Watching Mental Health Episode 2 | Liza Seitz
This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Episode 2 with Liza Seitz which you can watch and listen to here:
Katie Waechter: Hi everyone, and welcome to the second episode of Watching Mental Health. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I'm really excited because on this episode we have a really close personal friend of mine, but she is also really, really skilled in her field. So I'd like to introduce you to Liza Seitz, the founder of Banduri Holistics, and she is a functional nutrition counselor and a board certified holistic health practitioner. She continuously (like me) loves to research, to expand her knowledge and really focuses on how to use nutrition and other natural resources for holistic healing. Liza is not just a health practitioner, she's also a wellness partner in her business, and she's determined to be a partner with you in the trenches through your health journey because she knows what it feels like to have a challenging health journey. And on this episode of Watching Mental Health, we're going to discuss how nutrition and holistic healing really impacts mental health. And that idea of nutrition and mental health is so important right now. And so I'm really excited to have this really good conversation. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you to Liza, come on board and let's talk!
Liza Seitz: Hi. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here! Thank you for having me.
Katie: Of course, of course. This is, like I said, this is a second episode and I think that this is such an important topic to jump into nutrition. I know that me, personally, I have heard that your stomach is like your second mind. Your gut is that second mental health system. And I know personally from experience that when I struggle with my mental health, my stomach also struggles. And so without getting too much further into it, I want to let you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your health journey. I know that you've had a challenging one, and I know that that's been a big deal.
Liza: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Banduri Holistics was created out of my journey really. And the journey of my son, my daughter, our family. I think that a lot of people can understand that it didn't just start with you, and that is with any journey. So when we're thinking about mental health or we're thinking about our physical health or whatnot, it doesn't just start with us and we have to realize the effects down the line. And so my health was a huge challenge for me.
I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease very early on in my life. And the connection between chronic illness and mental health I think is a topic that needs to be amplified from the rooftops because I don't believe people understand truly what mental health embodies and what it can affect or what it can be affected from. We think that some people have primarily mental health because of their struggle. But when I know from my research, 14 and a half years, I've been researching antibody activation and trying to understand my condition and others like me because the research and the treatments have a lot of work to go. We have a lot of ground we need to cover and people are suffering and struggling, and that's in every realm. So…
Katie: What does the research and your personal experience really tell you about the connection between your physical health and autoimmune and your mental health? Because it seems like there's maybe symptoms or there's something. What are you seeing?
Liza: Well, so I mean, first and foremost, like you said, the gut and the mind. If we just start there and just try to understand autoimmune disease and the connection to how our body digests and processes things. So if we think of nutrient deficiencies, if we think of mutations, genetic mutations and predispositions, there are so many different things. The majority of our dopamine is actually made in the gut. When we think of neurotransmitters, everybody's like, oh, brain, brain. No! Other places, not one thing is singular. Our body doesn't have islands laying around. It's all connected.
Katie: All connected.
Liza: And so when one system is off balance, from what my research and expertise has shown me is that others will follow. And so when we're thinking of mental health and issues on all levels, we have to look at it as a downstream issue. What is going on upstream? Where is our health and where is our environment? If we are power and we're growing, what does our soil look like? Are we getting water? Is there someone helping to support and take care of us? We can't regulate without a support system. A lot of people, our introverts are like, no way. I tend to disagree.
Katie: And so that's our world today. It seems like, and I don't know this on my own, I haven't done research around nutrition deficiency, but it seems like that's the environment we live in. A very nutrient deficient, a very tough, it's almost like we're trying to grow our flowers in a blacktop. We're out there in our urban worlds trying to grow.
Liza: Flowers. How accurate that picture is when you think of the toxic burden that our environment is going through on a daily basis. I mean, we are trying to grow in asphalt. Our soils are contaminated, their loss of nutrients from over farming, and the list can go on of why things can be out of balance. And so when we think about it, and we're really, I know earlier on in my life I was a child growing up in conflict and survival. That was how I was raised. That was my personal experience. And so growing up from that, a body constantly stuck in fight or flight being flooded with stress hormones, understanding the connection between how our central nervous system grows while in conflict and what that means for other systems, right? Because if everything's connected, if our central nervous system is having a problem or any part of the nervous system in general is having a problem, you'll see other regulatory systems struggle. So endocrine system, thyroid under-functioning thyroid can actually coincide with an underdeveloped central nervous system. So when we think of these things and we think of a lot of people who go their entire life with undiagnosed Hashimoto, they have no idea or graves or you name it. I mean, there's so many different conditions that we just don't always have our eyes on.
Katie: And a lot of those conditions seem to have mental health symptoms.
Liza: Absolutely they do. Because again, if we are depending on the body's feedback systems to keep us aligned and keep us balanced, and our endocrine system is a regulatory system, when you think if you look at all the glands that are under the endocrine system, oh boy. I mean we have just a whole session just on that because then we could also talk about endocrine disruptors and enter in the toxic burden and the things that are coming into our body that are also affecting and inhibiting our body's ability to function.
Katie: So that's really interesting. So if somebody is maybe experiencing depression or they've been just feeling off, they're really kind of struggling, maybe anxiety, they're feeling a little bit off, they don't know what to do. Of course therapy and medications are options, but maybe there are some other kinds of nutritional or environmental options, what would you recommend for someone who's maybe just beginning looking into something like that?
Liza: I would say that you want to understand what's coming in and what's coming out.
When we are thinking about understanding toxic burden or load, another thing also too, is there any type of co-infection involved? So do we have comorbidities that we don't even know of in infection when disease, infection, whatnot come involved? Also, because we know that Lyme has an ability to affect one's mental state, there's so many different things that could go into pandas, we could go into brain inflammation. I mean, you name it, the rabbit holes are endless as far as what's out there.
Katie: I mean, inflammation in itself is just the whole thing.
Liza: Inflammation in itself is root of disease. And when we think of what causes that, and we think of nutrition just in general, okay, let's think omegas, right? Everybody's telling you to take some omegas and everybody's like, great, omegas are awesome. Let's do it. So if they just start taking these complex pills where it's like omega complex, I'm going to tell you right now that your diet is far likely to have an overload of omega sixes, then it does omega threes.
Katie: Oh, so I need to know before I start shoving omegas in my body,
Liza: Right and let me make sure that because, so when we think of ratio as far as omegas are concerned, concerns our diets and what actually is in our food, and you think of shelf stabilizers, what somebody can put in something to make it last longer.
So we start going into some serious problems with balancing omegas because they will end up putting so much into the oils and the foods and the processing that before you even are trying to take a supplement, you are already so far out of range that you need one omega to get the other omega in check, and they keep 'em balanced. One is anti-inflammatory, so they're supposed to be aligned. And that's with everything in our body if somebody is iron deficient. A lot of the times when we see iron deficiencies, we also see people struggling with ADHD symptoms, elevated concentration, focus, trying to really have that energy. They can be all over the board.
Katie: It just seems like the first step in some ways is you got to know what's going on with your body. We do a lab test. And having somebody like yourself who's not really maybe focused on just traditional western medicine, but somebody who maybe has a broader view can take a look at everything from more of a mental health perspective. Is that part of what you do? Do you consider that mental health part of when you're looking at people in their overall health journey?
Liza: Well, so I think that when we are looking at people in their overall health journey, we have to understand their mental health symptoms. So if you're saying depression, you're saying anxiety, you're saying, I mean there's a whole list of symptoms. Can they coincide with other things? And so are they a primary issue or are they a secondary that could developed out of the imbalance dysfunction?
Katie: Are they that upstream or that downstream? What came first? The chicken or the egg came?
Liza: First. Don't get me wrong. Anxiety could came first because you grew up, you just
Katie: in a life…
Liza: That was very unstable. You grew up with an unpredictable parent. You grew up in an unpredictable housing situation. You grew up in a divorce, violence, I mean, you name it, every circumstance has to be measured in its custom entirety. You know what I mean? Everybody has a story, everybody. So what happened to Susan and what happened to Kelly are going to be two totally different things. Symptomatology might match, but how you treat them is going to be different because how their body processes things, what they're allergic to, her liver's great. Her liver's not… you don’t know.
Katie: So when you go in to treat people, what are you doing? You're looking at their labs. What else are you doing to get an idea of where they need some assistance?
Liza: You want to see how they are living? How are you living? How does your life serve you? Yeah, how are you nourishing yourself? Yeah, I mean, if you were a machine, we'll do visuals. I love visuals, right? We're a machine. How are you performing right now?
Katie: Yeah.
Liza: Let's make it simple. You're a car and you turn yourself on. If we have awareness of how we are functioning right now, Point A, Point B… In a way that is okay for you because a lot of, I mean, what's acceptable to you and what's acceptable to me and how we choose to live and what is affected, what we choose to have affect us, it's all going to be different.We could go through the same exact car accident and how it affects you and how it affects me could be totally different.
Katie: Why is that?
Liza: That is trauma. The event is technically the same. So we should absorb that the same,
Katie: But we don't.
Liza: But your life experience and my life experience are two totally different experiences. So how we register things, how my body registers things, how your body, brain, I mean everything is going to be different. Someone who grew up in high conflict has a higher threshold or might have a lower threshold depending on certain triggers, right?
Katie: Right. Exactly.
Liza: There is no way to have a full and firm grip on a circumstance. Everything has a barrier.
Katie: And I mean that makes sense because when you look at mental health treatment and research on that side of things, there are so many people who present with the same symptomatology, but they are not responding the same to the exact same treatments. And for some people, medication really helps for other people, it can send them into a spiral.
Liza: So, a lot of the time in that case, I would really want people to understand what their genetics look like. Do you have an M T H F R mutation present? Are you methylated B vitamins properly? I don't know any people.
Katie: I love it! You’re saying all these things that I don’t know!
Liza: So I mean, thiamine just in general for the body, for detox brain function, B vitamins for neuro development. And we know in pregnancy for pregnant women, neuro, neurotube defect, we want to make sure that they're getting the proper B vitamins and that the fetus is growing in an environment where it has access to that. Because what a lot of women don't know is that the baby's going to take what it needs whether you have it or not. So if you are deficient, and that's why a lot of women, like with postpartum, if you have an M T H F R mutation and you are not properly methylated, and your B vitamins are not coming in, you're not absorbing them, you are at a higher risk for postpartum depression.
Katie: Wow.
Liza: How many women feel like they're crazy and they're losing their mind after they have a baby?
Katie: So many. So many.
Liza: I did. I know I did.
Katie: So stigmatized. Everyone's like, oh, it’s the happiest time of your life and you’re going crazy in your head.
Liza: Hormonal. You feel like New mom syndrome. I've heard that one too. I'm like, are we serious? Put that away. So there's a lot of different things.
Katie: So what you're saying is we're complex beings.
Liza: We're complex
Katie: There's not an easy answer.
Liza: No, there isn't. So we have to try to digest the situation as such. Don't judge yourself if your journey is heavy and you're struggling. Nine times out of 10, every single person sitting next to you is in the same boat. We just wear it differently.
Katie: Right, right.
Liza: Know what I mean? So don't be so harsh and get help. We are not meant to carry anything alone. Physical journey, mental journey, spiritual journey, any of it? None of it.
Katie: No, I totally agree. I always say we're social animals, and I'm an introvert, and I said that in my first episode. I know I need people in my life. I need a support system. And if you keep it all inside, then it will show up, not just in your mental health. You'll get disease and you will be sick and you're not going to understand what's going on. So it is so connected. And for the longest time, I think that a lot of us really weren't making those connections, really weren't connecting those dots that, oh, I'm having this severe stomach pain and I happen to be going through a very stressful period of my life. I don't know what that is all about, but it's there and it's a matter of us to start paying attention to what it sounds like.
Liza: Yeah. Well, and I think also too, so much of society tells us that so much of our worthiness can be attached to our productivity. So if you're feeling a headache, do you address what's causing the headache or think to dive deeper? Or do you take an ibuprofen and go to work or chug that caffeine drink because it helps with the migraines? Or why is it happening? Isn't necessarily the most relative to the circumstances, it’s more let's get going. I don't have time for this. What do I need to do next?
Katie: And then people just assume it's normal. Oh, whatever. It's common. Doesn't mean that it's normal or that it should be your life. So that's absolutely true.
Liza: Yeah, and again, everybody's willing to live in a certain amount of something, but why? We don't have to. But also, if we don't have access to resources and modalities that work for us, a lot of the times people are like, I'm trying. I'm searching. I can't figure it out. It's not working. There's nothing I'm responding to. I've been there too. I don’t know how many times where you think it's me, I must be defective. And I hear that with a lot of clients.
Katie: When you are in that position, that segues great to my next question, when you are feeling low, what do you do for self-care?
Liza: Oh, that's a good one. That is a good one. Especially as a practitioner that has and walks a chronic illness journey. First and foremost, for the longest time I thought I couldn't be a practitioner because I was like, I'm not cured. I'm not fixed in my head. And the pictures that you see from a lot of people is that your journey has to conclude for you to be able to step in. But when we understand chronic illness, we understand that it's not always necessarily something that can go away. It's something that's managed. It's something that you have to, so knowing some days are going to be bad.
Katie: Yeah.
Liza: Some days I'm not going to feel so hot and I can honor myself in that moment and not push myself and beat myself up and try to force myself to be something that I can't be. Because how often do we do that? Right?
Katie: Absolutely.
Liza: And instead, I try to think of myself as someone else, as a stranger off the street. If they were struggling in the same way as that I'm struggling right now, what would be my support to them? How would I love them? Because a lot of the times it comes back to can we love ourselves? Can I accept the love for myself?
Because how many people say self-care? Yeah, great, great. When you have not lived in an environment that was safe to feel love, that's hard. Or that you've had to, I don't know. When somebody said this to me, and it struck me so hard, there are some people in this world that have had to literally lick love off of a knife. That is what they experienced. It was love with conditions. And so we learned to love ourselves with conditions. We need to stop loving ourselves with conditions before anyone else can also realize that that's possible. We hold ourselves to that boundary.
Katie: Yeah. Oh my God.
Liza: Really and truly for myself, that's my personal experience. That's what I had to face. And what I had to look at was the fact that I wasn't asking for help and I was struggling with the fact that I wasn't taking care of myself, because honestly, I gave so much to everybody else around me that at the end of the day, I had nothing left. But I thought that's what you were supposed to do. That was a good mom, that was a good wife, that was a good person, that was a good friend, sister, the…
Katie: The society,
Liza: I mean, you name it, the list goes on to be good. I have to sacrifice and be more was my narrative that kept being on the loop. So I was sick and I was burnt out, and I had nothing to give. And my health responded to what I mean, if we think about it, if think our mental health isn't great, and you look around at your life and you're truly honest with yourself, no rose colored glasses, take them off… what's it going to look like? Am I truly taking care of myself in a way that allows me to live the life that I really want? Or am I self-sabotaging in ways that are keeping me from things that I might need to have a better understanding of what my relationship is to it? Are we living in fear? Are we living in anger? Where are we moving forward in our journey? Because obviously avoidances and obstacles don't just develop out of nothing. So if we find ourselves stuck, why are you stuck? We don't get sick for no reason. Nothing is random. So the moment we stop acting like we are, and I don't mean this in a way, but that circumstance happens and we are victims of it. We are victims of circumstance. Life just happened. I had nothing. Life happens. Absolutely. Hands down, life happens. We can't control all of it, but where can we participate in our healing and moving forward?
Katie: Right? It's getting out of that victim mentality and into a spot where you can say, okay, I'm going to take some steps forward. Maybe they're going to be hard. Maybe I don't know what they are. Maybe I have to take a couple steps back, but as long as I'm moving, getting out of that victim mentality is so key. And so we only have just three minutes left, but I wanted to get your perspective on this.
One last question, and I think for you, with your experience with chronic conditions, I think this is going to be an interesting question, so I want to get your thoughts on it. And it's really, do you think of a mental health diagnosis or a challenge, mental health illness as something that you can overcome or something that you really should accept as a part of you and learn to work with in the same way that maybe you would with an autoimmune or chronic? Or do you think that autoimmune and chronic conditions can be overcome? I just want to get your thoughts on that. I know it's a loaded question.
Liza: Yeah. Okay. So how do you approach that question? You approach that question. You can do anything you want to do. Can do anything you want to do, and it's only going to stop you if you choose to sit down and not do it. So, I was told I wouldn't walk.
Katie: Oh, wow. Today, lots of doctors have said that.
Liza: Yeah. Lots of doctors had said that. Lots of doctors told me that I wouldn't make it to 40. I have watched people go through Soul Death. I have watched people accept diagnoses as their identity and who they are, and it becomes the cage in which they are trapped in. They can't get outside of it. It is what keeps them where they are. And so first and foremost, realize that you are the person writing your story regardless of what is happening in it. I get that circumstances happen, but we're truly writing how we move forward with that circumstance. I could have very much sat down and taken my diagnosis and chose to be done, but I didn't. And neither does anybody else. But you do need resources and you do need community, and you do need help. So no, don't stop. And yes, you can do anything you want. And if you feel like you can't, it's because you are trying to do it without the resources you need.
Katie: Yeah, for sure.
Liza: And so it's about finding those resources.
Katie: And you're right, we do need resources. And so to wrap it up, tell us how to find you. You are a valuable resource, I think, in anybody's mental health journey, especially chronic illness. Chronic mental health problems. You've been feeling sick for 10 years and you don't know what's going on. So tell us how we can find you.
Liza: Yeah, so my website is https://banduriholistics.com/. There's contact info tabs there for you too, and you can see all of my information and whatnot. I'll be at the Uncommons on November 12th, the weekend Wellness is having an event, and I'll be teaching a workshop to decode your Body's Message at 9:00 AM. So, that's going to be a part of an intro to a two-part series, so I really want to start teaching some more workshops. And then if you want to email me, it's liza@banduriholistics.com
Katie: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me on this second episode of Watching Mental Health. This was such a powerful conversation. I took so much from it. You started going on about some stuff I didn't even know was happening. It just goes to show that we all have more to learn about our own bodies, and we're all together. We're not these single islands like you're saying. Everything is connected, and this was just so valuable. And so I'd love to have you again next or sometime soon. Anytime. I'll definitely, yeah, I'll definitely bring you back on for part two for our conversation. Thank you. But in the meantime, thank you so much. And this concludes watching Mental health. So stick around. This video will be on my website. It'll also be found on social media, katie rose wecter.com. And then join us every first and third Wednesday live at 3:00 PM and we'll see you next time.
Liza: Thanks! Bye.
