Bethany Hamilton Podcast Feature - My Healing Journey

I am OVERJOYED to have hopped on my friend Bethany Hamilton’s new podcast, All Things Possible, last week!

We had a lovely conversation that covered:

• My personal health journey from Hashimoto’s to being in remission

• My son’s allergy healing journey

• Nose to tail eating and why it matters

• My story of going from an angry mom to a peaceful mom

• and other fun little details along the way!

I hope you enjoy this chat as much as I did - the transcript is below and you can listen to the full episode, here!

Bethany: Aloha Fallon, I'm so overjoyed to have you. You have been such an encouragement in my life with your podcast that you had in the past. And I just like, my husband and our family have been through a lot with health stuff with other family members.

And it's been so hard to navigate and just really emotionally taxing and mentally taxing. And I know that you've had your own journey personally and with your son. And so I'd love for you to dive in and share a bit about yourself and your family.

What brings you all joy and your journey on health?

Fallon: I would love to. Thank you for having me. I cannot tell you how honored I am to be here!

I told you pre-recording that my kids think I'm so cool for being on here. And that's like my life goals for my kids to think I'm cool. So thank you for having me on!

I, if you don't mind, am going to take us back a little bit far in my story. I won't go, you know, all the way to day one. But I do think those foundational young teenage years really did bleed into my story in a way that I didn't expect.

So to set the stage a little bit, I was an active teenager. I was a very thin teenager, which is going to play into this. I did not have a particularly healthy lifestyle, but because I was so thin and because I played sports, I could justify, you know, eating Taco Bell and Sonic all the time.

And I had no qualms with that. I just thought, I mean, my gene size is the same, so there's no issue. I grew up in the 90s.

And I think like most kids in the 90s, I had this balance of I had a mom who could make a mean home cooked meal. But then it was also the era of the rise of processed food and food dye and all of these kind of Franken foods. And so I had sort of this balance in my home growing up of exposure to both of those things.

And I was very active in high school, got into the pageant circuit, started weight training, started distance running. And so for all intents and purposes, like I'm the picture of health as 17 years old, right? I'm thin, I can eat whatever I want, I'm active.

And so really that's what defined health for me at a young age was kind of what do I look like on the outside? How much fast food can I get away with eating without it showing up on the scale or my size or what have you? And so when I entered college, I sort of ate, I think what the trend was for health at that time, which was again coming out of the pageant circuit, you're eating low fat, you're eating sugar-free, you're doing a lot of meal prep like chicken, broccoli, rice, salads with light Italian dressing, like that was the hallmark of healthy food in that era.

And so when I got to college, continued distance running and weight training and exercising, was bound and determined not to gain that freshman 15, stay healthy, and then I start having these crazy health issues. Then I'm like, there's no reason I should be experiencing this.

Bethany: Did it kind of like hit all at once? Like, was it pretty sudden?

Fallon: That's a great question. I would call it a slow burn. And it started with, you know, joint pain, which for someone who was a runner, the answer is like, oh, you probably need some different shoes.

And then I developed insomnia and exhaustion. And it's like, oh, you probably just, you know, you're a college kid, you're just tired, I was working as a barista at the time, probably drinking too much coffee. You know, there was always kind of an answer.

And I remember having my first big anxiety attack and feeling like I should be the picture of health. I don't understand why this is happening. I have been a believer for most of my life.

And you know, it was in the word, was with community and believers and thought I was pursuing health. And so it couldn't make sense of, you know, why am I experiencing these mental health struggles and these physical struggles? And I will fast forward us a bit.

When I got into motherhood, I got married really young. My husband and I met when I was 19. We got married at 21 and had our first son when I was 22.

I love our story. I think it was the perfect timing for us. But I had my first son and then second son almost back to back.

And my health just started tanking. You know, pregnancy is just a beautiful journey for a woman. And it takes a lot for most physically.

I didn't have the foundation of nutrition or awareness of empowering myself, educating myself. And I was still kind of in this mainstream health mindset of, again, low fat, lots of lean chicken, lots of broccoli, that kind of thing. And it seemed like out of nowhere, I just couldn't function.

I had joint pain, back pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness. I mean, it was just a host of symptoms. And my second son, he was my wake up call.

He was the thing that led me to, okay, something has to change. I could handle a certain amount of suffering and stress for my own body, but when your baby is struggling, your mama bear kicks in and it's like, oh no, we're going to pursue, we're going to figure this out. And so he started experiencing just full body eczema, developed allergies, lung issues very rapidly.

And we just couldn't find answers. Every specialist, every doctor we saw said that he was one of the worst cases they had seen, but didn't really have a lot to offer. It was sort of like, well, here's another prescription, you know, trying to do the best you can.

And that was kind of it. It felt like they were very minimal resources offered to us. And I thankfully had a doctor who thought to check my thyroid during this time.

And so I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's during this window as well. And my son just continued to also get worse as I got worse, but I was just so focused on him. And so for him, I finally thought, okay, I'm going to try food, right?

Like I'm going to start somewhere. I'm going to try to start changing my diet. I started with kind of the stair step that people go through.

Normally you do gluten free and then you do dairy free and then you do soy free. And then eventually you're paleo. It's kind of the standard trajectory when you're trying to get into healing through food.

And I will say, it was a drastic change for us. My symptoms decreased exponentially. He started healing rapidly.

Our problem was that I got so food afraid that before long, I was eating next to nothing. He could eat next to nothing. And so we had a really dark season of a couple of years where it felt like we just couldn't get past this threshold of how do we continue to heal?

Bethany: It makes me think that there's kind of this trend of mom-induced eating disorders on their children, on their daughters, because mom's like, don't eat this, this, this, and this. And maybe they actually could eat most of those things, but mom thinks everything is bad. And I've had to check in with myself because I'm like, oh my gosh, am I just inducing food fear on my children?

Because I do try to educate them, though, and encourage my children to understand like, hey, this is why we're eating this, and help them to understand why we don't eat that. But I could see how in your situation, that would be really frustrating as a family, too.

Fallon: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you put that so succinctly. I was on absolutely that trajectory to do that to my own children.

Thankfully, the Lord intervened, and we've had such a drastic turnaround from those days. And I'm skipping over a lot in between, so please don't hear that our story was overnight or easy or without hardship and trial and error. But the Lord really took me out of those days of feeling like food was the enemy.

{Feeling} like can't eat anything. We're never going to heal until we eliminate the nightshades, the nuts, the beans, I mean, everything. And then I found this world of more ancestral eating, whole food eating, letting go of that food fear, but then also still sticking to those, I think, righteous boundaries of I'm going to eat what God created.

I'm not going to eat processed packaged food. And I think you always have to define when I say I don't want to walk in fear of food. I'm talking about real food.

I think that we have some necessary caution around foods that didn't exist 200 years ago. All that to say, we have now entered this world of a lot of food freedom, where we are eating the rainbow. Almost nothing is off limits in terms of real whole food.

We incorporate all kinds of things. And the way that you prepare it is so important. The way that you prioritize things on a biologically appropriate level is important.

How much am I eating certain foods in proportion to how they would have been offered in nature, if that makes sense. All those things are so important while also, like you said, teaching your kids the importance of enjoying real food without giving way to this diet culture fear mentality of, well, I can't eat dairy that's organic, or I can't eat rice, or there's all these parameters that we put around food that I really do think are making us fearful. They're possibly making us sicker.

And so I love that we are on the other side now and now get to walk in food freedom and point people toward just how much food really can heal.

Adam : I love that. It's interesting too thinking on a spiritual level. I can't help but think about when we place things above God, the fact that all the food and the fear of food is almost consuming your time and energy so that that is the main focus of your day. The focus of your life is like, I got to avoid this and make sure we're eating this way and not doing that.

It becomes almost like an idol in a spiritual way. But you found that freedom from that. It sounded like it was center of your life, but you found freedom from that.

I couldn't help but make the parallel of how the Lord frees us from our sin, we're no longer slaves to that, but we find freedom in the truth.

Well, and, it's like you look at our life on a day-to-day basis, and there's continual challenge to our nature as kind of struggling this struggle between good and evil. But yet, we always just need to look to God to be our freedom. And yet, sometimes we're like, no, I got this, I'm going to do it, Lord. I'm going to take control of this situation. But the true freedom is in allowing him to take control and lead, guide, protect, and direct us.

See the rest of the transcript and the entire episode here!

RELATED POST: Healing My Son’s Food Allergies

RELATED POST: Healing My Dairy Intolerance (How To Reintroduce Dairy into Your Diet, too!)

RELATED POST: Why Does Real Food For Kids Matter?