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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Fit Bottomed Zone Podcast. I’m Katie from fitbottomedzone.com and I am here today with Dani Williamson who is an absolute joy and we, in this first episode, talk about everything inflammation, dialing down on the number one reason for chronic lifestyle disease and her approach to resolving it.
And Dani is a family nurse practitioner who combines the art of medicine. By balancing traditional and integrative therapies and encouraging patients to step out of the realm of normal and into the realm of optimal. She owns Integrative Family Medicine and Wild and Well Emporium in Brentwood, Tennessee and has a whole thriving practice focused on whole body health.
And she really takes into account, as you’ll hear, the physical, mental, and emotional and spiritual approaches to healing and has her own story with this as well. Having reversed 24 years of chronic lifestyle diseases, including Lupus and she tells her story in this episode. She’s so fun to listen to. So let’s join Dani. Dani, welcome. It is such a pleasure to finally get to chat with you. How are you and welcome and thanks for being here.
Dani: Oh, I’m doing great. Thank you. Yes, it’s been a long time coming, so I’m excited. We’re going to have fun.
Katie: We are, and we’re going to get to do a couple of episodes together. And in this one, I’m really excited to tackle the topic of inflammation, because this seems like a recurring theme with a lot of people I’ve gotten to talk to on this podcast as a chronic root of a lot of what people have going on and a very important piece to address, no matter kind of what is going on with our health, as well as just for longevity and kind of all aspects of health and wellness.
And I know you have both personal experience with this and a tremendous amount of clinical experience with this. So if you’re willing, I would love for you to jump in with some background, both from your own story and the work that you’ve done that’s led to your six steps and how you kind of handle the inflammation piece.
Dani: Yeah, I spent 24 years seeing doctors. I had the first colonoscopy at age 20. Now, I had a tremendous amount of childhood trauma, which we’ll get into, that created a lot of chronic gut issues. I had four colonoscopies before I was 40 years old diagnosed with the irritable bowel syndrome. I started itching, itching unbelievably in my twenties, two different dermatologists. Then I was diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia in my thirties and depressed and in a rough marriage, a verbally, emotionally abusive marriage.
I was 44 years old, 24 years of seeing doctors, hurting, itching, bloating, gas, diarrhea, all the things. 44 years old before a doctor ever leaned into me, Katie, and said, Dani, what are you eating? Don’t you know your diet controls your symptoms? It turned the entire trajectory of my life around because I had gotten divorced and went back to school at 40. I was the oldest one in my class, got out at 44. I had never heard anything like this in school. I was at Vanderbilt nurse practitioner school and nurse midwifery school.
No one ever, ever told me there’s a root cause to what’s going on with you or your patients, right? They never told me if you were born healthy, you do not have to live sick. What? It was, it changed the whole trajectory. And since then, it’s helped thousands of people, you know, through, through my practice.
And I hope I’ve changed the next generation of my family and the kids, you know, right? So they know that what’s at the end of your fork will heal you or kill you. But also, what happens to you before the age of 18, right? The childhood trauma is going to set up in your body. So, that’s what led me to go, What? This is crazy. Nobody ever told me this.
And when I started changing, when I found out what my food sensitivities were, and for me, that changed my entire life. And it’s controversial food sensitivity testing, food allergy testing. Ah, it doesn’t work. Yes, it does. And I’m living proof of that. So are thousands of people that I work with through the have through the years when I realized what was at the end of my fork could kill me or heal me, it changed everything.
So then the inflammation started going down and that’s how I got started doing what I do. I realized, holy cow, there’s a route to all of this. And very few people are born depressed, if any, right? Most of us are born healthy. I wasn’t born with lupus. My mother who just died with Alzheimer’s disease at 78 was not born with Alzheimer’s disease, nor did she have the genetics for Alzheimer’s. She turned it on.
Chronic lifestyle diseases turned on by your lifestyle, by your inflammatory lifestyle turned off by your lifestyle. And that’s how I got started. And that was the, the light bulb moment for me. And that’s when I started kind of putting my six steps together. Well, you’ve got to eat well, you’ve got to sleep well, you need to poop well. You need to de-stress well, right? You’ve got to, uh, uh, commune well. And it just, it just kind of all fell together for me. And so that’s how I do it.
And when you turn that chronic inflammation around, when you start backing that inflammation up, and you start feeling better, it’s unbelievable what happens to your body. Our bodies want to heal themselves. And I was never taught that. Never told that. Given pill after pill after pill for all my chronic lifestyle diseases that started adding up. And now, I personally have reversed everything. I go today for my physical, my yearly physical. Hopefully still doing well. Have reversed every single bit of those chronic lifestyle diseases. I still have lupus, but I don’t have symptoms of lupus. And there’s the key right there.
Katie: I love that. And your story, I feel like is so practically applicable and also inspire so much hope. I didn’t know that you were at Vanderbilt at the nurse midwifery school. Those midwives caught two of my babies. I have a special place in my heart for the Vanderbilt nurse midwives.
Dani: Yes. No. I mean, yeah, I was there. I was did the nurse midwifery program and the family practice program.
Katie: I love that. Well, they are incredible there. I love those women so deeply. And, um, I love what you’re talking about with symptoms too. This is a, this was a big mindset shift that I had in my own healing journey was learning to rewrite the patterns and my beliefs around with like autoimmunity, for instance, that my body was attacking itself and actually realize symptoms are messengers and they’re a tremendous gift.
That’s like a direct communication from our body, either telling us something it needs that we’re not giving it or something it has that it doesn’t need that’s hurting it. And so I’m like, I learned to be grateful for those messages and to work with my body. And it was life changing. It sounds like that was the case for you too.
And you were able to reverse all these chronic conditions that people are told are irreversible and they’re gonna have for life. And I would guess many people listening have been given a word or diagnosis that they are told they’re gonna have through their whole life. And maybe don’t even know to consider that something else might be possible.
And I love that you kind of tackle the inflammation piece first because this does seem so connected to a lot of this. And it seems like just like if we’re having all these negative inputs, we have this sort of like negative spiral where those things are reinforcing each other. The good news is the reverse is also true.
So when we start like adjusting and adapting all those different pieces, we can create a positive feedback loop and seemingly the body in its wisdom, and always wanting to be in a state of health will adapt very quickly once we start to understand those pieces. But I would love to hear more about like, what were some of the specific things that really shifted things for you? And then where do you start with people who are kind of in that same place?
Dani: Right. Yes. And so the body, you’re correct. The body wants to right ship and it does it fast. It does it very quickly. I tell patients this every day, every single patient who comes in for sure, that’s a new patient. I tell them this is very simple what I ask you to do, but it’s not easy. There’s a difference.
And I start with food. For eating well, sleeping well, maybe a while. So the very first thing is we, I do a deep dive into their diet. What are you eating? Are you eating real one ingredient food? Or are you opening up boxes and bags and cans and packages and rolls and all this in your kitchen? If you open your cabinets right now and your refrigerator and your freezer, are there tons and tons of things in there that would still be there six months from now?
Well, that’s not real food. That’s Franken food. Real food goes bad fast. So what are we eating? Are you eating out? Are you cooking at home? Because cooking is self-care. And I had a new patient here today, 25 years old, wants to try to start having children here within the next year or so. She’s married. They don’t like to cook. And I just put my stuff down. I looked her straighter in the eye, straight in the eye. I said, I’m going to tell you something. You, and she has four autoimmune diseases. PCOS. She has, oh, she has all kinds of stuff going on. And I said, let me tell you something. I’m never going to be able to help you get better until you learn how to cook.
Cooking is self-care, period. You know, and now eating out, that’s great. But what we have to do initially is to bring it home. So I start with the diet and I work with food sensitivities and food allergies. Gluten, dairy, soy, corn, sugar, eggs, and peanuts are the top seven inflammatory foods in the country. I take them off of that the first visit, and we do a food sensitivity test, and they’re like, Dani, but I eat eggs every day.
That’s great, but eggs are the number two food allergy in the United States. For me, they were number one 15 years ago when I did my food sensitivity. My body hates eggs, and if I eat eggs, my hands hurt right here. I thought it was all lupus, right? Well, it was food sensitivities. My hands hurt, and I bloat. Dairy is the number one food allergy in the United States. Dairy, both of those are excellent protein sources. Not everyone has a dairy allergy. Not everyone has a dairy sensitivity. But we need to find out where we stand. And we eliminate it for 21 days. And then we challenge it back in. And how blessed are you if you don’t have a sensitivity to eggs?
If you eat eggs and you don’t get a migraine headache. But people don’t understand that what you eat could cause that headache. If you have a headache right now, it could be something you ate at, you know, three hours earlier, or it could be something you ate three days ago. Three hours to 72 hours is how that works for food sensitivities.
So, I start with diet. I start on healing the gut, right? A good probiotic, things like that. And then we move right into, how are you sleeping? Right? Because if you don’t sleep, your body will never heal. And this is something that I learned too, not too late, but later in life, is when your body heals.
And you did a fantastic two episodes on sleep just last week. Um, actually that was amazing. He talked about a sleep sanctuary. And I talk about the sleep sanctuary all in that book right there. You’ve got to make your bedroom a sanctuary. The bedroom is for sleep and sex only. If you’re not having one or the two in it, get out of it. Stay out of it. But clean your bedroom up. You’ve got to go to sleep, right? You have to sleep.
Maybe you need some supplements. Maybe you need a sleep study. Maybe you snore. I mean, we get into all of that. All the reasons that you would have trouble going to sleep or trouble staying asleep. Because oftentimes it’s two different reasons. Maybe you don’t have enough protein in your diet, and you’re waking up in the night. Maybe you need magnesium, you know. Maybe you need to calm down and get off your phone. I don’t even have my phone over here. So, you know, get off your phone, or your computer, or your TV at night. Or get your children out of your bed, possibly. Or your animals out of your bed. If you want to sleep with your kids, sleep with your kids. But, get your animals out of your bed.
So we have to sleep well, eat well and sleep well, I think are equal, honestly, because you will never eat well if you wake up exhausted, if you are up all night long, if you’re not sleeping.
And so we’ve got to get those 2 pillars in order and then you’ve got to move. Well, your body’s designed to move. So we talk about that and I ask them, you know, what’s going on with your exercise? You’ve got to move your body. I don’t care if it’s ballroom dancing, which is the number one way to decrease your dementia and Alzheimer’s risk.
Activity wise, ballroom dancing, or hula hooping, or rollerblading, I don’t care, just move your body. We are designed to move. And so we get into exercise and how you need to do that. And when you move better, guess what? You sleep better. And you eat better. It all works together. Eat well, sleep well, move well, poop well. Gotta poop! And people are not pooping, Katie. They are, and if your doctor tells you it’s fine, it’s fine. Some people only poop twice a week. Then you need a new healthcare provider because that is not normal. We are designed to eliminate today what we ate yesterday. You should have a bowel movement every two, I mean, two or three times a day, maybe twice a day. So we’ve got to get you pooping, but you won’t poop well if you don’t move, sleep or eat well, and it is all connected.
And it’s hard to keep these balls in the air all at the same time, and nobody has them all balanced out equally, um, all the time. But, and then you have to de stress well. The older I get, and I’ve been divorced 22 years, as we were talking about, you know, there’s been a tremendous amount of stress in my life, dealing with trauma and aging parents, my mom and all that, and you can’t pour from an empty vessel. And I am huge that if, I am a big believer that you have to fill your vessel up first. And as women, Katie, we don’t do that. We do not. We give and we give and we give. And then sometimes we get angry about it.
Sometimes if I hadn’t of wanted to do this podcast or if you didn’t want to do this podcast with me, right, you have the right to say. Absolutely not. No or no. No is a complete sentence. And I think we keep adding on and adding on and adding on to our schedules. And that’s on us. Nothing gets on that calendar unless we put it on there. And every time we say yes to something, I’ve got to say no to something else.
And so de-stressing well is key. We are the most stressed out community or culture, I’m sorry, that we’ve ever been. And suicide is on the rise. I work with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The fastest growing rate of suicide is age 10-23. Inside that age group, 10 to 13 or killing themselves faster than any other age group. That is heartbreaking and that is preventable and that is stress. That is loneliness, which gets into my sixth step, which is community, cultivating community. It is key for your overall health. And, you know, I’m a big believer in Jesus and Jesus loves community. He had 12 great people, crazy humans around him that were human, just like us. Nobody’s perfect. Right. But he had incredible community and inside that community, he had a tighter knit group.
But there was a study out, you know, that showed that the majority of the people, I think it was like 60 percent of the people don’t have one person that they can call. They feel like they can call if they had an emergency. That is heartbreaking. So that’s how I work with people finding out. Do you have community? Do you have support at home to help you eat well and move well and all? Do you, what’s your job like? Right? Do you have a lot of stress at home? Are you in a bad marriage? Well, you know what? There are worse things than divorce. And in my opinion, staying in a bad marriage is one of them for the children. And so we talk about that. And a lot of times women are like, wow, you know, and, um, so eat well, sleep well, move well, poop well, de-stress well, and commune well. And that’s how I start with patients, Katie, is I dig deep into all of that.
And again, they can’t fix it all at one time. But my goal is that when they come back and see me in a month, they’re like, Whoa, Dani, I gave up whatever eggs or dairy, but I found so many new things and I haven’t had a migraine in three weeks. Right. Or I haven’t had anxiety in three weeks. And then we start.
And you know what? I said no to whatever. You don’t have to be the room mom to every event. You don’t have to do all the things. Your kid’s still going to go to fourth grade if you’re if you’re not super involved. Right? And so, it’s fascinating. It is a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle. And, and, and once we start making these changes and they start sleeping better and eating better and they start moving their body and they get their sex drive back, that’s huge.
That’s not one of my six steps to healing, but it is a huge piece of what I do. So many married women, young married women, um, 30, 40, even 25 year olds, they don’t have any libido. Well, they also have no margin in their life. They’re exhausted. So, bringing it all together and watching these patients start to thrive and live the life that they were designed to live, it’s amazing.
And I wish I’d have learned it before I was 44 years old. I probably would have had a much better ride in life. But my goal is to help people see that, you know, it’s not about what you can’t do. It’s about all the things you can do or add on to your diet, you know, and it is, it’s about building resilience because when you build resilience in your gut and in your life, when you go out with your friends and Katie and I go out and we’re celebrating the birthday, right? And we do cheat, right? We have a burger and a beer. Or whatever. I don’t mean I haven’t had a beer in God knows when, but anyway you have a burger and a bourbon with your friends that you don’t pay for it for four days later, right? You’ve built up enough resilience in your body that you can get out there and live an incredible lifestyle.
People always only see what they can’t do. We know it’s hard for people to see the big picture and what they can add in.
Katie: I love that. I think that mindset shift is so powerful when we can switch from like what I can’t do to what I can do and like what I have to do versus I get to do. I know it was life changing for me, actually, when I simply switched my mindset from a point of when I was more trying to lose weight. It was like all this resistance and our brain doesn’t even want to lose anything ever.
So that wasn’t even a psychologically helpful place to be. And when I switched to just asking the question, how can I most nourish my body in this particular meal? How can I show my body the most love and joy and enjoying what I’m going to eat in this one meal? It was a game changer. Um, I also love your point about stress and women, especially.
I know we see the data on this and how modern women are more overstressed than ever before. Um, and this seems like a massive piece to really take, you know, audit and be aware of as well. I heard someone recently call it your sacred yes and your sacred no. And I loved that language and the gravity it brings to like, those are very powerful things when we choose to take on anything where letting go of something else.
I know before we forget, I want to mention to you, of course, your book dives so deep on all these things. I’ll link to that in the show notes or it’s everywhere books are sold. It’s phenomenal and so much in there. So I know it can cover all the pieces we won’t get to get to in one podcast episode, but I feel like you just highlighted so many important points about a sleep sanctuary and anything we can do to improve our sleep being so high ROI for every aspect of our health from that stress piece and how that was a big one for me. Just that alone auditing my stress levels realizing I had been in Sympathetic nervous system dominance for a decade and no matter what supplements I took no matter how much I exercised nothing was going to get better till I addressed that piece And when I did all those things I had been doing on a checklist erotically, suddenly were able to work.
It was like magic. I love that you bring these all together in like a roadmap that people can then follow. And to your point, I feel like it is incredible. Your body will blow you away with how quickly it responds when you give it the simple things it’s asking for. It’s incredible.
Dani: The simple things, and I wanted to say something real quick because I write, I wrote on a chapter here on, we are a nation of empty vessels and Eleanor Brown, the public speaker said it best. She said, ”Rest and self care are so important. When you take time to replenish your spirit, it allows you to serve others from the overflow. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.”
And I talk about this all the time. This is why you put your oxygen mask on first on the airplane, right? It’s not so you can save the neighbor or your child next to you. It’s because you are worthy to have 150 percent of that oxygen in order to get you out. But when you are full, when your vessel is full, your children, your husband, your spouse, your girlfriend, your job, your friends get the overflow.
They benefit from the overflow and everyone wins. Everyone wins when your vessel is full. We, you and I are the head of the household because we are single moms, Katie, but if we’re married, technically, I guess we’re not, you know, the head of the household. I don’t know. I get, I get in trouble for saying this all the time, but let’s just go back to traditional roots, right?
We’re not the head of the household if we’re married. That’s what they say, but we set the tone for the entire home. Women do. We may not be the head. But we set the tone. The second you walk through that door right there, whatever mood you’re in, whatever, whatever’s going on with you, the entire family picks up on your mood and your tone.
And that’s on us. And I spent way too many years walking in this house, overwhelmed, overstressed, overcommitted, no margin in my life. And I mean, I had one child who could say something and literally I would fly off the handle. And that was on me because I had no margin in my life. Hard job, hard marriage, all the things.
And I did not understand that I could automate, eliminate and delegate everything in my life. I automate, you know, as many things as I could get done, eliminate the things that were really, really not necessary. And that includes family members as in setting boundaries. I don’t mean like completely getting them out of your life, but a job, right?
If you’re in a bad job, what says you have to stay in it? Find something new. I quit a job 11 years ago that was killing me and opened my own clinic. Yes, I could have gone bankrupt. But guess what? I stepped out of that boat and I walked on water 11 years ago. And I am telling you, when you take those risks, there is no turning back when you don’t have a safety net, you are determined to make it happen. And so the mood and the tone of the home, unfortunately, the majority of the time lands on us and we have the right to take care of our health and build and our life and build a life that we don’t have to escape from. And I have finally figured that out. You know, today I go and get a facial. I’m not escaping from anything. I built it into my calendar that there were years that I couldn’t afford to do that. I could not go get a facial and I’m very blessed that I know I can now, and that helps me fill my bucket up.
But it does, it could be something free, right? Just get outside and take your shoes off, get your feet to the earth, your face to the sun, man, that’ll fill you up. So as women, I think that, you know, de-stressing well is key and I get it, that we’re overwhelmed, but there are little things that we can cut off our, our list that can give us some margin. And if you don’t like hosting Thanksgiving, guess what? This is February, March, whatever. Thanksgiving’s coming up in November.
Send a message out now to the family that, you know what? I’ve made a decision. I can’t do Thanksgiving this year. And I’m, but I’m welcome. I’m happy to help anyone who wants to host it, but I can’t do it. You have the right to say that. And you don’t, I mean, am I wrong on all of this or am I just menopausal postmenopausal 59 years old and mean as heck now, you know, I just wish these are things that I wish I would have known when I was raising my kids.
Katie: I am right there with you. I think it’s that reframe is really essential for women now to realize. Not only is self-care important, it’s actually essential. And not only is it not selfish, it’s seemingly one of the less, the more selfless things we can do, because like you said, we can’t pour from an empty cup and our kids deserve a mom who’s not at the end of her rope. Who’s not like a ticking time bomb. That’s going to fly off the handle. Like you said, we set the nervous system tone for our whole house. And the data shows that we know babies co regulate to their mother’s nervous system almost entirely for the first seven years, but that doesn’t just magically go away.
There are, we’re still in tune with our family and with our kids. And I think the beauty there is that can be a very positive thing as well. When we do the inner work and we learn how to not just bypass but actually regulate and address the things internally, we get to set a really positive tone and an example for our kids in that process.
And, on the parenting side, I could go on for hours about how, you know, often it’s easy to want to yell at our kids to have emotional regulation when they seem dysregulated. But we’re coming from an unregulated point if we’re doing that. And I get it. Kids can be our most impactful teachers because they can be our most impactful triggers, but it’s an opportunity to go inside and to do that work and to get to, for our own sake to a place of more inner calm so that that then radiates out. I think all these things you’re talking about are steps on that. We can’t do that if we never have a second in our day, we can’t do that. If we don’t have actual fuel in our body or we didn’t sleep or we haven’t moved.
And you’re right. I think the simple things often get overlooked because of their simplicity, but there is magic and getting morning sunlight or going for a walk. You don’t have to do a high intensity exercise with weights every day. You can just go for a walk in the sunshine. And hydrate and nourish your body and it will respond so, so well.
I also love that you talk about the community because I think in the modern world, this piece is so hard and it’s not as natural as it perhaps was for past generations. We don’t just necessarily live in the same neighborhood that we grew up in and have people around us all the time.
So it requires a little bit of intentionality. And what I’ve tried to learn over time is like, how can I sort of stack these things. How can I maybe make nourishing food, do a potluck, have people over, get to stay in my home, which is my nourishing environment, but be around people. Like I’ll build the community if it doesn’t exist, but do it in a way that is nervous system supportive versus nervous system exhaustive.
Dani: You bet. And I have, I talk all about that in there. I’m the cultivator in my community. I’m the one who brings the people together. I grew up an only child. I grew up in a tremendous amount of chaos and childhood trauma. So I made a decision when I grew up that I was going to cultivate my family. My friends became my family and it doesn’t have to be stressful.
I’ve done it both ways, cultivating it, bringing people over where I’m hysterical right before they get there trying to make everything right. I have decided the last 10 years, who cares if it’s all clean? Who cares if everything’s thrown in the closet or the dishwasher or whatever in the laundry room so nobody can see? All people want is to laugh with their people. The research is clear when you’re laughing with your friends, your girlfriends, your guy friends, whatever. Your cortisol levels go down, right? Your sympathetic nervous system starts to regulate, you get into parasympathetic. I mean, your immune system goes up when you’re laughing with your people.
And it’s yeah, and I do it probably a couple times a year at my house, a good little girl’s night and stuff and wish I did it more. But your neighborhood, you know, I grew up in the country where my neighbor would just come over and knock on the door. You know, when’s the last time that’s happened?
That’s never happened over here in my neighborhood. Nobody just comes and knocks on the door and hangs out with you anymore. And those are the things that I miss and, but it, but it is so good for your overall health. When you have community, you do eat better and you sleep better. And guess what? Then you’ve got community. You may be finding a buddy and you go exercise with as well. So it all works together. Yeah. Communities community is where it’s at. And we’re pretty lonely right now. We, we definitely have a mental health community crisis on our hands.
Katie: Agreed. And that was what even stood out to me in the blue zone studies was they had varied diets. They had very movement patterns. They all had a much different type of community than we see in a lot of places. And I think we missed that step because it’s not built in anymore. But I think it’s so important as part of this kind of holistic whole that you’re talking about. And I know we’re getting close to the end of our time for this episode. You guys definitely stay tuned because we’re going to do another one all about adverse childhood experiences and how those come into play in a very real way in adult life and also how to address them.
But before we end this one, Dani, can you tell people, I will link in the show notes, but where to find your book. I know you have an inflammation course as well, as well as a practice and a website. So where can people find all things, Dani?
DaniWilliamson.com is the website, but Dani Williamson Wellness is on every social media. That is my social media, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all of that. We have, the book is available anywhere you buy books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. All of that. So yes, inflammation is the devil is an online course and it is and I write about it in the book as well. So, yeah, we’re easy to get in touch with. We’re in Brentwood, Tennessee. We have a brick and mortar supplements store, wellness stores, all kinds of stuff. If anybody ever gets to Nashville, come see us. We’re open 6 days a week and the clinic as well is there. So we’re easy to get in touch with and easy to follow. And I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Well, thank you, Dani, so much for everything you shared today. And like I said, stay tuned for a round two, but for this episode, for sharing your time with us today. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Fit Bottomed Zone podcast.
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