Episode 29: Why I Wrote This Book

I’ve been sitting on something for a long time… and honestly, sharing it feels a little terrifying.

Because this one is personal.

In today’s episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on why I wrote this book—the moment everything shifted, the experience that changed how I practice medicine, and the woman I could not stop thinking about while writing every page.

She’s exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix.
She’s done everything right… and her body still isn’t responding.
She’s been told, “everything looks fine.”
But she knows she’s not.

I’ve been that woman.
And I’ve sat across from her hundreds of times.

This episode isn’t a clinical deep dive—it’s a story.
A story about the gap between “normal” and actually well.
A story about what’s really happening in your body when you feel tired, foggy, reactive, and stuck.
And a story about why this book had to exist.

Inside this episode, we talk about:

The moment I realized “fine” was not the right answer
What conventional medicine misses (and why it’s not your doctor’s fault)
How I became the patient—and what I discovered
The connection between metabolism, hormones, and brain health
Why symptoms in your 40s and 50s matter more than you’ve been told
And how this book gives you a clear, root-cause roadmap forward

If you’ve ever felt dismissed…
If your labs came back “normal” but your body didn’t feel that way…
If you’ve quietly wondered, “Is this just my life now?”

This episode is for you.

✨ The book launches May 6th at 10 AM—and your support that day helps this message reach the women who need it most.

Think of one woman in your life who needs this.
Send her this episode.
And let’s make sure she knows—she’s not crazy, she’s not broken, and there is a path forward.

If you’re ready to go deeper, here are your next steps:

✨ Free Guide: 9 Hidden Signs Your Metabolism Is Stuck in Survival Mode
www.drkaceywallace.com/hiddenmetabolicmess

✨ Adrenal Optimization Test (see your cortisol rhythm + DHEA clearly)
www.drkaceywallace.com/innercalm

✨ Resiliency Reboot Program
www.drkaceywallace.com/resiliencyreboot

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, wellness warriors. Welcome to the Anchor to Wellness Show, your compass in the sea of holistic health. Together we're making waves to reclaim control of our health destiny and anchor ourselves to wellness. So whether you're seeking clarity on brain fog or ready to reclaim your vitality, you're in the right place. So let's make waves and set sail towards a life anchored in wellness.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

So I've been sitting on something for a long time, and I almost did not share it because putting something this personal out there into the world is terrifying. But I keep thinking about a specific woman. Maybe you know her, maybe you are her. She's exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix. She's done everything right, or tried to, right? The diet, the workouts, the supplements, and her body is still not responding. She has set across from the doctor who looked her in the eye and told her everything looks fine. She's driven home, she's cried because she knew something is wrong. She has been told she is fine, she knows she's not, and I have been that woman. And I have set across from her hundreds of times. So I did something about it, and I wrote a book. And this episode is to tell you why. It starts with me sitting in my own doctor's office, knowing something was wrong in my body, and being sent home with nothing but doubt. And that experience, along with nearly two decades of watching the same thing happen to other women, is why this book exists. Today's episode is not a clinical one necessarily. It is just a story. Why this book exists, who it is for, and what I hope it does in the world. If you've ever been told you are fine while living in a body that felt anything but, stay with me. This one is for you. So welcome back to the Anchor to Wellness Show. I'm Dr. Casey, and today we're doing something a little bit different. I want to start by telling you who I was before I became the version of myself who wrote this book because I think it matters and I think it actually is the most important thing I can tell you. So I'm a board certified osteopathic family physician. I spent the first chunk of my career doing exactly what I was trained to do, seeing patients, running lab panels, reviewing the results, and telling people what their numbers meant. And if everything came back within the acceptable range, I told them they were fine. I told them to just reduce their stress, eat better, sleep more, try to relax. I told them that some of what they were experiencing was just part of getting older, just aging. I handed them maybe a pamphlet or something about eating healthier, and I sent them home. And I want to be very clear about something before I go any further. I was not a bad doctor, I was not dismissive or indifferent. I went into medicine because I wanted to help people, and I genuinely believed I was doing that because I was working inside a system. It was built on how to find diseases. And what I kept seeing in my exam room was not disease, it was dysfunction. And the system I was trained in had no language for that. There is a difference between normal and optimal because not yet sick and actually well are different. There's a difference. That gap is where women are falling through the cracks. Okay. Every single day in exam rooms around the country. I'm not anti-conventional medicine. I just notice there's a different pattern. I started noticing these patterns. I they I was seeing these high capacity women, they're smart, they're responsible, the kind of women who can hold everything together for everyone else. And coming in with real symptoms, they're exhausted and they that doesn't respond to rest and weight that did not respond to effort, the brain fog, mood swings, a body that felt increasingly unfamiliar. And every time I ran the standard panel, the numbers would come back looking acceptable. And I would sit across from her and tell her she was fine. I would watch her face when I said it. The flicker of something, the relief that nothing was catastrophically wrong, maybe, but underneath that was something else. There's confusion, there's deflation, there's that quiet, devastating experience of being told that what you're living in does not show up in the data. And I started to feel something I could not name for a long time. I kind of started feeling this low grade of unease because I knew on some level that just being fine was not the right answer. I just did not have a better one yet. And then something happened that made it impossible for me to keep pretending. I became the patient. Not all at once. It crept in the way things usually do, right? Gradually, just in a way that is easy to explain away when you're busy and when you're supposed to be the one who has all the answers. First was the fatigue, not that tired after a long day, kind of, you know, just goes away with a good night's sleep. But that kind where you wake up after eight hours and the first thought you have is, I cannot do this today. I cannot wait to go back to bed. And then, you know, you go and you do your day anyway because you have to, because people are counting on you because that is just what you do. But you are doing it on nothing, you're running on fumes and that sheer kind of stubbornness, and you know, that we're telling ourselves it's just a busy season, but you know what? It will always be a busy season. Okay, so then came in the brain fog, and I want to describe this carefully because I think the phrase has become so common that it almost sounds just like a minor thing, okay, but this was not minor, and brain fog is not minor. If we're having that, it's a red flag. This was trying to think, it's like trying to think through something that's thick and resistant and just cloudy, and I would think of a word, like I would try to think of a word, and it would just be gone, and I thought I was in the middle of would just kind of get lost, and a version of myself I had always counted on to be sharp and present was not available. I would be potentially talking to a patient and then lose my train of thought in a way that had never happened to me before, and I would sit down to write and stare at the screen, and I did not feel like myself. I could not explain why. And my gut was a disaster. I had dealt with IBS for years, the cramping, the bloating, the unpredictability that made every social situation feel like a logistical calculation. And I had done what most people in my position do. I managed it. I avoided triggers as best I could. I pushed through. I did not connect it to anything else going on in my body because that is not how I had been trained to think. Symptoms are all separate, right? They live in their own categories. Gut was the gut, fatigue is fatigue, brain is brain, hormones are hormones. What I did not understand yet was that they were all speaking the same language. My weight was shifting in ways that did not respond to what I was doing. My nervous system felt like it could not settle. I would get to the end of my day and feel wired and exhausted at the same time, which is its own particular kind of terrible. I would lay down, my mind would race, I would wake up at three in the morning with a heart that felt like it was running ahead of the rest of me, right? Pounding, I was inflamed in a way. I just didn't really even know how to even describe it. I couldn't point to anything. I didn't know. Okay. And here's the part that is still humbling to say out loud. And at that point, I was still practicing conventional medicine. I was still running standard panels, and when my own numbers come back, came back in range, some of me defaulted to what I had been trained to do. Just move on. I told myself I was probably just dressed, I was probably just overworked, I was probably just getting older. I was giving myself the same answer I had been giving to my patients. You are fine. But I was not fine. And luckily, I was told maybe you should just go find a functional medicine person. And I was like, I don't even know what that is, so let's go do it. Okay, so I start researching it, and I ended up getting in a program to train myself what it even was because I just felt like, oh my gosh, this is probably the missing piece. I started running some of the functional lab testing on myself, and I saw my cortisol pattern, I saw my gut dysfunction, the way these two things were talking to each other and affecting my hormones, my metabolism, my brain. I had this strange double experience of like relief and grief at the same time. Relief that there was a reason, but grief because I thought about every woman I had sent home with just the thought of just, oh yeah, it's just stress, it's just aging, it's just eat less and exercise more, right? So I started studying relentlessly because that is who I am. I am a research nerd. If there is a mechanism to understand, a pathway to trace, a study to dissect, I am already three tabs deep and taking notes, and functional medicine opened up a world of understanding that my formal training had never touched. But something else happened in that season of learning that I want to tell you about because it is the piece of my story that I think explains most clearly why this book exists and who it is for. I actually started learning about cognitive decline and dementia and what about what happens in the brain in the years and decades before someone walks into a neurologist's office and receives a diagnosis. And what I learned stopped me cold. So there's a protocol, it's called the Bredison Protocol. That it approaches cognitive decline from a root cause functional medicine perspective. And studying it, I applying it, working with people in the context of cognitive health, I kept running into the same devastating truth over and over again. By the time most people seek help for memory loss, for cognitive symptoms, for what gets eventually labeled as dementia, their dysfunction in their brain has been building for 20 to 30 years. Take that in, 20 to 30 years. That inflammation has been there, that insulin resistance was there, the gut dysfunction was likely there, the hormonal imbalances were there, the cortisol dysregulation was there for decades, quietly, not so quiet, because you knew you didn't feel good and didn't feel fine, right? So it's in a body whose annual labs came back looking normal because the standard panel was never designed to catch what was actually going wrong. I would see a post in a dementia support group, uh, you know, it'd be a woman 44 years old, they just were diagnosed with dementia, and the comments would be full of people saying, There's nothing you can do, get your affairs in order. I would read that and feel something probably close to anger, fury, something, because I knew and I know that 90% of the time there is something driving that. There is a reason. And if we had caught it 20 years earlier, that story would have been a lot different. So that is when something shifted for me in a fundamental way. I realized that the work that mattered most was not the work you do when someone is already in crisis. It was the work you do in the decades before the crisis arrives. When the dysfunction is there but has not yet become disease, when the woman in her 40s is exhausted and foggy, can't lose weight, and has been told she's fine, that woman is not just uncomfortable. She is in a window. A window where the work we do actually changes the trajectory. That is a woman I am built to serve. That is who I restructured my entire practice around, not waiting for the diagnosis, working upstream of it. Because the time to start is not when things are falling apart. The time to start is now in the middle of these fine years when your body is already trying to tell you something that the system around you is not equipped to hear. And I want to say something directly about that because I think it matters. The medical system is not malicious, the doctors telling you that you're fine are not bad people. They are working within a framework that was designed to diagnose disease, not to identify and reverse dysfunction before it becomes disease. Those are two completely different goals, and most of medicine is only funded, trained, and structured to do the first one. So, what I do and what this book is about is the second one. Catching what is already happening in your body, addressing it with the right tools, giving you a path back before the path becomes much, much harder. That is the reason this book exists. Not just because I want to help women feel better in their daily lives. I mean, I do want, that's absolutely part of it, but because what happens in your body in your 40s and 50s, 60s, it has a direct line to who you will be in your 70s, 80s, and beyond. And you deserve to know that. You deserve to know that it is not too late and it is definitely not too early. Right now, in the middle of these symptoms, you've been told to ignore, it's exactly the right time. So here's the question I keep sitting with. I have a practice, I have programs, I have this podcast. So why a book? And the honest answer is there's women I cannot reach. Everyone who has found their way into my world, my practice, my programs, this podcast has found me somehow. They've something brought them here. But for every woman who found me, there are thousands who have not, who are still in the middle of everything I just described, quietly convinced that this is just their life now, that the exhaustion is aging, that the fog is just stress, that the weight is their fault, that the doctor who told them they're fine must be right because he is a doctor and they are just, you know, a woman who feels terrible. I think about the woman at 11 o'clock at night. She can't sleep, she's on her phone, she's searching. Why am I so tired all the time? Why can't I lose weight no matter what I do? The brain fog, then there's perimenopause. Is this anxiety or is it something actually wrong? She is trying to understand something her own health care has failed to explain. She's not maybe going to find me on Instagram at that moment, but you know, maybe she'll find my book. And a book will travel in ways a practice cannot. It gets passed between women, a friend buys it and tucks it into a birthday card, maybe for the person she's been quietly worrying about. It shows up in a search result, it sits on a nightstand, it gets picked up at two in the morning when the brain fog is bad and she needs something, anything to make sense of what her body is doing. I spent two decades accumulating a very specific kind of knowledge, not just the clinical kind, but the human kind. The kind that comes from sitting across from a woman who is trying to hold her life together while her body is working against her and actually understanding what is happening in her physiology and why. That knowledge belongs to her, not just to the women who can find their way into my practice or find their way to this podcast. But that's why I wanted to write a book. I felt like I had this bigger mission, not that I think I'm just this amazing, like, oh, everybody should know me, but I want to be able to convey my message because I feel like it is a special one. So I wrote it down, all of it in the plainest language I could manage with the stories and the science and the roadmap because I just wanted that woman that's 11 o'clock at night. She deserves the answers, and I finally had one I could give her. So let me tell you what is actually in the book. Not all of it. You have to read all of it for that, but enough that you can understand what it can do for you or for the woman who you are going to give it to. First, what it is not. It is not a memoir, it's not a diet plan, it's not a supplement protocol, it is not another telling just thing telling you that if you just try harder, eat cleaner, stress less, you'll feel better. We're kind of done with that, right? So it is a clinical roadmap. It's written in plain language for the woman who is done being her own experiment. It takes all the things that are usually treated as separate problems, the fatigue and weight, and hormones, and gut, and brain fog, and sleep and mood, and it connects all of them because guess what? They are all connected, they are one system, and when you finally understand the system, the symptoms stop feeling like a list of failures and start making sense. And when things make sense, that shame can go away. That is one of the most important things this book does. It removes shame because there was never just a willpower problem. There's nothing wrong with you as a person. And I want to give you an example of what I mean by that because I think it is the kind of thing that changes how you see in your body and how you see your own body. When your body is under prolonged stress, and by stress, I do not just mean emotional stress, I mean the full physiologic load of poor sleep, blood sugar instability, gut dysfunction, chronic inflammation, your cortisol goes to work. And cortisol is not your enemy, it is a survival hormone. Its job is to keep you alive under threat. But here's the thing: one of cortisol's jobs is to preserve body fat, specifically around the middle, because in a true survival situation, your body needs that stored energy. It does not know the difference between a grizzly bear and a deadline, it does not know the difference between a famine and a skipped lunch. When the signals say we are in a prolonged threat, your body holds on tightly, stubbornly, in a way that does not respond to less food or more exercise because that can add to the physiologic stress load and reinforce the signal. So the woman who is eating less, working out more, and still cannot lose that weight in her middle, she's not broken, she's not weak-wheeled, her body is doing exactly what it was designed to do to protect her. The problem is that that signal it is responding to is not a bear. It is life, and no one has really ever talked about that. So that is the kind of thing this book does. Not just explaining the what, but the why. Because when you understand the why, you stop fighting your body and you can start working with it. So this book is built around a framework that I use with a lot of people, okay? Reset, repair, rebuild. And I will not walk you through the whole thing here because that's what the book's for, but I want you to know it is that there's a sequence, there's an intentional order because one of the biggest mistakes I see is people trying to fix the downstream problems before they have dressed. What is upstream? You cannot rebuild what has not been repaired, you cannot repair what has not been reset. The sequence matters and the book walks you through that. There's also going to be a free companion workbook. It goes through exercises and reflection prompts. There's action steps to help you take what you're reading and then apply it to your own body. And so we'll have all those resources for you. And I will have the link in the show notes. So start getting familiar with the framework. We're going to have the link for the workbook in the show notes. So you can even download it right now and you can start getting familiar with the framework even before the book gets in your hands. Okay. So here's the thing: the book comes out on May 6th. And I want to tell you what I need from you on that day because it does matter more than you realize. Here is something I want you to understand about how Amazon's bestseller rankings work. Not because I want to teach you about algorithms, but because I want you to understand why what you do on May 6th has an impact that goes beyond getting a copy for yourself. Amazon surfaces books based on velocity. How many copies move in a short window of time? The books that hit number one in a category on a given day are the books that are get that are getting recommended to other shoppers. And they they show up in the search results and they get seen by people who have never heard of this author. That would be me, right? And that visibility, that's how this book finds women who do not know me yet, and the one who is searching for answers right now. So that is the goal to get a number one best seller. Yes, and I am saying that plainly because I believe we can do it, and I believe in my message. I believe that because my community is extraordinary, and because this is a book for women who are actively looking for exactly what is in this book. So here's what I'm asking on May 6th. We are going to go live. It's at 10 o'clock. You can go to Amazon, you can buy the book. The link will be in the show notes. It's going to be in my bio, it's going to be in emails. Everywhere you find me, you can click it, you can buy it. It just takes a few seconds, right? I will be going live at 10 a.m. on Facebook. You can come celebrate with me. You don't have to stay for the live. You can just go purchase the copy and just be bright that day in that window. It's a vote for this book. It can reach so many women who need it. So you can put a reminder right now on your phone, your calendar, or a sticky note on your mirror, whatever works, May 6th, 10 a.m. I will be sending those reminder emails as it gets closer. It's pretty close now, so go ahead and put that in your reminders. And we are going to do this event online. You can come into the live on and celebrate with us. We'll be putting that all out on socials as well. And I am going to do an in-person meet and greet for my local people. And I'm really excited about it because you can get your book. And if you want me to sign it, I will. you know when that is going to be. So I want you to think about this. I want you to think about one woman, someone in your life who's tired, who keeps saying she is fine when you know she is not, who has been to the doctor, been told her labs look normal, she comes home feeling like a stranger in her own body, someone who maybe started to believe that this is just what their life is going to be like now. This is just aging. This is all just normal. Okay. Send her this episode. Plan to buy her this book, right? Tag her in my post. Just get this to her somehow because she is the reason I wrote this book and she deserves to know why it exists. I want to close with something honest. I did not write this book to sell you something. I did not write it because someone told me I should have a book or because it made strategic sense for my business. I wrote it because I was tired, genuinely deeply tired of watching women get dismissed. It's happening everywhere social media, all the influence it's all it's crazy, okay? I'm just tired of watching them leave appointments smaller than when they walked in. I'm tired of watching them turn their symptoms into proof of their own failure. Tired of watching them try harder and harder it's something that was never a willpower problem. Tired of knowing knowing with everything in me that the dysfunction I was watching build in women in their 40s could become something devastating in their 60s and 70s if nobody caught it. If nobody had a better answer than everything just looks fine, right? I was that woman I have been in the room with someone else with that was that woman and I know what it costs her not just physically but in her sense of herself in her trust of her own body in the quiet grief of not recognizing the person she used to be the book is my answer to that. It is me reaching across whatever distance separates us and saying I see you I hear you you were not wrong you are not broken and the path is the path back it is real. It is not easy it is not instant but it is real and you deserve to know where it starts. So May 6th 10 a.m the link will be everywhere please buy my book thank you so much for being here thank you for trusting me with your time and your health and it it means more to me than I know how to say so I'm Dr. Casey signing off. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Anchor to Wellness Show. Together let's anchor ourselves to a life of vibrant well being until next time take care stay curious and embrace the journey to holistic vitality stay anchored and stay well