Living Inspired - A Functional Approach to Women’s Health, Energy, and Resilience

If you have caught yourself holding onto a version of you that no longer fits, this conversation is for you.

Barb Wojahn, who is 93 years old, has volunteered as a bird bander for 52 years, held leadership roles in her church for decades, and is only now handing off a seniors program she has run for almost 30 years. This is not a conversation about how to live to 93. It is a conversation about how to keep asking who you want to be, no matter what stage of life you are in.

In This Episode

• The interest inventory that told Barb she was suited to be a housewife, and what it took to build a life beyond that

• Letting go of activities and identities that no longer fit, and why that is harder than it sounds

• Learning to say no at 93, and what her husband used to tell her about being in two places at once

• The advice Barb's mother gave her about friendship that shaped her entire life

• Why connection is one of the six vital inputs your nervous system reads every day

  
  

You already know the feeling. The plan falls apart, the day turns sideways, and you are left standing in the wreckage of your own expectations, wondering why you could not just stay calm this time.

In this episode, I sit down with a woman who spent decades in the cockpit of major airliners, flying everything from a small four passenger plane to a 787 across oceans, and who is now retired and figuring out what comes next.

This conversation is not just about flying. It is about what happens in your body before the crisis ever shows up, and whether you have trained for it.

In This Episode

• An unconventional path into a forty-six-year flying career, and the one conversation that started it.
• What it took to build a career in a field where only a small percentage of pilots were women.
• The exact moment an engine failed midair, and why the response was calm instead of panic.
• Simulators, checklists, and the real difference between talent and training.
• Calculated risk versus recklessness, and how to tell which one you are actually taking.
• The fine line between fear and excitement, and how to use it to make better decisions.
• What retirement actually looks like eighteen months in, and who would not let the dream sit unfinished.
• Why a hobby that hits more than one of your values will carry you further than one that only hits one.

Rachel's Resources:

- Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

- Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

- Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

- Eat Well Made Easy Course

You already know the feeling. It's the moment your calendar says you should be able to keep going, but your body has quietly decided otherwise: the fog rolling in mid-afternoon, the irritability you can't explain, the sense that you used to handle more than this without falling apart.

In this episode, I'm sharing a conversation I had as a guest on Tracy Hoth's podcast, The Organized Coach, where we got into why so many high-achieving women blame their mindset or their discipline for something that is actually coming straight from the body.

In This Episode

• Root causes: the three places nearly every chronic symptom actually traces back to
• Genes and epigenetics: why family history is not the same thing as fate
• The soil and the roots: a garden metaphor for how autoimmune conditions really develop
• Fight or flight and your to-do list: why your nervous system can't tell a real threat from a busy day
• Blood sugar and business: the physical reason behind midday irritability and brain fog
• The three-minute nervous system reset that changes how the rest of your day goes
• Fat, fiber, and protein: the simplest way to stabilize blood sugar without tracking anything
• Sleep as the first domino: why it matters more than any other single habit
• Pattern awareness: the practice that comes before any protocol

Resources

Tracy's podcast, The Organized Coach

Free Guide: The Real You Still Feel Off: What Your Symptoms Are Telling You

Website: rachelcartarn.com

IG: @peaceinperimenopause

If you've spent another Sunday night staring at a grocery list wondering whether you should be low carb, cutting dairy, fasting, or counting macros, this one is for you. In this episode, Rachel steps away from all the noise and hands you the one place she starts with almost every client, no matter what brought her through the door. This isn't another diet. It's a simple formula you can carry into any kitchen, for the rest of your life.

In This Episode

• The Magic Meal Formula and why it starts with three simple pieces, not another diet.
• Blood sugar spikes and crashes, and what's actually behind your cravings.
• Healthy fat sources and what they're doing for your hormones, your brain, and your energy.
• Fiber, the piece almost every woman is under-eating, and how much you actually need.
• Protein's role in steady mood, muscle, and blood sugar, and how to tell if you're getting enough.
• Real client patterns, mood swings and hot flashes that shifted once meals were rebuilt around this formula.
• Simple examples for smoothies, salads, and eggs so you can build a plate without overthinking it.
• Eat Well Made Easy, the mini course this teaching is pulled from.

Resources

• Eat Well Made Easy
• RachelCartaRN.com
• Find Rachel on IG: https://www.instagram.com/peaceinperimenopause/

Rachel's Free Resources:

Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos




Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.




Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

You wake up in a body that doesn't quite feel like yours. Sleep is worse, moods are sharper, weight settles somewhere it never used to, and when you finally ask your doctor, you’re told your labs are normal. In this episode, I'm opening the doors to something I teach inside the Living Inspired Life Lab. This is the hormone conversation I have with nearly every woman who finds her way to me.

It's not the version you've seen online where estrogen is the enemy and the right supplement fixes everything. It's the real one, where your hormones are one part of a much bigger story your body is telling you, and if you're in your late 30s, 40s, or beyond and you've started to feel like a stranger to yourself, this one is for you.

In This Episode

• The hormone hierarchy, and why your sex hormones sit at the very top of the pyramid

• Blood sugar as the foundation everything else is built on

• The monthly cycle, and the difference between feeling unstable and being cyclical

• Perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause, and why menopause is only one single day

• The estrogen roller coaster, and why this stretch is often harder than menopause itself

• Progesterone, ovulation, and the reason your sleep changed

• FSH, lab tests, and why a normal result doesn't mean nothing is happening

• Hormone therapy as a start-at-the-base conversation, not a first move

  
  

  Resources Mentioned

• Find Rachel on Instagram: @peaceinperimenopause

• Podcast episode with a hormone nurse practitioner, Dana Culp, on the hormone therapy process.

• Podcast episode with Jane Butler on the mindset of the menopause journey.

You laugh, you sneeze, you pick up the laundry basket, and there it is again, that little leak you've quietly learned to work around.

Or intimacy has started to hurt, and the only advice you've ever gotten was to have a glass of wine and relax.

Maybe days pass without a real bathroom trip and you've decided that's just how your body is now.

I sat down again with Dr. Judy Rossi, a pelvic floor therapist with a doctorate in physical therapy and advanced training in pelvic health and orthopedics, for the honest conversation most of us were never offered about what these symptoms are actually trying to tell us. If you've been handed the word "normal" every time you've worked up the courage to ask, this episode is for you.

In This Episode

• The pelvic floor as twenty-five percent of your core, and why the six-pack you were taught to chase isn't even part of it
• Stress incontinence versus urge incontinence, and why the leaking you brushed off gets treated two completely different ways
• Painful intimacy, medical gaslighting, and the "just relax" advice that sends women home without help when ninety percent of the time it's fixable
• Chronic constipation and dyssynergic defecation, the pattern where your pelvic floor clenches at the exact moment it's supposed to let go
• The two-way highway between your brain and your pelvic floor, and what stays stuck when you're living in fight or flight
• Why you can't out-supplement, out-exercise, or out-biohack a dysregulated nervous system, and where the work actually has to begin
• Judy's own decade with IBS and interstitial cystitis, and the tight, angry muscles that turned out to be the real driver
• The places the body stores stress, from the jaw to the neck to the pelvic floor, and one patient story you won't forget
• Perimenopause, thinning tissue, and the topical estrogen conversation worth having with your provider
• Simple vagus nerve practices like gargling, humming, and cold water that you can start at the bathroom sink today

Resources

Dr. Judy Rossi, Woodstock Pelvic Health

Judy on Instagram @woodstockpelvichealth

Living Inspired Podcast, Episode 54 (pelvic health basics and myths with Dr. Judy Rossi)

Learn More About Rachel

Rachel on Instagram @peaceinperimenopause

Get the Free Guide The Real Reason You Still Feel Off in Perimenopause

This is one of those solo episodes where I interrupt the regular schedule because an ordinary moment had something to say. If you've been moving so fast that you're missing your own life, and carrying a stress load you've never actually named, this one is for you.

In This Episode

• A hole in the road, a hard hat, and the morning that changed how I see comfort
• Physical stress versus emotional stress, and why your body counts both
• The hidden labor behind the heat, the roads, the gas lines, and the clean sidewalks most of us never see
• Why a nervous system living at its limit can't heal, no matter how hard you push
• The irritation of construction delays, and the one question that calms your body in the moment
• Comfort as the baseline, and what it costs us to treat every interruption as a problem
• A missions trip at fifteen, trash trenches, and what infrastructure really is
• Reading the name tag: a ten-second practice for actually seeing the people around you

Rachel's Free Resources:

Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

If your health feels like a list of problems you're supposed to fix on your own, and the internet keeps adding one more thing you "have to" do to feel okay in midlife, this conversation is the exhale you've been needing.

My guest is Andrea Nakayama, a pioneer in functional nutrition, the founder of the Functional Nutrition Alliance, and the educator who trained me to think the way I think. She has taught thousands of practitioners to see the person instead of the diagnosis, and that one shift changes everything about how you understand your own body. If you're a high-achieving woman who is tired of chasing symptoms and quietly wondering why you couldn't just figure this out yourself, this one is for you.

In This Episode

• The note-card model of medicine most of us were handed, and why symptom plus disease plus drug was never the whole story.

• The matrix Andrea teaches, made of story, soup, and skill, and the layer almost everyone skips.

• The tree, its roots, and the soil, and why you don't heal by cutting off the branches.

• The pause, and the one person who actually profits from it.

• Blood sugar at the base of the hormone hierarchy, and the morning habit that quietly sets your whole day off.

• Hormone therapy in midlife, and why it helps some women and isn't the fix it's being sold as for everyone.

• The nervous system stuck in fight or flight, and what your body cannot do until it feels safe.

• One client, fifteen supplements, and the two-minute practice that finally moved the needle on her IBS.

• Building your own ecosystem of support instead of asking one doctor to be everything.

Resources:

Find Andrea here: https://www.andreanakayama.com/

Andrea on IG

Rachel's Resources:

Website: RachelCartaRN.com

Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

You're doing all the things you've always done, and somehow your body is pushing back anyway. You're tired in a way sleep doesn't touch, reactive over things that never used to rattle you, moving so fast that whole days disappear before you've actually been inside any of them.

You keep telling yourself you'll slow down once everything calms down and everyone else is taken care of. This is episode 100 of the Living Inspired Podcast, and instead of a guest, Rachel sits down to reflect on what 100 episodes, two decades with women, and the last three nights of her father's life have taught her about the difference between surviving your life and actually living it. If you've forgotten what it feels like to be fully present in your own days, this one was made for you.

Key Takeaways

• Your symptoms are rarely the problem. They are your body's response to a load that's been building for years, and that means they can be read and answered rather than only silenced.

• Your body was always paying the price. Midlife is simply the season it stops letting you defer the bill, which is information, not a verdict.

• Living inspired means living at a pace your body and soul can actually sustain, and slowing down enough to notice you are alive now, not eventually.

  
  

  Rachel's Free Resources:

  Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

  
  

  Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

  
  

  Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

You've made it through the day. You ate well, you stayed focused, you held it together. And then the evening comes and something shifts. Suddenly you're standing in your kitchen reaching for bread, or something sweet, or anything that will quiet the noise. You tell yourself you'll do better tomorrow. But tomorrow looks exactly the same. If this is your life right now, this episode is going to explain something nobody has taken the time to tell you: your cravings have a physiological root cause, and willpower was never the solution.

In This Episode

• Blood sugar mechanics and why refined carbohydrates trigger a craving cycle that feels nearly impossible to break

• Cortisol, sleep deprivation, and the direct connection between a hard night and a carb-heavy next day

• Insulin resistance, what it actually means, and why it makes cravings more intense even when you're eating enough

• The brain chemistry behind why sugar temporarily calms a stressed nervous system, and what that means for women who think they're "just emotional eaters"

• The gut microbiome's role in what you reach for and why certain imbalances can make sugar cravings feel relentless

• The fat, fiber, protein principle Rachel teaches every client and why it's the most consistent shift she sees make a real difference

• Why restrictive dieting keeps failing and what your body is actually asking for instead

Resources

Website: RachelCartaRN.com 

Instagram: @peaceinperimenopause

Rachel's Free Resources:

1. Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

2. Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now?

Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

3. Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.