Health on $0 Budget. Like, Actually $0

October 3, 2023 By Leanne Vogel March 9, 2024

Today’s episode is a real heart-to-heart, inspired by our dear listener, Amber, who’s navigating her health journey on a budget.

We’re diving into savvy ways to pursue a wholesome lifestyle without emptying your wallet. Grab a comfy seat and let’s chat about making health both affordable and achievable.

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Transcript

What I like to do to just keep the home as clean as possible is just cleaning with a wet rag as often as possible. Sometimes it’s as simple as just a little dampness, like a little bit of distilled water on a microfiber cloth, and I’ll just go around and clean all the surfaces and get all the dust away. The dust is not what we want in the home when we’re dealing with mold.

Hey, my name is Leanne Vogel. I’m fascinated with helping women navigate how to eat, move, and care for their bodies using a low-carb diet. I’m a small-town holistic nutritionist turned three-time international best-selling author turned functional medicine practitioner offering telemedicine services around the globe to women looking to better their health and stop second-guessing themselves. I’m here to teach you how to wade through the wellness noise to get to the good stuff that’ll help you achieve your goals. We’re supporting your low-carb life beyond the “if it fits your macros” conversation. Hormones, emotions, relationship to your body, workouts, letdowns, motivation, blood work, detoxing, metabolism, I’m providing the tools to put your motivation into action. Think of it like quality time with your bestie mixed with a little med school so you’re empowered at your next doctor visit. Get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn about your body and how to care for it better. This is the Keto Diet Podcast.

Hey friend. Okay, so we have a special episode today.

Oftentimes I get messages from listeners of things that they’re struggling with and ideas that they have for episodes. And I just love when I get your guys’ messages. Don’t ever change. I love, love chatting with you about the ideas that you have and the struggles you’re going through and how I can help. And I received a message from a lady named Amber a couple of weeks ago now, and she recommended that we do a podcast episodes dedicated to everything saving money on this health journey.

And I loved the idea. It’s not really something that I’ve delved deep into. I definitely probably should, because when Amber was saying it, I’m like, “Really, I’ve never done an episode on this? is ridiculous because this is my life. Just it can be so overwhelming and Amber touches on this and I’m going to read her message to all of us in a moment just so we can kind of set the tone. But when we are surrounded by all this information, it is so easy to just buy this and buy that and buy this and try this and try that and it can consume not only your time, but your energy, your money and just like send you on wild goose chase. And so let’s set the stage.

I’m going to read Amber’s message. And then we’re going to get into the various aspects of her message. And then I have other items planned as to how you can facilitate a healing protocol while spending very limited money. So let’s get going.

Amber writes, we’re a one income family. My husband is a business owner, but still in the building phase. So income is very sporadic. And I stay at home with our homeschool our five kids. I started focusing on health after my last baby was born nine years ago with weight as my primary motivation and I achieved success with that and have gotten very very interested in natural health as a whole and devour books podcasts and articles. Through the years we’ve gotten progressively cleaner but it’s like the farther down this path you get the more and more at the financial rabbit hole. Currently we’re eating mostly whole foods but can barely afford to keep everyone fed on conventional meats, fruits, and vegetables that are available at Walmart and Aldi, let alone grass-fed organic anything. I have tried to swap as much of our toiletries and cleaning supplies for natural versions as possible, but natural versions of everything, as always, are more expensive as it has increased our household budget to a point where it’s barely sustainable. I know both my husband and I are dealing with some health issues. We suspect mold exposure. We know that our home has mold, candida, leaky gut, hormone imbalances, and we’ve tried to see our primary care physician and had blood work done, but not surprisingly, they were no help at all. Through my own research, I’ve tried to pinpoint and self-treat with a few supplements or different diets, but working on a trial-by-error basis on your own is very frustrating. We absolutely cannot afford to switch to a functional health practitioner or invest in more testing. So just have to keep on trying to figure out based on our own and guess whether it’s helping based on symptoms. The advice we get from yourself and others is helpful on one hand but very frustrating on the other hand when most of it seems to require spending money. I’m not really sure what the answer is for people like us. I wish I had more concrete suggestions. Affordable lab work, practitioners to walk us through would be super helpful. Or maybe advice on how to get your regular primary care physician to do labs that you could possibly get covered with insurance. We use Christian MediShare type coverage ourselves.

Okay, Amber, there’s so much in her message that I want to unpack. And then I also have other pieces that I want to kind of get you guys through. The first piece is congratulations. That’s incredible. It sounds like you’ve already done so many so much work and already know the basics of how to care for yourself. We’re gonna get deeper into that for those that may not know and talk about vitality and imbalance and how all of these things work together. I want to touch on the piece where Amber talks about natural versions of everything are more expensive.

So I myself also am on a pretty tight budget and I know how when we consume different content it can actually be triggering to the point where we think there’s problems where there aren’t any, or we like are compelled to get the newest supplement because it’s for sure going to help with our XYZ. And so really check yourself as you’re consuming this content. Creators including myself and I really like I try the products that I promote. I believe in these products. Do I think that they’re the only way to achieve XYZ? No, I think that they’re great quality, whatever it is, because I’ve vetted it for three plus months before I share it, but that’s not to say that you absolutely require it in order to achieve the outcome that I’m sharing. So I want to bring that in. When it comes to the natural products, girl, what are you doing buying natural products? If you have the time, which maybe to you time equals money, and that’s totally fine. And by money, I’m not saying like actual cash money because you said, you know, you’re homeschooling your kids. fantastic, but you might see that some of the recommendations I’m sharing is too much work and therefore you’re prioritizing other things over that. And then you are putting a dollar value to it.

Like for example, if you can get natural safe dishwasher tablets for $15 or you can make them yourself for 50 cents, you might decide to get the $15 dishwasher tablets because making them yourself is just too much.

So myself personally, I make them I make just about everything that we use other than my stuff for my face and stuff from a hair. I mean, you can use natural stuff for face and hair. I’ve never had any luck with it. It’s always made me break out and made my scalp super dry. I just can’t. It just doesn’t work for me. It might work for you and then that’s great. But there are so many resources online of you can literally type into Google natural DIY anything and it will tell you how to make stuff. So here are some of my favorite items that I make for our home that I love so much that cost very very very little that I’m so upset that I didn’t switch sooner. Okay so dishwasher detergent. So what I’ll do is mix some dish soap with salt and baking soda. I’ll kind of like mix it up and then I’ll press it into silicone like little trays and then I’ll just keep those. I keep them in the freezer just because they’re out of the way and whenever I need one I’ll put it in the dishwasher little dispenser. So that’s what I use for dish washing stuff. For cleaning I use vinegar and water a lot. So just like white vinegar and water. If I’m cleaning the sink or the shower, those sorts of things, I’ll use baking soda. I’ll kind of like powder baking soda on it and then use an apple cider vinegar spray so it starts to bubble. And then I just use a washable sponge.

I have these sponges where you can just put them in the dishwasher. It cleans them and they last forever. So I’ll use that on like showers or tubs or sinks, those sorts of things. And then, so we go through a lot of of lemons in our house. I love fresh lemons. And so after I’ve done this, I’m finished squeezing a lemon, like I’ve gotten all the juice out, put the actual rind, like the half of the lemon into a mason jar. And that mason jar will just like sit in the fridge with some vinegar in it. And when it’s full, I’ll let it sit with the lemon rinds all like soaking in the vinegar. Then after a couple of days, like it’s supposed to be three, usually it’s like a week or so. I’ll strain it and then that cleaner is like pungent. I use that for everything. Everything. When things are really grummy, like greasy, I’ll use rubbing alcohol. Sometimes with a little bit of water. Usually just straight up because it works so well.

For polishing wood, I’ll use coconut oil. We have like a varnished wood in our home because our home’s a boat and so I use coconut oils polish. Oh another one that I use is borax. I use borax quite a lot for cleaning especially when things are needing scrubbing and that’s super safe and wonderful. When it comes to laundry detergent, so okay this is challenging for me. I have done it.

There are a couple of really awesome ways that you can make laundry detergent at home and it’s a powder and I’ve done it. This is one of those things where I’ve just decided it’s like easier for me to just buy the pods. So I buy drops pods. I get them on Amazon, just the unscented variety and I’ll purchase a whole box for $30 and it’ll last us like half a year only because I don’t super do a ton of laundry. I mostly am in my bathing suit a lot and so I’ll just like hand wash those things. So for myself personally I I don’t use this a lot, but usually it’s a mixture of like baking soda, I think Epsom salt, sea salt. You can find recipes online. So when it comes to natural products, you really shouldn’t have to be spending a ton of money. And you know, the lemon mixture is my top, top, like I use it all the time. And the rubbing alcohol, those are like my two, well, and vinegar. Those are like my three. Those are my three favorite things that I use all the time. and I’ll maybe get a white vinegar bottle at Costco once a year. And I think that thing is like maybe $8 and it’ll last me an entire year for cleaning. And I clean a lot ’cause everything is always disgusting. You know how it is? So I wanna preface that because if this is blowing your budget out, there are many ways to bring that back in because I couldn’t even imagine if we were purchasing all natural products, just like off the shelf, how much that would cost, that makes me really nervous.

Okay, another piece, we talked about this a little bit, but I kinda wanna just go into it a tiny bit more, is everyone’s a little bit different on this. Some people can consume content and be like, “Wow, that was so great, how entertaining. I can’t afford any of that, but it was a super fun conversation.” Like, I had to stop listening to Bulletproof Radio a couple of years ago because I would be convinced to try to figure out how to spend $1,000 on a new XYZ tool. I’m like, I can’t do this because now I know about it and I need it and now I’m totally stressed about it. And so you need to determine what kind of person you are. If the individuals that you’re listening to are like, buy this, buy that, do this, do that, it can get quite challenging. But with a little bit of Googling and some creativity around budget and meals and those things, there are a lot of things that you can do. And it sounds like for Amber’s case, you guys have cleaned up as much as you can with what’s available. And when it comes to conventional versus grass-fed, grass-finished meats, I remember when in our budget could not afford the grass-fed, grass-finished meats. And so instead of me owning a car, I got like a super junky car, which meant that I didn’t have any car payments. And every month I could spend $250 on meat instead of having a car. And I remember every time I would get into that really bad car, which had been in like three accidents at that point, I was like, this is so great that I get to have a grass-fed burger when I get home. Like, even though this car is really bad. And I still do that today.

I, oh man, my Jeep is not in good shape. I currently don’t even have an ability to check the pressures on my tires and it doesn’t shift properly. And I just think like, how great is it that I have my wild pastures order coming And my car is just, it gets me from point A to B. It’s a little dicey sometimes, I get a little nervous, but you know, like, we have to make sacrifices. And sometimes when you sit down as a family and you go through those, you decide to get the Branch Basics cleaner because you don’t wanna make the things. It was the same thing with my clothing washer. It was just like, I can’t deal with this powder situation. When we’re underway, it tips over and then there’s like powder everywhere. And it was just like stressful to me. so I switched.

Okay, but there are other things you can do and places you can go with this. But if consuming certain content triggers you, like for example, knowing that my car, like for example, my car doesn’t like totally shift gears right now, and there’s no way I’m going to get this serviced at all. And so I would never, as I’m struggling through shifting gears and just like being frustrated with my car, I would never just walk into to a Kia dealership or a Toyota dealership or a Jeep dealership and be like, yeah, I’m just wanting to look at awesome cars when I go into my car, I’m gonna like feel better about my car. No way would I do that. Like, oh, that would be so hard. And so if you know you’re the type of person that’s just gonna be triggered by being around people talking about all the things that they’re doing for their health that you won’t be able to do or that you need to be quite creative in doing, it might not be worthwhile consuming all that content all the time. And again, you might be a person that is just like, “No big deal. I can listen to it. It’s super educational and it’s inspiring and one day I’m going to be able to do all the things.” Then great, but some of us just aren’t like that and that’s cool too.

When I started eating a low-carb diet in 2014, I had no idea the impacts that low electrolytes would have on my overall health. I started keto. I added a little bit of pink salt to my water, but really didn’t think that a lack of sodium, potassium, or magnesium would really throw me off.

I can tell you after a couple of weeks of eating the ketogenic diet, it was very apparent that I needed electrolytes. Unfortunately at the time, there was no Element electrolytes. There was no such thing. I really had two different options. They weren’t the best. I went and added pink salt to my water. That tasted not so great. Fast forward a whole bunch of years, Element came out with their first electrolyte powder and I’ve been hooked ever since. In fact, little secret here, I actually add more salt to my Element packet because I’m crazy. So my very favorite way to enjoy Element electrolytes is to add it to my 24-ounce water bottle and add an additional quarter teaspoon of gray sea salt. Now this isn’t for everybody, but for individuals that are massively lacking sodium, I do have this issue personally. It can display as allergies, apathy, abdominal bloating, depression, dizziness, fatigue, low blood pressure, low hydrochloric acid in your stomach, poor protein digestion, weakness, slow oxidation, and unfortunately calcium supplements will make this even worse. And so if you think that maybe maybe you need more sodium on your ketogenic diet, the best way to bump this up is with electrolyte packets.

I’ve had many coaching friends and clients tell me that they’re taking anywhere between two to six packets a day. I know that it is my most favorite way to prepare for a workout is doing my electrolytes about 30 minutes before I work out. If you haven’t tried Element and you’re looking for a different type of electrolyte or you’ve never tried them before and you’re curious if this is the missing ticket in your ketogenic diet, you can go to drinklmnt.com, grab a couple items and get a free sample pack with your order. That’s eight single serving packets free with any element order. All you have to do is go to drinklmnt.com/kdp and you can get your free sample pack with any order. Now this is totally risk-free. If you don’t like what you get, contact them and they will give you your money back. No questions asked. You really have nothing to lose. It’s a fantastic product and I can’t wait to hear which flavor is your favorite.

Okay, the next piece I want to talk about in Amber’s piece that she shared was like, how do I find a practitioner that can run labs for me or how do I talk to my primary care physician about getting the proper labs? Here’s the problem with that. Yeah, you can probably find a doctor that can pull the labs that you want, but the issue is that the doctor is gonna be looking at the labs from a diagnostic perspective. They’re gonna be looking at whether or not you’re struggling with a disease, okay?

That’s what your primary care physician is trained for. That’s what they’re amazing at. 100%, if I wanted to be diagnosed with a disease because I thought something super serious was going on, you better believe I would be going to a diagnostic doctor, but they’re not meant for function. And so, not surprisingly, like what you were saying, is you went to the doctor, they ran a couple labs, they said nothing was wrong, and congratulations, you’re not, like, they weren’t able to find a disease. So yay, thumbs up, but they’re not gonna help you with function. And so, yeah, you can totally shop around, find a doctor that will do basic labs. It’s becoming increasingly more challenging to do that, only because if they don’t find anything with that initial lab run, they’re not going to run more because they don’t think you’re dying of a disease. So, they’re going to tell you from a disease standpoint, you’re fine. I don’t see anything in here. You’re not dying of a disease, so bye. But that doesn’t mean that your function is going well. And so, I just want to highlight that. I know I’ve talked about this multiple times on the podcast, but the differentiation between functional care and diagnostic care couldn’t be more different. And we’re all going, like, we’re all learning about this functional medicine and stuff, we’re all learning about how we’re functioning and we’re becoming more mindful of our function. And so we’re going to our primary care physician being like, help me with my function. And instead of them saying like, hey, I’m a diagnostic doctor, I’m gonna look for disease and you don’t have disease, I can’t find a disease. Why don’t you go to somebody who understands function? They just say there’s nothing wrong with you, which is great. They weren’t able to find a disease, but that doesn’t help you because you’re still struggling, right? And so that’s probably why you’re here is because you wanna learn about that function side of things, whether it be following a ketogenic diet or learning how to eat cleaner or moving your body or the things that we talk about here on the show.

So we’re gonna break things down into a couple of options, like depending on budget.

I’ve already tried to do that as best I can by like really, really, really going thin on what you spend money on. I’m gonna kind of like bounce around with the next ideas so you can kind of pixie choosy on what would work for you. So we’ve already kind of talked about when you have absolutely no budget at all, like none, like you just got to kind of do the best you can. That’s all, period.

In the case of Amber, it sounds like you’re kind of at your max. And so it could be a matter of switching those cleaning products, personal care products, you know, even when it comes to, and I recorded this episode again, so I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but the last audio didn’t go through and so I’m having to recreate this. So if I already said this, I apologize. Maybe I said it in the last recording that failed. Oh, such a bummer when that happens. Even making your own personal care products, fantastic. Like I purchased a sheet of like natural flannel probably five years ago and came up with a little pattern and made my own pads, like reusable pads. And I’ve been using those things now for five years. I love them. I have my little Peach Life cup that I got off Amazon. I sanitize it after every cycle. And at this point, I’ve probably spent like, I don’t know, 5 cents a pad at this point, and like maybe 10 cents for the cup every month at this point, because I reuse it and reuse it and reuse it. So there are ways around this. You just need to do your research and kind of pick where the areas, like sit down with your grocery receipts and just see where are we spending the most money. And the interesting thing, like my husband and I still go back and forth on this because Kevin always sees like big purchases. He’s like, well, we’ve had no big purchases. And I’m like, but the little purchases add up. So you really need to look at the big picture of all the things and just see where you’re spending the money. Don’t just look for the bigger items, but the small items add up too. Then we’re gonna talk like the outline for like a tiny bit of budget with a little bit of wiggle room. So when it comes to a tiny bit of budget with a little bit of wiggle room or a bit more budget with a little bit of wiggle room, you gotta do things yourself.

Like you said, Amber, you can’t rely on practitioners, unfortunately, because when it comes to how I run my business, there are a couple of options that I’ve put into place at different thresholds for different budgets to try my best to help as many people as possible, while also making sure that when it comes to paying fees and transaction stuff and just like maintaining the websites and stuff that I have enough. And so it’s always such a challenge with practitioners of just not overcharging and choosing the right options. And so it might be that you’re able to work with a practitioner, maybe somebody who has like a group setting or like lower prices. Sometimes lower prices means lower quality, but high prices don’t always mean the best quality. And so aligning yourself perhaps with a practitioner that is able to meet your budget, or like in my case, what I’ve done is I have one-on-one coaching clients who pay anywhere between $100 to $300 every time they connect with me, and that might be totally out of budget, crazy, crazy. And then I also have a root cause program where what a lot of women do is just join for a monthly fee of $49, and they just ask me questions in the community. And so some of them aren’t even doing the full protocols, they just have access to me on a monthly basis. And so finding something like that, for example, for mine, it’s $49 a month, might be beneficial to have somebody guide you through pieces and just having a checkpoint so you have that kind of support ongoing, but it’s not as dedicated as somebody managing your ongoing process, okay? So again, getting creative with the budget, whether it be no wiggle room at all, like none, absolutely no budget.

You really just have to work with what you got.

You got to sit down with those receipts and just figure out. And this might even, as I’m saying this, you’re like, oh dear, I am not, I don’t have the capacity for this. Then it’s just not something you can do right now. Like just be honest with yourself. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to all of this. And so if as I’m talking, you’re just like, I ain’t gonna do that. I ain’t gonna do that. It’s like recently over the last year, I had this goal of 10,000 steps a day and I crushed it for an entire year. I did 10,000 steps a day. I’m never doing 10. Well, never say never. But that was really torturous. And I just came to a point where I’m like, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t even care if it means that I don’t have the results that I want. I really need to put it to 6000. So I have some sort of life. I don’t even care. “I can’t do 10,000, I don’t wanna do 10,000.” Maybe that’s a bad example, but it’s what came to mind. And know that regardless of where you’re at with your health journey, you can 100% do it yourself. You have to be organized, you have to be diligent, you have to have some sort of outline, and that’s what I really wanna spend the rest of our time together on, is just going through kind of what that outline would look like and how to structure things. So if you are doing it 100% on your own, even the group situation, like I mentioned, for the monthly fee of connecting with me or another practitioner, maybe there are other people that you follow that you wanna align with on that, if that’s just totally out of reach, you’re gonna need to manage it yourself. So let’s just dive into the rest of what I have planned for us today.

Okay, so first I wanna cover focusing on your health, just like basic pieces. and it sounds like Amber, you’ve already done a whole bunch of this, but like focusing on your health, what does it mean? So what do you do during your spare time? Oftentimes I’ll find myself when I’m just like doing nothing and I have nothing planned, I’ll be like on my phone watching Instagram reels and I’ll catch myself a couple times a week. I’m like, Leanne, get off your phone. There are literally so many things you could be doing right now. Being on your phone, watching reels is not one of them. And really, is this contributing to balanced health or is it taking away? I would say me sitting on my phone watching Reels is probably taking away from my health. What am I doing in my spare time? A big one. What are your thoughts on your health, on your journey, on the safety of your home? When it comes to living in mold, a lot of people struggle with feeling safe in their home and your home is supposed to be your safe place, like your little hideaway place you go from the world. It’s just this little place where you can be all safe. If when you walk into your home, you’re thinking this place is making me sick, what do you think that’s doing to your nervous system? Like no good, right? So what are you thinking when you’re making food? We don’t have enough money for this. Oh my gosh, I’m so stressed out. How’s all this gonna work? We really need to like take a step back and count our blessings and just be so thankful as you’re preparing the meat that you got at Walmart and the gluten-free crackers you found at Aldi, like whatever it is, just being excited about what you’re able to do at this point. Just the thoughts you’re thinking affect your health in such a big way.

The relationships in your life. So if you have a bunch of people in your life that you’re not forgiving, or there’s stuff that needs to be said that hasn’t been said, and you know, all of those things needs to be prioritized because that’s a huge part of your health. How much water are you drinking? And is that water clean water? Now, when it comes to clean versus other choices of water, this is going to be a budgetary item that you’re gonna have to prioritize or decide whether or not you wanna prioritize. I would say it’s right up there with a food quality.

And again, in the case of Amber, it sounds like just where you’re at, it might not be the clean water conversation might overwhelm but there are other people where it’s like, okay, like I can maybe afford a water filter like an under the sink water filter from Home Depot that makes reverse osmosis water and we can save up for that. They started around $150 and that’s something that we can invest in. Cool, awesome, okay. So now you’re drinking safe water, focusing on how much water you’re drinking, making sure that the water we’re drinking is clean water. So that’s a really big piece of the health.

Family meals and eating three meals a day, okay, ditching the snacks, like all the extra snacky snack things, you’d be amazed at what I see on an ongoing basis. People saying, “I don’t have enough money to eat healthy,” and then I look at what they’re eating. I’m like, “But you went for Starbucks over here. You went to McDonald’s over here, and then you got this over there, and you got $20 worth of snacks at Whole Foods.” So 100%, that’s a whole meal for a huge family, $20. You can make that go a very long way. So just prioritizing family meals, meals at home, ditching the snacks, and really planning out what you’re going to eat, how you’re going to prepare it.

Now when it comes to just conventional versus grass-fed meats, if you have to go with conventional, that’s fine. I would go for lean proteins because lean proteins will have less toxins in them because generally speaking, fats are going to be more toxin-laden. So things like chicken breast or pork tenderloin versus like chicken thighs. So that’s something to look at too. And if you need to add fat, like in the case of the ketogenic diet, then adding things on your own like coconut oil or olive oil, nuts, seeds, those sorts of things to add fat to the meals manually. motivation is a big issue. Why many of us, including myself, don’t get things done that we know we really, really want to, but like the drive just isn’t there for those individuals just struggling with mental performance, brain health, and just that oomph to be motivated and get things done. I have a super special product to share with you by neurohacker.

It’s called Qualia Mind and when you go to neurohacker.com/kdp, that’s N-E-U-R-O-H-A-C-K-E-R.com/kdp, you can check out this product for yourself. Now when you go to that page, you’re going to see that this specific product has caffeine, including a bunch of other nootropics that have been shown to really boost our brain. But if you, like me, are super sensitive to caffeine, if you head on up to the top of their product section, you can choose a caffeine-free version. Now this formula, either the caffeine filled or the caffeine free, is non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free.

The ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in each ingredient’s effect on supporting mental clarity. They have a 100-day money-back guarantee, so you have almost three months to try this product and see if it can boost your motivation as it has mine. Again that’s narrowhacker.com/kdp and use the coupon code KDP at checkout for an extra 15% off in addition to the $100 off you get by trying this product. Again that’s narrowhacker.com/kdp with the coupon code KDP at checkout. Another piece on focusing on your health is digestion, making sure that you’re absorbing your foods, there’s no food in your stool, that your digestion is running pretty good, that, I mean, most perfect digestion is a bowel movement after every meal. Myself personally, I’m very happy with two bowel movements a day, and so it really depends on the individual and what your history has been, but digestion is super important for overall health. And then stress, like where’s your stress at and And how much is this health journey adding to that stress, which is totally not even the point, right? Like, that’s working against what our goals are. So just prioritizing prayer, breath work, those sorts of things to really help your body recover.

This is all about making a resilient body. Like the higher your vitality is, the more you’ll be able to handle the metals, the mold, the parasites, all those things. If you can coach up your vitality, it does a great job at fighting for you. That’s really what I’ve noticed over the last year of really getting into maintenance with all the things. With my diet, I’m kind of in a maintenance place right now. With drainage practices and parasites and mold, I’m kind of in a maintenance right now. I’m kind of just coasting along because my vitality is really high. My energy is really good. My body is pretty resilient. I’m not gonna be quote unquote catching a lot of the things that I would have in the past when I just wasn’t as strong.

So a piece in this conversation has to do with reprioritizing the budget. We talked about this a little while ago. Our number one way to save money is with cars. That’s always been such a great go-to for us that we don’t drive the nicest cars and we try to not be in a lease or payment or at least not a lease or payment structure like financing with both cars. Oh my goodness, that would be insane. We have been a zero car family for many years. We’ve been a one car family for many years. If we do need two cars, one is always just like paid for in cash, a couple thousand dollars. One of us will drive it, whoever’s not driving the most. And so we just make use of those resources. I mentioned it before, at home meals only, like just, you know, if friends say, you know, come over dinner with us, just say, you know, like, we can’t, that sort of thing. We’ve done that many times. You can even start up an Etsy shop to fund your health. I’ve done that a couple of times. It’s like starting little side hustles to save up enough money to do certain things or taking little side jobs. I’ve done that a couple of times. Going into the store with a plan, never go to the grocery store hungry, never go after the gym, always go with a full belly and with a plan. What we’ve done in the past too is limited all online spending. So we’ll go periods of time where we cancel our Amazon accounts and we just don’t spend any money online.

If we need to get something, we will purchase it at the store. Then it just like takes away the quickness of things and you can just get whatever you want. And really just sitting down as a family and going through options. Okay, so Amber mentioned a little bit about knowing that you’re in mold and chances are if the budget is tight with food, The budget is also tight with the home and things like remediation is probably like just so over the top. And things like moving is just also so over the top. So you gotta work with what you got. So here we go. Keeping the air clean. It can be as simple as opening up the windows and just keeping like good airflow throughout the home, super important. If you can afford it, filters are great. If not, just open those windows. Please, please, please do not do the work yourself. Don’t see the water damage and be like, “Yeah, I can just like cut it out and it’ll be fine. Not the best idea. So instead, just keeping the space really clean. What I like to do to just keep the home as clean as possible is just cleaning with a wet rag as often as possible. Sometimes it’s as simple as just a little dampness, like a little bit of distilled water on a microfiber cloth and I’ll just go around and like clean all the surfaces and get all the dust away.

The dust is not what we want in the home when we’re dealing with mold. Vacuuming multiple times per week. So you probably own a vacuum, Probably, maybe it has a HEPA filter on it, which is ideal. And you can just vacuum multiple times per week to help keep the dust down. Also, you can put essential oils, so a lot of vacuums have the filters in them, and you can put essential oils that kill mold, like clove oil, tea tree, lavender, citrus, eucalyptus, and put it actually on the filter. So as you’re cleaning, the air that’s coming out of the vacuum is not gonna be yucky. You can also put that same sort of blend or a mixture of those or one in a diffuser, which can help to eradicate the mold in the air. Now, these aren’t perfect solutions, but these are very inexpensive if not costing any money, like opening a window doesn’t cost you money, to keep cost down and keep mold exposure down. So then let’s spend the rest of this conversation talking about just a proper order of operations as you work through root causes, okay? So like we talked about, the number one thing is just prioritizing your health. So we talked about focusing on health of like stress work, relationship in your life, ditching the snacks, family meals, what else did we talk about? What you do in your spare time, the thoughts that you think, like these are important pieces to your health.

We didn’t even touch on how to focus your diet. I mean, we talk about that so much here on the podcast. We’re not gonna get into it today. Yeah, I would say for diet, I will mention, Dirty Dozen, Clean 15. I would stay away from the Dirty Dozen if you could. If you’re not familiar with that, you can just do a quick Google search and just see if you can’t buy those items organic, I wouldn’t buy them, okay? So when it comes to root causes, now we’re getting a little bit deeper. We’re talking about like, if you have mold or parasites or metals or lime and you’re like, what do I even do with this? I know I have this situation, but I have no money to manage this stuff. So I mentioned this previously. I’ll mention it one more time just so you know where to go for this resource. So if you have a little bit of budget, like just a tiny bit, like $50 a month, and you want some sort of guidance, I do offer that on my website.

You can go to healthfulpursuit.com/coaching, and on that page, you’re gonna see a couple of options, and there’s a group coaching option that’s $49 per month, and when you click that, it’ll take you to a site called Practice Better. You can sign up, and then you get access to me all the time. So if you have questions about all the things, you can just ask me. And some of the women that are in that group, they follow the protocols that I outline and some of them don’t. And they just come in there and ask questions about root causes and parasites and herbal remedies and things. So that’s always available to you as well. So Amber touched on this and I want to highlight it too. It sounds like Amber, you don’t love using symptoms as a guide as a practitioner. Symptoms as a Guide is my favorite, favorite way to understand what’s going on with the body. So, especially when you don’t know how to look at your labs functionally.

Now, if you have just a tiny bit of money, you can do something like my Bloodwork course. You can go to healthfulpursuit.com/bloodwork to learn how to read your own blood work. So, if you have a panel from a doctor who said that you’re fine, but you want to look at it functionally, you can actually learn how to look at it functionally and actually help yourself and see progress that way. But if money is still too tight for that, no problem. Just a resource available to you but might not work. So, Symptoms as a Guide is a great guide. Using natural herbal remedies and homeopathic remedies are gonna be a bit more work through the root causes, but they’re far less costly. And homeopathic remedies are quite easy to understand, really. The Google machine is fantastic at this. If you just say, like, “Parasites, homeopathics,” and you kind of go down the rabbit hole of your symptoms, you can usually find a couple homeopathic remedies that could be beneficial for the type of symptoms you’re having with parasites.

For example, there are homeopathic remedies for mold and metals and lime. There’s a whole bunch, a slew of resources when it comes to this. And homeopathic remedies will run you maybe $20 a month, which is far better than other options. Okay, so let’s get into an order of operations and kind of the flow of things as you’re working through root causes. So, the first one is going to be opening drainage. So, this can really be focused on lifestyle practices primarily, but I would always include a binder and a biofilm agent. And those things can either be things from around your home or supplements that you purchase. So, opening drainage, usually most people will need some form of liver support when they’re opening drainage. The most cost-effective liver support for opening drainage is probably castor oil packs. All you have to do is buy the castor oil. If you can’t even afford the fabric, you can literally just put the castor oil on your body right over top of your liver, under your right breast, and just let it sit there. If you have a heating pad, you can also cover it up with a grubby shirt that you’re not using anymore and just put it directly on that area or even a hot water bottle would do the trick. So that’s how we can support the liver through lifestyle practices. And then a biofilm agent which you can get just in your home is brewed green tea which is very inexpensive and can bust biofilms as can unsweetened cranberry juice.

I find green tea to be more effective budget-wise. And a binder that’s low-cost that works really well throughout this is gonna be things like charcoal, zeolite, bentonite, modified citrus pectin, which you can find especially the charcoal and the modified citrus pectin pretty cheap. And they’re a great option for binders throughout a root cause protocol. Then the next step we go through is parasites. So if you have symptoms for parasites, which I talk quite extensively about over on the blog, you can also go to healthfulpursuit.com/parasite and get that free guide that kind of goes through the symptoms to look for if you are dealing with parasites.

When it comes to herbal remedies that are going to be a lot less expensive than going with a mixture of herbal items is going to be Artemisia, Golden Thread, also known as Berberine, which is gaining in popularity and pretty inexpensive at this point. Wormwood is another great one. You can get tinctures and things like that at herbal places that are pretty inexpensive. Black Walnut. Enemas also work pretty good and are inexpensive and things you can do on your own. And then the castor oil packs are also pretty beneficial with the parasite stuff. Then we get into, in our order of operations, metals, yeast, and mold. So really inexpensive options that you can go with are gonna include oil of oregano, garlic, reishi, sweating in the sun, neti pots, even putting colloidal silver in your neti pot.

Gosh, I’ve even seen neti pots at Goodwill for a dollar. of course like sanitize it and everything but that could be a really good option especially if living in mold to get the marcons like moving out of your sinus. And then the last kind of phase is chronic bacteria virus. So inexpensive options are going to be reishi, ozone, hcc, astragalus. Now red light can be a little bit more costly but you can also use sunshine. So the beginning of the day and the end of the day are going to be most effective for red light. So yeah, those are all the things that I had planned for this episode. I’m trying to think. So yeah, that’s what I got for you. I think we’ve covered a good amount of stuff. I’m feeling pretty good about it. I hope you guys are too. I hope you learned something. I hope Amber especially feels supported through this. There are so many ways that you can move toward a healthy life, and a lot of this is mental. Not saying that what you’re experiencing is happening in your mind, but I think once we know, like for example, we had a water leak in our home about a year ago, and we just didn’t have the money to manage it.

And I was like freaking out.

I wasn’t sleeping, and I thought it was a mold. I’m totally freaking out and my husband totally called me out on it. He’s like, this is what we got to work with So you can either keep making yourself sick by thinking about you being sick or you can like get out of your head about this and so just don’t discount the power of your mind and also set clear boundaries around the content that you’re consuming to determine whether or not it’s helping you or hurting you because When you walk into your home, if you know that there’s mold and you’re walking into your home and you’re like, this is an unsafe place, I hate it here. What do you, how do you think your body is gonna respond to that? And so we really need to be mindful of the thoughts we’re thinking, the blessings that we have and the food that we’re eating, the supplements we’re able to take, the water we’re drinking, whatever we have access to, whatever we’ve shifted, however small it feels, it’s still a step in the right direction. And so I hope that’s an encouragement to your process in living a healthy life, whatever that looks like for you.

So yes, this was a blast. I hope you enjoyed it.

And I will see you back here for another episode of the Keto Diet Podcast. Bye.

Thanks for listening. Join us next Tuesday for another episode of the Keto Diet Podcast.

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