Personal Evolution + How I Got Here

Welcome to The Elizabeth Rider Show!

A health coach for over a decade, I’ve seen it all, from college students to busy professionals to stay-at-home moms – everybody is looking for simpler solutions and optimized well-being. And because there is no one right way for everyone, I’m obsessed with helping you find out what works for you to create a sustainable path to health and wellness.

This show is all about the tools, resources, inspiration, and perspectives that will help you figure out how to integrate health and wellness practices into your life. From solo episodes to listener Q&As to conversations with scientists, experts, and changemakers, tune in to find what works best for you, so you can leave the rest behind!

KEY POINTS:

• What to expect on The Elizabeth Rider show
• Why Elizabeth does not believe in black-and-white thinking 
• How was The Elizabeth Rider Show born?
• Taking control of your physical and mental health 

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Transcript: Episode 01: Personal Evolution + How I Got Here

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Elizabeth Rider (00:02):
Welcome to the Elizabeth Rider Show, where we talk about optimizing health, personal evolution, and defining what true wellness means to you. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rider. I’m a certified health coach, longtime blogger and author of The Health Habit. On this podcast, we dive deep into all things health and wellbeing. From physical and mental health, spirituality, relationships, lifestyle choices, and personal growth. Each week I bring you inspiring interviews with guests and thought leaders, as well as solo episodes where I share my own experiences and insights. My mission is to give you practical insights, inspiring stories, and transformative tools that can help you unlock your full potential and create a life you truly love. I hope this podcast serves as a valuable resource to develop your sustainable habits, mindful living, and an overall state of health and happiness. Let’s dive in.
(00:52):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Elizabeth Rider Show. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rider. On this show, we will be diving in helping you find out what true wellness means to you, and I’m here to support you in your own personal evolution of finding your highest wellbeing. This show is a mix of solo episodes, listener Q&As, and conversations with scientists, experts, and change makers so that you can find what works best for you and leave the rest behind. I have been a health coach for over a decade, and I have seen it all in this industry. From college students to busy professionals to stay at home moms, everybody is looking for simpler solutions and optimized wellbeing. And I am here to tell you that there is no one right way for everyone. And that is why I’m obsessed with helping you find out what works for you and helping you find a sustainable path to health and wellness.
(01:47):
So this show is all about the tools and resources and inspiration and perspectives that will help you figure out how to integrate health and wellness practices, mindset practices, and just general health practices into your life. And I want everyone to know, you should know that I take my job very seriously. But I don’t take life too seriously because none of us get out of here alive. I like to have fun on this show, so we’ll do a lot of fun and engaging solo episodes and also just fun conversations with guests. And really dive into getting to know people and what works for them, and also learn what has not worked for them so you can take from that and like I said before, leave the rest. So the purpose of the show, like I said, is to help listeners find what works for you when it comes to your health and wellness and optimized wellbeing.
(02:37):
We’ll talk about food, we’ll talk about self-care, which is sometimes bubble baths, but not always things on the outside. Oftentimes, self-care is what we’re doing on the inside to take care of our own mental health. We’ll talk about shared human experiences, lifestyle stuff, stories from guests, and just anything that you can do from micro habits to life changes that you might be considering that will make your life better because you are constantly changing and evolving. Every single day. Billions of cells in your body renew. So from a physical perspective, you are constantly renewing and changing. Every day you have new experiences and you learn new information. And your mind is constantly evolving and changing every day as well. So I have discovered in life that I do not believe in binary thinking anymore, in black and white thinking, saying it has to be A or B, and those are my only two options.
(03:31):
I want to teach everyone that when you are coming to a decision for your health or for your relationships or for your life, you have the entire alphabet to choose from. You can create anything you want in life. It is not a yes or no answer. It’s not A or B. And when we can get out of our closed mindset, our fixed mindset way of thinking, when we can develop a growth mindset, anything is possible. So I want to talk a little bit about how this podcast started. So backing up, I was working in corporate America many years ago. And I really liked my job, but I was working 40, 50 actually probably 60 hour weeks for a big four accounting firm. And I was not eating well. I was just eating whatever they were bringing into the audit rooms, which oftentimes was just the big box chain restaurant’s, food, and it was delicious.
(04:21):
But I started feeling like crap as most people do when they don’t eat well. And I was sitting constantly because I was working at a desk job. And every time I did have some chance to maybe Google how to be healthier or read a magazine or look something up, I would find a lot of conflicting evidence or conflicting ideas. Some articles would say you have to be vegan to be healthy. And some articles would say, no, you have to be paleo and eat a ton of meat and not eat as many carbs. And then there’s the grapefruit diet and there was just anything that you could think of. And all of the advice seemed to work for some different people, which really got me thinking everybody’s probably a little bit different and you kind of have to figure out what works for you. I was also really tired. And in the previous years I had been diagnosed with low thyroid disease.
(05:13):
I was very young when that happened. I’ll talk about that in a moment. But I was also just really tired and I was sitting in my apartment one night exhausted, having eaten horrible food all day, sitting all day, wondering why I had mystery symptoms when I was young, I was in my early twenties. And I just realized that something needed to change. So I decided in a late night Google search to become a health coach. I spent a year learning about health and wellness from the world’s top experts. I started an online business. I started a blog, a recipe blog about healthy food that I was making and decided to commit myself to growing this business really to help my own personal evolution of my own health and my own life. And as it started to grow and I started sharing that with other people, it’s really become a passion to share all of this.
(05:59):
So that is why I’m here. I’ve had the blog for about 15 years. Millions of readers come every year. There’s over 75,000 I think now, people on my email list who get email updates. And this podcast is just the next fun evolution of being able to communicate with everyone and connect. So I want to talk really quickly about let’s back up to when I was a kid. And I was really active and I was about 18 and I was walking up the stairs of my high school and I had to sit down because I was out of breath, which was very strange for somebody who was in my position being an active kid. My mom took me to the doctor that night and they ran some blood tests and she called the next morning and said you need to put her on thyroid medicine right now.
(06:39):
I remember my mom being so confused on the phone. She was like, “Thyroid medicine, isn’t that for older people?” And the doctor said, “Her thyroid levels are so low, I’m surprised she can even get out of bed.” So I started taking the thyroid medicine and I felt better, and I took that through college, just took the levothyroxine every morning all through college. And then in my early twenties started to realize that every year the thyroid medicine dose would go up and I would start to feel tired and then they would raise it again. And I just kept thinking, we can’t just keep raising this every year. Eventually I’m going to be on such a high dose, nothing’s helping. And that is what was happening. I got on such a high dose that it was helping a little bit with the fatigue during the day, but then I couldn’t sleep at night.
(07:17):
So I started to dive into what would be the cause of an 18-year old at the time and now is in my twenties, having thyroid issues because that’s not super common. And I found the idea of a concept of reactivated Epstein bar. So Epstein Bar is a virus. It is the virus that causes what most of us know as mono, mononucleosis. And many of us have had mono when you were in high school or maybe when you were a kid. And I want to mention this because it is so common that someone had mono and then ends up having mystery symptoms later in life. And there’s a lot of debate about this in the medical community right now, so I just want to call that out before we talk about this. There are some functional medicine practitioners and naturopaths and doctors who focus on natural healing who say that reactivated Epstein bar, that virus that causes mono, it can become reactivated, is absolutely a thing.
(08:08):
Many of us are dealing with it, and that it can be the cause of a lot of other symptoms that you’re having, whether it’s thyroid issues or adrenal fatigue or other mystery symptoms that are presenting for you. There’s another part of the medical establishment that says that’s absolutely not a thing. You get mono once, the virus goes dormant and it’s not a problem anymore. It’s difficult to test for. There are some blood tests. I’ll dive into this in a future episode because not everybody has this. But for those of you who want to listen to the Reactivated Epstein Bar story, we’ll we’ll dive into that on a future episode. But I want to mention it here because whether or not you have activated Epstein bar or maybe you have another virus, maybe it’s Lyme disease or it’s some kind of chronic fatigue, or you’re dealing with some kind of issue, you are not crazy.
(08:55):
You know your body. And if you are having the symptoms, you can go on the path to discover what is happening to your body. So I got really into understanding Reactivated Epstein Bar and I decided that it was really time to take care of myself. So whether or not the actual reactivated Epstein bar that was causing it or something else in my life, I decided that I was going to change the way that I eat. And I started focusing on fresh food and mostly fruits and vegetables. I definitely want to say this, I believe in the 80 20 lifestyle. I am not a strict dieter. You might see me out eating tacos or enchiladas or something at some point. I’m not into defining diet styles and saying that it has to be a certain way. But I do believe it’s very, very important to fill your body up with real foods.
(09:39):
And again, that’s how the blog started. It’s just a healthy food blog with lots of healthy recipes. And that’s where I got my start. I also dove into understanding natural remedies with my naturopath. I started doing something called blood ozone treatments, which might sound a little scary if you’ve never heard of something like this, but it actually made me feel tremendously better. It’s called Auto Hemotherapy. Ozone in blood treatments has been used for I think over 100 years, probably 200 years now at this point in Europe and in other places. What happens is it’s kind of like getting an IV. They hook you up to what looks like an IV. They take some blood out, they mix that blood in a bag with medical grade ozone gas. It’s actually fascinating to watch because the blood turns bright red because ozone is three oxygen molecule molecules.
(10:28):
There are free radicals in your blood, which is looking to pair with one of those oxygen molecules. And when that happens, it becomes O2, it becomes oxygen, and it turns bright red. And then they actually, leaving it in the bag, they put your own blood back into your body and that hyper oxygenates your blood and your tissues. And some people do it just for energy. This is what some people would call blood doping in athletics. This is something that’s used that athletes do to increase their energy. And it made me feel tremendously better. That’s just one example that I wanted to give you. I’m not a doctor. I’m not recommending that to anyone. That’s just one example of when I decided to take control of my health and I decided that I was in charge and I was going to start doing things instead of just taking this little pill that they were giving me every single morning.
(11:15):
And I’m happy to say that now that I’m 40, I’m actually on a lower dose of thyroid medicine than I was in my twenties. It wasn’t about completely saying I’m never going to take thyroid medicine again. It was about saying how can I treat my body in a different way? How can I improve my health? And how can I make sure that this doesn’t just keep going down the path of getting worse and worse and worse and worse every year? And that’s where a lot of the blog and my business have come from, and now this podcast. I want to take you guys through your own personal health journeys. What worked for me may not work for you. I’m going to have a lot of experts on and guests. And you may be able to find things from guests and experts that help you achieve that optimal living and that optimal wellbeing that I know that everybody is after.
(11:58):
I also want to mention that through this health journey, for me personally, I’ve had a lot of big aha’s when it comes to mental health and emotional health and how I deal with things. So my twenties respect to my physical health was a lot about figuring out what I just mentioned, becoming a health coach, figuring out reactivated Epstein bar, doing a lot of things about physical health. And my thirties really were about diving into mental health and understanding how my emotions were affecting my physical health. When I was 32, I got divorced. And at the time it felt like an abrupt ending to a very long-term relationship. And it was a very sad time in my life. It felt like my entire life imploded pretty quickly. And I was left having to rebuild that life. So I spent most of my thirties digging into what it meant to be healthy from a mental health perspective.
(12:56):
I spent a lot of time alone. I traveled the world, which was very, very fun. And I went to a lot of therapy as well. And we’ll talk about that on this podcast, different types of therapy that I’ve used for mental health. And I can really say in the past four or five years, my life has really turned into exactly what I wanted it to be. I’m actually getting married this summer. Very, very excited. I met in a very lucky way, but I think in a very healed way, met my partner just about four months before the COVID shut-downs in early 2020. So I was very lucky for that. And it was a beautiful thing for us from the perspective of we had been dating just long enough to say, “Hey, this COVID thing is happening. Everything is being shut down. We still want to keep singing each other,” so we created our pod together.
(13:44):
And when he proposed last year, he said, “I’ve been stuck in a house with you for two years.” The pandemic was coming to an end, and he said, “And I never want you to leave.” So I felt the same way and it was a beautiful thing. But it really was introspective for me as well to learn about what I learned about mental health in my thirties to build this beautiful relationship and this beautiful life now. And as I was just saying that, it reminded me of when I was hosting a wellness retreat. This was about six years ago, I used to host wellness retreats and I had about 12 women on this retreat and this awesome woman, we’ll call her Annie, that’s not her real name, but I’ll just call her Annie so she has a name, was with us. And we were at this health retreat eating all really healthy food.
(14:26):
It was all organic, there were no electronics. We were going to sleep early. And it was really just a retreat to kind of reset from life. And every evening there wasn’t a ton of organized activities, but every evening all of us would come together. I think there were 12 or 13 of us. It was all women. We would come together in the evening and I would just have picked a topic about maybe it was gut health or maybe it was skin health, whatever it was. And we were talking about emotions the last night. So we were all sitting there and it had struck me the entire retreat, Annie was one of those women who she ate almost too perfectly, almost to the point where when somebody’s so dedicated to their diet that it can venture a little bit towards disordered eating, but she seemed healthy.
(15:07):
So that was great. She was very into the keto diet at that time. She was very fit. This woman was probably in her late forties or early fifties, and she was very fit. She slept well. And on her intake form, I had remember her saying, “I want to come on this retreat because I’m doing everything right, but I have this crazy rash all over my body and no doctor can figure out what it is.” So she wasn’t coming to the retreat for a diagnosis, but she thought, “Oh, maybe I just need to reset.” So I had had a few individual chats with all of the women. We ate breakfast together, we ate lunch together, and then you could do massages or you could do these different things. And it was coming towards the end of our time together. And we had this great talk about emotions on the last night, and everyone was kind of heading to bed.
(15:54):
We were kind of gathering our things and heading to bed. And she said, “Do you have a second to talk?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” And she said, “I think I might have figured out what is causing the rash.” And I said, “Great, tell me more.” And she said, “Well, actually, we just found out my son who just got married about four months ago and his wife are separating.” And I was like, “Oh, wow. That must be really hard. That must be really hard news.” And she just dove into this story about how they had just contributed to this wedding, and they were so excited that they were getting married and they just had this whole future plan for their son. And I remember saying to her, “This sounds really, really hard because that sounds like it wasn’t what you were expecting.” But we had the talk about how we can’t control what our children do and we can’t control other people.
(16:43):
And she said, “Yeah, I’ve realized that.” And then there was a long pause and she said, “But really, this is really affecting my own marriage.” And then everything really came out. And she really talked about what was happening in her own home. And I thought of that story because it was really for her, not doing more dieting, not doing more yoga classes, not doing more check off the list of self-care, physical things. It was really for her about finally admitting and understanding all of the external things that were affecting her emotions so that she could start to heal. And there is story after story after story of that happening. I was just talking to a girlfriend who got divorced last year and she lost 30 pounds within four months of getting divorced when she had tried every diet under the sun. And I’m not advocating for getting divorced, by the way.
(17:37):
That might not be for you. Or it might be. But it’s oftentimes when we heal the inside, when we heal our emotions, when we heal our thoughts, when we heal our mental health and our past traumas, that we can move past and make the physical things that we need to do like eating broccoli or drinking our smoothies, it makes all of that stuff so much easier. So as I mentioned, I started the blog over 15 years ago and had actually joined a network marketing company at that time. And I want to mention that because if somebody sees my blog in business right now, everybody asks, how did you build this? Or How did you get this going? And at the time, I did a network marketing business. And I am lovingly retired for net from network marketing. I loved that business. I just grew out of it.
(18:18):
And I went all over the world speaking on stages and made so many wonderful friends and learned so much in that business. And it was at a time in my life when that was the best fit. And that is something that I want to talk about as well that’ll be throughout this entire podcast, is sometimes in life something will be a really good fit for you and you will outgrow it and it will no longer be a great fit for you. I started in network marketing from a business perspective, and then I realized I loved teaching online. I was teaching my team online. Webinars and conferences, I moved into teaching online courses. And from 2016, my online courses started to do even better than my network marketing business. So I shifted everything to the blog and to the online courses. And then as I mentioned, the pandemic hit and I had to do just what everybody else did as well and start to rethink what I wanted life to look like and what I wanted my business to look like.
(19:09):
So here we are with this podcast. I am so excited to continue to bring you new episodes to continue to evolve with you and continue to let this be a way to connect with the community. We’re going to do all of this with a non-prescriptive approach. Again, I am not a medical doctor. I am just a person who wants to help everyone find out what works best for them. If you like the show, the best way to continue to support us is to subscribe. Whether you’re on YouTube, hit the subscribe button or if you’re in the podcast app to subscribe to this show, that really helps us continue to make more episodes. I’m excited to talk to you all next time. I’ll see you soon.
(19:46):
Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of the Elizabeth Rider Show. I hope you caught something today that helped you uplevel your mind, body, and or health. If you want more episodes, insider notes, recipes and resources, then make sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter over at elizabethrider.com/list. Or simply go to the website and hit the subscribe button and enter your email address. You can also download a free recipe guide, a meal plan, or the top 10 micro habits guide while you’re there. And if you are a person who likes to share things, then make sure you share the show with a friend. And if you really like the show, I would be so grateful for a five star review in the podcast app. Thanks for being here. I’ll talk to you next time.