My Foundation: Sugar, Soda, and Survival

I need to start at the beginning, because The Whole Therapist wasn't born from some grand vision. It emerged from a sequence of events in my own life that led me to one firm conclusion: my lifestyle is directly related to my mood, my functioning, a regulated nervous system, and my ability to be present day to day.

Growing up, we were poor and processed foods were cheap (and easy!). Our countertops were lined with Little Debbie snacks, Lay's potato chips, crackers, and ice cream was stacked in the freezer. My mom would buy some fruit, but it stood no chance against the processed foods surrounding it. I watched that fruit turn brown and mushy until she stopped buying it altogether. 

I don't remember drinking water when I was younger. Just soda and Kool-Aid. As I reflect now, I really think I was struggling with low energy, fatigue, inertia, and maybe even depression from this combination of poor nutrition and lack of movement. Life is complicated, but that foundation shaped everything that followed.

The Anxiety Years: When Running Was My Only Therapy

My movement changed dramatically in high school and my eating habits improved a bit... but let's fast forward to grad school where the poo really hit the fan. I was debilitatingly anxious about everything. One of my supervisors, in the same breath, noted my anxiety and how large my coffee was. I felt exposed (not judged), and it was the first time someone attempted to support me with my anxiety and my lifestyle choices. 

I was fueling myself on caffeine and highly processed carbs (hello, sugar!) while barely sleeping because I was always studying. Running was my only therapy. Actually, this was before I saw a therapist. All I did was study and run, sometimes 30 to 40 miles a week during my peak training. I was training for marathons, never fast, always steady. Running was how I managed the imposter syndrome and overwhelming anxiety of graduate school.

Then everything changed when I threw my back out putting on my underwear one morning. Yes, you read that right. My underwear. My spine shifted forever that day. What I learned from several specialists was that my hamstrings and glutes were incredibly tight from all that running, and the front of my body was tight from sitting and studying. I never stretched because, really, who has time?!  At 25, I also had degenerative disc disease, and my back was completely out of alignment.

Running had been my lifeline, and suddenly it was gone.

The First Breakthrough: Understanding Movement & Food as Medicine

Desperate for relief, I tried moving less to reduce my pain. It made everything worse. Someone mentioned yoga, which wasn't the widespread practice it is today. There was only one studio in our huge college town, and it was tucked away on the second floor above a business. It smelled of patchouli, the incense scratched my throat, and I went trembling with anxiety, feeling completely out of place. I don't remember much of my first class, but I do remember being in severe pain and I remember that Laurie was the first person who invited me to notice my body, and all of my sensations, with warmth and curiosity. She was the first person on this planet to speak kindly to the parts of me that ached. She instructed me to move in ways that were accessible to my body, and to make space for that to be okay, just as I was. I was in a forward fold (Uttanasana), and I started to cry.  

Shortly after, I saw my first real therapist. A cognitive behavioral therapist who also practiced EMDR. In addition to insanely effective EMDR interventions and resourcing that soothed my nervous system and healed me in so many other ways, she was the first person to ever talk to me about food and sugar. She explained how sugar causes swings in insulin, increased heart rate, jitteriness, energy spikes followed by slumps that create fatigue and lack of focus.

She didn't give me a dietary plan, but she hesitantly recommended a book called "The South Beach Diet." Not for weight loss, but to understand the research and science on how sugar affects our bodies. I became obsessed with understanding how food affected my performance and mental state.

I started noticing everything. If I had sugar in the morning or a high-carb breakfast, my entire day was spent drinking more caffeine trying to get my energy up. My mood would drop. My runs were terrible. But if I needed to function and focus, I kept sugar and simple carbs to a minimum. These weren't abstract concepts anymore. They were lived experiences I could feel in my body.

The Pain Journey: Finding Wholeness Through Crisis

When my running injury persisted, I tried everything. Massage therapists, chiropractors, physical therapists, running specialists, and yoga. I even did barefoot running for six months in Pennsylvania, partially through winter. Nothing worked. I couldn't run more than a mile without pain. It hurt every time I went from sitting to standing. Some days I couldn't rotate my torso to look over my shoulder while driving. The pain would fluctuate from mild to very severe over those three years.

I focused on walking my dog and doing yoga when I could afford it. Classes were $10, which was more than a third of my $25 weekly social budget. That fellowship award of $5,000? The first thing I did was buy a road bike for $1,000 so I could move my body. Later I got a used treadmill so I could walk indoors during Pennsylvania winters.

I wasn't interested in self-actualization during this time. I was interested in survival.

The Holistic Physical Therapist: Everything Changes

At Vanderbilt during my predoctoral internship, I met a holistic physical therapist who changed my life. In addition to giving me PT exercises, she literally gave me a specific high antioxidant tea. Green gunpowder tea. She told me exactly which store to buy it from. She had me increase my daily antioxidant intake while also doing cognitive therapy during my runs.

Within two months, I was running three miles without pain.

This was after three years of chronic back pain, three years of not being able to run more than a mile. I ran my first half marathon again. I had gone three full years unable to do what had been my primary coping mechanism.

Although my chronic pain ebbs and flows, and I have been periodically debilitated by pain over the past 25 years, at that moment I KNEW in my KNOWER that my body could heal. My mood lifted, my anxiety was less (that didn't go away until I got seriously good therapy :), and I was starting to connect more dots. 

The Yoga Teacher Training Years: Mind Body Integration

At the VA in Arkansas, I met my dear friend Mary, who was connected to the yoga community. We started co-facilitating yoga classes. She handled instruction while I led meditation. I eventually completed my 200-hour and then 500-hour yoga teacher training, studying with Matt and Holly Krepps from Circle yoga Shala and Stacey Faught, who became my home studio teacher.

Through these experiences, my awareness of mind body connection grew exponentially. Mood and movement were not separate. My ability to notice my thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and memories from a place of curiosity and gentleness was directly related to my ability to navigate the world with greater calm. I was teaching two Yoga for PTSD classes a week at the VA, serving on the whole health committee, and training psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, primary care doctors, and nurses in whole health interventions. I even got trained in Battlefield Acupuncture, though my state licensure wouldn't let me practice. 

The Professional Awakening: What My Peers Were Missing

As I worked alongside my peers and trained interns and postdocs, I realized something crucial: we don't get formal training in how lifestyle interventions impact mental health outcomes. My interns and postdocs weren't getting this education, and my peers certainly weren't talking about it in sessions.

But I was. I felt comfortable incorporating meditation and mindfulness. When clients were lethargic, I'd ask if they had their blood work done, how much sugar they were eating, and I'd make a referral to their PCP. I explored with them how they felt when they walked, ran, hunted, weight lifted, hiked, or kayaked. I noticed that hunters in Montana who did a lot of hiking in tough terrain would come back to therapy feeling centered, grounded, more reflective and their mood had improved.  

I started connecting these dots: the more clients were rooted in better lifestyle practices, the easier mental health treatment became and the quicker gains occurred.  I wasn't sacrificing mental health treatment for lifestyle changes. They were symbiotic, facilitating each other. I was not their medical doctor, I was not making specific recommendations, but I was facilitating conversations and relationships with medical professionals.  

The Walk That Started Everything

The Whole Therapist concept came to me during one of my daily walks with my dog. About an hour total, 25 to 30 minutes in the morning and afternoon, sometimes an extra evening walk in summer. Walking has become my medicine- when I have pain or when I'm pain free, I am walking (although it looks different as my body provides the wisdom). Anyways, back to the story - I have a lot of time to think and reflect on what I'd learned after 20 years of providing clinical care, mapping that onto my own awareness and journey.

I realized that when I went to the Montana VA, I was trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Pain (CBT-CP), and everything I had learned on my own was actually part of this evidence- based model. I saw that the way we move our bodies (or don't move our bodies), directly impacts our thinking, our mood, isolation, and actually increases our pain. I think that's why I have minimal chronic pain with minimal flare ups to this day, 20 years later. I had organically (and desperately) discovered this approach through necessity.

The Gap I Couldn't Ignore

Walking with my dog, I thought about what I do in therapy that feels unique and important. I don't think I'm the only one integrating lifestyle and mental health, but I don't think mental health providers get the structure, organization, or permission to talk about it. We are not trained to talk about it, or HOW to talk about it so we stay within our scope of practice. 

The research is abundant. It's kind of ridiculous how much evidence we have that lifestyle interventions impact mental health outcomes. Yet there's this massive gap between knowing this intellectually and being able to integrate it ethically and effectively into practice.

Why "The Whole Therapist" Had to Exist

The Whole Therapist emerged because I realized that when therapists have support with gentle and ethical integration of whole-health interventions, then clients benefit... and therapists can relax knowing they are addressing the whole client. 

Also, when we (the therapists) embody these principles ourselves, then we understand the mind body connection from the inside out, and we become more effective healers. 

This isn't about therapists creating exercise routines, giving nutritional advice, or being armchair medical providers. This isn't about us abandoning the meaningful and healing work of traditional psychotherapy.  It's also NOT about therapists knowing how to do all the mind-body practices known to humankind. It's about seeing the greater picture, being supported (by me) in ethical integration of whole health interventions. Healing is multi-layered and multi-faceted. 

I created The Whole Therapist to bridge the gap between what we know about holistic healing and how we can ethically, authentically integrate it into practice while maintaining appropriate scope and boundaries.

After 20 years in this field, I've learned that your own healing and wholeness isn't separate from your professional effectiveness. It's the foundation of it.

Ready to explore what this integration looks like in your own practice? The Whole Therapist online course launches this fall, offering a comprehensive approach to bridging somatic wisdom, nervous system regulation, and holistic care with trauma therapy practice.