Dream Health: Why Your Health Is Your First Wealth with Raewyn Guerrero

Welcome And Guest Background

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Wellness and Wealth. My name's Wendy Manganaro, your host, and today I am joined by Raewyn Guerrero. The topic is dream health. I'm gonna read Raewyn's bio and then we'll get right into it. Raewyn is the gutsy executive coach, corporate wellness consultant, functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, CBT hypnotherapist, corporate drop-out, bestseller author, and speaker. After years chasing IBS and anxiety in the conventional medical model while stuck in a toxic corporate role, she's created freedom in her life by focusing on health as the first wealth. Now she guides high performing women from burnout and overwhelmed to clarify energy so they can create the personal and professional impact they were meant for with the freedom in their bodies to do so. Welcome, Raewyn. Thanks for being here with us today. Thank you so much, Wendy. I am so excited to be here. I feel like we've been having this conversation for a long time. It's actually happening, so it's great. It is actually happening. Yes, this is exciting. So yeah, so thanks for being here, and I love your bio where you say, "Health as the first wealth," because it's, For me, that's been so true, and You know, until you're in burnout, you don't realize how important 'cause you're just going to get stuff, and then you're like, "No, this doesn't matter how much I get if I, if I'm not here to enjoy it," you know, fully here to enjoy it.

Defining Dream Health As Energy

So we're gonna talk about dream health today, and I'd love to know, from you, what does dream health mean to you? Well, it means having the energy, like you were just saying, like having the energy to be able to do all the things that you wanna do in your life. Like, to be able to travel if you wanna travel and not have to worry about where's the bathroom, you know? because in my case, you mentioned in my bio I was chasing IBS and anxiety for several years, in the conventional medical world, and I didn't wanna leave my house unless I knew exactly, like, okay, how far away from a bathroom am I? So that's one of the main things, like having the energy to get out of bed, was a big thing, too. having a gut that's functioning well and properly and able to digest and assimilate my food so that I have all the things that I need, like all the nutrients that I need. dream health, like, I don't know. I mean, what does that look like? It's different for everyone, but I think there are some basic tenets, right? and one of them I think is just being able to, function without pain, to be able to move without pain, to be able to sleep easily. you know, for your body temperature to be in a good place where you're never too cold and, a lot of women come to me, they've got problems with their thyroid, and they're always struggling with cold hands and cold feet and sweaty palms, and things that they've been told, like, there's nothing you can do about it. But, like, these are clues, right? Like, these types of things are things for you to wake up to. Like, my body's talking to me. My body's saying that something isn't right and that I need to pay attention to it and not ignore it. So dream health for me is energy and, and that my body's doing everything that it's supposed to so that I can do all the things that I want to. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I wanna ask you this off- off question, slightly off question, but not really. because I know for me, I've had stomach issues in the past. I don't know if I was officially ever diagnosed with something way back when, but I know that it, the more stress I had, the worse my stomach issues were. And that is part of, I don't think you realize how much stress on the body sometimes makes your symptoms so much worse. 'Cause y- you're looking at the symptom and not really what the cause of that symptom is. I don't know if that was, for you, a similar situation, is the more stress you were under, the worse... any health issue. Mine is I don't sleep, and then I suddenly can't eat anything. But, like, I know for me, that my stress level has a lot to do with how I'm physically feeling.

Stress As The Hidden Driver

Yeah, I love that you brought this up, because we, I wanted to share something with your listeners that I hope they take away, that psychological stress is one of the main contributors to the fact that people are struggling with chronic illness, right? So I love to do a talk about this, called Become the CEO of Your Health, and I used to quote the CDC, who said that 95 of all illness was lifestyle and stress-related. I've been corrected recently by the father of epigenetics, Dr. Bruce Lipton. I went to a conference that he was speaking at, and he said it's actually 99% is stress-related and lifestyle-related of all illness. So genetics have very little to do with it, right? So the fact that you've tuned into that stress was exacerbating a lot of what was going on with you physically. I, I want, also wanna make sure that people understand that psychological stress is just one of the stressors. We have got numerous other stressors. We have biochemical stressors, environmental stressors, so toxins in the air, in the water, in, you know, things that you're breathing, stuff that you're putting on your skin in, you know, that, your, your laundry detergents, your personal care products, as women. They have all got toxicants and toxins that can be a stress on the body, and that can actually overwhelm things like your thyroid. So very often when people say, "Oh, I have a thyroid problem," I'm like, no, you think your thyroid is the problem, but your thyroid is the result of the problem. It's showing up there, but that's not where the real problem has originated from. And in my case, you know, I thought my gut was the problem, and there were some problems there for sure But it was the result of several other

Corporate Burnout And Medical Gaslighting

problems. the amount of stress that I was under with my corporate role and the life that I was living in London. I was living in Canary Wharf in a high-pressure banking job, and I worked in HR and I was running a wellbeing program, and the irony does not escape me. But I was a one-woman band at the time and had been doing that for several years, trying to push water up a hill in many instances, and trying to get traction and getting buy-in from senior people. And, it led to me burning out because I never felt seen, I never felt validated, I never felt acknowledged or valued, and was always trying to, win approval for something that I realized, like, how is it that people don't realize how important wellbeing is to a company? Like, if you don't have well people, how is your company gonna do well? And it's the same thing, with our bodies. If your body is not functioning well, how are you gonna get to all the places that you wanna get to in your life? You know, if you think about your body in terms of like a car, and I love using car analogies for this. Unfortunately, you know, bodies you can't swap out parts, whereas with a car you can, right? So if your, you know, your body, your check engine light is on on your dashboard, and those are your symptoms, the symptoms to the check engine light, you wanna go and look at what's going on under the hood. And unfortunately, with the modern medical system, the looking under the hood, it's very dismissive. Sometimes I call it, in fact, there's a lot of medical gaslighting that goes on, and I've been through that what I call medical merry-go-round, where you bounce from practitioner to practitioner, from specialist to specialist. And each one of them tells you, like, "Oh, well, take this pill and just please leave my office and leave me alone." And they don't wanna have anything to do with you. And like, "Come back in a year if it's not fixed." And you're like, "Well, how... That doesn't solve my problem, right?" Because that in a sense is like, well, you're take- taking a pill to put out a fire alarm, but you're not finding out where the source of the fire is. So the labs that I do, that I run with people, they're very different to what traditional medi- medical doctors do and traditional specialists do. Because they look at the hidden stressors, that hormones, immune system, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system. 'Cause all of those systems are, overlapping with each other. So if something's showing up in my gut or in my endocrine system, which is, your hormones and stuff, that means that other areas of my health are being impacted. And you can never figure it out ultimately, like, well, what's impacting what? And in my case, stress was exacerbating my gut conditions, my gut issues, like the fact that I wasn't breaking down food because I was in such a state of fight or flight all the time.

Fight Or Flight To Leaky Gut

and ideally what we wanna be in is a state of rest and digest. So we wanna be in a parasympathetic state when we're eating and when we're trying to break down food so we can absorb nutrients. But if you're in a stressed-out state all the time, what you're doing is you're damaging your mucosal lining because of the cortisol, so you end up with holes in your gut. You end up with, like, a leaky gut as we call it in functional medicine. And then you don't have enough enzymes to break down your food. And then you don't have enough stomach acid to break down food. So there's a lot of components that go into being able to break down, digest, and assimilate nutrients from food. And if they're out of whack because you're under so much pressure psychologically or you're under pressure from the toxins in your environment or you're under pressure from the gut bacteria that's out of whack in your gut, like, there's all these different areas that could be contributing to what's going on. In my case, it was the perfect storm. I had the stress from work, I had the leaky gut, I had the overgrowth of pathogens. you have to work on all of those things at the same time You can't work on, like, "Well, I'm just gonna deal with the pathogens." the practitioner that I've been working with at the time, he said, "You could take as many probiotics as you want and as many antifungals as you want and as many antimicrobials as you want," if you don't fix the fact that you are miserable at work and that you are not sleeping and you are not nourishing your spirit," amount of us working on the food and the supplements is going to help you." And I have seen it repeated in my practice. The people who get better are the people who realize that this is beyond just fixing my nutrition or fixing my supplements. It's like, how am I fixing my life? How am I nourishing myself, mind, body, and spirit? Yeah, and I completely agree with you, and actually I was like, "Why was I having so many stomach..." So years and years ago, it's been over, oh my God, 20-something years, but I used to smoke, and I'll never forget, as you were talking about other toxins, I know, it's very hard to, it's hard for me to believe that I used to smoke, but I did. And, as a cancer survivor too, it's not a good... But I remember feeling, like, so much stress. I was in school, I was trying to work full time, go to school full time, and I started to have such stomach problems they thought I had, cancer. And so they had given me a, endoscope, because- they wanted, and I, actually, that's what made me quit, because I was like, "How did I get a cancer?" So I was born with cancer, so how me, as a cancer survivor, ends up smoking, exactly what you're talking about though, because I remember thinking, "Okay, so if I wait and I get the results and nothing's wrong, I'm not gonna quit. And if I wait and I, something's wrong, I'm gonna justify my smoking." So I quit while I was waiting for the results, but as you're talking about stressors and toxins, because for months I had these lumps on my throat and I could not understand it, and it was all of the toxin coming out of my body. And it was not pleasant or pretty or, and, and I'm grateful. I literally, now I go and I'm like, "I can't believe I s-" You know? It's just not for me, for sure. but as you're talking, right, because it, you know, and I don't think that some people realize that, as you're talking about that integrative health, is that you get stressed, you turn to something, whether it's food or whatever. Your body takes full, and it just is this cycle merry-go-round that you go on until, you know, and you're talking about burnout for corporate, but when suddenly it's like, no, if you don't stop, this is what's really going on here, and it's so serious. and you don't have to wait till that point, though, too. I think that's what a lot of people don't realize. You don't have to get to that point. And that's what I would love the message to be, because I have worked with a lot of really sick people. I've worked with people with MS, I've worked with people who can't get out of bed, who can't move. But I do wanna catch, I feel like I'm done fishing people out of the river. I want to catch them on the riverbank before they fall in. So you don't need to have that come to Jesus moment the way that I did. Like, I could not get out of bed, unless I meditated for, like, two hours to psych myself up to be able to calm down the fire that was going on in my stomach and the panic that was going on in my mind about having to go into an environment that was pretty hostile. if we could reach people before they get to that point by getting them to pay attention to the signs and clues that their bodies are giving them, the fact that they might

Warning Signs Before You Crash

not be sleeping or that they're waking up at 3:00 in the morning every night, or they're waking up with sweats, or the foods that they're eating is making them really tired. like, what are some of the signs that they can look out for? Like, what are the warning signs that my body's giving me? am I angry and irritable and snapping at the people around me? Is that a clue? am I more irritable after I eat certain types of foods? Do I get more tired after I eat certain types of foods? Am I getting energy from food or am I being drained from food? You know, these are some of the things. And you know, I always say, like, if you look within, and when I work with people, I get them to keep food journals and food diaries and that kind of thing, and take pictures so that we can see what they're doing. 'Cause, you know, the fuel is the foundation. But also, the mindset is a huge part of that, too. Getting into that mindset of, like, and not to be panicked about it, but just like, hey, my body's actually talking to me, and I just need to be able to listen to what it's saying. And once I can translate it, and maybe I need- You know, a body whisperer, and that's where a, a functional practitioner comes in. And they're like, "I'll help you understand what it's saying to you," because the labs give you clarity, and that's why I have this whole CEO method. It's called, clarity. You get energy once you get the clarity, and then you take ownership, right? You're taking ownership, so it's CEO. and once you get those things, the clarity will help you figure out what's going on with your body because no two bodies are alike, you know? Although there are some basic rules, like smoking's definitely not gonna be great for anyone ultimately, right? Sugar, ultimately not great for anyone, unless you are, running through the Serengeti every day and you're burning it off. But the way that we're living now, we're sitting all the time. We don't need as much sugar as we think we do. We don't need as much food as we think we do, you know, all the snacking and the stuff that we do. And I remember in corporate, having donuts at the end of every desk on a Friday and having pizzas and beer and whatever on a Thursday night. these are not things that are good for people. ultimately, you mentioned medicating 'cause it's self-medicating, right? Because, when we feel stressed, what happens is we have problems with our blood sugar, and in order to rectify that, the body craves quick-release energy. So it craves carbohydrates, right? Like starchy carbohydrates or sweets. So Us reaching for the pizza or for the donuts, that is a stress response, right? That is a biochemical stress response. It's not a willpower response, it's a stress response. And also, which might freak your listeners out a little bit, but I do feel it's important to talk about this since my moniker is the gutsy executive

Sugar Cravings And Microbiome Control

coach, and I'm all about the gut and the brain. When, when the gut is, like, overpopulated by not so friendly bacteria or yeast or fungus or whatever, parasites, those microorganisms, they crave sugar. They need sugar to survive, right? And in fact, in the gut of pretty much every cancer patient around, they all have problems with yeast overgrowth. Like, every single one of them have got issues with yeast, Our gut microbiome is made up of 57% of non-human DNA. So it's non-human microorganism. Like, it's not even us. So when people say, "Oh, I don't have the willpower to stop eating sweets," I'm like, "It's not even you." Like, you can take that burden off of you. Like, that is your gut microbiome being out of whack, and there are ways that we can work on it to bring it back into balance. We can, we can start to... Well, one, obviously reducing the food source is one thing, but at the same time, so you're starving out the, the bad guys. At the same time, you wanna be putting back in good guys, and then you also wanna be, like, hitting the bad guys with some natural antimicrobials. Not necessarily antibiotics, but there are botanicals that you can use to kinda, like, knock them down so that they get back into balance, and you give the good guys a chance to repopulate. Now, all this stuff takes time. It does not happen overnight. It's not like drugs. my mom had cancer, and she was always very irritated by how long natural healing took. in fact, she couldn't be bothered to wait, so she went through chemo and all the things, and unfortunately, chemo actually is what killed her. So I have a real vested interest in making sure that people don't end up like that, because I'd seen what happened to her by not following some of the principles that I like to teach people now. And of course, she would never... She just wouldn't listen to her daughter, no matter what I did. I printed out, like, all this. I was like, "This is what you're gonna be eating. This is, this is your supplements. Take it to your oncologist." And she said she tried taking it to him, and he just said, "What you eat doesn't make a difference. It doesn't matter what you eat, and I don't care about your supplements." So, which was very distressing for me to hear, and I think it completely def- like, deflated her, and she had no faith in the fact that anything that I had recommended was gonna help her, so she didn't do any of it. five years later, I went back into the fridge and found all the supplements that I had bought for her at the start to help her out, to help her liver, to help her detox, to protect her from the radiation, and she had left all of it in the fridge and never taken any of it. So I have a real interest in making sure that no one else ends up like that, and that they actually pay attention to the signs and clues that their bodies are give- And for her, she'd been having clues, like, ever since I was a little girl. Like, since I was about 15, I remember she had, like, this horrible, like, histamine reaction. She was always getting hives. she couldn't sweat. She was someone who couldn't sweat. So that was a big clue. Like, if you're not peeing, pooping, perspiring. She didn't go to the bathroom regularly either, so it was like once every three or four days. So these are some of the clues. Like, if you're not eliminating on a regular basis, if you're not sweating out toxins on a regular basis and sweating, like, daily, if you're not drinking, and she hated drinking water. So if you're not drinking water on a regular basis, you're not having your two liters or whatever, these are all signs that you need to pay attention to what's going on with you. Because ultimately, cars can get replaced, parts can get replaced, human bodies can't. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Yeah, and I completely agree. You know, I was thinking about that the other night. So I was born with cancer and diagnosed six weeks old, and given six months to live- Wow because my first pediatrician would not listen to my mother that there was something wrong. He was saying that she was just being an over-anxious parent. And so I was thinking about that because, and I've had other people on the show, but I haven't really given it to that much thought of, like- And I, and I think babies are a little bit different where I do kind of believe that we come into this world with all the answers, but, you know, sometimes through life we forget. But I was thinking about that because I was on a trial program for chemo, and I survived acute lymphoblastic leukemia at a time that nobody was, and what I was really thinking about is the energy that I must have had because things were still stress-free 'cause I was a child, as a baby, right? And so I think that's the other thing that happens, is that we grow up and we go, "Oh, will this work, not work?" And we start to, take all of what we hear or not hear, and then cancer is harder to fight because we have all of life that kind of combines that. But as a baby, I didn't have any of that. It was just this was it. And my disposition at that time was actually very cheery. I was smiling in every picture. the reason why I'm saying that is, as you were talking about these things, is, like, I think that's what happens is the stress of life plays into it. Like, one goes right into the other, and I have seen doctors who do not listen, And I'm always an advocate of, like, if you don't like your doctor, you need to go find one that will listen to you, because we only get one chance here. And so to have that one chance and not have somebody listen, it's a really difficult situation. So, one of the things I'd love to know for you, and then we'll have to wrap up, is for female entrepreneurs specifically, 'cause you talked a little bit about what the symptoms are and, you know, to getting to better health is, if they're realizing they're having these symptoms, what's the first step for them? Because a lot of times, I think, as we were talking, it becomes so normal. We've had these symptoms for so long, we don't pay attention to them. So realizing that we're having some of these problems, what's the first step that they can do to kind of, get on the right track? Yeah, the first step always is test, don't guess. Because you are, you want to wake people up to the fact that they can take care, better

Test Don’t Guess With Functional Labs

care of themselves, and that the things that they're chasing aren't necessarily the things that are gonna make them happy or healthy. I truly believe that. It's taken me years. even after having cancer and understanding, I was raised as, somebody who, because I had cancer, I was not allowed to do anything in case I got sick again. Mm-hmm. And I, I rebelled against that hard- for many, many years. And talk about burnout and sickness and scares and, and it's kinda come full circle of w- I wasn't, you know, I was hurting myself more than I was trying to prove to them Yeah. so, that's why it's so important for me to, be like, "You don't have to get to that sickness point." for you to understand how important it is to take care of yourself. that's why I love the lab work because very often we get caught up in, like, "Well, I'm gonna try a keto diet. I'm gonna try a probiotic. I'm gonna try..." And you end up with a supplement graveyard, you know, a cupboard full of things that you never take because, "Oh, it didn't work." and I was one of those people. You've tried acupuncture, you've tried reiki, you have tried homeopathy, you've tried kinesiology. All these things that don't actually... They, they are fo- the, the problem with, with these sorts of situations are they, they're really focused, these treatments, these alternative treatments, they're focused on the thing that you're treating. They're not focused on you. And the same thing with cancer. Let's say we're talking about cancer. When you go to see an oncologist, they're focused on treating the cancer. And there's a joke that goes around about this, like, "Oh, we got rid of the cancer," but they've also killed the person at the same time. So, like, they had the chemo worked, totally. It killed the cancer, but it also killed the person. So I'm focused on the person. My work is about the person, and the testing that I do, the labs, you know, we look at your gut, we look at, you know, stool tests, saliva tests for your cortisol, for your se- your sex hormones. We look at your hair to look at heavy metals and the balance of minerals. We look at dried urine, and there's a finger stick blood test that we do as well to look at the mucosal barrier to see how that's functioning because, like I mentioned, you know, 80% of your serotonin's in your gut. your immune system's in your gut as well. So we're looking at all these things. We're looking at how is the mucosal barrier doing because if it's not doing its job and it's allowing toxins in because it's leaky, that can be a trigger for so many other things. People with migraines, people with chronic fatigue, who say they can't get out of bed or they're waking up in the middle of the night. They're tired and they're wired. So there's, a lot of scope in the way that I look at stuff because one of the things that I love to tell people is, like, well, if you have an intruder, you don't only look in one room of your house. You're gonna look everywhere. You're gonna look in the basement, you're gonna look in the attic, you're gonna look in the kitchen. You're gonna look everywhere, and that's my job. We're looking at all the different systems. those hidden stressors, the hormones, immune system, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system. We wanna see how they're all talking to each other because ultimately the body's working like a symphony, and if your drummer is out of whack, then, you know, your chorus is gonna be out of whack, and we wanna make sure that everybody's playing and singing and, in harmony with each other. So that's my job, to look at all these different things and start there, and then we know what we're dealing with. And then you can actually build a protocol from there. Then you know what you should be eating, 'cause food sensitivities are a huge part of this as well. So if you, if you have a... And some people say, "Well, I'm becoming more and more sensitive to things over and as I get older." I'm like, "Well, that's a clue." If all of a sudden you can't tolerate food anymore, certain foods that you used to be able to tolerate and you can't do it anymore, that's a big clue that something is definitely wrong with your gut, or there's something in the environment that's triggering this type of response. So let's look into that and figure out what it is, and then build a protocol and a plan from there, and in 90 days you'll be amazed at some of the things that can change and transform. Yes, and I've done that before, so I understand. It's so important, and people don't realize how important it is. And the energy shifts alone is really amazing. So, I loved having you on and chatting with you today. I know that you have a special offer for our guests. I'll let you talk about that now, and the link for that will be in the show notes.

Free Session Offer And Closing

Yeah. I'd love everybody to understand a little bit about the labs that I use a little bit deeper, and why they're different to the conventional things, and why I use the five labs, and then also sort of like the pathway of what would happen after that. So it would be a little bit different to the things that they might have done in the past. And I'd like to extend, a complimentary 30-minute session for them as well. So if they wanna get on a call with me, they are welcome to do that. So I think we'll put the link for that in the notes as well, right? Absolutely. So thank you so much, Rae Wynn, for coming on with us today. It's been such a pleasure, and I, look forward to chatting again soon. Yes. So if you love what you heard today, please subscribe for more self-care tips going forward. And if you love what Rae Wynn said today, please leave a review. In the meantime, have a blessed and abundant week.