People ask what it means to be rebellious about wellness, health, and aging. This shortie will answer that in part.

Boiler plate medicine is one-size-fits-all diagnosing and prescribing and it makes me nuts.

True, some aspects of being a woman or a man line up, like stress is bad for us and junk food in abundance causes inflammation and a host of other ills.

Most every other aspect of health must be filtered by, at the least, gender, age, lifestyle habits, and genetics. (Yeah, that’s me who used to say genes are not destiny. I still believe that, but new science has me expand on that idea. They are still only a blueprint waiting for a builder, (that would be you and me) but the more we know about our genetic profile the stronger we can build our house.

That’s not the focus of this episode, but if you want to hear about the latest science of using genes for better mental and physical health, here’s an episode on that.

What I hope you’ll take away is that every recommendation for a prescription or procedure that you get from a western trained doc isn’t necessarily what you need and might in fact be harmful over time.

Hearing loss impacts 430 million people worldwide, including 48 million in the US. You may be one of them or know someone in this category.

My guests today are Gael Hannan and Shari Eberts. They both have hearing loss and advocate for others. They co-authored the book Hear and Beyond, Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss. Their book offer a new skills-based approach to hearing loss that is centered not on hearing better, but on communicating better.

According to my guest, Kathy White, Yoga not just another physical activity like Pilates or going to the gym. And it’s not just for the flexible, young, and fit among us.

If you’ve tried traditional yoga practices like hatha, hot, or vinyasa but felt the poses were too strenuous or complex, stay with us.

Kathy calls her unique blend of yoga styles, a joint renewal system and her goal is to help women rediscover flexibility and relief from joint pain.

Dr. Michael Green loves delivering babies!

So why is he appearing on a podcast for over 50 women? Because his second passion is helping women feel better, feel like themselves so they can enjoy the second half of life.

He is the head of clinical operations at ByWinona.com, whose mission is “To create a world where the second half of life is even better than the first.”

He’s also a full time OB-GYN, still bringing those babies into the world.

The co-founder, Nancy Belcher, PhD, struggled during her own menopause journey and was reluctant to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT) due to outdated science of the Women’s Health Initiative. Because of this old information, like so many women, she suffered unnecessarily for far too long. Today, Nancy is focused on reassuring women on the safety of HRT to help relieve menopause symptoms and prevent diseases associated with decreased levels of hormones.

So she started an online company to make getting educated about and prescriptions for HRT easy and convenient.

Michael and I discussed:

1. The Women’s Health Initiative Study, the source of much of the erroneous information on bioidentical hormone therapy.
2. Who is a good candidate for BHRT —

J. Ann Dunn, suffered with depression for almost 50 years and with Fibromyalgia for decades. As a Doctor of Chiropractic trained in functional medicine as well, she tried everything she knew to heal herself. Nothing worked.

She had a successful practice in New Mexico for 30+ years and was bothered by those few patients who didn’t respond to tools she used on all her patients–nutrition, structural work, emotional work.

“As natural healthcare practitioners, we kind of park that stuff on the side and say, it must be genetic. You know, that was kind of the black box on the side that we couldn’t really get to.”

Her father had died young of lung cancer which didn’t surprise J because he had been a smoker and drinker with a few other poor lifestyle habits. Her step-dad on the other hand, who shared his buddy’s bad habits, lived another 30 years.

All of those things had J. curious about this genetics thing.

Many years of research and studying later, she is depression free, free of fibromyalgia, and has helped thousands of people heal from emotional and physical problems using gene mapping and biochemistry.

You might say this is a departure for this podcast, for me as Rebellious Wellness. You have a point. Here’s why I had Mary Henderson, international personal branding and digital business specialist, as a guest.

Many of my people are women entrepreneurs at Be More Marketable and here. Of the many, a good percentage of them are second careerers or looking to get into their own business.

Another piece of Mary’s work that I think is important for listeners, business owners, or not, is the idea of core identity.

“What I have found with women over the age of 50 is that even though we’re at that point in our life where it’s like, ‘screw everybody, I don’t care. I could be unapologetically myself.’ That the reality is that women aren’t unapologetically themselves.”

What holds them back is their core identity. The part of them, us, that keeps us in fear or “I’m not good enough, see it’s not working” and backing down or not doing what it takes to succeed.

“The identity is that a much younger version of me that’s holding onto beliefs and behaviors around one or two areas of my life where I feel powerless and helpless. Once we can see that we are powerless and helpless in one or two areas of our life. And typically, it’s around love and money. We know that’s a clue to say that we have an identity that is showing up as that lesser version of, smaller version of ourselves.”

Morgan Adams is a double certified sleep coach. Here’s how she got started.

“I was desperate to get a good night’s sleep after an unexpected crisis rocked my world in my mid-thirties. As a Pharma rep, I didn’t have the luxury of “sleeping in” after staring at the clock all night. That’s when I got my hands on a popular, physician-prescribed sleeping pill—because when you work in the Pharma field, it’s not hard to score a pill for any ill.”

This all-too-common scenario — woman can’t sleep, doc says “I have just the thing”—resulted in reliance on Ambien, pharma name, Zolpidem. According to medlineplus.gov, “Zolpidem is used to treat insomnia (difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep). Zolpidem belongs to a class of medications called sedative-hypnotics.

They go on to say, “Zolpidem may cause serious or possibly life-threatening sleep behaviors. Some people who took zolpidem got out of bed and drove their cars, prepared and ate food, had sex, made phone calls, sleep-walked, or were involved in other activities while not fully awake. After they woke up, these people were unable to remember what they had done.”

Morgan goes on to say, “I didn’t know that sleeping pills inhibit your ability to experience restorative sleep. Taking the pills may help you become unconscious, but sedation is not the same as sleep. I would wake up groggy, oftentimes to an empty box of cookies I didn’t remember eating, and trudge through the morning until last night’s pill would wear off. It’s a miracle I never got behind the wheel in these fugue states.”

So begins our conversation on how to sleep deeply and restoratively, without using prescription medications long term.

Are you a grandma? Fifty is old enough to have that title. By sixty many women will be lucky enough to join to club. I became a grandma-or Gigi as my grandson calls me — in 2021.

Like my guest, Marsha McLean, founder of Grandmas 2.0, I was not ready for that.

Who among us relishes talking about death? Specifically our deaths or those of the near and dear to us. Which is weird because if you’re alive, you’re in for a penny in for a pound kind of thing, with death.

End of life conversations, though hard to start, can bring you closer to the person whose life you are helping to plan.

My guest, Jane Duncan Rogers, was thrown into a situation where she had to have the conversation, ask questions like, buried or cremated, what kind of urn or coffin, party or quiet ceremony only — when her husband was diagnosed with a terminal cancer and their time was short.

She put off asking “the questions” and had hoped to rush through them, just get it done. What happened instead was a 90-minute conversation with him. It was full of laughter and a sense of being in a project together.

So you think you know how a lack of deep sleep affects you?

Unless you follow someone like Matt Walker, the preeminent neuroscientist specializing in sleep, or one of his colleagues around the world, you may miss out on information that will encourage you to make sleep a priority.

And increase the likelihood of aging in good health.

It’s no secret that as we age, regular, sound, sleep seems to elude us unless everything is Goldilocks perfect. Not too hot, not too cold, not too much on our minds, the creaky back isn’t complaining, and on and on.

But, as you’ll find out in this episode, it’s possible to improve your sleep, though it’s not likely to happen overnight. (Couldn’t help myself)