The Balance Code for High Achievers
Welcome to the Balance Code for High Achievers Podcast! A place where you have permission to step outside the hamster wheel of day to day life and learn tools to create more balance.
The Balance Code for High Achievers
Reconnecting with Your Body's Wisdom with Jennifer Ragazzo
What if the key to better health isn't just about what you eat or how you exercise, but about learning to truly listen to what your body is trying to tell you?
In this episode, I sit down with Functional Wellness Coach Jennifer Ragazzo, CHC, AFMC, to discuss the importance of quieting the external and internal noise to better understand what our bodies need.
Jennifer specializes in working with Christian Women in Mid-life, helping them shift from fatigued, anxious, bloated, and inflamed to energetic, calm, and vibrant with a skilled integrative approach addressing the mind, body, and spirit. Jennifer's unique ability to integrate functional medicine and naturopathy principles for holistic wellness alongside life coaching has helped her guide hundreds of women over the last decade into vibrant health in her Vibrant Rise Functional Wellness coaching programs.
Today, Jennifer shares her expertise in helping women (and men) tap into their body's signals, addressing not just physical symptoms but also emotional and spiritual well-being. We dive into how modern life often keeps us disconnected from our bodies and the steps we can take to rebuild that connection, leading to a more balanced and abundant life.
In this episode:
- The importance of slowing down and tuning into your body's signals.
- Common health issues like chronic fatigue, inflammation, and anxiety, and their underlying causes.
- The concept of foundational wellness and why addressing core issues like hydration and digestion can have a ripple effect on overall health.
- The role of a wellness coach in guiding clients to understand and take control of their health.
- Personal stories of overcoming health challenges by silencing the noise and focusing on holistic wellness.
- Practical tips for better hydration and how to properly nourish your body on a cellular level.
Connect with Jennifer:
Visit her website: www.jenniferragazzo.com
Find her on Instagram: @Jennifer.Ragazzo
Resources:
Couples Goal Setting Workbook
Complimentary Relationship Assessment
Couples Goal Setting Workbook
Complimentary Relationship Assessment
Follow Katie Rössler on Instagram
Check out the podcast website
Welcome back to the podcast. Today I have Jennifer Ragazzo, and we're gonna be discussing how to start silencing all the noise so we can pay attention to what our body's trying to tell us.
Welcome to the Balance Code Podcast, a place for high achievers to step outside the hamster wheel of day to day life and start learning tools for more balance. I'm your host, Katie Ressler, and I will be guiding you on this journey of discovering your balance code.
Jennifer, thank you so much for being here.
I'm excited about this discussion. Share with us a little bit about yourself, what you do, who you serve, and where you are in the world. Absolutely. So I am in the United States, although I work with clients all over the world, mostly in the States, though, just because of the time zone thing. But I am a functional wellness coach and I work primarily with Christian women who are really struggling.
Seeking to optimize their health and health is so very all encompassing. So in the [00:01:00] work that I do with women, we dive deep into not only the physical part of health, the physiology, but we dive into the mind, the body, and the spirit. spirit, because they're also very, very interconnected. So a lot of the women who will come to me are coming to me with their physical pains, anxiety, fatigue, information, and they have no idea where to even begin.
And what I help them do is really start. Slow it down, begin, as we're going to talk about today to listen to what their body is asking from them and of them. And so often it is so much more than again, just focusing on the physiology. I have training in functional medicine, in applied functional medicine and naturopathy life coaching.
And I just. Bring it all together so that we can create those powerful shifts and live that really abundant, peaceful, joyful life that God intends for us. Yeah. You know, the, the value [00:02:00] of what you're gonna be sharing today, and if you're not a woman, please still listen, because I think you're going to get from this, the importance of us paying attention to our bodies more, as well as hearing some of the warning signs that things are coming up.
But for me, I know in my own health journey, and it really hit a head last summer. where I realized that inflammation in my body was causing reactions in so many different ways. And I needed to make a difference in, and it wasn't even like, many people probably come to you about like losing weight or understanding these are these things.
For me, it was, What is going on inside of me that I can't see. And I was putting food into my body. My body couldn't process properly because I started showing signs of mast cell activation syndrome and I was having allergy symptoms, runny nose, phlegm in the throat after eating anything like an apple, like things that should not have created a reaction in me.
And thank goodness that I got connected with a naturopath who [00:03:00] was like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Early signs. Let's work on this. And it has been a game changer. So I'm so glad you're speaking to us because it is very easy to get up in our heads and to cope in different ways. And what we're doing is sometimes compounding the problem.
So what are you noticing are some of the trends that women are coming to you with? and they're going like, here's the symptoms. Here's the symptoms. Here's what I'm noticing. Yes. Yes. Definitely fatigue. So fatigue and a lot of women will come and they'll label it chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue has so many different root cause drivers.
There's a lot of different, reasons why someone may be experiencing chronic fatigue syndrome, but, and it's this umbrella term and a lot of women don't even understand. And they just know that they wake up tired, they're tired in the afternoon, they're tired all day, they go to bed, sometimes they can't even sleep very well, and they get up the next day and they feel like they're moving through [00:04:00] sludge.
They feel very inflamed, so there's a lot of inflammation. Anxiety. And the anxiety is usually, I see as a byproduct of just feeling so crappy, feeling so sluggish, feeling so inflamed. Many women will come with diagnoses of autoimmune diseases. So there is an autoimmune, maybe one, maybe two popping up in their body.
And they have been trying to treat it, allopathically and yet not feeling any better. So they are just. And what you experienced last summer with the high histamine reactions, that's also a very, very common symptom that I see in women. And there's a lot of different reasons for that as well, a lot of different drivers and it's never usually just one.
It's oftentimes multiple. Things going on at the same time. And so really [00:05:00] quieting the noise, clearing the decks, peeling away those layers of the onion, so to speak, helps us to be able to listen, to lean in and listen to what is it that the body is asking us for more of for less of and what kind of healing environment.
And that does invite. Us to quiet the noise to slow it down the majority of the clients that land here and I primarily work with women, but I work with men and I'm always over the years I've been in practice for almost nine years have men coming in and out of my practice as well. And it's.
Similar. It's very, very similar for men too, because we, we get so busy and our days are so full and we can push and push and push to the point where we're not connecting to our bodies and we're not listening to our body. And then all of a sudden the body where it was once whispering, it's. Now [00:06:00] it's speaking very loudly.
Some people listen at that point. Perhaps that's where you were last summer. Sometimes it's screaming where you're not even able to digest or some people can't get out of bed or something happens to them that puts them in a place where they're really needing to be forced to listen. Yeah, it's funny that we're sort of titling this quiet noise and one of the symptoms that led me to finally really get help was tinnitus.
And I had it for three years and it was wild because I'm very young to have tinnitus. but it happened in my third pregnancy and it stayed and. having quiet actually would make me cry because just constant noise and that journey of figuring out what was causing that and being able to almost reverse half of it.
One year is completely gone. One year is much less than it ever has been before was not anything that I could have Googled was not anything that I could have. Even changed my diet. It took a detox of [00:07:00] certain things that I didn't even realize were causing it. So when we talk about quiet, the noise, it isn't always just lean in and see, do you feel like asparagus today?
It's. Go and get the support to do the blood work, to do the mineral samples, to understand what's really going on, but to listen to your body and its symptoms. So as you've got these women and men coming in, what keeps them from quieting the noise? What keeps them so in their heads and so going that they don't want to pay attention to their bodies?
I think it's the, the busyness of life, the constant distractions that are surrounding us, that are vying for our attention, that are pulling us into this noisy, often chaotic existence. It's almost like you get on this merry go rounds and you can't get off. You're going round and round and round and round.
And we may be looking for [00:08:00] solutions, but the looking for solutions can be. Oh, let me quickly hop on Dr. Google and search my symptoms and see if this thing is going to work or this thing's going to work because I don't have the time to slow it down and to really understand what's happening and we squeeze in a few different doctor's appointments here and there and we don't find the Answers that, are really creating any type of a change in our life.
And we keep going and we push and we push. So it's this perception that we don't have the time to slow it down. And there is a reality when we're in different seasons of life, motherhood and compound motherhood with working in a career and. Certain seasons, even of motherhood where all of the Children have a million different activities.
I'm sure that that's something that you can relate to. And we put ourselves at the bottom of our to do list and we don't prioritize taking care of ourselves. [00:09:00] And we just think, okay, it'll go away. It will just go And, So that I think is a big part of it. And then there's also a lack of understanding how the human body works and what holistic wellness actually truly is.
When I work with clients and when I start with anyone, I always explain a very simple model where when we look at what holistic functional wellness is, we have all of the different symptoms of a disease. And we think of that as being at the very top of say this tier. So we have all symptoms. You can plug in any symptoms.
So we can have a symptom of high histamine, bloating, inflammation, migraines, insomnia, whatever that is. So we have that at the very top but what we need to do is if we just try and go after those symptoms, those, labels of disease with band aids, I'm going to call them band aids because they're not really getting [00:10:00] underneath, then we're going to stay there.
It's like shoveling snow in a snowstorm. So we need to get underneath that and ask, where is the breakdown in. function in our body that is leading to this cascade that's leading to the symptoms of the disease, the pain that we're feeling. So we look for the breakdown in function and very, some very common breakdowns in function could be breakdown in digestion.
We have weak digestion. We could have metabolic dysfunction. So glucose, fat, dysregulation, poor nutrients. So we don't have good nutrients on board. poor cellular metabolism. So those are just some to name a few breakdowns and functions. So we look and we're like, okay, we found some breakdowns and function.
What's underneath that? That. So we can't stop there, because, okay, so we have weak digestion. We could address that with some digestive enzymes, we can support cellular metabolism, and we can bring in nutrients. Great. And sometimes those things are needed to help [00:11:00] move the needle, but We still have to dig deeper.
We need to get underneath. And that's where we're looking at these really important building blocks that I look at as being the foundation of our house. This is the house we have to live in. Our body is the house that we've been given to live in. We get one. And there are, some functional foundational building blocks that must be really solid for every one of us, for our bodies to function at their very best.
And when we have cracks in the foundation, that leads to breakdown and function, which will lead to symptoms of disease. So the very exciting part is We go down to the foundation, we look for the cracks, and when you start to shear up the cracks in the foundation, you have this beautiful ripple effect.
It's like domino effect, where now we're shearing up some cracks in digestion. We're not digesting properly. We find out why, perhaps there's a bacterial [00:12:00] infection, perhaps there's a dynamic, and Where that person is very stressed out because it's always all interconnected and that shutting down digestion, perhaps there are nutrient deficiencies because we're not consuming them the right things for our unique body.
We have a very inflammatory diet. whenever there's viral viral infections. So we find those things and then they ripple out and they ripple out that one thing that one crack could have a ripple and affect 10 different functions in the body that then is affecting multiple different symptoms. So it's, it's, Easier than we think it is or simpler.
I should say, I should say simpler than we think it is. It's not always easy because we have to do the work to do that. And in order to do that, we do need to slow it down. We need to slow it down and, carve out time and bring our attention to these different areas. And I very strategically start with every person I work and let's look at.
These different foundations one at [00:13:00] a time. And we'll look for the ones that I feel are like huge needle movers, like hydration, which sounds like, okay, yes, Jen drink water. It's more than that. It's cellular hydration. So are we hydrated on a cellular level? Are we, getting enough minerals and electrolytes and salt?
Salt is a huge one to be able to get those water molecules into the cell itself. So are we hydrated and that our, our body is made up of cells. So. I just started one of my group programs and we had our second session last night and the ladies, what we were working on, I mean, I just smile and it feels so miraculous, all the different things I'm hearing, but we've been working in hydration and they reported back to me that, constipation, better sleep is better.
Energy is better. It's better. And so again, simple, but that's always easy. Right. Yeah.
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Now back to the interview.
And what you're saying is it's not drink more water. It's how you're drinking the water, what you're drinking in your water. So these, again, you can go to Dr. Google or you can really work with somebody who goes, and let [00:14:00] me teach you this.
What I love about the work you do is that it's very much like a therapist. Like my goal is always to work myself out of a job. And that's yours as well. Like, let me teach you how to fish. And so just keep giving you a fish. Like, let me teach you how to read the labels. Let me teach you how to better assess some of your symptoms.
And it puts the control and power back into our lives. And we forget that often when we think we're going to go get some help. But we, you know, it's all, on your shoulders to tell us versus being kind of a co creation of like, let's talk together. What things look like. Cause you're not going to come in and be like, you just need to decrease your stress.
You get it. There's no way to decrease the stress, but there are tools that you can put in to help with the stress. Some of that, it's not compounding worse. And then that season comes where things are a little bit calmer, maybe they don't need you as much. Then you can do a little more of the rebuild.
Yeah. Oh my goodness. I love all that you just shared there. Yes, that is [00:15:00] absolutely it. So it is never my job to fix someone, to do for someone. I can't want it more for someone. someone than they want it for themselves. I look at myself very much as a guide and an educator. And I am a coach. So coaching is the art of, helping that person to reflect, to self reflect, holding that mirror up.
a lot of, there's a lot of questions involved in coaching because I. Hold the belief that each and every person has the answers within them. They just may not know how to find them. we all hold the owner's manual to our house, to our body in our hands. We have it in our possession, but we might not know how to read it.
So I am here to help educate you so that you can start to read it, but it's your body. It's your life. So I want you really learning how to optimize your health. How do you feel and function your very best? When I have conversations with people, even [00:16:00] around diet, I will absolutely educate you on what a really solid anti inflammatory nutrition, dense blood sugar, balancing diet looks like now you have to go and experiment and experience that for yourself.
And there's gray space. There is going to be this, space where what works for you, Katie, doesn't necessarily work for me, or I need a little bit more protein, or you may feel better with some, complex carbohydrates where my blood sugar doesn't appreciate that, right? There could be, strawberries for you, my Jack up your histamine and my daddy loves strawberries.
So you have to learn that for yourself and really taking ownership of that is so important. It's also really empowering because now we're creating transformation and we have the tools in our possession to use for the rest of our life. And we're not dependent on working with someone, but the. Work that you, the time and investment that you make [00:17:00] in yourself to be able to understand yourself, to be able to gain those tools, mental and emotional tools, physical tools, spiritual tools, whatever those tools are that you are needing to create that transformation, to empower yourself.
It's priceless. It's absolutely priceless because it changes your entire life. It changes the trajectory of your entire life. I'll share a little bit of a personal story, with you in my own life. And even though I've been doing this work for almost nine years and it was my own personal health journey that actually led me here.
I went through so much in my younger years, infertility in my twenties, acne. Chronic migraines, the diagnoses after diagnoses. And I searched and searched and, I, actually ended up getting sicker and sicker because I was looking in the wrong places and I was never asking why any of it was showing up in my body because I didn't [00:18:00] even know.
To ask why that wasn't the model of medicine that I was looking to. I was looking for. fixes. And so anyway, jump forward. I ended up stepping into this career, shifting, stepping away from my prior career as a teacher. And I teach people in a very different way. And I stepped in and went back to school for integrative nutrition and started health coaching and continued on and got more education and applied functional medicine.
And again, that naturopathy, and I just became so fascinated with the human body. And yet, I had all of this knowledge, and I thought I was doing it all right, but I was, I, myself, was Not quieting noise. I was running and pushing and a very type A personality and a lot of reasons that why I thought I had stories where I thought I had to work hard and prove myself and my children who are now 16, 18 and 20 were, you know, that much [00:19:00] younger.
So think back a decade ago and I'm mom and I'm carpooling all over the place and I'm Going to school and starting a business and running a business and keeping myself so busy. And it was as if I was running from my own self to running from the things that really truly did matter. And so it was four years ago.
The world was starting right at the beginning of the pandemic, pandemic that spring was getting really noisy, very noisy. We were living in a state of fear globally, and understandably so. We didn't know what was going on here in the United States. it was an election year, so noisy, very noisy.
And I found myself. In quarantine with my family, still running a business, still trying to help everyone else with all of their fear and their anxiety and all of that. And here I was, and I, I was doing the opposite of fighting noise. I was everything in my life was noisier, noisier, noisier, and I [00:20:00] was becoming consumed with all of it.
And I didn't know how to slow down. I was finding myself struggling behind my own scenes with insomnia. So bad, couldn't sleep and my anxiety was ramping up and up and up. And I was part of a small group in the school that I was also teaching at. So I had gone to the school of applied functional, functional medicine.
I was on staff there and we had a small group of other practitioners and we would run functional tests. And we, ran to learn for fun, help geeks do, and we ran these functional tests and collectively did a few that were the same. I got my test results back and I was my sickest client. I was so inflamed, so inflamed that I didn't even know what to do.
I looked at it and I thought, I need help. I need help. It's time for me to tear the house down. And it was my dark night in the soul moment in my life. My knees hit the ground and [00:21:00] I said, God, I don't even know where to start. Do I need a therapist? Do I need a coach? Do I need help with my health? Do I need help with my business and organizing the life, my marriage, my parenting, all of it, I need help with all of it.
And at that time. I was very, very blessed to have someone who I ended up hiring come into my life, who ended up being it all like all of it. And we very, very intensely worked together for three years, to dig into all of these areas. And I really look at that time as being not only personally life changing and transforming for me, but professionally, because I really, really.
Learned what it was to walk my dog and I really learned during those three years what matters when it comes to our health and why our health is our most important asset and the investment is priceless and it does require Us [00:22:00] dedicating time and effort, but we are worth that and it changes everything.
So today I'm living so very, very, very differently. And I actually, in that time, I realized one of my biggest drivers of the inflammation in my body was, my nerve came from my nervous system. Because I was stuck in fight or flight. I was stuck in this place of go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And quieting down the noise was hard for me.
I had slowing myself down physically, slowing myself down mentally, the doing things like you had said when it was hard for you with your ringing in your ears to. Be quiet. It was almost as if it were, I felt I didn't have the ringing in my ears, but slowing myself going for a walk in nature with nothing, because that's what my coach would challenge me to do.
Don't take your phone, Jen. Oh my goodness. I was like, Oh, what? Oh, this was hard. And then slowly I was able to start to pay attention. I was [00:23:00] able to hear, I was able to make connections in my physical body, with what was going on in my mind and work on my mind to help, shift my physical body. Yeah.
you know, I love that you've shared so openly, but even when you were doing the work that you realized you were your sickest client and how easy it is to get in the rat race and to ignore the body. Even when it's the work that you do, which speaks to just all of us, that it is normal and we can really take time, whether it be with support or on our own to sit listen and to decrease all that noise, right?
To decrease the, I've got this and I've got this and I've got this, and I call it the fires, right? Like put out the Maybe those fires have to burn for a little bit because the fire within you that's going, I'm danger, danger is getting worse needs to be able to be calmed and relaxed first so that you then can put out the fires more effectively, right in your [00:24:00] life and help the little ones like that.
So, yeah, Everything you said really spoke to me. Cause I'm like, yeah, Cause that's how it felt last summer. It's like, man, I teach life balance and here I am, like, can't eat food without having a reaction to it, but it's true, we can serve others and still need to do the work ourselves. Oh, gosh.
I would say that we have to do the work ourselves and. Oftentimes, that's where the power of, hiring someone else in, in looking to someone else to help guide because comes in. Because when you are so close to the mirror, I, I, look at it like you are looking in a mirror, but your nose is squished up to the, mirror itself.
And so everything is blurry and it's really hard. It's really, really hard to discern and it's hard to see the things in yourself. So investing in yourself also helps you then to invest in other people and [00:25:00] to become so much more powerful life. And whatever that role is that you are called to do in this world.
And most of us have multiple roles, right? So it's a role in our career role as a, perhaps a parent, perhaps a spouse, a daughter, like all of our relationships become that much better because we've taken the time to slow it down and to invest in ourselves and to become the best version of ourselves.
So we can show up and pour out also to other people. Jennifer, if people want to connect with you, if they're hearing this stuff, and I know you've got lots of resources, what are some things that they can find on your website and how can they connect with you? Great. Absolutely. You can follow me on Instagram at jennifer.
ragazzo. I'm very active on Instagram stories, because I love connecting with people on my website. It's JenniferRagazzo. com and I'll share that with you for the show notes. [00:26:00] I also have a free guide. It's, um, 12 ways that Christian women can fight back and win against, midlife fatigue and anxiety. So there's a guide with a different, again, the guide is helpful and applicable to anybody.
So even if you are a man and you want to download the guide, there are 12 different, very solid needle moving steps that will help to begin to support those foundations that I was talking about. And there's things, there's many, many, many different tools. And I know you teach them to Katie that we can bring on board, put into our toolkit and start to integrate into our daily website.
Are free. And again, they're simple. They're not always easy because it's. carving out a whole new pattern habit system. so I have that as well and I have different coaching programs. So right now my, two offerings are my one on one. So it, my, programs are called the Vibrant Rise Functional So Vibrant Rise Functional Wellness Intensive is my one on one work where I go really deep with [00:27:00] my clients in To all the different areas of health and the one on one we can go deeper and bring on board lab work and Functional testing if needed And I very much customize my coaching program for my clients.
So we go where you need to go and then I also have a group program, Vibrant Rise Functional Wellness Collective. We are kicking off another cohort in the spring. It just started one last week for the, our winter round. And that is a program where I teach clients collectively, those functional foundations.
And we go into all of them and we look for our cracks. I teach them, I teach. The women, how to look for the cracks in their foundation and, what really matters. And so that helps people to really build that strong foundation to their house. That group sounds amazing. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you for what you do and supporting women around the world and some men and really helping again, for us to have that [00:28:00] power and control back in our lives of our health and teaching us the tools to be able to do that.
I think that's amazing. And I. I know that some of you will go and find her and connect and get that resource. So thank you again for being here. You are so welcome. And dear listener, here's to finding our balance code.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Take a moment to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform. That helps other listeners just like you to find this podcast too. Want to connect and learn how we can work together? Check out the links in the show notes below.
Discovering your balance code doesn't have to be a one person journey. You can have a team and I'd love to support you. So here's to finding our balance code.