Tami Simon: You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Amy Kurtz. Amy Kurtz is a 32-year-old young woman who made a commitment to becoming an active participant in her own health after facing a series of health challenges. Following a trip abroad, Amy was confronted with a thyroid disorder, celiac disease, parasite infections, and a severe gastric motility disorder of the colon. An intense journey through doctor's offices, medical clinics, specialists, and spiritual communities led Amy to the decision to become more involved, educated, and invested in her own human process. That interest became her life's passion. Amy now coaches clients to become "wellness warriors." She's a Pilates instructor, a detox expert and the author of a new book with Sounds True called Kicking Sick: Your Go-To Guide for Thriving with Chronic Health Conditions.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Amy and I talked about how to take an empowered approach to your health and see food as medicine and movement as medicine. We also talked about the importance of creating an "A-Team" of support for one's healing journey and how to honor your own instincts even when they contradict what a doctor says—that you know your body better than anyone else. Finally, we talked about what it means to be what Amy calls a "glow warrior," someone who journeys successfully through adversity and communicates a light of inner strength and resilience. Here's my conversation with young, brave, and outspoken Amy Kurtz.
Amy, one of the things I learned from your new book Kicking Sick that I didn't know that really surprised me was that one out of every two people has a chronic health condition. Talk a little bit about that. That means one out of every two people that I run into, that I walk by on the street or when I'm doing an errand, or here, at Sounds True, has a chronic health condition.
Amy Kurtz: Yes, it's very staggering to hear that number. What's more surprising is that it's not just one in two have one, it's one in two have at least one. That means that 365 million people in our country have at least one chronic health condition that they're dealing with. That literally means that everyone knows somebody with something health-related right now, which speaks a lot about the health condition and crisis in our country and the rising rate of chronic illness, which is pretty alarming when you hear that number. Right?
TS: I feel like my eyes are being opened as we're talking about this and as I read that statistic. Tell me what you mean, to be sure I'm clear, by a "chronic health condition."
AK: OK. A chronic health condition could be anything from lupus to Lyme disease, from celiac disease to Crohn's disease, from a thyroid condition to anything like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or Lyme disease. I think I said Lyme disease already. It could be anything that's chronic that's not curable that you live with. It could be an autoimmune disorder or it could be something like asthma that you don't know how to properly get rid of, but it's something that's always with you.
TS: Now you said [that] understanding this statistic tells us something about the chronic health crisis in our world today. Do you think that more people have these kinds of conditions than at other times or did we just not know about it previously?
AK: I definitely feel that the disease rate is growing in the country and I think it's growing faster than our medical system is equipped to handle. I think a lot of that is from the way that we eat and the way that we live, and the environment changing around us and stress levels. It seems to be more prevalent now than ever. People also are now shifting their belief in what medicine is. I can talk a little bit more about that, but I think that it's definitely rising and people are definitely in need of more personal practices to help keep themselves well in a way that I don't think was always this prevalent.
TS: Now, tell our listeners a little bit about your journey. Your writing comes from your own experience with multiple chronic illnesses and really your own journey to empowerment. That's what I'm most interested, Amy, in focusing on in this conversation, is how anyone can move from a position of feeling like a victim—that their body is revolting or that the environmental conditions that we live in are attacking them and they're a victim—to a place of empowerment. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your own story and your own sense, if you will, of feeling a victim of illness and moving to empowerment?
AK: Yes. I was always a very lively kid. I was very active. I never wanted to miss out on the action around me. I was very spunky. I was full of life and I was very high energy. When I was around 14 years old, I came back from dance class and I had this shooting pain go up my spine. It was very alarming. I had never felt anything like it, I was just 14 years old. I really had that pain stay with me for a good 10 years of my life. My father is a Western-minded physician, so I grew up thinking that Western medicine was all that existed. We went to all of the best specialists and we were outside of our comfort zone in many ways. Dealing with debilitating pain as a young child isn't something that most people have to deal with.
I think I sort of took on this "victim of my circumstance" mentality from a young age because I really didn't know any better. I went from doctor to doctor and nobody could tell me that the root cause of the pain was likely food-related or tell me what it was. The answer was to put me on medication. That certainly made me identify as sick. Then after that time period I was always on this medicine, I was always not—like, my friends were going to sports or in the school plays, and I was going from doctor to doctor trying to figure out how to make the pain more bearable in my body. I almost thought that it was normal at [the] time, even though that sounds so strange.
Then when I went to college I got the mononucleosis virus. A lot of people around me had it, but I didn't recover as quickly and I didn't understand why that was. I just thought "That's me, that's what I have to deal with, things are just harder for me than other people my age." Then after college I went to Israel and I sort of had a perfect storm of health issues crop up. I picked up a parasite infection and it sort of was the tipping point between the back pain—which was later diagnosed as celiac disease—and the mono and the parasite infection. Every system in my body pretty much blew out and everything started short-circuiting.
It was really scary and intense. I didn't know how to handle it. I gained 30 pounds in 30 days. My hair was falling out. I had rashes all over my body. I couldn't keep any solid food down and I couldn't go to the bathroom at all. I felt so sick. I had to move home. It threw me into this unchartered territory of having to deal with a medical world that was very overwhelming, and because my body was in such an extreme state of crisis, I went into this "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" phase where I was trying everything and going to every doctor and completely feeling victimized by my condition and my body and my relation to myself. I didn't know anything; from a young age this, is how I related to myself, as my physical problems were who I was.
I went through from doctor to doctor to doctor until I got to a surgeon who told me that I had to remove my colon if I ever wanted to go to the bathroom again. I completely hit rock bottom. Then I let myself cry and I let it all go. I realized that I had to accept the present moment for what it is and trust that there is a lesson in everything. I was in so much pain in a body that wasn't working for me, but it's so important to remember that you aren't failing because you aren't healed. You have to be willing to look at the dark and sit with it and locate it and be with it. Everything is perfect the way it is no matter how it is. There is a lesson in everything.
What helped me in that moment was to realize that you are so much more than your physical condition. A lot of people who are struggling with illness don't understand that there's this separation between the diagnosis and who they are. I think that that's an extremely common theme, but what helped me was realizing that my physical condition was only a part of me. In understanding that and treating it that way, I could get into the river and flow, and truly learn to take care of my condition from a place of power and care and perspective. Until I started to see it as not all-encompassing and every part of who I was, I couldn't really start to take care of myself.
TS: Now, you're saying a lot of really interesting things, so I want to unpack a couple of the items you've pointed to here. Realizing that your physical condition is not all of who you are, and how when that realization dawned and deepened in your experience, it allowed you to then treat yourself differently and take care of yourself differently. I'm wondering if you can help me understand that connection. How did that recognition that you're more than your physical condition allow you to treat yourself differently?
AK: I had a doctor that once said to me—he's also a spiritual teacher—he said, "Shut your eyes and think of who you are. That is very different than something you're diagnosed with." It's like thinking about your arm; that's just a part of you. That really stuck with me. The idea that we really are our spirit and that the mind and the body are connected through every major organ system. When you start to think of yourself as healthy and well and healing and you start to place thoughts into your consciousness of a different reality than what you are now, you can better separate from sort of feeling a victim of your condition. Does that make sense?
TS: [Yes.] I wonder if somebody is listening and they're like, "You know, but the truth is I do feel like a failure, that somehow I've failed. I've failed not only by having the health condition I'm in right now and the state of my body, but I'm not responding very well either. The truth is I feel like a failure."
AK: Right. I think that a lot of people feel that way. I think that it is important to really understand the concept that just because you aren't healing at the rate you would like to be or that you're not fully well, you aren't failing.
That is something that's really hard to wrap your head around and that you need to sit with for a moment. You are separate from your illness, and healing is a journey and it's not a destination. It's only a part of who you are, it doesn't define you. It is only then that you can relate to yourself in a different way—one with more love and compassion and kindness. When you do this, you're able to truly shift the paradigm of how you care for yourself and that's when you start to heal.
TS: You also made a statement, [a] very powerful statement, that part of your journey to a more empowered perspective around your own chronic illnesses was to understand that things are actually perfect the way they are and that there's a lesson in everything. I think these are spiritual teachings that people hear and they may want to embrace, but a part of them also says, "Oh, come on. It's not perfect the way it is. I don't want this lesson. Maybe there's a lesson in this, but it's not the lesson I'm interested in. No thank you." I wonder if you can talk to that person.
AK: I mean, I was that person, so I totally understand how that feels. But I don't think that that's productive to sit in that place, because that in itself is being a victim of your circumstance. If you aren't willing to separate and realize that maybe you need to think outside the box of what you know, or expand your horizons in terms of healing and your body and what you know to be true, you can't ever get yourself unstuck.
There has to be this moment where you approach things differently in order to make real change. It's easy to get really transfixed and stuck in this state of being over it or being frustrated with yourself, or even this self-loathing [that] comes with illness sometimes, where you wish you could just hop out of your body and into somebody else's that works better. But when you are in that place you can't possibly connect with yourself, and you can't possibly begin to love yourself into wholeness.
Those spiritual teachings that you were referring to really are the ideas that put you into a place where you can start loving yourself into being whole again. It's important to think outside of your current circumstance into something that's almost a bigger theme.
TS: Now, you talked about how in your own process, it was so confusing as a young person to go to so many different doctors and try to make sense of what the right way through to get the right kind of treatment is. A lot of your book, Kicking Sick, talks about that process and educates people. You're trying to save people some of the struggle and pain that you went through, and really creating a health plan for oneself. Tell me a little bit about sorting through the confusion and what you learned in that process about really creating a health plan.
AK: As I had mentioned before, I grew up only thinking that Western medicine existed. I was a young person that literally went to 30 doctors in 30 years, and nobody ever had a clear, concise answer for me. It wasn't until I referenced earlier, the "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" state when I had to stop and really think about how I was going to get myself well, and I always knew that I didn't want to be identified as a sick person. I wanted to get better. It really made me face how I look at healing and how I look at life, and find different resources that were better for me. The type of doctor that I was going to isn't wrong for some people, but it wasn't working for me. My body was in such a state of crisis that it was demanding I look in a different way at healing; instead of just as one approach, I went all the way to the Eastern minded approach, and then I found something in the middle.
What started to make sense to me was this idea of functional medicine, which is you look at the body as multiple systems that all have to work together in order for the body to properly function. To me this was this new idea, because it might sound simple but I was used to saying, "OK, I have this symptom, I have to take this medication for that part of my body." When I started to embrace the idea that all of these systems have to work together in order to function well and that everything is interconnected, I started to realize that it wasn't just finding the right doctors—which I call your A-team, which you really have to create for yourself. You have to find the right person that is a good match for you, [who] wants to partner with you and be an advocate for you with yourself.
Then you have to figure out what sort of wellness treatment to really help enhance your quality of being and also lower your stress response in the body. Stress makes everything worse, and unfortunately—literally everything in life, stress makes everything worse. Unfortunately when you're sick, your body can often go into that state of fight-or-flight where if a tiger was chasing you and you're scared, your cortisol levels rush through your body. When you're dealing with a chronic illness, you can sort of get fixated in that state, which is also kind of what we were speaking about before emotionally about feeling frustrated in a fixed state. We have to do everything that we can to heal, and I did, to try to eliminate stress in my body.
When I started to see food as medicine and create the right team for me to take all of the pressure off of me handling everything myself, I could really start to embrace a healing mentality. It's everything. It's the whole mind/body connection. Everything is connected. When you start to realize that food is medicine, movement is medicine, wellness practices, energy work, spiritual teachings, meditation is all medicine, seeing the right doctors is medicine, then you can start to embrace this idea that it isn't in a pill—it's in an entire idea of personal well-being. That's what made it easy for me to create the Kicking Sick Action Plan, where I teach people how to go from being a "sick person" or what I call "the sick chick" to the glow warrior, which is a person who rises up through adversity and glows in the face of it and grows through a deeply traumatizing experience into something that's deeply transformative.
TS: Now, "food is medicine," that's a very powerful idea. In hearing about your own story—that your 10-year journey with back pain ended up being related to celiac disease, a severe gluten intolerance—I never would've expected that a gluten intolerance could have any kind of connection to back pain. That surprises me.
AK: It surprised me too. It surprised everyone I know. Interestingly enough, gluten is really tricky because it can present itself in the body in multiple ways. For me, it was through debilitating pain. I didn't know it at the time, but now I know that my body was in an inflammatory state and it was sending me a signal saying, "Listen up, we're in trouble. Pay attention," and I didn't know. I grew up eating all-processed foods. I didn't know any differently. I thought that was healthy. My whole family thought that was healthy. I never for once thought that what I put into my body would be a representation of how my body was feeling. I really didn't make the connection at all, and I was a little kid so I didn't know.
Then when I started eating a healthier diet, my pee started getting a little bit better. This was before I went to Israel. Then when I went to Israel I was eating all gluten again; I came home in excruciating pain. One of the doctors I saw said we need to take out inflammatory foods, so I took out gluten. In two days, the pain that had run my life for ten years completely disappeared—in two days.
If you think about that on a larger scale, that something could be affecting your body that much that you're sensitive to—that it can really kind of break down everything, it's what really broke down my constitution to even get as sick as I was in Israel—that doesn't just happen to somebody, not typically. If you think about how disconnected we as a culture have gotten from whole foods and eating a plant-based diet full of the nutrients that we need, it's really fascinating to think about something like gluten affecting the body that way. I really was eating all gluten, all day, all the time. Then two days after I went off it was completely gone.
TS: There are people that have celiac disease and then there are many people who have self-identified as being gluten intolerant but not having celiac disease. I live in Boulder, Colorado—that's where Sounds True is headquartered. There's a lot of gluten-intolerant people in Boulder and there's a lot of people who make fun on gluten-intolerant people in Boulder. I'm curious what your view is of that—both the gluten-intolerant movement and all of the people who are making fun of gluten intolerance.
AK: I think that there are a couple ways to look at it. One is that, really, gluten isn't great for anybody. The way that wheat is grown in our country is different than other places. It's not the healthiest choice for anybody. Then there really is an autoimmune disorder with gluten that effects your small intestine and your body doesn't know how to process it, and that really is so real.
There's also a trend—a diet—that's going on. There has always been these trend diets, but a lot of people go gluten-free because they think that that's the latest thing. It's a tricky situation because on one hand it really does make most people feel better to not eat gluten. That's the truth. If somebody tried it they would probably feel better energy and more vitality. Some people wouldn't; some people wouldn't even notice. But, a lot of people do.
I think that people are leaning that way because it makes them feel better and people are starting to pay attention to what you put in your body directly affects how your body feels and responds and is. Then there are the people that make fun of it and maybe simply they're just not open-minded to try something new or maybe it's that it seems like a fad—which there have been many fad diets. I don't really know what the making fun of it is, but I think that for some people it's a real allergy and for other people it's just a healthy choice.
TS: Well, it's interesting to me as someone who has looked into this deeply—not just for yourself but for people that you work with and coach—that most people in your opinion would feel better on a gluten-free diet—that that's your view. That most people find that. That's interesting. Why do you think that is?
AK: I think that with most of my clients—and I do particularly coach people with chronic health issues—any foods that are anti-inflammatory help take down the inflammatory response in the body. Because of that, people start to feel better. Usually—especially if somebody is fighting with a chronic issue—those are the first things that we remove from the diet. Then they'll feel better energy, more clarity—that their body doesn't have to work as hard to function well. These are things that a predominately healthy person doesn't naturally think about. But for someone with a compromised constitution, they have to think about those things in order to put themselves in an optimal state for healing.
TS: [Yes.] Now, in thinking about food as medicine, there's a quote from your book Kicking Sick that I like. It's that, "Our gut is our second brain." You talk about how important it is to be able to tune in and listen to your gut, your second brain. I wonder if you can talk about that—how you came to discover the gut as a second brain.
AK: I think this is multilayered. For me, my whole way of being shifted when I cleaned up my diet and when I started to heal my gut—which most of my health conditions were directly related to my gut. It wasn't just the bacteria infection or the parasite infection, it was anxiety that came with it and all of these emotions that are actually held in the gut. It's scientifically proven that your gut is your second brain. If you don't take care of your digestion system and your intestines well, and put them in optimal shape by way of food and probiotics and all these things that will help it function well, you're not setting yourself up for success.
Then there also is gut feelings and gut instincts and being able to listen to the signals. This is related to something we were speaking about earlier, about picking the right doctor. There have been many times where I was with someone or doing a treatment or on my quest to get well, and something didn't fit totally right in my gut, but I didn't listen to it because at the time I didn't have the tools or knowhow to, which is part of what we were speaking about with the victim circumstance. Just trying to tie it all together, you really are able to listen to yourself on a deeper level to know what's right and what's not. Also, the gut is really your second brain, so you have to take care of it and nurture it accordingly so that your whole body can function well and your brain can function well.
TS: I know you're a detox expert as well. How do you see the role of detoxing and clearing out our second brain, if you will? How do you see that and what do you recommend when you're coaching people?
AK: I think detoxification is an extremely important part of healing. I know this through my own experience. I'm a teacher through my own trials and tribulations. I've learned from my own experiences. Because I've been celiac for my whole life and I didn't know, I really had to heal my gut in a very profound way with the right doctor when I finally got there. I think detoxification—when the body isn't eliminating toxins—and the toxic load that we carry around now is different as when we're talking about with environmental toxins—and if you're not eliminating properly, you're going to have a higher toxic load than most people.
The way that you can take care of this and put rituals into your life to optimize the detoxification process—some of them are sweating. The skin is the largest organ in the body and if you're regularly sweating, you're helping your body to eliminate anything that doesn't serve it. The other is through going to the bathroom well and having bowel movements and making sure that your body is moving so that it's removing and it can cleanse properly. Another way is through eating water-based foods, having probiotics—doing anything that you can to cleanse at a cellular level is going to help you get healthy faster.
I also think part of detoxification is dumping your stress load, which through meditation of mindfulness practices you're able to get rid of a lot of stress that you would normally carry in your body in a peaceful way. That's only putting your body in a state of being able to detox. I mean it in more than just a physical way.
TS: I notice often when I hear somebody talk about detoxing I think, "Gosh, that's something I really should do. But, I don't know if I'm going to take a week and do some intensive detox or a 30-day program." Is there something I could do in a 24 or 48-hour period—let's go 24—in a 24-hour period that would help my body? I've heard what you said about sweating and dumping my stress. But in terms of my relationship with food, like, "Gosh, I just need to give my intestines some love and a break from how hard they've been working," what would you suggest?
AK: OK, so if we're going to do a 24-hour thing I would probably suggest starting the day with hot water and lemon. That's really detoxifying in itself and it gives your digestion a break. If you think about how hard the digestive system has to work all the time to process—and think of it as a treadmill moving through your body, it's constantly working. If you can give it a bit of a break and flush it with a lot of water and hot water with lemon, that's great because it gives it an opportunity to sort of reboot itself, if that makes sense.
TS: Yes.
AK: Then I think taking down the acidity in the food would be great for the day. People hear "detox" and they think "extreme." They think, "Oh I got to go on this juice cleanse," or "Oh I have to do the most extreme thing to cleanse," and it's really not about that at all. It's simply adding in the things that will help your body so that it can detox better. What I mean by that is the hot water with lemon, raising your water intake significantly, eating more alkaline-based foods—so adding in a green juice of really dark, leafy greens with a lot of phytonutrients and amino acids—a green smoothie, having an extra salad with your meal.
Then I speak a lot about food-combining in the book because I think that it really helps people's internal stress level if they are eating foods that eliminate at the same rate. What I mean by that is you can have a protein and a starch. You can think of it as a Ferrari versus a dump truck on a highway. If the Ferrari gets stuck behind the dump truck it's in a traffic jam because it wants to just move faster. Sometimes when you put certain foods groups in together, one is ready to go from the stomach to the small intestine and the other one needs more time and more production to be ready to break down and leave.
If you think about just simply two things—because it can get very complicated. But if you think about eating a protein with vegetables or a starch with vegetables, it will digest at a better rate, which puts less pressure on your body and keeps things moving through you more smoothly. You might find that you're less bloated, that you don't feel as tired or like you would after Thanksgiving dinner, and that things move quicker for you.
Those would be my top tips for doing a quick "detox." Again, I think that there's a misconception with that word—that it has to be extreme—when really there's so much you can add in that would help all the time.
TS: That's very helpful. Now we touched on this point of how finding the right doctor that is a fit for you, that your gut instincts say, "Yes, this person can really help me"—how important that is. One of the things I picked up on in Kicking Sick that got my attention was that before you chose the acupuncturist you wanted to work with that you went to ten different acupuncturists to try to find the person that was really right for you. I thought, "Wow, that's brave." I don't know how I would go through a process like that. I'd have to—you know. Tell me a little bit about that.
AK: I think it seems like I was interviewing them, but I wasn't. I was just simply—it was post the place of where I said I needed to rethink how I was looking at going to doctors and [the] healing process. I really had started to step into a place of empowerment with my own health. I had read about the benefits of acupuncture and I met some people that just didn't make me immediately feel that they were the right fit. It's like with anything. It's like when you meet a friend, you sometimes instantly connect with someone and sometimes you don't. It's the same with a doctor or a healer or an acupuncturist.
Really, I just wanted to find a person that could help me get to a state of healing quicker—that made me comfortable, that really knew what they were talking about, and could really explain to me why acupuncture would help me and my condition. I wanted to be informed of what this person thought in terms of helping me specifically, not just some broad health condition. I really wanted to create a team for myself where I could trust in the person's knowledge, that they were the right fit to help me, if that makes sense.
TS: In navigating creating an A-team—gathering your A team—one of the things that I think people find so overwhelming and confusing is, "OK, so my acupuncturist says this and my chiropractor says something different. My Western medical doctor says something that seems contradictory. How do I get my whole team to be working together, and what's my role? If we use a sports metaphor or something, am I the quarterback of the team? I don't even understand all of these things. Can't someone else be the quarterback?" How did you navigate creating a team and having everybody coordinated and your role in that?
AK:I really went from a place where I was seeing so many different people and managing it all myself, which was really stressful in itself. That's a full-time job regardless of if you're healthy or not. That puts a certain amount of stress on you as a person to begin with. Then I rethought this idea that there has to be a way that you can create a team for yourself where if you have a flare-up or you're in a state of healing, you don't feel like you're jumping out of a plane without a parachute. It was really important for me to go and find the right people that were the right match for me.
What I created was: I wanted to have an internist that would be my main doctor [and] that would talk to everybody else so that I didn't have to be the one connecting all the dots. It also was important for me to embrace the idea that I am the captain of my ship and if I don't step into the place of power and pick the right people for me, I could be a victim of the medical world forever. That's just not someplace that I wanted to be or live from.
It takes a long time to go from acupuncturist to acupuncturist or from functional medicine doctor to functional medicine doctor to find the person that is the right fit for you. But it really starts with asking yourself what is important for you to heal. What aspects do you need in a doctor? What do you need them to be an expert at? Are they present for you? And that changes for each person. It's going to be very personal.
For me, I had to really kind of cut the whole team if I was the quarterback and then start again, and find the people that were willing to talk to each other and were willing to be a part of—I don't want to say "community" because that's not really the right word—but that wanted to be a part of a system that I created for myself to help me heal.
Unfortunately there aren't a lot of people that do that. But, starting with a great functional medicine practitioner is really key because they look at the body as many different systems that work together. Then you find the people that will work together.
TS: Now there's another quote from Kicking Sick that I really liked, which is, "You know your body better than anyone." This was in the context of you writing about how important it is that you bring forward exactly what's happening in your experience and that you trust yourself in a primary kind of way. I'm curious to hear more about that, especially if a doctor is giving you advice that seems to not fit with your instincts and you think, "Well I know my body better than anyone, but this person is a doctor. They know what they're talking about. Do they know more than I do?"
AK: I think that that comes up a lot for people, and it certainly came up for me for many years—feeling that the doctor was always going to have the answer and it was likely going to be in a pill that could just make me feel better. It wasn't that way at all. When I was speaking earlier about feeling that—I was on my knees in the doctor's office who told me I had to remove my colon. I started thinking, "No. This is not right. This does not feel right to me."
It was in that moment where I just woke up and I realized that I could have so many people tell me so many different things, but I'm the one that knows what intuitively feels right. It was in that moment when I heard the doctor tell me I had no other option but to remove my colon that I stopped and said, "No, that's not enough for me. That's not good enough for me. There has to be another way."
That enabled me to start thinking about other possibilities, which opened doors for finding the world's specialist on this specific issue that I didn't ever know existed [and] a medication that really helped me work on this specific issue that nobody else could figure out. It wasn't enough for me anymore to have people tell me that there was no answer. I spent much of my life listening to people say, "We don't know what's wrong." It was in that pivotal doctor's appointment that I realized that I had to be in control of my health and that nobody knew my body better than me.
I had to get to an extreme point of having somebody say, "Remove your large intestine because I don't have another option for you," for me to say, "No, that's not good enough. That's not an option. There has to be other options." It was in that and [my] brainstorming and thinking that everything started to open up and I profoundly learned lessons throughout my healing that I do know myself better than anyone. If I was constantly—which I did for many years. I was over-treated for a thyroid condition. I really let people totally take the wheel. That's not saying that people shouldn't do that, but for me I learned the hard way that I had to be an active participant in my own health or I would never get better.
I think that that is really, really key, especially when you're dealing with a chronic health issue—that you are your own captain of your ship, you're your own person, and you have to take control of the situation because nobody else is going to do it for you.
TS: Let's say someone is listening and the area in their wellness journey that they're having difficulty with has to do with their own beliefs about their situation, because you have a section of Kicking Sick that talks about how to work with your beliefs. Let's say someone's beliefs are things like, "You know, I just don't think I'm ever going to get better," or, "I have a body that is just cursed with difficulties. Other people don't have that," or, "I just continue to feel sorry for myself and I can't really get out of that." There could be all kinds of beliefs that people have invested in and they can recognize them but they don't really know how to authentically change them. They don't want to just put some kind of affirmation on top [and] that they don't have a conviction [that] is real. "I don't feel like I'm ever going to get better. That's really what I believe." How could you help coach someone like that?
AK: This is a theme that was really real for me, so I really understand it deeply. When we're diagnosed with something, we mentally, physically, and spiritually hear that that diagnosis is a limitation or something permanent that we need to adjust to. If we believe that that's a reality forever, we won't ever get better and we won't ever be able to shift. That's where faith and belief come in.
When somebody said to me that my colon would never work again, I really believed him at first. I really felt so hopeless and helpless. I had a doctor that told me that my thyroid was always going to need to be medicated, and I believed him. It was in that belief of somebody giving me a blanket statement like that that sort of broke my spirit in a way.
After I had established a true spiritual practice and I knew and believed that my colon would work again and I would have to dream about it—I would really have to think, "This is the state of health that I want for myself." And I would have to think about how that would feel and how that would be. The simple shift in a belief made me get to more specialists who had much more information than the original doctor, many more solutions and suggestions. The power of believing that there is some other option for yourself is extremely important.
I think you have to start by saying, "What beliefs about your diagnosis are you willing to shift?" For example, I say in the book—let's say that you've been told that you're fibromyalgia will keep you in constant pain and feeling exhausted. You really think about that state. That's how I'm told I'm going to feel. Then you would think about the contrary belief. What is the opposite of that? You could say, "I'm pain-free and energetic." Then you start to really say it to yourself until you totally believe it to be true.
A couple of other examples could be a diagnosis of your arthritis will incapacitate you. You can say, "I'm completely healthy and well. My body works and moves freely just as it is supposed to." I think the first place that I start with people is: what do they believe to be true and what makes them excited? On the flip side, what would the opposite of that belief be? If you won't be able to walk again, maybe the belief is, "I will dance."
If you stay and sit with it for a while—hear it in your mind—if it feels really happy and it feels that it resonates through every cell in your body and it feels like a dream to you, that's where you need to sit with and make it a mantra for yourself because you feel your thoughts on a cellular level.
If you can start to really flip the belief or the diagnosis into something that you want to be so—if that makes sense—you can really start to shift your health on a cellular level. I think the first step for clients typically is the willingness to try to think of their circumstance as different than it currently is.
TS: Now you mentioned this idea, Amy, of people becoming "glow warriors." This is a phrase that you use. It's an interesting phrase. It has to do with our ability to rise up through adversity and be in a different place. Tell me what you mean by being a glow warrior. What's the glow part?
AK: The glow part is somebody who glows through the space of adversity or illness, who is willing to look at their circumstances different than it is, who is willing to recognize that every challenge in life has a beautiful lesson to be learned, and is willing to take it on with a different mindset and a belief that there is another side and another way and a way to take care of themselves that's different than they're being told. So, when I speak about "glow," I really mean "glow from the inside out"—finding your spiritual center and being able to look at your circumstance as a lesson and not something that is permanent or fixed that we spoke about before.
The warrior part is that you're willing to face your challenges head on, but in a way that really serves you and takes care of yourself—where you're a champion of your life.
TS: It's interesting that you use the word "glow," because of course people say, "Oh that person is glowing with health," or even certain people who seem to almost have some kind of halo effect when they walk into a room, the whole room starts to glow just because of their openheartedness or their generosity or goodness, you can feel it. I just think it's interesting how that word glow connects to our inner light and health. I wonder why you chose that word.
AK: I think I chose that word pretty much for what you said—[how] there is this radiant quality to that word. It's not just about being a warrior and being "hard" about the process. Glow, to me, represents something soft and serene and peaceful while also being illuminating and transformative. There's something really beautiful about a glow. I think I chose that word because it's something that the idea and the softness of that color is very healing to me. But, it also represents a lightness of spirit that—when you're faced with a physical challenge, you have to be a warrior. But, the only way to truly heal and to truly transform and glow through the experience or grow through the experience is to embrace that you're on a journey, and that healing is a journey and not a destination. You need to embrace that lightness of spirit if you're going to really have it be transformative.
TS: OK, Amy, just two final questions for you. Here's the first one. What do you hope people will get if you had one wish from your book Kicking Sick? What's the takeaway you want people to have?
AK: I want one in two people that read this book, hopefully, to know that they are not alone and that there really is a different way that they can approach their—what probably feels overwhelming health situation—and turn something that could potentially be deeply traumatic into something deeply transformative for themselves. I want to teach them the tools that they need to be able to take on this challenge and have it be something beautiful and shift the way that they see the world and their life and their relationships. I think I want it all for them, but I really want them to know that healing is a journey and that they need their time, their love, and their attention to get through it and to be a kind friend to themselves.
TS: And then my final question: Our show is called Insights at the Edge, and I'm always curious to know in someone's life what their current edge is. What I mean is: what are you currently working on [or] challenged by in your own life that's really a priority for you right now?
AK: I really am a seeker and have always been my entire life. I always love to be learning and growing and expanding. But, for me right now as I'm getting ready to put my first book into the world with Sounds True—and I'm so grateful to be doing that—and the truth is I'm learning to be brave and put my message out there because I know it will deeply help other people and to not judge myself for my past experiences and to be fully accepting of my story and supportive of that journey because I know that other people have gone through it. I think being patient and not judging myself has been something that I've really been working on lately, that's the truth.
TS: [Yes,] patient, brave, and not judging yourself. I love it. Thank you so much. I've been speaking with Amy Kurtz. She is the author of the new book Kicking Sick: Your Go-To Guide for Thriving with Chronic Health Conditions. The book includes a forward by Mark Hyman. Also, it includes lots of health advice from some friends of yours who are also renowned experts in the field. Amy, maybe as we end you can just tell us a little bit about that—about some of the contributors to Kicking Sick.
AK: When I had the idea to write the book, it came to me in a dream and I woke up and said, "I need to create this resource guide. I want everybody who has helped me along my path to healing—whether that be my doctors or thought leaders and healers that have changed the way I perceive life and the situation to be—in the book." Then I also put people who I call the glow warriors, who are women who have overcome difficult health situations, giving their tips and tricks throughout the book as well. It's everybody who has inspired me and everyone who has helped me heal my life so that they can help this audience heal theirs.
TS: Amy Kurtz, thank you for your work, for your bravery, and your book Kicking Sick. Thank you for being a guest on Insights at the Edge.
AK: Thank you so much, Tami. It has been such an honor to be a part of the Sounds True family and to be on the show with you. It's one of my greatest honors. Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. To our good health, everyone. Many voices, one journey.
