these days for people to look at and being talked about on a level that it was never talked about five, even five years ago. Right. And so information’s out there. But honestly, I think Jared’s an excellent source of education on how to get started with supplements and breaks it down very well for people to done. And then you can always call the store where we love to talk to people, both of us. Our goal is to help as many people figure out the natural world as possible.
0:59:49 Jen St. Clair: So. And then you always, everybody always has that kooky friend that’s been into it for a while. So I did, I, I had plenty. They, they didn’t always, you know, they let me do my thing, which is great. But, but I think we all know at least one or two people that, that are a little more into that lifestyle and go to them and ask them, you know, for references or places they can go, you can go to look.
1:00:15 Tansy Rodgers: Now you had mentioned the vital Five. That is a part of his line that he has and you said that you had used that. He put you on that and that was something that you were Working through or working with as you were starting to release out the pharmaceuticals. But I’m cur. And maybe your answer is the vital five. But I’m curious, is there a cocktail per se, of nutrients, of supplementation that you found to be the most important for you on this journey that you were going on?
1:00:50 Jen St. Clair: So I do kind of think, I think the spore probiotics are a big deal. I think that the studies and what we’ve seen with that shows that they are the best at recolonizing. And the gut brain connection is, well, they call the gut the second brain, and they’re actually calling spore probiotics psychobiotics because of the effect that they have on the brain, specifically in mental health issues. And so I think that a good spore probiotic is.
1:01:20 Jen St. Clair: Is really important. And actually, Jared didn’t have his own out when I first met him, and so he put me on Just Thrive, which I believe you.
1:01:30 Tansy Rodgers: I do, yeah. And it’s what I use right now.
1:01:32 Jen St. Clair: Yeah. And so just Thrive is where I started. And then Jared actually knew the guy that created Just Thrive and had worked with him in developing his own version of a sport probiotic. So once that released, then I switched to the one Jared came up with. But there are some really good spore. I mean, there’s lots of good spore probiotics out on the market. So I think that probably is the number one place to start. If you don’t fix your gut, you’re not going to fix mental health issues.
1:02:02 Jen St. Clair: I think omega threes are really important. We don’t get enough in our diet. We get way too much Omega 6, not enough Omega 3s, and Omega 3 is vital to brain health. And like I said earlier, the studies show that the higher dose, at least 2, at least 2,000 milligrams, 2 grams or, but higher. I. I do a minimum of 3,000 milligrams a day of fish oil, and I still do fish oil every day. You know, I’m. This was seven years ago that I met him, and I still do. I still do all of them, actually. Every day. I. I do combine the probiotic. I go back and forth. My. My stomach is so much better.
1:02:44 Jen St. Clair: I don’t have to use probiotic every day. I used it for about a year straight. And then I’d take a little break and then I’d go back and kind of go back and forth with it. I use digestive enzymes on a pretty regular basis just because I don’t have a gallbladder. A bunch of reasons and as we age, we need them anyway. And I just feel better with them. But I don’t have to use them every meal like I used to. And my preference now is the back on track, which is actually the spore probiotics and the digestive enzymes. So I get it all in one pill and it’s way less pills to take.
1:03:17 Jen St. Clair: So. And then I think magnesium is the, the other big one. If, if I was going to narrow the vial to five down to three, those would be the top three and a good form of magnesium. I actually did a combo of magnesium bisglycinate and threonate. Magnesium threonate. Because 3 and 8 has been shown to cross the blood brain barrier. So I do a little bit of a combo of the two of those. But. And then the multi is a good multi. And we always preface multi as a good, a great multi. You’ve got to make sure your vitamins, your B vitamins are methylated.
1:03:55 Jen St. Clair: And there’s. There’s a few things to watch for in your multi. So you don’t really want to get your multi just out of a grocery store. You want to make sure you’re getting a very high quality multi and then. Well, and that, that covered it all. So those are kind of the big. If I was to leave something out. The digestive enzymes are kind of a, they’re an added benefit to the probiotic and the multi is excellent. But it’s probably one that if you’re on a budget and you’re really not sure, you could leave the multi out for the first little bit.
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1:06:12 Tansy Rodgers: How about detoxification? I mean, you had the opiates running through you. Your lifestyle was probably not necessarily watching out for toxins that were coming in. So what, what did you do on the detoxification side? Or would that be more in the diet end?
1:06:31 Jen St. Clair: No, we did do some detoxification stuff, and that was all new to me. And, yeah, I had no idea about any of the, you know, stuff going on with food and in our environment. And I learned about glyphosate after I started working here, which would have been, you know, six years ago. And so we did. We did a few liver cleanses. There’s a couple liver cleanse options that Jared put me on that and some heavy metal cleanses because we figured I probably had quite a bit of buildup of heavy metal from.
1:07:06 Jen St. Clair: And then there’s a few things we did. At the time, it was called Astrosense. We’ve since created our own version of it called Endocleans. But it basically helps clean up xenoestrogens and helps with hormone regulation. And so we did. We kind of attacked the heavy metal end. We helped the liver clear out and clean up a little bit. And then we went after. Yeah, like the hormone imbalances and things like that.
1:07:33 Jen St. Clair: And so those were thrown in. They were sprinkled in there for sure. But I do think too, that once you start detoxing is great, and I think everybody needs to do it to some degree. But I do think that once you start filling in some deficiencies, like we were doing with the supplementation, the body is brilliant. And it. It can start to figure out once it’s not fighting because it’s got. It’s deficient in something, and it’s like, oh, I can back off of trying to fill this in now. I can go over here and I can actually start working on cleaning this up a little bit. So I think a cleanse, like cleansing is absolutely necessary at some point.
1:08:13 Jen St. Clair: I. I think when you start to give the body what it needs, it. The cleansing part can actually start happening a little more naturally on its own, too. And so I wouldn’t get hung up on I have to do all of these things at once. You do it as you can. But, yeah, I’m a big believer that the body knows what it’s doing, and if we give it what it needs and it’s not searching and fighting for that, it’s going to fill in the blanks.
1:08:37 Tansy Rodgers: I agree with you. And I think it’s important, too, to also remind ourselves that when our body is overloaded or deficient, that it’s already working extra hard. And when you detox, either through supplementation or through other protocols, that detoxification process is going to add extra stress on the body. So it’s really important to get the body into a place of a little.
1:09:03 Tansy Rodgers: Bit more balance first, take some of.
1:09:05 Tansy Rodgers: The load off, and then you can come back in and help the cleanup process if needed.
1:09:11 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, I agree 100%. I did. I did my first parasite cleanse just a year ago, and I’d been wanting to do one for a while, and Jared just kept saying, we let’s. You’re doing great, but let’s get you even a little more, because it does it. And it did take a toll. Three months, parasite cleanse. It wasn’t horrible, but I. It took me a couple months after that to fully feel like I had even recovered from doing that.
1:09:38 Jen St. Clair: And so, yeah, you just gotta. You’ve gotta pace yourself. You can’t dive in all at once because you can create a little more havoc than you might be dealing with to begin with if you go too fast.
1:09:50 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah, yeah. All right. So we talked about pillar one, which is the supplements. Let’s talk about pillar two, the mindset.
1:09:58 Tansy Rodgers: Can you share.
1:09:59 Tansy Rodgers: Can you share with us a little bit about the mindset journey and what you learned through that process?
1:10:05 Jen St. Clair: Yes. So the mindset was probably the hardest.
1:10:09 Tansy Rodgers: I’m sure it was.
1:10:10 Jen St. Clair: Yeah. It’s interesting, Jared. We went to a conference and we met a guy there who has since become a pretty good friend. And he had come up with a program that he called naap Neuro Auto Associative Programming. And basically, he has. What he came up with wasn’t necessarily, like, unique or new. He had pulled from a whole bunch of different places and kind of just put it into a program like highlights from different programs. There’s a lot of NLP in it.
1:10:44 Jen St. Clair: There’s a lot of Tony Robbins stuff in that. There’s a lot of Joe Dispenza stuff in it. He just kind of pulled big parts of, you know, the most useful parts of Those and put it into a package that was a little more usable for the everyday person. So we met him and he told us about this, what he was doing, and Jared signed us up to do it. And at the time, the way he was doing it was basically an eight hour session with him, one on one.
1:11:09 Jen St. Clair: And he was walking and he basically, it was like a coaching. He walked you through and, you know, challenged beliefs and taught you a lot about perception and definitions and different things like that. And it was a fire hose of information and a lot of it. I, at the time, this was early. This was the end of 2019, and I did it and Jared left. We each did it, Jared left. And he was so pumped on it. He.
1:11:42 Jen St. Clair: He had been doing his radio show for like 12 years at that point and had been wanting to do a podcast, had been putting it off for like five years. And within three months of doing this, he got his podcast launched. Like it unlocked some stuff in him. And he was like, this is the best thing ever. And I walked out of it and I was like, that’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. I just. It.
1:12:06 Jen St. Clair: It didn’t land super well. It’s like you were asking earlier, a lot of it didn’t land super well with me at the time. But there were a few things that he said in there that like, stuck in my head that I couldn’t quit kind of thinking about. A lot of it was on the perception end of things and, and different, like how people perceive things differently and that we actually have some control over the perception. And that was the part I didn’t like. I didn’t like hearing that I had more control over my thoughts and the feelings that were coming from that I didn’t like that I didn’t want to believe that I was making myself miserable, right? That I’m living my whole life in this state of misery. And it’s because I’m choosing to do that.
1:12:56 Jen St. Clair: And I didn’t like that. That wasn’t fun to hear. But like I said, some of those things were enough that I’m like, that’s a really interesting thought. And is that true? Like, is that true? And so it’s really funny because about six months later, which put us in the middle of 2020, or not the beginning of 2020, in the middle of COVID I said to Jared, I said, man, I kind of wish I could do that again because I think things would stick a little better this time.
1:13:27 Jen St. Clair: And lo and behold, Lamont is the. Is the guy’s name that was doing it. He decided to switch from doing one on ones to doing groups because time wise, right, you can only do one person a day at eight hours thing. You can get 10 people in a room for eight hours. You got 10 people. So he was looking to do. He’d been doing some small groups in people’s homes. He had a little larger group that he was trying to get together. So he’s looking for a place to do it because it was Covid.
1:13:59 Jen St. Clair: And he reached out to us and asked if we would want to come if he found a place since we had already been through it. And at that point we jumped at it. We’re like, yeah, I would like. Jared was like, well, yeah, I want to do it. I loved it. And I’m like, yeah, I’d like to hear it again and see like if things click a little better. And that second time through, things clicked a lot more. In fact, to a point that he started certifying people in teaching it. Jared got certified in it.
1:14:29 Jen St. Clair: I didn’t get certified in it, but we actually ended up teaching it. Jared, me and another friend who had gone through it ended up teaching it in the back of our store. For almost a year, we just struggled with getting people to commit to showing up. We. We broke it down. We. We would do like two hours, like a couple times a week trying to condense it for people because we knew most people couldn’t devote eight hours or, you know, five nights a week or anything.
1:14:57 Jen St. Clair: But in the teaching of it, that just helps solidify a lot more of the mindset shift for me because I was talking about it constantly. That’s where my focus was, right? And so then Jared. And it was beautiful to do it with Jared because we could work on it together and he could catch me in things and I even could catch him sometimes in things. And so we, we could bounce things. And the things that I couldn’t quite grasp or that didn’t make sense or that I didn’t like, we could actually have a discussion about.
1:15:32 Jen St. Clair: I’d be like, okay, this doesn’t, I don’t like this because of this. This doesn’t make sense to me. How do I do this? And it became this practice every day because we were teaching it, we were talking about it. And that’s where a lot of them, that’s when the mind shift stuff started kicking in. But like I said earlier, I don’t believe that would have been possible had I still been back on the antidepressants and the mood stabilizer.
1:15:56 Jen St. Clair: And still foggy from all the deficiencies. My brain was clearing up a lot by this point. I was a couple years into. We met in 2018. So, you know, my brain was clearing up a lot more as. And the mood swings that were, you know, the roller coaster was getting a little lower and a little lower because I could catch myself in the cyclical thinking. If I started going down telling myself a story, I learned I could change that story.
1:16:26 Jen St. Clair: And then, you know, a lot of. One of the big things I learned was focus, meaning and purpose. And you know, what I chose to focus on and the meaning that I put to that. And I got to choose what meaning it was. And that made a huge difference when I really started realizing that I got to put the emotion to things. The emotion may come really quick without me having control over it, but I can take a pause, step back and think about it. And this is where the questioning, the curiosity constantly came in of asking myself, am I right? Is this true?
1:17:02 Jen St. Clair: Those types of questions made a huge difference in me being able to shift. And in that process, I mean, I, I had lived my life with zero self esteem. Like I, I just didn’t like myself ever had zero self esteem. And it’s, it’s funny because I can still remember being in the back teaching my section of a class and I actually said out loud to the group, I’m like, and for the first time in my life, I actually like who I am.
1:17:31 Jen St. Clair: And it was really funny because I looked at Jared as I said that and I know that and I tell everyone that’s the point, that he fell in love with me because he was bound to determine he was never going to marry anyone that was depressed and anxious and that again. And which I don’t blame him, but it was when he, when I finally made that realization, learned to love myself and was really putting in the effort to try and make that change that it was in that I’m. I know it was in that room that night that he.
1:18:03 Jen St. Clair: That things shifted. It took a while before it went, you know, anywhere, but. But that’s where that shit, that’s where the shift came, where the two of us finally kind of hit a different level of, of not just being best friends.
1:18:16 Tansy Rodgers: So what did you find was the most impactful part of those teachings that you personally found really valuable to help you want to go back a second time to do more of the work?
1:18:31 Jen St. Clair: Like I said, it was, it was the whole perception thing. It sounds really. The funny thing is, is when I think about it now and Honestly, it was there A lot of the stuff I had heard before, maybe in a little different way, maybe not quite as blunt, but it wasn’t like they were novel ideas. But for whatever reason, my brain just had never really grasp onto those or thought real in depth about them. So when I really started thinking about what perception really is and how two people can be in the exact same situation and see it completely different, like as I really. And like I said, I’m the type.
1:19:11 Jen St. Clair: Once I started learning this, like, just like with bipolar and the supplements, I mean, I read every book on neuroscience you could find. And that played a big part for me too. I started to recognize there was like legit coming from a medical, western medicine background. Also the fact that there’s legit science to back this stuff up helped me a lot to be able to grasp onto it. I dismissed that a lot more now than I did back then. But back then that was in. That was kind of important to me that there was actual science behind how this stuff worked.
1:19:47 Jen St. Clair: I was listening to Tony Robbins with Jordan Peterson just the other day and they’re talking about clinical studies now that they’re doing on his stuff. And I’m like, who needs clinical studies? I just know it works. I’ve seen it too much now. But like it is. It’s very cool to know that there’s actual neuroscience, you know. I started listening to Andrew Huberman who just re. He was the science end of everything that I’d learned over here that JoJo’s Joe Dispenza talks about. Right. That seems kind of woo woo in one way, but then there’s science behind it over here.
1:20:15 Jen St. Clair: And so for me there was a lot of that that helped, but the perception thing was a big part of it. And realizing that I. And just acknowledging that and my kids hate it. But my big saying was no one can make you feel anything because that became an excuse all the time. Well, they made me feel that. They made me mad. They made me this and my kid. I saw my kids using that, I used it. And when I recognized that nobody gets and, and like I said, being stubborn and not wanting anyone to tell me what to do, I, I think I realized I’d been playing the victim for a long time and I did not like when I realized that it was actually kind of hard not to be mad at myself for, for that because I didn’t like that at all. But that really was. What had it came down to in my mind is that I had allowed myself to become a victim of my Own thoughts.
1:21:06 Jen St. Clair: And I didn’t want to live like that anymore. And so it. It wasn’t easy. It took time. It was slow. It was a couple years of really being able to. And a lot of slow progress. And. And I’d get really upset because I’d tell Jared, I’m like, I get two steps forward and then I fall clear back. And. And then I also realized that was a matter of perception. I get. I’d learn these things, I’d move forwards and then I’d look at the falling back as a failure. And once I switched it and thought started looking at as an opportunity, okay, I’ve learned this.
1:21:39 Jen St. Clair: Now the fallback comes. That’s my opportunity to apply it. And once I started actually applying it, then I jumped ahead further. I’d learned more new things, the opportunity to come to apply them. And it was more like this leapfrog at that point instead of feeling like I was like learning and failing and. And that was just a shift in my perception.
1:21:59 Tansy Rodgers: And so mindset shifting, perception shifting. That’s one. That’s one part of the puzzle. But when we talk about what you call the emotional vitality, like actually having the vitality emotionally, right. I feel like that is taking it even a step further. What does emotional vitality really mean to you? And how do you. Jen. Cultivated. How do you. What do you do to cultivate it daily?
1:22:30 Jen St. Clair: So I think taking it further, I think, like I said, I think paying attention to what we decide to focus on. I was choosing to focus on a lot of negative aspects of my life and not pay attention to the really good aspects. And I mean, that’s as simple as gratitude, right? And people dismiss the power of gratitude, but it all comes down to focus. And once I also started shifting focus and actually acknowledging that, yeah, there’s not some great things here, but that’s okay. There’s not great things in everybody’s life. But there’s a lot of good things over here that I’m just completely ignoring. And so I’m going to shift my focus over to those.
1:23:11 Jen St. Clair: Then that just starts adding more. Like you get more excited about life, right? You get more enthusiastic. And then you start wanting to like, point it out to other people. Because then the more that I was seeing, like the good and getting out of this cyclical thinking and not having the depressing thoughts because I was shifting them, then I want to share that until I. Because I have lots of friends that are dealing with mental health issues.
1:23:35 Jen St. Clair: We do seem to flock together. You seem to attract the people, right? That. That you relate to and that you’re focused on. And so I have all of these friends that are also bipolar or depressed or anxious, and I just want to share now with them, like, you guys can get out of it. Like, you’ve just got it. And. And I understand, though, at the same time that to people, that sounds way too simplistic. If you like, it’s. And it’s not exactly just changing your mind.
1:24:05 Jen St. Clair: It is changing your mind, but there’s a process to it, and there’s a practice to it. And you can’t just decide today, oh, I’m changing my mind. I’m not depressed anymore. It doesn’t work like that. Right. But it is a mind shift that takes some time, and it takes practice, and you’re going to slip back into those days of. You know, Jared used to laugh at me because I’d curl up with my. He called it my depression blanket. I’d put on the music, that really depressing music that kept me in that place, and it just Reidified everything that I thought and validated those feelings.
1:24:40 Jen St. Clair: And once I started putting a stop to that, then I could keep myself out of it longer. But it was a poll. It’s definitely. It was. My brain was. And as I learned neuroscience and the way your brain maps. I had created these really deep maps in my brain of what I did in certain situations. And breaking those habits takes some time, but they can be broken. Yeah. And I think that’s the biggest thing I want people to realize is be.
1:25:08 Jen St. Clair: Give yourself grace. Give others grace. They’re fighting the same things, they’re seeing things, the same doing. And most people aren’t even worried about you. They’re so wrapped up in what’s in your. Their head that we all think that we’re the center of the universe. We are to us, but not to everybody else, because everybody else is trying to figure it out, too.
1:25:30 Tansy Rodgers: So true. So true. All right, so we got pillar one, which is supplements. We got pillar two, which is mindset shifting, perception shifting. Let’s talk about pillar three, the diet side of it.
1:25:42 Tansy Rodgers: Yes.
1:25:43 Tansy Rodgers: What was some of the biggest lessons that you learned in the diet? End of it. And when did that fall into your journey?
1:25:52 Jen St. Clair: So the diet end is interesting because it originally came out. So as I was going through this journey, I was learning more and more. Right. I was learning to clean up my diet. I’d gotten rid of, you know, a lot of packaged foods and wasn’t drinking sodas or things like that. It just kept. The diet kept evolving over the years to, you know, I was doing. I probably was at about 50, 50 organic, and, you know, following the dirty does and stay away from the dirty dozen, clean 15, and all of that.
1:26:24 Jen St. Clair: So I knew those things. I’d learned those things. I knew glyphosate wasn’t good. So I was in a really. I think I’m. Where a lot of people. I think I was at where a lot of people are just kind of a. They’re trying, but there’s. There’s definitely room for improvement. But what started happening three years ago, in fact, it’s three years this past January. We had a customer come in the store, and I was.
1:26:46 Jen St. Clair: Because of my back issues, I was dealing with a lot of sciatic pain again. And it was getting to a point that I wasn’t sure. I was thinking I was going to have to probably maybe go do something about it, because it was really affecting what I could do. And so I. I wasn’t here at the time, but a customer came in and started talking to Jared that he had known years ago and he had dealt with sciatica.
1:27:09 Jen St. Clair: And he said, you know, remember how bad that was? Well, I. I don’t have it anymore. And Jared’s like, well, what did you do? And at this point, you know, he’s. He’s thinking of me because I’m. It’s really bad. And he said, I went grain free. And so Jared’s like, interesting. He says, within three days of going grain free, my sciatica was gone, and I haven’t had it since. And that’s been five years ago.
1:27:35 Jen St. Clair: And so Jared called me and was like, okay, this customer came in, he said this. What do you think? And in my head, I’m thinking, what in the world does grain free have to do with sciatica? Like, how in the world is that going to help? Because, again, I had educated a lot in some areas, but there was still a lot I didn’t know or understand. But I was at a point, and at this point, I had done so many things that.
1:28:02 Jen St. Clair: And Jared didn’t think I was. HE laughs. He says, I didn’t think you was going to say yes. He’s like, I might not have told you about it if I thought you were going to say yes. But I said, why not? Let’s give it a shot. I’m like, I’ll do it for a month. Let’s see if anything changes, and then we’ll reevaluate from there. And so we. I decided to go grain free. And we started and about four, four to five days in there, there was a significant difference in my sciatica at that point, like so noticeable that I’m like, I don’t understand this, like, why is this making such a difference? And so we.
1:28:42 Jen St. Clair: That. And then that’s. At that point I started digging in more as to why grains would be so inflammatory. It was definitely a learning curve. We had to learn all the names of all the hidden things. What we discovered is, for me specifically, corn is the worst. Corn absolutely wrecks me. And we discovered that when I. Because I still wasn’t used to certain things, I. I can remember I was doing a yoga teacher training class and I’d stopped at Starbucks and got a Matcha and I think I had them put a little pump of syrup or something in it. And within 30 minutes of starting to drink that, I was hurting so bad and I was like racking my brain what I have with. And then I’m like, corn syrup in my syrup.
1:29:28 Jen St. Clair: And so then we had to learn, you know, modified food starch and glucose syrup and maltodextrin and all the hidden names of corn in things. Shopping became a little tedious for a while. Two hour shopping trips to read labels in depth and. But as I cut those out, the inflammation dropped drastically. The knots that I had talked about earlier that were in my shoulder that put me on opiates to begin with, they completely disappeared. I don’t even have them anymore. Jared used to rub so much CBD on my back and try to rub them out and they just, they’re not even there anymore.
1:30:08 Jen St. Clair: But what was really interesting that we started to notice a little bit further down the road was not only did the pain go away, my mood that was kind of still a little rocky up and down, my mood completely leveled out. There was no anxiety, there was no lows other than, you know, if something bad happened and I’d get a little sad. The. The mood is probably, like I said, it wasn’t as noticeable. Like we didn’t notice it right away because I was more focused on the inflammation end. And that was the reason I started the diet.
1:30:43 Jen St. Clair: But the mood absolutely leveled out. And I think the diet absolutely made the biggest difference in my mood swings. And again, as I studied and learned more about what I was, the foods and grains, mthfr enriched foods, I think we took. So we had fixed part of the problem of the deficiencies with supplements, right. And had seen some success there. But what happened when we took the grains out is we took out the toxins, right?
1:31:15 Jen St. Clair: We Took out all the enriched folic acid. I was, he had me on a multi that was methylated, but it was kind of battling with all the enriched stuff. It was kind of battling and wiping each other out. Right? Methylated, good in the vitamin, but still getting the toxic level of folic acid and cyanocobalamin in, in the other foods. And so I, my belief that’s where we, like I said, we haven’t done the testing, but we’re pretty convinced that MTHFR plays a big part for me. And I see it in my kids for sure. It’s. And the mental health issues that run in my family go right along with, with that genetic mutation.
1:31:57 Tansy Rodgers: So when did you discover that you probably had the genetic mutation?
1:32:04 Jen St. Clair: Just like, oh, two years ago was when we really started. Jared had had some suspicions. He hadn’t really talked to me about it because I had tried to look into it. One time he’d said something and it was so confusing to me. It didn’t like I couldn’t understand. I had a couple podcasts. We had a guy that worked here that tried to explain, explain. It was so confusing to me. And it wasn’t until I listened to Gary Brecka a couple years ago and the way he explained it all, like it totally clicked at that point. And I’m like, oh, I get this. And then it made sense why the diet shift would make such a difference for me.
1:32:39 Jen St. Clair: And so about two years ago and I have a test sitting on my desk in the other room. I need to get it done because I need to have proof to my ex husband and some family members when it comes to my kids that that there is a reason I want their diets cleaned up a little bit. But without doing that, I mean, as sure as we can be without actually doing the test, it all just adds up way too much that what we’ve seen happen by eliminating that stuff and replacing it with the methylated, it just makes too much. And then the mental health issues in general, it just makes.
1:33:14 Jen St. Clair: And then that just leads me to wonder how many people in this country that are diagnosed with mental health disorders are actually dealing with toxicity from the food supply and deficiency because from the food supply. So I think that, I think food plays a much bigger part than people want to acknowledge. And but like I said, I started with supplements. If you had come to me six years ago and said, I want you to go grain free, seed oil free and you’re going to eat 99% organic, you will never eat out because you can’t do it.
1:33:50 Jen St. Clair: I would have been like, no, go away. That will never happen. And so it’s like I said. And that still sounds extreme to people, but it was a progression, right? And it’s. And it’s just my life now. And I don’t even. It’s funny. I don’t miss things. And I have learned. I can actually do ancient grains. So kamut flour, einkorn, there’s a handful of ancient grain flowers that we have at home that we cook with. And so I can have a cookie every once in a while if I want to bake a cookie or bread.
1:34:23 Jen St. Clair: If it’s a true sourdough, I can do a sourdough. And so there’s little things that if I do, like a white rice that’s not enriched, I can do a little bit of that. But brown rice, oats, corn, standard wheat are all. I just don’t. I just don’t eat them. And then we cut out seed oils, and that helped with the inflammation even more. So diet is a big part. And. And unfortunately, it is. It’s. It’s not fun.
1:34:52 Jen St. Clair: It. Food is such a social thing in our world that a lot of people don’t want to give it up because they feel like they’re giving up their social life. So.
1:35:04 Tansy Rodgers: And it’s. It’s such a huge part. And, you know, I think that it’s easy to fall into that whole trap of, oh, I know that I should be eating better or, you know, whatever. But I will tell you, I had a client come to me, this is a couple years ago, and she’s worked on and off with me over the years during different seasons of things that she had going on. And I remember she originally came to me because she had eating disorder, mental health, stuff going on, adrenal fatigue.
1:35:38 Tansy Rodgers: She was running the gamut. And just last year she got diagnosed with mhtfr. And when she got that diagnosis, I was like, it all makes sense. There we go. And so she responded great to supplementation that I had her on. She responded great to the diet changes and working. She’s also an athlete, so working with the food in relation to the athletic pursuits that she was on, she responded wonderfully. But there were still like these little pieces that we were trying to dial in. We’re like, what is going on here? And then she got that diagnosis and it just.
1:36:26 Tansy Rodgers: Light bulb moment, you know. And so I love that you’re bringing this to the table because it’s not just about eating better, quote unquote. It’s about really dialing in to your genetics and knowing what it is that you have going on, you know, under the surface. So thinking about that and thinking outside of just getting maybe a genetic test and getting like those testings done, what were the key factors for you on your journey?
1:37:00 Tansy Rodgers: You said about taking the grains out. What were the other key factors for you that were of the most importance in the diet? End of this on your journey to help you have some success and to move forward? Like if you could pick just a handful of things for the listeners that were the key points on your diet shifting, what would you say that that.
1:37:24 Jen St. Clair: Would be so I would say so two aspects of this. If you’re, if you’re dealing with chronic inflammation and you’re curious, if you know a grain free diet could help with that, then you know you don’t have to commit. So it’s inconvenient. But inconvenient for a week or two or a month is doable for most people. Right? And if you don’t see results, and I had results pretty quickly, the guy before me had results pretty quickly. But not everyone’s going to see it. Jared did it. Jared still eats grain free most of the time because he supports me. He doesn’t really have an issue with grains. He doesn’t notice a whole lot of difference.
1:38:02 Jen St. Clair: But give it a shot. Worst case is it doesn’t do anything and you go back to eating it. Right. On the other end of the MTHFR gene, it is expensive, it is pricey to go get a test, but if you want, if, and if you’re curious, if that’s it, and again not necessarily easy, but it is, do it. Spend a week or two avoiding enriched foods means you just have to read your labels. But if you cut out and, and anything, grains, cereals, even juices are enriched sometimes there’s a lot of things they enrich now. And basically in parentheses it’ll say fortified or enriched on the label usually and in parentheses on the ingredients it’ll list niacin, thiamine, folic or yeah, folic acid and things like that. So if it says folic acid. So folic acid is the death knell for mthfr.
1:38:57 Jen St. Clair: It your body can’t process it, you build up a toxic level and then you’re still deficient in methyl folate, which is what you need. And so when people come in and talk to me about, I say cut out enriched foods for a week or two and if you notice a difference in your mood and you’ve got to pay attention because Mood sometimes is hard. People just go on with their day and they’re always paying attention to how they’re.
1:39:20 Jen St. Clair: And work with someone, have a spouse or a friend and say, you know what, pay attention to me and see if you notice a difference in me during this time. But from what I have seen, it’s a fairly, you can see improvement fairly quickly if you eliminate that out of your diet. And so that’s a place I usually tell people to start. If you really are curious and you don’t want to spend the money on testing, give it a shot of just getting rid of enriched foods out of it. That’s not grains, that’s just enriched food. Which means you’re looking, you need organic to do that.
1:39:52 Jen St. Clair: Although be careful. There are some organic now that are adding enriched stuff to them. But the majority of organic is not fortified. So that’s a place to start for me. Then it was, I’m cutting back sugar. I, I go in weird spurts with sugar. I’m not necessarily a sugar person. I can have sugar in the house and not touch it and then I’ll have a few days where. But sugar, I know is super inflammatory for me.
1:40:19 Jen St. Clair: But just eat, you know, really clean for me. It’s quality meat, grass fed. We do spend a little more money on our meat. But I’ve also discovered, Pete, a lot of people say it’s too expensive to eat organic. Well, I kind of disagree in maybe up front it’s a little more money but you’re gonna save in the long run. We don’t buy nearly as much food and we’re fuller off of what we eat. We don’t eat out because we can’t avoid seed oils and, and I don’t know what’s in things.
1:40:50 Jen St. Clair: We have like two places we know we can eat and that’s very rare. And we travel a lot, but we always get a place with an Airbnb and we hit the closest local health food store when we get there and buy our groceries and we just cook, what everywhere we go. Is it convenient? No, but it’s. I just am at a point where I, I don’t want to ever go back to feeling that pain or having the mood swings. And so nothing I eat is worth it to me to put myself back in that place. And that was a major mind shift too. Right.
1:41:24 Jen St. Clair: Not everyone can get to that point. But eat whole foods, eat, eat grass fed meat, lots of veggies and fruits. We go through a lot of fruit is my sugar. So I do eat a lot of fruit. The other thing we did is we switched to. Well, we did this way before, but raw dairy is about all the dairy that we do. And every once in a while we might sneak an organic ice cream in. But yeah, raw dairy to get rid of the pasteurized and you know, there’s just. You don’t have to jump all in. Start with something.
1:41:57 Jen St. Clair: Unfortunately, enriched is a little bit of a big step because so much of what we is on. On the shelves. If you’re buying anything packaged, you’re pretty much looking at enriched. But you know, there, there’s a lot more options out there. We buy Einkorn and Kamut pastas online now so we can have. We don’t eat a lot of pasta, but we can have it every once in a while if we, if we want to. We do a lot of cassava flour, but you’ve got to watch cassava to make sure it’s organic because there’s a lot of glyphosate.
1:42:30 Jen St. Clair: And so for me too, it’s a. That’s the other question. When we went organic, we cut out a lot of glyphosate. So there’s a few factors. I can’t say 100 that it, you know, glyphosate. Getting rid of glyphosate through organic makes a difference, period. Right. That’s going to help with inflammation and just overall health. It’s going to help detoxify because is. It’s one of the greatest. It’s. And glyphosate is a human antibiotic, so it’s messing up your gut constantly.
1:42:56 Jen St. Clair: And then, you know, but then with the mthfr, getting rid of the enriched to the folic acid made a huge difference. So there’s, it’s kind of just a. There’s a whole bunch of levels to it. I can’t pinpoint exactly which thing did what, but I know as a whole it just, it made all the difference in the world and people are going to see different results. Some people may not see any results getting rid of it, and others, it might make a whole.
1:43:20 Jen St. Clair: Might change their life. So you’ve just kind of got to play around with it and then decide how committed you. You can be to doing it.
1:43:28 Tansy Rodgers: And I think that that’s the best part of the advice is there’s levels.
1:43:32 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I didn’t jump into this by any means. I had been gradually building and changing my diet for years by the time the idea of getting rid of grain came along. And even that was a little Bit of a jump, but it wasn’t such a jump that it wasn’t doable at that point in time.
1:43:52 Tansy Rodgers: Yeah. You know, as. As we’re wrapping up the podcast and this. This interview, which has been fantastic and.
1:44:00 Jen St. Clair: So inspiring, I feel like I’ve talked so much.
1:44:02 Tansy Rodgers: I love it.
1:44:03 Jen St. Clair: I love it.
1:44:05 Tansy Rodgers: For those who are listening and maybe still feeling an obstacle, maybe a level of hopelessness, or like, I’ve tried everything, and they’re still feeling a little stuck. Even gave them so much information and inspiration. Is there anything that you would want to say to them right now as they’re maybe starting the journey or taking the next step in their journey?
1:44:30 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, a couple things, I think. Number one, I get that. I’ve been there, I think. Start rewriting your story. Start telling yourself what it would look like if you could do this, what it would look like if you. If it did change even one or two sentences, write it out if you need to, and. And add a sentence every day or once a week of what your life, what you want your life to be, what you want it to look like.
1:44:56 Jen St. Clair: Start putting that in your head. And again, what you’re going to focus on is what you’re going to get. So take it. Like I said, you take a small. You do little steps. You can’t. You don’t have to write out this big affirmation of all the things you want in your life that’s going to happen in the next year. Start with the sentence of I’m going to be happy tomorrow. I’m going to focus on whatever, you know, whatever it is you want to be grateful for. Just take small and then put that on your mirror or somewhere where you can look at it every day. Tell yourself that every day.
1:45:30 Jen St. Clair: And then just take a minute to really think about that. Because the one thing I learned about the brain with neuroscience is it doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination. What we imagine it thinks is. It’s why we wake up from a dream and a panic, because our brain thinks it’s happening. It’s why we can watch a movie and get scared, because our brain doesn’t know it’s not happening to us. Right.
1:45:52 Jen St. Clair: And it’s the same thing with our thoughts. It doesn’t. If we’re telling it bad things, it doesn’t know that that’s not what’s happening. If we’re telling it good things, it also doesn’t know that. So why won’t we choose the good things? And if we can’t figure out and that’s a real question. If you can’t even come up with my. I’ve had times where my brain just shuts down and I can’t come up with that one good thing.
1:46:13 Jen St. Clair: So then I start asking myself, why? Why can’t I come up with one good thing? What do I believe in this moment that’s not allowing me to. To do that? And you don’t always get an answer. And that’s okay. Just the fact that you’re posing that question. Your brain wants an answer and it will look for an answer. You may not get it right in that moment, but it will keep looking until it starts supplying you one.
1:46:38 Jen St. Clair: And that’s when. And then you just got to stay aware and, and keep questioning. But just start small. Start with one little step. Talk to a friend and say, this is what I would like to do. I don’t know how to do it, but hold me accountable. Ask me each day how I’m doing. You know, fine. If I do think it helps if you can find someone to be supportive, for sure. But at that same time, you have to be the one to do it too. And that was the one thing we needed to. That everybody wanted to make with Jared and I is.
1:47:10 Jen St. Clair: Jared was there to support me 100%, to guide me through supplements, to support me with that I could talk to. But I did everything myself and I’m where I’m at now. I. I wouldn’t. You can’t stay happy because somebody else makes you happy. You have to be happy because you’re happy. And so that’s an important thing. Find support. But you can’t make that support your reason or the only reason that you’re doing it. Just someone, though, that understands and wants to work with you.
1:47:42 Jen St. Clair: And don’t try to do too much at once. It is. Oh, it can be very overwhelming. And give yourself a lot of grace. You’re going to make progress and then you’re going to fall back. And that’s okay because that’s part of learning, like I said. Then that’s just your opportunity to apply all those things that you’ve learned and then move forward again.
1:48:02 Tansy Rodgers: It’s such sage advice. I love it. Thank you. Jen. This was awesome. I loved hearing the depth of your story. I’m so honored that you came here and you were vulnerable and you shared your experience with everybody and just really opened up your soul. Thank you so much.
1:48:21 Jen St. Clair: Thank you. Oh, can I add one last thing? Because I leave this off and then people get mad. So Jared and I did get married A year ago. Everyone’s like, okay, where did, where did that end up? And I always forget to throw it in. So, yes, we just celebrated our one year anniversary in January, this last January. So we did make it. And now we’re having a lot of fun doing what we do here at Vitality and helping everybody and as much as we can. And we love it.
1:48:51 Tansy Rodgers: Happy endings. I love it. Jen, where can people find you? What are you most excited. Excited about right now?
1:49:01 Jen St. Clair: Well, where you can find us? Like I mentioned Jared’s podcast, Vitality Radio podcast. We have a brick and mortar store in Bountiful, Utah that you can always call us at. 801-292-66662. We have a website that if you want to order any products from called vitality nutrition.com that has a really cool chat feature that if you have any questions, you can open a chat and it’s always either Jared or send Bridger that responds to that and they’re pretty quick getting back to you.
1:49:32 Jen St. Clair: We’re on Instagram at Vitality Nutrition Bountiful. It’s a little long, but that’s where you can find us on Instagram. You can always call and leave messages on any of those or you call the store to look for me or leave messages on any of those to get a hold of me. What I’m looking for. Was it what I’m looking forward to? Yeah, you know, I just, I get really excited to. Like I said, it’s not in my comfort zone to necessarily speak to people, but I love sharing my story just so people know that there are other. There are answers out there. They might be outside of what you think or ever knew about.
1:50:14 Jen St. Clair: Things can change. I thought I was stuck my entire life. The. I mean, I hit a point of hopelessness where I really believe that, that my kids and everyone would be better off if I wasn’t here. And you can’t get lower than that. And so. And I’m at a point though now in my life where I just absolutely love my life and I love what I’m doing. I love being able to help people and give them hope and nothing’s permanent. Things change all the time and so don’t feel like you’re stuck. That’s the worst feeling in the world.
1:50:48 Jen St. Clair: Like I said, I lived my whole life feeling stuck until about five years ago. And so that’s what I’m most excited about, is just helping people. We’ve got so many fun things we’re doing here at the store. New protocols are coming up to Help improve people. Helping people with their health has kind of become a passion of mine now because there’s this whole world I didn’t know existed that has so many answers that.
1:51:12 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, I’m just excited to learn more and share.
1:51:16 Tansy Rodgers: And all of those links will be down in the show notes, so make sure you jump on down there and get into Jen’s world. Jen, before we sign off today, do you have any last words to lay on the hearts of the listeners?
1:51:29 Jen St. Clair: Oh, well, I think just hang in there. There’s hope. I’m not. We’re all unique, but I’m not unique to finding answers. If I can do it, I really believe anybody can do it. I used to think, yeah, well, that was you. That’s not me. But now it’s me. And I believe that anybody can get to the point where they can say, yeah, now it’s me. And so just keep looking. It’ll come. The right people will come into your life. The right podcasts, the right.
1:52:02 Jen St. Clair: The right timing will come, and then it will all fall in place.
1:52:06 Tansy Rodgers: Thank you so much.
1:52:08 Jen St. Clair: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thank you.
1:52:13 Tansy Rodgers: Sometimes healing feels like chaos, and sometimes it feels like silence. And sometimes, like in Jen’s story, it begins when you finally stop believing the lie that you’re broken. So this week, I invite you to ask yourself, where in your life have you accepted dysfunction as your normal? What if the thing you thought was unhealable just hasn’t been approached the right way yet? And what version of you is waiting on the other side of surrender?
1:52:49 Tansy Rodgers: My friend, you are not too far gone. You are not too late. And your body is not your energy enemy. It’s your messenger. If this episode stirred something in you, send it to someone who needs a little hope today. And if you haven’t yet, take two seconds to subscribe, leave a quick review, or share the show. It helps these conversations get into the hearts and ears of the people who really need them the most.
1:53:18 Tansy Rodgers: And until next time, keep spreading that beautiful energy you were born to share.
