What We’re Talking About in this Episode:
Here are the notes for Episode 1:
Frank – Intro: 00:00 Hey everyone and welcome to unconventional wellness radio, a powerful and inspiring podcast set to revolutionize and disrupt healthcare. It’s trying to put you in the driver’s seat and be the force of change necessary for the lifestyle you’ve always wanted.
Frank: 00:18 Hey everyone, I am so excited to be able to bring this podcast to you. I am so thrilled that you’re here to join us today. I actually have the pleasure of my very first interview with somebody who is 100 percent amazing and has like just this unbelievable following online and she is just so inspirational to so many and on top of it all she’s my wife! And so like I get the opportunity to interview Jackie Ritz. She is the founder and CEO of thepaleomama.com, a blog website. And also I have been working with her on this journey for so long now that it just seems like she would be the perfect person that we should start with. So, I just without further ado, thank you so much for joining us on the show, Jackie.
Jackie: 01:07 Well, thank you so much, frank. You got some Brownie points there to add to the, to the growing list, so I figured a good spot for us to start would be like, obviously we want to talk about our story because people that are listening to this podcast, they need to know like where we’re coming from.
Speaker 2: 01:22 And so I just wanted to kind of like hit the rewind button, hit the retro button if I could and let’s go ahead and tell folks where we were in order to be able to help explain where we are now. Where do you want to start? Well, I think what it would make sense that we just go ahead and start with where I, where I was in military service. So as a young 20 something year old, 9/11 just happened and I figured I needed to do something with my life. And so I looked at everybody that was in my family and my family had all served in the military in some form or fashion. And I said, I don’t want to be the only person in my family that hasn’t served. And so like any, hopefully soon to be great American, I went into my recruiter office and I started talking to somebody from the army, well found out that I was grotesquely overweight because at that time I had lost my dad two months after nine slash 11 happened and just like anybody else, I drowned in my sorrows and too much food and excessive amounts of alcohol and so I needed to do something to lose the weight.
Frank: 02:32 So I got internally inspired. I was able to drop 50 pounds and I enlisted in the U, s army and I enlisted in the U, s army as a combat medic because I’ve always had a love for medicine. And so during my time in service I had the chance to work through being a combat medic. But then I became a maintenance officer and then I did this branch of the military that I had no idea what it was. But I said, you know what? This is the needs of the army thing. But then I had an opportunity to shadow a physician assistant while I was on my first deployment. And that revolutionized how I thought and what I wanted to do with the rest of my time in the military. And so I applied and was accepted to physician assistant school. I did it through the military and then I became a certified physician assistant at that same time though I was finishing up school.
Frank: 03:25 That’s when I met my darling Jackie. And so she was able to stick with me for the last four months of my first year of physician assistant school. And then we both sort of like, just, we, we transferred over to me do my clinicals the second year. And uh, during that time we started trying to figure out what can we do to maintain our health in an appropriate way. Once I graduated from PA school, we subsequently moved to a station in Georgia where, uh, you know, now we’re going to start getting into sort of like where Jackie comes from and at that time really we, we had our daughter, we had our son. And then why don’t you go ahead and tell everybody a little bit about like at that point in our life what
Jackie: 04:09 was happening. So, but at that point, frank was actually about to deploy again. Um, he had already been to Iraq for a year and, um, he had come back and they were about to deploy him again. And around that same time is when I lost my little sister. She was two and a half years younger than me. She made a completely impulsive decision and took her own life after she had lost her boyfriend the day before. And so she got so wrapped up in her grief that she just made a very, very dumb and silly decision. Um, and we, uh, entered a phase of fog, I call it, I don’t even remember a lot of the first year of my son’s life because we were in survival mode. You know, there was a very traumatic event that happened, you know, that I was a part of and unfortunately had to experience.
Jackie: 05:14 And, and from that point on, we were, we were just in a state of fogginess, of survival, of grief. And we weren’t sure really how we were going to get out of it or if there was any kind of light. At the end of the tunnel, I had just started when my daughter was in my belly, I had just started come questioning everything that I was eating, putting on my body. I’d never really considered myself natural at all, never bought organic food that was for the hippies. And I became a Hippie, I guess you could say because I started questioning those things. I started looking at the ingredients. I knew it was going to, in fact my daughter and I know it would ultimately affect her growth inside my belly. So that was when I just started swapping things out, you know, I bought my first bottle of coconut oil.
Jackie: 06:13 I remember how awkward I felt like there were so many different kinds and how overwhelming it was. Um, you know, and then over the next year we just started slowly transitioning or other parts of our health, you know, our, our cleaning supplies, our medicine cabinet, a lot of that, you know, we started throwing some of the older stuff away and replacing it with elderberry syrup. Maybe some vitamin C or vitamin D instead of, you know, some other kinds of medications. Um, and then the sister thing happened and it completely blew us away. Somebody at that point, and this is kind of how the whole Paleo Mama blog started, was one of my friends, you know, how people like to feed you when you’re sad while somebody’s cooked me and fed me a paleo meal. And I remember asking them what that meant and, and I was thinking and the food was going to taste terrible because who wants to eat something that’s grain free and dairy free.
Jackie: 07:16 But I remember taking the first bite and just like my eyeballs opened up wide, like the flavor was so amazing. And so that kind of was the pinnacle for us becoming a more Paleo ish family and we’re never 100 percent Paleo. We believe it’s more of a lifestyle to live by. Um, so we consider ourselves about 80 percent paleo. But that was how the blog happened, is I started using the blog as an outlet for my grief for some of the new recipes I was trying and making up in making. And even some of the new body butters that I was experiencing with, you know, I didn’t want to buy lotion anymore because of all the junk in the ingredients. So I started making some of those homemade recipes and created a really amazing following of readers on my blog who wanted to do the same thing and who also didn’t know how to take those, um, the jump into living more natural. And ultimately this is what caused me to write my first book everyday natural, which came out about a year ago was I didn’t want people to get overwhelmed with all the natural stuff and to get confused by should I just start in, swap everything all at once, you know. And so it’s really just a guidebook for taking baby steps into eating, into living, into having more natural children. And I’m just being a happier person and family because of that, because of their choices that you’re making at that level of your health. I really
Frank: 08:56 appreciate that. And uh, and, and I mean I can’t thank you enough because every single day we eat and have ways now that we just don’t think about that we know that we are positively influencing our lifestyle for the better. Um, I also come from a personal history of, and I’ll sort of parallel a little bit of what was going on with me and my professional career as well as my personal life is that, you know, I come from a family where my father passed away from a heart attack at 56 years old and 56. I mean like now that I’m almost about to turn 40, I’m like sitting there going, okay, now it’s time for me to go ahead and start really investing now more than ever into the lifestyle that I need. So I don’t, I’ve always wanted to follow in his footsteps. I just don’t want to follow in that footstep.
Frank: 09:46 And so I was working as a certified PA and the reason why I say I was working as a certified pa because I’ve now had the pleasure of being able to work at home with this lovely lady for the last three years. And so, uh, when I was doing my professional career, I actually came across people who were doing acupuncture and doing chiropractic medicine and doing some really amazing integrative methods while I was still on active duty treating my soldier population. And so I started integrating a lot of those methods because they were honestly working. And so I was able to really start tuning my understanding of what I’m going to refer to as an east meets west philosophy of medicine is that by all means, I am so grateful that our healthcare system is what it is today. We have medications or we especially have antibiotics that are just crucial to helping people not die from the illnesses.
Frank: 10:44 They did, at least, you know, in excess of 100 years ago. But what that also being said is that like our bodies have always been very similar throughout the ages. And so we have realized that, you know, when somebody has a positive benefit that they do every single day, that that actually is more beneficial than going to see someone when you’re actually ill instead of like having a, a, a understanding of I’m going to go see somebody when I’m at disease instead what we need to do is we need to put ourselves at ease by making sure that we follow a very good lifestyle. And so I became an integrative physician assistant actually outside of my time in the service because I was medically retired from the military about five years ago. And I started being able to see patients and really working toward a where I was managing patients with very little to almost no medicine.
Frank: 11:37 Um, I don’t giving up very many opioids if at any I don’t think I gave out any other medications. And I was able to really manage a lot of, you know, chronic conditions or help give people an idea of how to actually manage these chronic conditions themselves. And it was really nice and empowering to be able to do that. And coming from a personal standpoint now, working at home with Jackie opened up my eyes to even more things because as she was gaining more knowledge about the Paleo lifestyle, we were looking into alternative ways to be able to support the health of our family and that’s where we came across a doterra essential oils. And so if you just want to like talk about like that personal portion of your journey if you will, like hey aren’t you, how you came across the oils, what they started initially doing for you. And then we’ll talk about what they even did for the family.
Jackie: 12:25 Well it was kind of, it kind of all happened by mistake. Actually. I never intended to, you know, joined Doterra and to build a business, let’s say that I was more looking for something to help my son. So there was this one time where, you know, my son, he was about one or two years old. He just kept waking up in the middle of the night with ear discomfort. And after so many times of this happening, you know, we started talking about putting tubes in and doing all this and that I really wanted to see if I could be more go more of a unconventional route with this. And so I wanted to try out a Melaleuca tea tree oil, which is really supposed to be great for your discomfort in, um, and it’s also safe to be used on little ones. And so I bought a starter kit that included some, you know, 10 of the most popular essential oils that you can use hundreds of different ways, you know, we were on a really tight budget at that time.
Jackie: 13:34 You remember we were rapidly paying off $50,000 of debt and spending $150 on a starter kit was a really, really big decision that we had to make. And um, and so I remember telling my husband, I believe I asked you if I could buy it as you were, as I was clicking. Okay. Now that one little decision has completely transformed our family, our, uh, our business. We became entrepreneurs because of it. It’s just crazy to think of how everything has just happened for a reason. Even my son’s poor ear discomfort. So, um, I remember buying it, I bought it for that purpose and I remember telling the person I purchased it from a really good friend of mine, Jill Winger of the prairie homestead that I was buying it and that she can really just leave me alone about, you know, doing the business of Doterra because I would never, ever, ever do any kind of network marketing company.
Jackie: 14:34 But um, so I bought it. I couldn’t wait for it to come in and test it out. And the essential oils completely blew me away. They smelled different than any oils I had bought before. I was used to buying essential oils off, you know, Amazon or from the food store. They had kind of an alcohol smell to them. So, and I was never really comfortable about putting these store bought oils on my kids. I used them for cleaning. I’m, I might have used them for diffusing even though now I wouldn’t recommend that. Um, but they were never something that we used medicinally or therapeutically. So I remember I couldn’t wait for my son to have, you know, some ear pain. So he woke up, I put some Melaleuca on the back of his ears, you don’t put it down that year, you put a kind of behind the ear down the jawline and I just remember his discomfort was almost instantly soothed and just a little bit of lavender to help calm him down.
Jackie: 15:34 We put in the diffuser and I just was blown away about how fast these oils worked and how effective they were without any side effects, without any, um, crazy ingredients that I can’t read that I’m afraid to put on my kids and just so pure and just work so great. And that’s, that’s God for you. You know what I mean? He put these plants on this earth for a purpose and that’s for us to tap into the power of his medicine. And so I’m just grateful that we were able to find that and it kind of led us down our journey of using essential oils and now we’ve been using them for. We’re coming up next month on five years.
Frank: 16:20 And here’s a quick little tidbit for you is that as she was saying that about how all of these essential oils are plant based, uh, honestly, even our medicines, this, the medicines that we now know of, we literally have hundreds of medicines for various different things. Over 300 of those actually have the basis in a plant. That’s where we actually first started with a lot of our anesthesia. A lot of our anesthesia comes from something like Belladonna. And so all of our, our, excuse me, I should say over 300 medicine’s already have a plant base. So we were like, well, why don’t we go back to the plants at, that’s where all of the therapeutic properties can be. And so we really started cleaning that up and being able to look at something that had one ingredient, you know, or five ingredients rather than something had an entire side of a package with a lot of different chemicals that we couldn’t even actually pronounce, you know.
Frank: 17:16 So we wanted to really look into cleaning all of that up. And the reason why, one of the reasons why I know that we started doterra was because Jackie was also looking for a way for us to be able to purchase organic food. Um, we want it to not only take the step in trying to functionally move better and get better sleep and stuff like that, but we also want to look at our food. Food is like, you know, 75, 80 percent of it, uh, one staggering statistic is that now over 80 million Americans suffer from or should say, excuse me, 80 percent of Americans suffer from one chronic illness. And so, uh, the, the amount of money that is spent every single year is in the trillions on managing those chronic conditions. And we have found out through plenty of evidence based medicine articles is that if we take care of ourselves through the appropriate diet and exercise regimen that anyone of us can perform, we can actually substantially reduce, if not eliminate a lot of these preventable diseases.
Frank: 18:19 Because that’s the thing about these diseases is that they are actually preventable. They are not something that somebody just so happens to get. These are things that people develop over time and it’s because of those poor lifestyle choices is that we’re finding out that these things are actually in fact preventable. You know, things like illness or infection or any of those sorts of things. Yes. They still do get some people from time to time, but by and far high blood pressure, high cholesterol isn’t leading to cardiovascular disease. Things of that nature. Those are what really truly get a lot of Americans. And so I started using essential oils myself and I wanted to look for a different way to be able to manage a lot of my baggage that came as well from my time in the service. And I do remember specifically I was talking about ways to ground me better because I did have symptoms that were related to conditions and situations that happened to me while I was deployed and I was coming back with a lot of those feelings of anxiousness and and depressive symptoms and things like that where I was just, you know, a guarded and withdrawing from people and all those sorts of things.
Frank: 19:28 And so I really wanted to say like I’m going to take a stand for what I know I actually am rather than allowing these things to define who they want me to be. And so I looked into different essential oil blends and oils and all of that and I’ve come up with some really good ones that I cannot see them not being a part of my life. And so I wanted to make sure that we share that with you, is that we’re going to be also doing a podcast of essential oils. We’re going to start off with some essential oils, as a to help folks that are listening to this understand, you know, like what does melaleuca do, what are all the benefits of Melaleuca, what does it even mean to apply it, where to apply it. Things like that. And we’re also going to talk about different recipes and different things that we do not only on our homestead, what with our families. And then we’re going to bring other people who have been doing this same thing onto the podcast to do interviews and get their takes about what, how essential oils have revolutionized their life as well.
Jackie: 20:31 Yeah. It’ll be a totally separate podcast from this because we know some of you might not want to hear all about oils and so we’ll keep that on a separate podcast that we’ll share with you once we have it live so you guys can follow that. If you’re excited about hearing more about how to use essential oils, which ones
Frank: 20:48 to use and so forth. Because this podcast that you’re listening to is going to be about what we call unconventional wellness and unconventional wellness to me is four to five different foundational things that we can be doing every single day in order to be able to really achieve that lifestyle that we’ve always wanted. And so I’ve been able to learn over the years as a practicing PA, as a father, as a husband, and really just as a friend who. A lot of other veterans. I have learned some different amazing ways to be able to handle these sorts of things without conventional means. And so we want to talk to you. We’re going to talk to you about diet, we’re going to talk to you about all the different diets that are out there. I don’t like the word Diet because diet to me is already a fatal flaw in the word Diet, right?
Jackie: 21:33 Like yes and no foods. And that’s not food freedom. That’s exactly right. So instead what we look at it now as, I think that we have a baseline of foods that we look at that we can always go back to and that yes, we Jackie said earlier that we are Paleo Ish. Like we like pizza, you know, and so like we might have pizza every once in a while. It’s not that every day of the week meal, um, it might be once monthly or something like that. But you know, there’s really great tasting food out there that we know come from very good sources. So you know, we have to face it like this, if, if, if people don’t appreciate the taste of food, they’re not going to eat it. Food has to be tasty and so we’re going to talk and uncovering an and develop all of these understandings of all those different quote unquote diets out there.
Frank: 22:19 You’ve got the ketogenic diet. We’ve got the Mediterranean diet, what’s intermittent fasting all about. We’ll talk about the Paleo Diet and we’ll just talk about all these different nutritional regimens that will help you get what you are looking for. And Oh, by the way, we want to make sure that we make a budget friendly as well. So we’ll talk about all the little tricks and tips and those sorts of things that we’ve been able to uncover to keep our food bill low, but yet still eat food that we know is going to be nourishing for our bodies. So the next thing that we’ll talk about of course will also be functional movement. When I think functional movement, I just think like by definition it means multiplanar multi joints movement that you do every single day. So like when I squat down to pick up something that is a functional movement when I lived something over my head, if I do that, I’m doing a functional movement.
Frank: 23:09 So we’re going to talk about different ways to improve all four aspects of your fitness, not just strength and not just cardiovascular endurance, but two very important things that I think as we get older are extremely important. Our balance and flexibility and that is something that a lot of us lose throughout the years because we don’t focus on that. And so we’re going to talk about functional movement and, and, and develop into that and uncover that and pat unpackage that so we can understand it so we can start applying it as well. We’re also going to talk about how to get better sleep. I read a great book by Dr Ben Lynch. It’s called Dirty Genes. Uh, it’s amazing. Epigenetics in our life are actually starting to be an understood more and more every single day. So like, you know, you aren’t what you are made of.
Frank: 24:00 DNA doesn’t determine your destiny. And so we’re finding out that a lot of environmental choices that we can make directly influence our health, and Dr Ben Lynch discusses what is known as eight delicious hours of sleep and I love that terminology by hand because it means exactly that like, yes, we might sleep in an eight hour window, but really are you getting restorative sleep when you do that? So we’re going to unpackage that as well. Talk about some sleep hygiene things and help you understand hopefully how to get better sleep as well. In addition to, we’re going to talk about stress. We’re going to talk about adversity. We’re going to talk about feelings of anxiousness. How do we combat those and really understand that in the baseline of how we are as human beings. We are emotional creatures, we think emotionally, but we also react emotionally and so we’re gonna start developing the understanding of the Mammalian and the reptilian brain and then the fact that we have a very wonderful blessing of our ability to make sense out of what we’re feeling and then how to channel those feelings in the appropriate way.
Frank: 25:11 One thing that I’ve learned in particular is I have to embrace my emotions and understand that are a part of me, but the fact of the matter is, is that I have time to process those emotions and not have to react to the ways that I am feeling instead. And so we’re going to talk about stress as a great deal. And then one other thing that I know that Jackie would probably love to talk about just here really quick. It’s probably about detoxification. We started looking at ways to detoxify both inside and outside of our home. And we’ll talk about different things like BPA. We’ll talk about, uh, you know, different types of toxins like voc is and all those other wonderful acronyms that are out there that have all of these really detrimental longterm effects to us. But unfortunately we come across those every single day. We’ll also talk about emf says, well, so I’m gonna let Jackie sort of unpackage that a little bit. Uh, right now.
Jackie: 26:08 Well, we really didn’t even get into the whole detoxification stuff until about two years ago. Um, we had just experienced our third miscarriage and I just knew there was a reason I was one of those women. I’m like, I’ve got to find out why I keep having a miscarriage. And so I had read some stuff online in a book I was reading on Mthfr. Frank can tell you what that stands for it because I can’t say it. Go ahead. Oh, are you going to put me on the spot? Essentially it is. No, it’s, I, I, I sat that I can say
Frank: 26:53 that I can’t say it, but long story short for those listeners, I promise we’ll say on the next podcast, but it is the enzyme that is responsible for methylating meaning like to put a c, h, two or a ch three group. If you are ever a follower of organic chemistry and by doing that it either turns the switch on or turns the switch off and allowing your genes to actually do something. But what Mthfr is responsible for, I do know that the r stands for reductase. I do know that. But anyway, what it’s responsible for his methodology.
Jackie: 27:27 So just say that the abbreviation is pretty spot on.
Frank: 27:31 Yeah, it’s like methyl hydro, Tetra method of Hydra, my thought, Ethel tycho hydro reductase or something like that. But I promise I’ll get it absolutely right. We just know it by the acronym Mthfr because a lot of us are affected by it. We may not necessarily know there were affected by it and it is something that is crucial in being able to help detoxify our bodies.
Jackie: 27:57 So I knew that when I read this article I was like one of the, one of the um, reasons that you could miscarry as, because you have this Mthfr gene mutation. And so I wanted to find out if I had this because some of the symptoms of it are, some of the symptoms are not only miscarriage but you’re extremely low in b vitamins. You are, what are some of the other sides on this? So it’s interrelated. You can’t process folic acid. So like the biggest thing that most people understand is that they become bad processes of folic acid and that is true, but he didn’t know that they watch for what would some of the symptoms be?
Frank: 28:40 Well, you know, just like your regular stuff that you would have from any type of a deficiency if you’ve ever been deficient in any one of the major vitamins like aed or k, you know, you’re going to have some lethargy, you’re going to have some fatigue. Uh, you’re going to have low levels of sleep, uh, you’re going to have low levels of energy. Um, it might actually cause weight gain and males. It can cause some weight gain and females. So just sort of like these very like something ain’t right type of symptoms could be totally related to Mthfr. There are more specific symptoms, but really a lot of those blah, blah feelings can be related to Mthfr. But, uh, but really the biggest thing that take away from that is it’s a complex environment in which our bodies operate. And so Mthfr is just one piece to another wise, larger puzzle. And so we’ll talk about how to, how to, how to unpackage all of that because we want to make sure that you are given all the understanding that you could possibly get to be able to really truly that we live in a toxic environment, but you don’t have to live in a toxic environment all the time and how to detoxify yourself when you’ve been exposed to those types of things as well.
Jackie: 29:51 Well, and that’s kind of what I was getting at is that when I discovered that I did have one of the Mthfr gene mutations, I, um, I realized how important it is for somebody who has this to detoxify and that, um, you know, you have to make sure that you are constantly detoxifying yourself. So, you know, that’s where we got into doing detox baths, you know, not just for me and frank, since we both have this Mthfr, we are pretty positive that our kids have it. So we kind of treat them like they do because we haven’t had them tested yet. But, um, you know, detox baths with epsom salts and baking soda. Some essential oils if you want to put in there and just sitting in there for 20 minutes, sweating, you know, that is an amazing detoxification. That’s not going to cost you any money really just for the salt and the oil is of use, but you know, if you can’t go buy a sauna, sauna is another really great way to detoxify drinking lemon water. Another really great way to detoxify, you know, and detoxifying your home, making sure that you’re not cleaning with chemicals is really, really important. Your breathing those in, you know, you’re breathing. I’m in through the ninth through the day constantly if you’re cleaning with them. So, um, that’s, that’s kind of some of the things that we’ll talk to you about. An unconventional wellness radio is um, just how to detoxify your body in your house.
Frank: 31:13 So here’s the actual one, right? Methylenetetrahydrofolatereductase. So I was awfully close to go. I just said methyl tetrahydrofolate life. But needless to say, it’s still a reductase. And long story short is that we will uncover what we have learned about that as well. And then we’ll also talk about like one of Dr Lynch’s really great ways of being able to being able to sort of clean up your dirty jeans. And when I say jeans, I mean g e n e s not blue, jeans like j e a n s a very good play on words by Dr Lynch. But anyway, thank you so much for joining me. It has been an absolute pleasure. I mean it’s also been a pleasure for the last 11 years, but I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing some wisdom and your story and I just cannot wait to see what we can bring to people and help them live an unconventional life. You have anything else that you want to say?
Jackie: 32:06 No. I’m excited for this podcast. And um, you know, I can’t wait for the next one. Hope that you guys have enjoyed it. We’ve loved sharing with all of you and we hope that you have enjoyed this too. So it’s wonderful to chat with you all today.
Frank: 32:21 Until next time guys, look for us. Uh, please add us on spotify at Amazon, a stitcher at us on A. Yeah, that’s another thing too, by the way. They might be listening to that as well as, uh, as the itunes store. So please check us out and please subscribe way and we can absolutely
Frank: 32:40 bring all this wonderful information to you while you’re driving in the car or listening to it at this age or working out or whatever. Let us help you in your journey toward unconventional. Thanks guys. Talk to you again very soon
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