We discover BII (Breast Implant Illness), we explant, and we continue the journey toward optimal health and wellness. But what exactly is wellness? It is the pursuit of continued growth and balance various dimensions of wellness. Many people think about “wellness” in terms of physical health only. Wellness, however, is much more than physical health. Wellness is a full integration of physical, mental and spiritual well-being. It is a complex interaction that leads to quality of life. Neglect of any one of these for any length of time has adverse effects on overall health.

Physical Health

R1 of restoring health is removing the source(s) that are causing dis-ease or dysfunction. Many women who are struggling with their health and not getting anywhere with conventional medicine are becoming very aware of the types of things that lead to disease and a huge step they are taking to get their health back is removing their breast implants.

However, I’m seeing that women are not necessarily exercising the right way for their current condition or maybe they’re not even exercising at all. We really need to be meeting our bodies where they’re at rather than pushing ourselves so hard we feel terrible the next day. And for some people that might mean simply going for a walk outside daily or doing some gently yin yoga. The important thing is just to move your body. 

I also see that women coming to me for help don’t really know what kind of diet is right for them. They’re following what this person says or what that person says is the right way to eat without really being in tune with what their specific body needs or wants. We need proper nutrition, but what works for one person can be detrimental to another (even healthy plant foods).

Most people also aren’t getting enough quality sleep. This is #1 in my book. Sleep is more important than anything else. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not detoxing, you’re not regenerating your body, you’re not processing the stressors of the day. Of course you don’t always have control over this if you have young kids or if you struggle with insomnia like I did. However, there are key things you can be doing to set the stage for better sleep…and insomnia typically has a deeper root cause that can be discovered and addressed. I’ve helped clients get completely off of hard core sleep drugs. Some tips for good sleep hygiene are:

• Wear blue-light blocking glasses at least an hour before bed and put your screens on night mode. Blue light that enters the retina at night shuts down melatonin (sleep hormone) production by the pineal gland and stimulates cortisol production by the adrenals (which keeps you awake).
• Don’t eat within 2-3 hours of bedtime. Eating before bed spikes blood sugar and insulin, raises heart rate, and triggers digestions, all of which can keep you from having a restful night sleep.
• Meditate or practice BrainTap – meditation can calm your body in order to get you relaxed and ready for sleep. BrainTap actually stimulates deep delta brain wave activity needed for deep sleep. My clients swear by it! And I do too.
• Don’t read or watch anything too stimulating as it will keep your brain active and prevent sleep.
• Don’t exercise too close to bedtime – this triggers cortisol release, which keeps you awake. Gentle yin yoga may be okay, however.
• Take a warm bath with Dead Sea Salts – added minerals can improve sleep and heat from the bath can be calming and help you unwind from the day.
• Fix your gut – parasites are most active at night and stimulate cortisol, which can wake you up. 
• Support your liver – liver congestion an also cause you to wake up in the middle of the night. My favorite gentle way to support the liver is by doing castor oil packs before bed.
• Don’t drink liquids within an hour of bedtime – you’ll be getting up to pee if you do and that disrupts sleep. You shouldn’t need to get up to pee overnight. 
• Keep your thermostat between 63-66 degrees – higher temperatures negatively impact sleep. Or invest in a CHILIPAD.
• Detox – toxicity can also contribute to sleep problems

If you’ve done all of these things and still struggle with sleep, you may need to dig deeper with some functional lab work to determine what the root cause is.

Emotional Health

Emotional wellness is a dynamic state that fluctuates frequently. In order to be emotionally well, we need to feel and express our emotion. It means having the ability to love and be loved and achieving a sense of fulfillment in life. Emotional wellness encompasses optimism, self-esteem, self-acceptance and the ability to share feelings. 

What I’m seeing is that as women, we’re starting to wake up to this and return to a place of self-love and self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. We’re tuning into their thoughts and feelings and sharing them with others. We’re seeking support. We have hope!

What I see most often that needs work is stress management and this need women have to always be doing for others at the sacrifice of themselves and their own health. We have this instinct to care for our families and what we need to understand is that we can’t take care of others if we don’t first take care of ourselves…that’s why they always tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first if the plane goes down before helping someone else put their mask on. 

And most women these days are just rushing around from one thing to the next, always saying “yes” to everything, being everything to everyone, never really taking the time to be in the moment or reflect on what she needs. And there are so many distractions in the world that today that we can lose sight of what really matters the most. 

Spiritual Health

Spiritual wellness involves knowing your guiding principles, your beliefs, your values that help direct your life. Spiritual health is about faith and hope and a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. 

In my practice I’m seeing a lot of women reinventing their lives because they are filled with so much hope for their future! 

Some, however, have lost hope and faith, and a sense of purpose, and so this healing journey becomes at least partly rediscovering that. Reconnecting to self and your higher power. There needs to be a big enough “why” to truly and completely heal. What is the reason that you’re taking these steps to getting your health back? What is it you want to do with your life? What is the one thing you feel you were put here on this earth to do or what do you absolutely have to do while you’re hear on this earth that is non-negotiable. That becomes your why, your driving force that keeps you motivated when things get tough, and they will.

My story was a very spiritual journey and a pain to purpose journey. I believe I was allowed to go through this struggle with my health so that I could learn how I should be living, and so I could then teach others. That’s what it’s all about. We need to share this information with the world!

How the Body Works with Respect to the 5Rs

Throughout my work with clients I implement the 5Rs of healing: 

R1 – removing the source – The toxic source or sources that are either still present as well as those that have bio-accumulated in the body over time. We must remove the things that are contributing to toxicity and infections like breast implants, amalgam fillings, root canals, mold, toxic air we breathe and water we drink, and toxic products we use. We can never truly get well if we don’t first remove the source – otherwise you’ll be swimming upstream like I was for 5 years. We must effectively and safely detoxify the body’s tissues, organs, and cells.

R2 – regenerate the cell membrane – It has been shown that the cell membrane holds the intelligence of the cell and plays a major role in detox, turning genes on or off, and regulating hormones. Regenerating the cell membrane is at the core of a solution to the growing number of unexplainable symptoms and degenerative diseases seen today in epidemic proportions. In healthy people, the lipid bilayer of the cell allows nutrients to flow inside easily, and toxins to leave easily. If it is inflamed, nothing can come in or out, so the cell becomes toxic and illness results. Restoring the cell membrane has been shown to be the key player in turning off genes that express unwanted symptoms and diseases. This means getting the necessary building blocks to create healthy cells. 

R3 – restore cellular energy – Cellular energy is the gasoline of the cell, and nothing runs or functions without it. As nutrients flow into the cell, they feed the powerhouse called mitochondria. Without adequate production of ATP, cells are unable to detoxify or regenerate properly. And the lower your ATP, the more inflammation is occurring at the cellular level. This leads to symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, digestive problems, and hormone conditions. If you don’t raise ATP in the cell, nothing else you do will be very effective. Improving ATP production will downregulate inflammation and upregulate detoxification pathways.

R4 – reduce cellular inflammation – Systemic cellular inflammation is linked to almost all chronic diseases and hormone conditions today. I’m specifically referring to inflammation of the cell membrane that affects the way the cell communicates, detoxes, and ultimately changes gene expression, which can trigger a disease of genetic weakness. Understanding how inflammation affects the cell and how to downregulate it is essential to get almost any condition well. Top sources of inflammation are dietary sugars and grains, bad fats, and toxins. My approach addresses all three. And we also use supplements that contain ingredients shown in studies to raise intracellular glutathione, which reduces inflammation.

R5 – reestablish methylation – I’m sure most of you have heard of methylation or at least the MTHFR gene as it’s a hot topic in the BII FB groups. Methylation is a biochemical process that affects many essential body functions including DNA repair, detoxification, fighting infections, removing environmental toxins such as lead and estrogen, and more processes we’re only beginning to understand The body needs methylation to regulate stress hormones, and when unable to methylate remains in a state of constant stress. Methyl groups are needed to turn on the stress response, but also to turn it off. Therefore, if methyl groups are lacking, a greater opportunity is created for toxins, inflammation, and other stressors to trigger bad genes. A toxic diet, lifestyle, and various other stressors, whether chemical, physical, or emotional, can turn on bad genes by depleting methylation. On the other hand, a healthy lifestyle, clean diet and environment, and properly restored methylation can turn off bad genes. Hence our DNA is no longer our destiny.). 

Creating a Healing Environment

When focusing on healing, you want to look for ways to reduce stress in the environment. Emotional stress impacts our bodies in multiple ways because our brain and our nervous, endocrine, and immune systems are constantly interacting. An impact on one system reverberates throughout the others.

So, we want to create calm. And because we can’t always have “calm” we also want to implement strategies to cope with stress to balance the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems (fight or flight vs rest and digest). 

• Meditation
• Prayer
• Step out of urgency and step into peace. You cannot heal in a chronic state of urgency.
• Positive affirmations and positive self-talk – your cells are listening!
• Setting positive intentions for the day
• Get to bed early – make sleep a priority
• Creating a positive mindset, or when you catch yourself going to that negative/dark place, acknowledge it, accept it, and then reframe it. Mindset is everything.
• Make time for things that bring you happiness, make space for pleasure.
• Connect with others – connection is so important for our emotional wellbeing. 
• Reduce your exposure to toxins in the home: EMFs, WIFI, cleaning products, personal care products, new furniture, paint, carpet, air and water filtration, addressing mold in the home, etc.

Other things that create a healing environment are simply being prepared for the healing journey by:

• Cleaning out the junk from your pantry, stocking your kitchen with healthy essentials for good nutrition.
• Batch cooking so you are prepared when your schedule gets busy and you don’t have time to cook – that way you don’t find yourself picking off your kid’s plates or going through a drive through window for something quick.
• Preparing your supplements for the week and setting a timer so you don’t forget.
• Telling family and friends what you’re doing/working on so they can support you and encourage you.
• Find an accountability partner that you can rely on to reach out to you and ask how you’re doing.
• Creating a plan for each week for what you want to get accomplished, what you want to focus on that week for your healing, and then not beating yourself up about it if you’re not perfect. It’s not about perfections, it’s about progress. It’s about taking the next right step toward healing each day.

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Apply for your BII Discovery Call with Sarah HERE.

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Professional Bio

Founder of Reversing Breast Implant Illness. Sarah has a passion for restoring health that has taken her along a path from a practicing RN, to walking away from her conventional nursing career to become a certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner, and Breast Implant Illness and Detox Expert. She believes the solution to Reversing Breast Implant illness is about more than just the explant and that we all need to take personal responsibility for restoring our health by addressing the root causes that contribute to chronic illness: toxicity, infections, trauma, and shame. Sarah’s “pain to purpose” is using her personal experience along with her understanding about the body to guide women through the sea of mis-information about Breast Implant Illness in hopes of finding their path to true and lasting healing.

Sarah was once quite happy and comfortable living the conventional life, but she began to look at things very differently when her body started failing her after getting breast implants. Within about six months of getting breast implants, Sarah began to see her once perfect health steadily decline. She began experiencing a myriad of symptoms which no doctor could explain. Noone understood what Sarah was going through. She felt completely alone in this invisible illness because on the outside she looked fine. On the inside, the discomfort of living inside her own body was maddening.

Sarah soon realized she was looking in the wrong places, for the wrong things. If she wanted to fix her broken body, she had to stop looking to treat the symptoms; she had to start looking for a cause. It was time to take her health into her own hands and find real answers. She discovered that the root cause was literally inside of her.

Sarah believes there is always a greater purpose within our struggles, and she believes that purpose for her was to learn how to heal her own body so she could then help other women like her do the same. It is Sarah’s believe that the body has an innate desire to heal if given what it needs and she focuses on teaching natural healing principles. Sarah will teach you how to Reverse Breast Implant Illness, take back your health, and live vibrantly!