Recently I interviewed Josie Warren, who shares how she regained herself after dealing with eight different autoimmune conditions, all by addressing a single trigger. If you would prefer to listen the interview you can access it by Clicking Here [1].
With me, I have Josie Warren. She will be discussing how she overcame multiple autoimmune conditions. Josie is an autoimmune expert. She used to have Graves’, Hashimoto’s, and six other autoimmune disorders. She completely resolved all of her autoimmune conditions and now takes people down the same path of healing she has traveled. Thank you so much for joining us, Josie.
Josie Warren:
Thank you, Dr. Eric. It’s great to be here. Excited to speak with the Save My Thyroid audience.
Dr. Eric:
Great to have you. Why don’t we go ahead and start off by giving your background? How did you start doing what you’re doing today, which is helping others with autoimmune conditions?
Josie:
That’s a great question. Like all of you listening out there, I also had multiple autoimmune conditions starting in high school. I started with arthritis. Seems like you can’t just have one. They snowballed over the years, as I continued to not deal with my life and stressors.
By the time I was 28, I had to leave my profession. I used to be a licensed professional counselor; I worked at the Betty Ford Center. I loved it, but it was very stressful. I decided to set out on a quest to figure out all my health conditions. I had about eight autoimmune disorders at this point, and some mental health conditions as well.
I found an organization here in Denver who I was told could help me because I was someone that doctors didn’t have any explanation for. I came here and was able to learn a very unique and novel perspective on healing from autoimmune. Within a number of months, all my autoimmune disorders resolved and went away. It so profoundly changed my life and gave me my life back that I knew I had to learn and teach this.
I left my profession as a licensed counselor. I trained for five years. Now, I teach the same educational program that I learned, but we’re always updating it and making it more current. That’s what I do now. I am an autoimmune expert, taking others down this same path.
Dr. Eric:
That’s some story. What autoimmune condition were you diagnosed with first?
Josie:
The first one was rheumatoid arthritis. I believe I was about 17 years old, 16 or 17. I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t see that as a red flag, that there was something not right in my immune system, and I should be noticing there was a dysregulation happening.
Dr. Eric:
As you probably know, I was diagnosed with Graves’. One question I had for you also is family history. When it came to Graves’, I honestly don’t know anybody else in my immediate family or even distant family who had Graves’. There are some hypothyroid cases. I’m not sure if they had Hashimoto’s. Either way, is there a history of autoimmunity in your family?
Josie:
There is. My sister has lupus. My mom had hypothyroidism. Back in the day, I had many great-aunts who had what I now believe to be some autoimmune conditions that they were going more misdiagnosed. My grandmother had autoimmune. Yes, autoimmune definitely runs in my family.
For me, for many out there, if it’s genetic, I thought that I was trapped, and there was no way out of these conditions because of that genetic factor. I always like to teach people and talk about how we are not a prisoner thankfully to our genes. For me, even though I have a history of it, now, not having any autoimmune, I can attest that the genes do not hold us back.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. The reason I ask is because you had so many autoimmune conditions. As you said, regardless of whether someone has one autoimmune condition, like I did in the past, or many conditions, like you dealt with, genetics is still a factor, but it’s not the most important factor. I’m glad you brought that up.
Can you discuss some of the similarities between different autoimmune conditions, what they have in common?
Josie:
Absolutely. I’ll speak for how I was taught back then, and now what I understand. When I had all of these autoimmune conditions, I was taught that they were all separate and to treat them separately. I was seeing different specialists to treat all of these conditions. Different endocrinologists, immunologist, rheumatologist. I was also doing functional medicine and seeing nutritionists and doing herbs. I was trying the whole spectrum for all of these different conditions.
What I have found is not only do they share very similar symptoms, symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue, body pain, but I have also found they are all coming from the same place. That is what I did not understand when I had them for all those years. All of my autoimmune conditions were coming from the very same singular root cause, which we know here is stress and chronic stress. I focused on the one root cause that was causing my immune system to go overactive and to malfunction, all of the autoimmune conditions resolved, and all of the symptoms resolved, just by working on one thing. Before, where I was working on everything separate, treating them all as separate conditions, I actually would never have found for myself a way out of them.
Dr. Eric:
You brought up a great point. In the conventional medical world, you go to different specialists depending on the autoimmune condition. If you have an autoimmune thyroid condition, you will see an endocrinologist. If you have rheumatoid arthritis, chances are you will see a rheumatologist. If you have some kind of gut disorder, you will see a gastroenterologist, even if it’s autoimmune. There is not an autoimmune specialist amongst conventional medical doctors. They are not focusing on that autoimmune component, like you said.
In my experience, you could have multiple triggers when you have different autoimmune conditions, but in your experience, there was one main factor, it sounded like. Once you resolved that, you got everything under control, which was great.
How important was diet when it came to restoring your health? I imagine it had to be at least a piece of the puzzle. I wanted to get your opinion as far as what type of diet you followed then. What type of diet do you follow now, now that you’re in a state of wellness?
Josie:
Great question. Thank you for asking. What I will share is going to be different than what you are hearing out there. Up until I got healthy, those years of autoimmune conditions, I was really focused on restrictive food diets. Like many out there, I went from diet to diet. I did elimination, AIP, the LEAP program, low-FODMAP, gluten-free, sugar-free, the Candida diet, Bulletproof, paleo, just to name a few. I was really on a lot of diets.
By the time I came to the organization I work for now, A New Life Center, I was only eating five foods. That’s all that my body could handle. If I remember right, it was kelp noodles, spinach, garbanzo beans, coconut oil, and something else. That was my daily diet. I could not handle anything else because of the years of restrictive food diets I had been on.
In my body healing and self-repairing, there wasn’t a diet component to that because what I found here was that the reason my digestive system wasn’t working properly, the reason my gut was leaky, and the reason I had all of those digestive issues wasn’t the foods I was eating. It was my immune system. My body was stuck in the sympathetic nervous system due to chronic stress. When I worked on my chronic stress, my body was able to exit out of the sympathetic, enter into the parasympathetic nervous system, and in that, my gut naturally healed and self-repaired. That process happened all without a food diet.
My experience, and the experience of my students that I work with, we don’t work with any diets. I didn’t do any diets to resolve my conditions. Now, to give people hope out there, I’m happy to report that it’s almost been eight years since I’ve had these conditions, and I am not on any restrictive food diets. I eat a normal, healthy diet. I enjoy barbecues, birthday parties. I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks, and I will be getting a cake. I don’t have to worry about foods I eat because I don’t have these conditions anymore.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned a normal, healthy diet. It sounds like most of the time, you’re still eating healthy. You’re not going to McDonald’s every day.
Josie:
No.
Dr. Eric:
You’re not eating cakes and cookies every day. Maybe for your birthday and special occasions. Maybe more frequently than that. When it comes to working with clients, there is no special diets like AIP or paleo. Do you tell them to restrict anything as far as gluten or dairy or any other foods?
Josie:
Like myself, many of the students I work with who come in with different autoimmune such as Graves’, Hashimoto’s, fibromyalgia, and other chronic illnesses like migraines are often on special food diets. They are coming in severely restricted on foods, oftentimes AIP, gluten-free, dairy-free, etc. I just let them know, “Hey, it’s up to you if you feel like you want to continue this” while they are in my program. Some do. Some choose not to.
I know that at the end of the program and working with me, the immune system will go back to normal; the digestive system heals and self-repairs. Regardless of if they are on a food diet or not, they are then able to start reintroducing foods that they were once maybe sensitive or allergic to back into their diet.
While I don’t work with food diets, and some choose to stay on them and some not, every person I work with who is/was on a food diet, I teach how to reintroduce foods just like I did for myself. They are able to go back to eating those foods that they were once allergic to, even things that they were sensitive to, like gluten. I work with people with Celiac who can now eat gluten. Even people who had anaphylactic experiences to things like nuts are, over time, able to go back to eating those as well. I focus more on the reintroduction versus the taking out.
Dr. Eric:
Very interesting. It sounds like stress was a big factor. I also listened to some of your other podcasts. I try to get acquainted with my guests before I interview them and learn about them. I know you had a journey with regard to stress and mental health. Can you talk about that, as far as how that ties into autoimmunity, not just your condition but your students?
Josie:
Yes, I love talking stress because it’s the thing that I find no one is talking about when it comes to autoimmune, and it is, from my experience, the singular root cause. What I didn’t understand, and this is true for myself and anyone that I have worked with on autoimmune, is that we are not good stress people. We are born into this world not well wired to handle stress. Unfortunately, what happened with myself and everyone with autoimmune is that we unconsciously suppressed stress in our bodies.
If you think about a lifetime from birth on, suppressing the stressors that we have been through, things such as, even at a young age, moving, siblings being born, maybe a parents’ divorce, heartbreaks, graduations, new jobs, marriages, we just suppress that. All of that stress layered into our body until our body reached a tipping point. Physically, it could not handle any more suppressed stress.
That was my experience. I had a lifetime of suppressed stress. I had the health to show it. We all have different kinds of conditions that led up to these autoimmune that we had. They didn’t come out of nowhere. There is actually a term for that, “allostatic load.” That is a term that talks about the accumulative wear and tear of our bodies due to increased stress in our lifetime. If you were to take a timeline of the conditions you had, say, even, strep or sinus infections and things like that, and you layered it over the stressors of your life, you will see them line right up.
For people like us with autoimmune, from my perspective, you have reached that stress tipping point, and we have one stressor that is one too many. It pushes our body over into a nervous system called the sympathetic, which is where fight or flight exists. Our fight or flight kicked on, but it unfortunately stays on due to the chronic stress of our life. It thinks we are under a constant threat. From that point forward, people with autoimmune are stuck in the sympathetic. The immune system goes overactive. People with thyroid conditions, it starts attacking our thyroid. That’s where it all comes from.
For me, stress is everything. The reason we haven’t healed is because we haven’t dealt with our stress. Deal with the root cause: chronic stress. I have found fight or flight will always turn off. Then the body can fully heal and self-repair. The immune system goes back to normal. The body no longer has autoimmune anymore. That’s why I no longer have these autoimmune disorders and why my students don’t either. Love talking stress.
Dr. Eric:
Stress definitely was a big factor in the development of my Graves’ condition. A lot of people are in a sympathetic state, and we need to make the switch more to a parasympathetic state.
I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time with your clients as far as trying to help them overcome the stressors. We don’t have time to go over everything during this call; that’s why they would see you. Can you go over at least some of the basics? What do you do? Do you do testing to look at their adrenals? Do you just assume everyone has stressed-out adrenals, and you have people do mind/body medicine? If you could give some pointers of what you do to help your students deal with stress or eliminate the stress, whatever approach you take.
Josie:
There is a lot of misconception about stress out there. Our society likes to deal with stress after the fact that we’re stressed. Then we’re told to work out or sleep more or eat healthier. That’s not really getting to the reason of why you are stressed in the first place.
What I do and what we teach here is an educational program. There is no need for any kind of lab testing or bloodwork. We let their doctors do that testing. People I work with have already been diagnosed, so they can do that testing before they work with me and after, or within the program if they feel like it. I know definitively stress is the way out. Everybody I work with, I do the same stress work with, and everybody gets better, regardless of age, what or how many autoimmune conditions or chronic illnesses they have. I know it’s stress. We just have to learn a new perspective on stress.
When we learn a new perspective of life and stress, our experience changes internally, and we are no longer feeling chronically stressed anymore. Fight or flight picks up on that and turns off. You enter into parasympathetic. Autoimmune resolves. The body heals and self-repairs.
I have three tips I can share to give you an idea of what I’ve done and what I teach my students. The first one is we have to normalize stress. We have to realize that our stressors are really not unique. If I think the things that have happened in my life are worse than others and more unique, I make them too big, and I can’t handle them or overcome them. We have to realize that as humans, we all generally have the same kinds of stressors in our lives, give or take. If you wrangled up a group of 100 people, you’d find the same things. I needed to learn that for myself to normalize my stress. We can know and anticipate the stressors we have because that’s what humans have. It’s what our ancestors a couple hundred years ago had. It’s what the people who come after us will have. First, we have to normalize stress.
The second thing is I teach people that stress is an internal experience, meaning it’s not given to us by the things, events, and circumstances. Our stress comes from inside of us. That’s why if you fly on an airplane, you will find five different people with five different experiences or stress responses to the same stimuli. Some people might be relaxed; some people might be taking medication to help them with the stress experience; some people might have the bag out. You don’t know. That’s because stress comes from us. If it comes from us, which it does, the key is there is something you can do about it. Remember, stress, from my perspective, is the root cause of the autoimmune condition in the first place. If there is something you can do about it, that’s wonderful. You will be your own solution.
The third thing that I teach people is that to resolve our experience of stress, we have to activate and grow and build the resolution of chronic stress, which is our natural resilience. I know “resilience” is a buzz word. It’s our ability to be adaptive and bounce back quickly in times of stress. It’s our ability to go out into life to grow and learn. Our ancestors had strong resilience because they had to deal with all these day-to-day events for their survival. We have a very easy life these days. Resilience has gone a little weak.
I teach my students it’s by going back out into life, into the stressors, not hiding from them, willingly, to grow and learn, and to build our own internal strength, that your body and self is able to handle your stress. You grow that resilience. Again, your body picks up on that, and your fight or flight will turn off. That is how you enter into that parasympathetic nervous system.
In a long nutshell, that is my framework of what I teach on stress. It’s not after the fact. It’s prevention and doing it before it happens, by changing our perspective.
Dr. Eric:
It’s not getting rid of the stressors. Many times, that’s not possible. Even if you can eliminate some stressors, we are always going to be faced with stressors in the future. Some of them are unexpected. You are teaching people to deal with their current stressors better as well as from a preventative perspective. Improve stress management skills and their perspective of stress, so that future stress won’t have that same impact on their health.
Josie:
Yes. It’s changing us. You make a great point. Our society teaches, and I did this for some time before I knew better, “Oh, I’m stressed. I have to leave that place. I have to move. I have to leave that job, that relationship, etc.” That is no solution because wherever we go, there we are. Stress is in us. We are the creators of our stress. I was the one who had to change my perspective. Then I could keep the same life I have. It’s no longer feeling chronically or overwhelmingly stressful anymore because I have the resilience and the ability to handle it. From that, our body will heal and self-repair our autoimmune and chronic illness.
Dr. Eric:
You said you don’t do any testing. You leave the testing to the practitioners. Correct?
Josie:
That’s correct.
Dr. Eric:
If someone with Graves’ or Hashimoto’s came to see you, how do you know that they are in remission? Is it based on the tests that they are getting with another practitioner, like they go to an endocrinologist, and their thyroid panel stabilizes, their antibodies normalize? Maybe you don’t look at those. How do you determine if someone has restored their health?
Josie:
Great question. I have two answers to that, but I want to touch on remission. I was taught back before I learned this and healed that remission was the best I could do. That was the top of the pyramid. Everyone is searching for remission. What I have found and what I teach is the step beyond remission, which is the condition is actually no longer present anymore in the body. In remission, we are still in that sympathetic state. The immune system has still malfunctioned. Unfortunately, no one taught me this, but it’s only a matter of time before a flare-up will pull a person out of remission. You don’t know when, but you know it will. That is the problem there. With remission, it doesn’t mean the condition is gone.
What we teach with stress is that when you can get the body out of that sympathetic nervous system state, when you can get it into the parasympathetic state by eliminating the experience of chronic stress, the immune system actually goes back to normal functioning. In the case of Graves’ or Hashimoto’s, that immune system permanently stops attacking the thyroid. When your immune system stops attacking that organ, you no longer have an autoimmune disorder. That is actually beyond remission; that is a permanent elimination of the autoimmune disorder. There is nothing that needs to be done to maintain that. That’s why I don’t have to be on restrictive food diets or take supplements to maintain my health. My immune system is healthy and back to normal.
For testing, it’s very interesting. What we find is that when a body gets into that parasympathetic state, when you eliminate chronic stress, the immune system goes back to normal, the autoimmune disorder resolves permanently, and the symptoms do as well. People don’t always test normal right away. We recommend for people outside of my 10-week program to give themselves six months or a year. Give their body some time to get in that parasympathetic nervous system for all the levels to test normal.
Regardless of levels testing normal right away, it is undeniable when a person no longer has an autoimmune condition. You will feel physically tangibly that internal health of you’re no longer fatigued. I used to have almost no hair up here. Your hair grows back. Your weight stabilizes. You wake up in the morning with energy. Your skin is moisturized again. For hyperthyroidism, you’re not anxious all the time, your heart isn’t palpitating, and you’re not sweating abnormally anymore. You go back to living a normal, healthy life. You can feel that regardless of testing or not.
We don’t do testing because we’re education. People have gotten tested, and I have gotten retested outside of the program. We don’t have anything anymore. Our immune system has gone back to normal.
Dr. Eric:
It’s an interesting perspective. I have written articles like “Remission versus Cure.” I have been in remission since 2009, but everything is normal. I feel like I am cured. I am hesitant to say that because there is that genetic component. Even though it’s not just genetics, obviously environment plays a much greater role. I definitely agree with a lot of people who relapse, it’s just the stressor getting out of that sympathetic state, and not just shifting to the parasympathetic, but staying there.
This leads me to what you’re currently doing to maintain your state of wellness. Diet-wise, you spoke about. You’re not following any specific diet. Are you doing things on a regular basis to stay in that parasympathetic state?
Josie:
Just to answer a little bit from my perspective on what you shared to clarify my understanding, I want all the listeners out there to know, like I shared earlier: What I have found is regardless of if we have it in our genes or not, whether you have the genetic component or markers, it is no factor in the body’s ability to heal itself. It’s a nonfactor. It’s so wonderful because I know for so many of us, like myself, I felt that pulled me back. I couldn’t heal because of that.
Dr. Eric:
I agree with that. The environmental factors definitely are a greater factor. If you have the genetics, I agree, that’s not going to prevent you from getting into that parasympathetic state.
Josie:
It’s a great thing. I was so excited because I felt so trapped by environmental toxins, foods, GMOS and allergens, and when I threw in my genetic background and my family history, I thought there was no way I could ever heal.
What I teach, working on what we know as the singular root cause here, which is chronic stress, that’s all we work on. That’s all I was taught. Move my body from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic, and it’s been in the parasympathetic for almost eight years. I do not need to do any specific maintenance to keep it there. I eat a normal, healthy, all-American diet. Nothing too out of the ordinary. I don’t take any supplements anymore. I used to be on at least 12 a day. All I do is work on dealing with my life, going out into life to grow and learn, continuing to activate and grow my natural resilience and ability to do life. That is what reinforces my body in the parasympathetic. It’s my approach to life that is keeping me healthy.
I have worked with so many people. We have been doing this here for over 15 years. I have seen people who have done this work and resolved their conditions. They have been healthy for 12, 13, 14 years. They are all still in the parasympathetic state. When we really lock in there, it takes a lot of work for someone to get out. You’d have to be intentional, if that makes sense.
Parasympathetic, it’s not challenging whatsoever to stay in there. It really comes from how I’m approaching my life.
Dr. Eric:
No daily yoga or meditation or any type of mind/body medicine? Just your approach to life, your perspective on the stressors.
Josie:
Correct. I did come from a background of doing meditation. I did a lot of yoga leading up to this. I still had all of my autoimmune conditions. Did the supplements. Did all the restrictive food diets, like I shared. What I didn’t realize at the time was that was all symptom management, which was great if we want to manage our symptoms. But I want not to have the autoimmune disorders anymore.
It didn’t click with me that working on a symptom was never going to resolve the actual condition. I was having these symptoms because I was stuck in the sympathetic nervous system. Working on the foods, the supplements, the meditation, or even the yoga, that was me managing my symptoms in the sympathetic. When I got to the real root cause, and worked on stress, all of the symptoms and the autoimmune disorders resolved. I didn’t have to and don’t have to use symptom management because I no longer have the conditions anymore.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned leaky gut earlier. That also ties into the stressors since the stress is the root cause of everything in your experience and with your students. In order to heal the gut, you found in your experience that it’s not so much the diet or other factors, but just the resiliency, the perspective on the stress, switching from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system state.
Josie:
Yes. Here is what made so much sense to me, and I wish someone would have told me this earlier. I asked, “Why am I having these autoimmune?” In addition to this, I had food allergies, leaky gut, candida, digestion issues, constipation, all the stuff that we have with autoimmune.
What I did not realize was that trapped in the sympathetic nervous system, not only does our immune system go overactive, and for a thyroid condition, it attacks our thyroid. In the sympathetic, the digestive system becomes compromised as well. In that fight or flight state, the body is turning off what it deems nonessential functioning. The digestive system is one of those. That is actually where the leaky gut is coming from.
Stuck in that sympathetic nervous system, our digestive system isn’t functioning properly, and we get leaky gut and those other digestive conditions. The way to resolve that is to get out of the sympathetic by eliminating chronic stress, so that the digestive system can then go back to normal functioning, which it does in the parasympathetic. It does it naturally all on its own. That leaky gut will naturally heal and self-repair without the need for supplementation, cleanses, and diets.
For me, that was almost a miracle. As stressful as my autoimmune conditions were, dealing with my leaky gut and the symptoms of my leaky gut were just as or more stressful than that as well. Again, parasympathetic heals and repairs on its own. The reason we have leaky gut is we are stuck in sympathetic.
Dr. Eric:
Thanks for sharing that. Are there any questions that I didn’t ask you that I should have asked? Anything else that you’d like to share?
Josie:
What I want to share is I want to give you all hope. I have been in your shoes. I know what it’s like to be trying diet after diet, supplement after supplement, maybe even different medications, changing doctors, and feeling so stressed, like “What is wrong with me? What is wrong with my body? Why did this happen to me?”
I want you all to know that there is nothing wrong with you. I say that with so much love. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re just like I was. Your body is just stuck in the sympathetic, and it’s staying there because you just haven’t been taught how to deal with life’s stressors. When you learn to handle your stress, your body will heal, and it will self-repair. I’ve worked with women who are 74 and have had these conditions for decades, and I have also worked with students as young as eight or nine who have autoimmune conditions. Everybody’s body can heal and self-repair by eliminating chronic stress. You’re not too far gone. You haven’t had these too long. There is nothing wrong with you that will keep your body from going back to the natural state that you were born into and healing and self-repairing on its own.
Dr. Eric:
If anybody listening would like to get in contact with you, work with you, can you tell them where to find you?
Josie:
Yes, I love hearing from people. I know what I’m sharing here, no one else is talking about. It brings up a lot of questions. If you have any questions, reach out to me on email. My email is Josie@TheHashimotosFix.com [2]. My website is TheHashimotosFix.com.
I want you all to know that while my niche is Hashimoto’s, because it is the most common autoimmune disorder for women, as I’ve spoken about today, the work I do works with almost all autoimmune conditions, whether that’s Graves’, fibromyalgia, Celiac, Lyme, or chronic conditions like chronic pain and migraines, and other chronic conditions, like anxiety and depression. They are all coming from the same root cause from my experience: chronic stress. Reach out to me with questions. I love to hear from all of you.
Dr. Eric:
It was great chatting with you, Josie. I really do appreciate you sharing your knowledge on how you overcame multiple autoimmune conditions. I’m sure they learned a great deal.
Josie:
Appreciate it. It was great to be here. Thank you for having me.