Episode 30- Autoimmune before autoimmunity

If you've ever been told your labs are normal while your body feels like it's falling apart. This episode is for you.

Because autoimmune disease rarely starts at the diagnosis. It starts years earlier. In the gray zone. Where you're symptomatic enough to suffer but not sick enough to qualify. Where the system keeps telling you to wait and see while your body keeps getting louder.

Today I'm talking about what I call autoimmunity before the autoimmunity. That phase where immune dysregulation is already running the show, but no one has given it a name yet. I'm walking you through why the referral cycle fails women in this phase, what pre-autoimmune patterns actually look like in real life, and why inflammation is never the root cause. It's the dashboard light.

I'm also sharing the story of a patient I call Mandy. She did everything right. She went to every appointment. She waited through every referral. And every time, she left with some version of "you're fine." She wasn't fine. And once we stopped waiting for a diagnosis to give her permission to heal, everything changed.

Inside this episode, we cover:

• Why the diagnosis lag is not prevention. It's delayed action.
• What the gray zone actually looks like in your body.
• Why the referral cycle is designed to rule out disease, not restore function.
• The internal stressors driving immune activation that no one is talking about.
• The three buckets: Reset, Repair, Rebuild, and why sequence matters.
• Why chasing inflammation keeps you stuck in the supplement cycle.

If you've been bounced between specialists with no answers. If your imaging came back normal but your body didn't feel that way. If you've started wondering whether you're just being dramatic. You're not. Your physiology is loud, and it's been trying to tell you something.

Share this episode with one woman who's been told she's fine when she knows she's not. This is the conversation she's been waiting for.

Your next steps are below:

✨ 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

✨ Get the book: You Are Not Fine  www.youarenotfine.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, wellness warriors. Welcome to the Anchor to Wellness Show, your compass in the sea of holistic health. I'm Casey Wallace and I'm your passionate advocate for vibrant well-being. 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. If you've ever been told your labs are normal, while you're sitting there thinking, cool, so why do I feel like I'm falling apart? This episode is for you. Because I need to say something out loud that is not being said nearly enough. Autoimmune disease rarely starts at the diagnosis. It starts way earlier in what I call the gray zone. In the years where your body is clearly waving those red flags, but you don't yet meet any kind of criteria, or your labs are normal, or we'll just wait and see. Okay. In the years where you've you're just exhausted and inflamed, reactive, overwhelmed, and not like yourself, and you're told things like it's just stress, you're anxious, you're depressed, we'll just watch it, come back if it gets worse. And what happens next is what I call the referral cycle. You get bounced around like a pinball. Primary care, referral. Referral, months of waiting. Appointment day finally comes, you're hopeful, then you leave with either no answers or a vague plan that sounds like, yeah, let's just kind of wait and see, or you're handed something that treats the symptom but never explains why. And in the meantime, you're still going home in a body that doesn't feel safe, you're still waking up tired, you're still dealing with the joint pain that moves around, you're still puffy, you're still inflamed. Even when you're, you know, eating pretty healthy, your brain still feels foggy, your mood still feels reactive. And it's not because you're weak, it's because your physiology is loud and it's speaking loudly at you. And the worst part, you start to question yourself. You start to wonder, am I just being dramatic? Is this all in my head? I think maybe I'm just getting older, or if you should just push through. And you know what? I'm not buying any of that because what I see over and over, especially in women, is that autoimmunity has a runway. There is a before. And that before phase, it matters because it's the phase where you can still change the trajectory. And I want to be really careful how I say this because I'm not here to bash medications or make people feel scared. There are absolutely times when immunosuppressants or biologics are completely appropriate. But I am here to say this: it's a lot harder to rebuild your health after years of immune-driven damage than it is to intervene when your body is showing early signs that it's dysregulated. This is why I love working with empowered women who are willing to do the work, or the women who are like, okay, if we're not waiting for the diagnosis, what do we do now? Where do we look? What's actually driving this? And today I'm going to walk you through what autoimmunity before the autoimmunity looks like, and a lot of times why the system misses it and what it actually means to shift your internal terrain so your immune system can stop living like a smoke alarm that goes off every time someone makes toast. And I'm going to tell you a story about a patient who recently came to me who was getting bounced all over the place inside the medical system, this referral, this specialist, and getting nowhere. She was getting dismissed as anxious and depressed, and she was told, let's just wait and see if something autoimmune develops further. Basically, she wasn't sick enough. She was stuck in the cycle. Please hear me. This is not about intelligence. This is not about willpower. This is not about just being too sensitive. It's about the fact that the conventional system is designed to rule out disease and not necessarily to restore function. I'm not against conventional medicine, but there's a reason why I left conventional medicine. And if you need to go back and listen to those episodes, there's podcasts. I did a podcast about that. So go back and listen. So if you're in the middle of this, if you're in this weird middle space, you're not sick enough on paper, but definitely not well enough in real life, listen closely. You're not crazy and you're not doomed to just wait until it gets worse. So let's talk about that before thing. What is that gray zone? Why that referral cycle fails, what pre-autoimmune looks like. What do I mean when I say autoimmunity before the autoimmunity? I'm talking about the phase where your body is clearly dysregulated, immune-wise, metabolically, hormonally, neurologically, but you don't have this neat little diagnosis that makes the system take you seriously. This is the space where you might hear things like your labs are normal, your ANA is positive, but it doesn't really mean anything. Your thyroid's fine, your inflammation markers, they're just not high enough. Let's just repeat in six months. Maybe you need therapy. It's probably just anxiety. And listen, I'm not here to trash talk therapy. I love nervous system work. I love mind body work. But when a woman is telling me my body feels like it's turning on me and she's dealing with fatigues and flares and joint pain and brain fog and gut chaos and rashes and reactions and weight that won't budge and sleep that doesn't restore her. And the only explanation is stress. That is lazy medicine because stress isn't a diagnosis, it's a category. And if we don't decode what kind of stress is happening, is it blood sugar stress? Is it sleep stress? Is it inflammatory stress, gut stress, toxin stress, trauma stress, overtraining stress, under-eating stress? They're all basically telling you to calm down while your body is screaming for help. So let's talk through why this referral cycle fails women in this phase. And here's the hard truth. I've been there. The conventional medical system is designed to answer one main question, and that is do you have a diagnosable disease we can name, code, and treat? It's not designed to answer the question you're actually asking, which is why is my body changing? Why don't I feel like myself? And what's driving this? So you end up what I call the diagnosis waiting room. You're symptomatic enough to suffer, but you're not sick enough to qualify. And that is the exact phase where women lose years of their life, not because they're weak, but because they're dismissed. So I want to talk about what is this pre-autoimmune, what does it look like in real life? This is the part where people expect me to just say, oh yeah, inflammation, it's just inflammation, and we stop there. No, because inflammation is usually the result, it's not the starting point. Here's what I say way more often: your immune system is becoming more reactive because the train is unstable, meaning that your internal environment is creating constant irritation and immune signaling. So in this pre-autoimmune phase, it often shows up like this, okay? You're exhausted, but your body doesn't feel calm. You feel that like tired but wired feeling. And what about the reactivity? Like things like food and smells and supplements and stress, everything just feels like too much. Your sleep is fragile. You're waking up at 2 to 3 a.m. and you're just wide awake, your sleep doesn't feel restorative, and then there's that joint pain, that stiffness that comes and goes, it migrates all over, it flares randomly. Then our gut, our gut is inconsistent. We might have bloating, constipation, loose stools, everything just feels like it's sensitive to our stomach. And then the skin is doing those weird things like rashes and itching and flushing and breakouts and dryness. That's all connected, okay? Your mood, it can be we can be snappy or anxious. We could have a low mood. It feels it doesn't just feel like mental things, it feels like something else is going on. And then, of course, our brain starts to fill off. There, there's word-finding issues and fog and poor focus, and then we get overstimulated so easily. So here's the point here: these symptoms aren't random, they're patterned. It's not just you're falling apart, okay? Your body is adapting to stressors and losing resilience, and your immune system starts acting like it has no buffer. So let's talk about how this is a capacity problem because this is honestly why I love working with empowered women. I talk about this a lot. I want to work with empowered women. Take your power back from everyone else, okay? Anyone that's willing to do this work, because you understand this, it's a resilience issue. It's not a weakness issue, it's not just a mindset issue. We stop chasing things and those symptoms like just a whack-a-mole, and we start asking, what is driving our immune activation? What is draining our capacity to regulate this inflammatory inflammation? And what is keeping our nervous system stuck in protective mode? What is constantly poking the bear internally or externally? And this is where I want to bring the story, that story of that patient I discussed earlier, because her story is such a perfect example of how this goes down. She did what most women do, she trusted the process, she went to her appointments, she waited for the referrals, she did the whole watch and see thing. And for a long time, the takeaway she kept getting was basically you're anxious, you're depressed, you're just a busy mom, nothing is wrong, but something was wrong. And once we started looking at the terrain, things like her stress physiology, her metabolic stability, her inflammation inputs, those immune system things, right? The gut immune signaling, everything started to make sense. So let me tell you what happened. Let me tell you about her. We're going to call her Mandy. I talk about her in my book. So go get my book, You Are Not Fine. Okay. I love telling her story because it's the perfect example of what I mean when I say autoimmunity before the autoimmunity, okay? Because she's not lazy. She wasn't just not trying. She wasn't sitting on the couch and eating junk food and wondering why she felt bad. She was doing what most women do. She was pushing through. After a long time, she lived in that same gray zone pattern with that area where you're not sick enough for the system to call you anything, but you don't feel well. Okay, you're not fine. Fatigue, she had fatigue that didn't match what was going on. She had brain fog that just she didn't feel like herself, body aching, flarings, things were flaring, everything was just all over the place. Gut issues felt unpredictable, sleep was not restorative, and she had a nervous system that felt like it just couldn't calm down, okay? And when she did what she was supposed to do, she went to the doctors, she got put into that referral cycle, appointment, waiting list, specialist, more waiting, repeat. And every time she showed up with real symptoms, the message she kept getting was some version of your labs are fine, nothing is technically wrong. It's probably anxiety, it's probably depression. Let's just keep an eye on it. And you know what that does to a woman? It makes her start questioning her own reality. Because when your body feels inflamed and reactive and exhausted, but the people you're trusting to help you just keep telling you it's all in your head, you start doing this kind of dangerous thing. You start to distrust yourself. She started wondering, oh, maybe I'm just weak. Maybe I'm just too emotional, I'm too dramatic, I should be able to handle things better. And here's the part that makes me so fired up. When women get put into that box of anxious and depressed, it becomes a dead end. Not because anxiety and depression aren't real, they are truly real, but because sometimes when we've been labeled with this mental health thing, it's actually physiology that is screaming. It's a nervous system overdrive, it's inflammatory signaling, it's blood sugar chaos, it's circadian disruption, it's a gut immune activation, it's the body in protective mode. And in her case, the more we listened, the clearer it became. She wasn't just stressed. Her body had been running without a buffer for a long time. And here's where things changed. We stopped waiting for a diagnosis to give her permission to heal. We stopped asking, does she meet criteria? And we started asking the better questions. What is driving immune activation right now? What is draining her resilience? What's keeping her system stuck in overdrive? What's creating this constant internal stress load? And when we approached her body through that lens, her symptoms stopped looking random. They started looking more predictable, like a pattern, like a system. And this is when it made sense. One of the biggest shifts for her was simply this validation, not hype, not a quick fix, just finally hearing, nope, you're not crazy. This is not you, just you. It's not a character flaw. And once she had that, she could do something that most women can't do when they're stuck in fear and confusion. She could take action with clarity. She had validation for why she felt that way. We focused on restoring stability first because you can't rebuild resiliency on a shaky foundation. So we started foundational, and that's when her momentum started. Her energy stopped free-falling, her sleep became more predictable, her reactivity began to calm down, her brain started to feel sharper, her body felt less less like a ticking time bomb. And that's the part I want you to hear. It's not one magic supplement, it's not the perfect diet. It is rebuilding capacity, restoring the foundations. And that is exactly why I care so much about reaching women before the autoimmune label shows up. Because if you wait until the damage is heavy, until it's advanced, until joints are really involved, organs are involved, and you're living in flare cycles, until the conversation becomes biologic, it becomes a steeper climb. It's not impossible, but it's harder. And what breaks my heart is how many women could have shifted the trajectory years earlier if someone had taught them what this gray zone actually means. So if you're listening and thinking, that's me, I'm in this referral cycle. I'm waiting forever. I'm being told to watch and see. I want to give you the reframe that changed things for Mandy. She, you don't have to wait for the diagnosis to start restoring resilience. And again, it's not too late. It's just a little bit harder climb, okay? So let's talk about this diagnosis lag problem. Let's talk about one of the biggest problems in autoimmune care, and that is the diagnosis lag. Because most people don't just suddenly get autoimmunity. They live in this immune dysregulation for years, and then one day they finally meet criteria. One day the labs will cross the line, the inflammation markers get too high, the symptoms get bad enough, and the right specialist finally gets to be able to put the right code on the paper. I'm not dogging them, but that's what happens. I lived it. And that then everyone acts like this autoimmune disease, it just appeared. And we get another autoimmune disease and another autoimmune disease. There's a reason why people are getting so many autoimmune diseases when they get one, okay? It's because the immune system is so dysregulated at that point. The diagnosis is not a starting point, and this is where so many women get stuck in what I call this zone, this gray zone. You're in that space where you might get something like your ANA is positive, your symptoms are real, your imaging looks normal, let's watch and wait, come back in six months. Waiting for the label is not prevention, it's delayed action. It's basically saying, let's wait until your body has accumulated enough damage to be undeniable. And that's not the doctor's fault necessarily. It's kind of all this criteria that's been developed that you have to fit into this code so that insurance can get involved. So that's the problem. Here's why that happened happens. It's again, it's not because doctors are evil, it's but it's because that's how the system was built. Conventional medicine has to have that diagnosable disease. It's not a question of just why do I feel awful even though I'm not sick enough yet? Okay. Why, why you can feel so terrible when you're not sick enough? It's because the immune system can be loud and dysregulated long before it becomes official. Okay, that's why we get those fatigue and brain fog and joint pain. Okay, so that's happens even before the labs cross into a certain threshold. And we have to think about when we don't meet the criteria, the system doesn't have that standardized pathway. So instead of saying, let's rebuild the resilience and restore the foundations and the terrain now, it becomes we have to wait. But waiting doesn't stop the immune system from learning bad patterns. So imaging can be normal while your body is screaming. Imaging is great for certain things, it can look for structural damage and obvious inflammation and advanced changes, but early stage immune dysfunction often doesn't show up as this dramatic structural finding. So you can have again normal imaging, normal labs, but you're you can still feel inflamed and reactive. There's something going on deeper when you're having these symptoms, and we can't just shove everyone into this, you're just anxious and depressed box, or maybe you're just making it up just because the test is normal, because sometimes it is actually a physiologic stress response. So there's a that long runway before the diagnosis, and we have to shift that trajectory, and there's a chain reaction involved here. And I want to talk more about that because your immune system doesn't just malfunction in isolation, it reacts to the environment it's living in. So that is where I want you to stop thinking, why is my immune system broken? and start thinking, what is my immune system responding to? Because your internal environment is unstable. When that's unstable metabolically, hormonally, or neurologically, your immune system becomes much more like triggered a lot more. So here's why I say it's not just stress. Yeah, life stress matters. Our relationships, our work, like previous traumas, seasons of overwhelm. We can't necessarily get rid of our stress, but what most women don't realize is that there's another layer of stress that's happening 24-7, and that's metabolic stress, that internal strain, the stress of blood sugar swings, the stress of poor sleep, and stress of circadian, that cortisol rhythm dysfunction, and then the stress of gut permeability issues, the stress of immune activation, the stress of the toxic load we have, we're exposed to so many toxins every day. So I want to talk through these so you understand them more. When we get blood sugar swings, when it's unstable, up and down, up and down, our body reads that as a threat. Your brain and your immune system both depend on this steady fuel. And what happens is we get cortisol and adrenaline spikes to compensate. We get cravings, we get irritability, we get crashes, and then you also get inflammation. Inflammatory signaling because the body is constantly putting out fires related to this metabolic strain. Okay. That is why we're living in this pattern of tired and wired cravings, crashes, reactive, puffy, inflamed, and it can go back to blood sugar swings so many times. Then we have to think about poor sleep and circadian disruption because that can create significant immune volatility. And let's layer this in because sleep is not just a luxury, it's immune regulation, it's toxin regulation. When your sleep is fragmented, when you're waking up at two or three o'clock in the morning, your circadian rhythm is off, the immune system becomes more volatile because it also is creating metabolic shifts as well. And then that whole rhythm gets chaotic, the immune response is chaotic. And when we're told, like, oh yeah, just get more sleep, that's great. Great advice. If your body will actually let you. So that is why I always tell people if you're not getting good sleep, we have to work on that first. And there's different things we can do to help people get better sleep, not just take a sleep aid. There's so many things we can do for that. And then there's that chronic stress physiology, the cortisol and adrenal strain creates a lot of immune confusion. Okay, cortisol's not a villain, cortisol is So powerful, we have to have it to survive. It does help regulate inflammation, it helps with blood sugar, it helps us respond to life. But cortisol is supposed to rise in the morning and fall at night. And when that rhythm gets flipped or flattened or stuck high, the immune system gets confused. And the cortisol can mask inflammation until it can't. Meaning that if cortisol is running high for long enough, you can that's when you can feel that wired but tired feeling anxious and inflamed, reactive. The inflammation markers they can look okay. So eventually the system will burn out. That cortisol output drops, DHEA drops, and resiliency drops. And suddenly inflammation becomes more obvious, symptoms flare harder, and people feel like they like just randomly got worse, but it wasn't just random, it was that buffer, the whole thing disappearing. Now I want to talk about the gut barrier and the microbiome because of what it does with the immune system. I talk about the gut all the time because a massive portion of your immune system is tied to your gut. So if the gut barrier is irritated, if that microbiome is imbalanced, like that's the good and the bad bacteria, if there's gut permeability issues, that's where we hear leaky gut, that immune system it gets exposed to things it shouldn't be dealing with all day long. And that's where we can get things like food reactions, bloating, bowel issues, skin flares, joint pain, brain fog, those like histamine type reactions, like where you eat something and your heart rate kind of starts to go up, or you get that flush feeling, and then that fatigue that feels heavy. Okay. That is why women can eat kind of healthy, like really be trying to eat healthy and still feel awful because it's not just about food quality, it's about immune signaling. Okay. So now let's talk about toxin damage because um we have to be able to have appropriate drainage, and our body just can kind of seem like it's reacting to everything. And that is an issue that's not always a quick fix, and that's toxic load and then the drainage associated. So if your drainage pathways are sluggish, like liver, bile flow, you know, gut motility, lymphatic movement, what are we doing with sweating, hydration, even minerals, your body can start feeling like it's reacting to everything smells, you know, perfumes, supplements, foods, hormone shifts, stress, not because you're just fragile, but because your toxic load is so high and your output is low. So the immune system does what it always does when it senses overwhelm. It's gonna get louder, it's gonna get more reactive. Okay. So what's the takeaway if you're stuck in this cluster of fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, mood swings, gut chaos, and nobody's taking you seriously because labs and imaging aren't screaming yet? This is often the reason that it's because the immune system is responding to an unstable internal environment. And once you understand that, the conversation can change from, you know, what diagnosis do you have to what is driving the immune system? How do I rebuild resiliency and get it to calm down? Okay. And that is where we move into this part where we talk about these buckets that we we can first start to stabilize without overwhelm. Okay. Inflammation is not a root cause, okay? Inflammation is a dashboard light, it's a signal. Something's going on deeper, right? The roots are the root cause, not inflammation. Okay. It's kind of like a check engine signal that something upstream is off. I actually would say something more downstream, like something down in the roots is off. And what I see all the time, especially in the wellness world, is people treating inflammation like it's the whole problem. They, you know, like they start on like this whole anti-inflammatory whack-a-mole thing. You know, here's a supplement, here's another detox, just get on this protocol, here's another elimination diet, or another expensive powder, or let's do this gut healing stack. And listen, I love tools. I use these things, I use supplements strategically, but here's the truth: if you're only chasing inflammation, you'll end up just supplementing forever because you're not fixing what's driving the immune alarm. You're just trying to silence the siren, and your body is smarter than that. Okay. So this is why don't play that everything is normal, you're fine game. That's why I wrote my book, You Are Not Fine, because normal just means you don't qualify for a diagnosis. It does not mean you're functioning well. A woman can be normal and still be inflamed, reactive, exhausted, and foggy because that whole thing matters. And this is where I like to empower people. We don't wait for one lab to scream. We watch the pattern. Maybe your CRP is technically normal, but it's slowly creeping up, or maybe your fasting insulin is within range, if it was even checked, to be honest, but it's not optimal, right? Or maybe your triglycerides and your HGL are waving this quiet red flag, or maybe something's in your CBC that everything's normal, but maybe there's something there that's a clue that something's going on with the immune system. What about those thyroid numbers? They can be fine, but your symptoms are not, okay? That's not random chaos that your body communicating. So the goal isn't to obsess over the inflammation. The goal is to ask, again, why is your immune system turning on the dashboard light in the first place? Okay, when you fix that, the blood sugar, the sleep, the cortisol, the gut, all those things, because that changes our environment, we can stop chasing symptoms. So let's talk about these three buckets because where do you even start when you're in that gray zone? Because sometimes, like wellness people, like I fit between this like wellness influencer that's overwhelming you with this, you know, science-based, you know, evidence of someone getting better, you know, and more of the conventional mindset folks. Um, but I fit in the middle of that because sometimes you get handed 47 steps and 19 supplements and a food list that makes you want to cry. And that's all we're doing here. We're we're doing a map, okay? Because the how has to be personalized to your patterns and your labs and your life and your capacity. And I want you to understand the three buckets why we understand that just random hacks haven't worked, okay? So, bucket number one, stabilize the signals. That's why I talk about rhythm reset, okay? This is the phase where we stop the daily chaos. This is stopping the blood sugar from swinging, getting your sleep better, getting your nervous system. It's stuck in overdrive. So getting that figured out and trying to get that immune system to calm down as much as we can just with resetting rhythms, okay? This is why so many women can feel like they're doing things right, but they're still reacting. We we rebuild because we buffer, we rebuild because we reset these rhythms. Number two, the number two bucket, reduce the immune load. That's what I call re root repair. Okay, reset repair so far, right? Once the foundation stops wobbling, then we can address what's actually provoking the immune system. This is where people jump in too early. They try to heal the gut or detox while their system is still stressed or underslept or their blood sugars and unstable, and then they wonder why everything's making them feel worse. And that's why I say sequence matters, timings matters because we have to look at those major sources of immune activation, inflammation signaling that's keeping the dashboard on, and that's things like gut immune activation, hormone immune activation, and loops, those things, hidden inflammatory triggers. How do we calm things down? What nutrients are being depleted? Okay. And I don't do this with fear, and we don't do it with restriction because that can make it worse when we just keep pushing through and restricting more, and we for sure don't do it, which is supplement roulette. We do it with a clear strategy and a body first order of operation so your system can process change without flaring. And then bucket number three is rebuild resilience, okay? Reset, repair, rebuild. This is the bucket that makes the results last because even if you calm your symptoms for a season, if your body has this trigger response, you will just keep cycling back. And this is where when we rebuild that capacity, we have better stress tolerance. Like we're never going to get rid of our stress, but we'll have better stress tolerance, stronger recovery, more stable mood, more stable energy, clearer thinking, and a nervous system that doesn't just treat every day like a threat. This is what women want. They don't just want less symptoms, they want to feel like themselves again, right? Steady, clear, and in control. So if you're listening to this and thinking, okay, I see myself in this, but I'm overwhelmed, even hearing the buckets, that is not a sign that you're failing. That's a sign that your system is already at capacity. And that is why so many women stay stuck in this referral cycle, the supplement cycle. You don't need more information. You need a structured process and someone that can help you interpret what your body is actually saying so you're not just guessing because the before phase, this autoimmune before the autoimmunity is where trajectory can change. And that is exactly why I build things the way I rebuild them with this reset, repair, rebuild in mind, not to throw more noise at you, but to give you more of a step-by-step path that restores stability first and then addresses the drivers and then rebuild resiliency. So you're not waiting for this diagnosis just to get permission to heal. So if you've been living in this gray zone, the positive markers that aren't high enough, the symptoms that are real but not taken seriously, and a body that feels like it's just getting louder, I want you to know you don't have to keep guessing. I've been working on this to make things so much more accessible, especially for women who know something is off but don't want to wait until it becomes undeniable. And one of the most powerful steps you could take first is to look at your stress physiology because cortisol rhythm dysfunction is one of the biggest accelerators of the entire metabolic mess. And there, therefore, the immune mess cycle. And that's why I created the adrenal optimization test. It gives you an at-home look at that cortisol pattern throughout the day. It also looks at DHEA, which is that buffer to cortisol, and tells you how resilient your system really is and what it is in relationship to your cortisol pattern. And also, I didn't just want you to have the test, but I also wanted you to have the tools and the education to actually understand what you're looking at. So you get a member portal that looks at not just your test results, but also looks at how do I fix this? What do I do? What are things I can implement on my own right now to help this? Okay. So the other thing is we have deeper support options with a full guided roadmap. It's not just information, it's transformation. And that's what we're doing inside the resiliency reboot method. We walk through these buckets in the right order with the right strategy and support and real momentum. All this is in your show notes. All the links will be right there. You don't need a diagnosis to start getting your life back. You need a plan that matches what your body is actually doing. This is why I wrote my book, You're not fine, because so many of us are saying we're fine when we're not fine, okay? We're having all this metabolic collapse and hormone craziness and brain health issues. Our brain is foggy, and we're just continuing to push through, which makes it worse. So get the book, you're not fine. It's a great place to start. It's to help you understand that you're not fine, but you can be, okay? So if nothing else comes out of this episode, I want you to think this, okay? Most people don't suddenly just get autoimmune. They live in immune dysregulation for years, and then finally one day they just meet criteria. That's the diagnosis lag. That is not prevention, that is delayed action. So don't just stay stuck in the gray zone. You're not weak, you're not making it up, your body's communicating, and that inflammation, again, it's not the root, it's the dashboard light. If you only chase inflammation, you will stay stuck. Okay. The goal is to fix what's driving that immune alarm, whether it's the metabolic mess, immune mess, all the things that drive that. Okay. So here's the next steps. You can download our free guide. Nine hidden signs your metabolism is stuck in survival mode. You can stop guessing and get real data. You can get deeper support inside the resiliency reboot method. You can get my book, you are not fine. Any of those things are great places to start because so many women, you are suffering in silence, you're thinking you're the problem when really you're just living in that diagnosis lag, that gray zone. You don't have to wait for permission to heal. That's what I'm doing here. I'm trying to help you to understand that we can feel better. We can live in our purpose, we can live in our presence, we can be the powerful, empowered people that we're supposed to be. So keep going, and I'll see you in the next episode. 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.