[DR. CRISTINA CASTAGNINI] Behind The Bite podcast is part of a network of podcasts that are good for the world. Check out podcasts like the Full of Shift podcast, After the First Marriage podcast and Eating Recovery Academy over at practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to Behind The Bite podcast. This podcast is about the real-life struggles women face with food, body image and weight. We're here to help you inspire and create better healthier lives. Welcome. Well, hello everyone. Thank you for being here and listening to the show. I really do appreciate all of you for being here and all of you who rate, review and subscribe to the show. it's just about this time of year when I have an opportunity to decide if I'm going to continue with the podcast or not. Honestly, part of what helps me determine whether or not to do so is really about the feedback and all the information I get from all of you listeners, the messages, the questions, the comments, they really all do make a difference. I want to be able to have guests in topics on here that are relevant and meaningful to all of you who are listening. So, people have asked me why I continue to record the podcast every week when it's really not something that's a source of income, and it also takes a lot of time away from my life and my practice. The truth is that I want to continue to do whatever I can to help anyone out there who is struggling with an eating disorder, disordered eating or body image issues. Because my hope is that through hearing other people's stories, you can feel less alone or even realize that you have an eating disorder and seek help. I really hope to get information out there that's accurate and helps dispel the myth out there that are wrong and perpetuating toxic diet culture. So please keep the communication coming. Go to my website and use the new link I have to Speakpipe and ask me a question, leave comments, and like I said, rate review and subscribe to this show because it all really matters. Now that being said, let's get to today's show. Look, I know I say this often, but we really do have an amazing show and guest on for you today. Not only is our guest, someone who is here to share information from both her personal perspective, but her professional perspective. Michelle McGough is an acoustic sound therapist that specializes in adult recovery of childhood trauma and eating disorders. She has recovered from a long-term relationship with bulimia herself, and I can't wait to get her on the show. Well, Michelle, welcome to this show. I'm really glad to have you here. [MICHELLE MCGOUGH] Thank you, thank you [DR. CRISTINA] So, I know you have a quite amazing story, and I am so grateful always when I have somebody on here who's willing to share their journey because, as you and I were talking a little bit before we got started here, it really has such an impact and it's so powerful when you hear somebody else's story, it helps you feel much less alone. For anyone listening who maybe has no idea even that they're struggling, they might be thinking they're doing something normal with food, or what they're doing is just not dieting correctly. Or they might hear something that on this podcast from somebody like yourself who's sharing and realizing, oh my gosh, like, I need help. I really appreciate you being on here and being willing to open up and share. So saying that, you started having struggles early on in your life and I'm just wondering what happened for you that you started to notice, okay, I'm not having a healthy relationship with food? [MICHELLE] I don't know if I ever had a healthy relationship with food until much, much, much later in life. I grew up in a pretty tumultuous household. I was also adopted at birth so I never had, I wanted milk. I didn't want bottle milk. I wanted a booby just like every child does. I didn't even get that, and I'm not making a correlation to that because I don't know, but personally I never felt sated but then coupled with a pretty, I would say, violent and extremely emotionally abusive household, I never felt happy. People will say, "Hey, wasn't there a moment in your childhood that you can go back to and just puts a smile on your face?" I don't have any, I don't I really don't. The only pleasure that I was really allowed to have was food and as a pleasure, I wouldn't say that we didn't have good food in the house. It was mostly both of my parents, adoptive parents worked. And my mother, she didn't want to cook. It was still traditional. I grew up, I was born in the 70s so mom was the one responsible for meals, even though she worked too. She didn't really enjoy that so it was mostly a pre-packaged boxed foods, the types of foods that if you've done any nutritional studying, and I'm sure you've done a bunch, they don't really satisfy us. They don't have good nutrition. Then there was no love in the house at all, I mean, even between my parents. So that was an icky situation but if I needed a little pick-me-up, which was pretty often, I would eat, and it wouldn't even have to be a sweet, we didn't have a lot of them in the house. I would just have more of whatever normal foods that there were around, crackers or anything starchy. I found later in my practice that starchy foods and carbohydrates, and my favorite was heavy dairies, whole milk and yogurts and ice cream, things like that, cheese. I found out sort of later that a lot of that is associated with anger, which is in the in the liver. So when you hear about fatty liver and you find out someone's been eating a lot of dense dairy and a lot of carbohydrates, you'll see that leads to fatty liver. So I think people often, not just me, would use foods to sort of cope with the feelings of anger that I wasn't really allowed to express. As I grew up I became heavy from eating that way. At that time, I was the only child in my class that was heavy. I think it's fairly common now. I think our foods are a lot different than how they were at that time. But I would get singled out for that and told I was disgusting and fat and gross and all the words that everybody knows. I mean, I can think of a laundry list of them. I would get that same humiliation from my parents. My father would call me a sausage or my mom would say, you're as fat as your dad. The funny, not funny, but the ironic thing is they were both very overweight. They also used foods to cope with their unexpressed emotions. They were very stoic very quiet. Talking about feelings was not a good thing. So this went on and on and all I really wanted was to just get out of that house. So when I was in high school, I went to public school and everyone in, I think 10th, maybe 11th grade, we all had to take the avap, which at the time was the military aptitude test. They made everybody in school take this test and I did really, really, really well on this test so all these recruiters were calling me., My parents weren't going to give me any money for college, and we weren't poor enough for me to qualify for most of the scholarships and I also worked. After school, I wasn't in academics or any other types of programs that would allow me to like get a leg up into college so it just just wasn't on the radar. So I thought, okay, I'll go do that. Somebody actually wants me, so I enlisted and even though I was a little overweight, they still took me in. I had to die a lot to get in there. So the last, like, month before I went off to basic training, I had really deprived myself because I just really wanted to get out of that house. That type of discipline wasn't something that I typically had. That just shows how desperate I was to get out of there. So I got out and I got to basic training, and this is the first time that I had three actual meals a day and they were pretty good. Like, the breakfast was cooked for us, you could ask for the eggs the way that you wanted, and they had all the condiments. It was great. I loved going to the mealtime unless we were getting the, when we were doing field days but it was nice and it was the best tasting food I'd ever had, if that tells you what I was growing up with. So I put on weight some of it was muscle because we did athletic training every day, and I did okay in the athletic training. I wasn't a fast runner, but I was strong and so I was able to to make it through. But when we got all done I think this was eight or nine weeks that I had done the basic training, they gave us our clothes back, our civilian clothes, we got all of our luggage and everything back and I couldn't even get them up. I couldn't get my jeans up, let alone zipped or anything and I had no idea because the bds, the dress, like the regular casual camo outfits that they give you, they're really comfortable and they're adjustable and you have no idea what size you are. That was pretty scary because when I we had to put our civilian clothes on to travel or it was expected that we would to go on to the next step, which was AIT or the occupational training that they send you to, so you learn your military job. My occupational training was pretty long. I want to say it was nine months or 10 months. Some of them are as short as like eight weeks and then they can go a little bit over a year so I had a very long time and I was at Fort Augusta, Georgia and still getting these great meals. The food was even better at AIT and I was just, I was putting on weight and they'd weigh us in every month. I had gone up significantly, like higher than I'd ever weighed before and they pulled me aside and said, listen, you have to do something about this or you're going to be out. That's when I started with bulimia. That was a 19 year affair I had with bulimia, and I think I was, just turned 18 at that point. [DR. CRISTINA] So they had these requirements that you had to meet there? [MICHELLE] Oh yeah. They had height and weight requirement. Well, they had a minimum height requirement, but there was a weight requirement associated with every maybe inch and a half or two inches, I can't remember exactly, but there was a range of acceptable weight. They had different charts for males and females at that time. I don't know what they do today. So there's also a physical fitness requirement too. I was able to like, I did grade on the core work and the strength work, but running, like, I would always just barely make it. It wasn't my scene, the running. But because I was passing, they gave me a little bit more of a little more leeway because I would meet the physical fitness requirements in terms of the test but there was a weight level where I just went so far beyond, they're like, okay, you can't keep this up. It's time to get back down into the scale. [DR. CRISTINA] Just so sad because you were meeting the criteria, you were obviously able to do all the things. How sad. [MICHELLE] Yeah, but I probably was on track to get to a point where I couldn't keep it up. I mean, I wasn't healthy anyway. I was already having a problem and while this did trigger an eating disorder, I had one to begin with, I wasn't just eating because I was hungry. I was just eating because it was like the most pleasure that I would get out of an entire day. I didn't know how to have healthy relationships. I'd never seen one and a lot of the people that were there with me were mostly, well, I think we were all enlisted and everybody was trying to get away from something. I mean, for a lot of people that were there, this was like the best opportunity that they could possibly have. If you think about that, you think about all the options you have in life as a teenager, a young adult. If the military is the best possible option that you have, like, gosh that's, it's not the worst situation in life, but it's probably not the one that most people would wish for when they're growing up. Most people who want to be in the military when they grow up, it's because they had a family figure who did it that they admired often. A lot of times those people were officers, so they went to college first, they didn't go in there straight away. [DR. CRISTINA] So this started your trajectory and your, like you said, your relationship with bulimia? Did anyone catch on in the military? [MICHELLE] No, not at all. Nope [DR. CRISTINA] Okay. My goodness, for anyone listening, who knows what that whole experience is like, it's not, I mean, it's hell. So 19 years, so how long were you in the military for? [MICHELLE] Not that long. I had gone in as a reservist because when you, when you go to the processing station, well, when you go to the, to basically pick out your military occupation, they give you, I didn't know this at the time, but they give you options and often those options are based on the bonuses that the recruiters get. So you don't get to see all the options. The options that they gave me for full-time were just not as good in terms of like, what could I do with those skills later in life. They just weren't as good as the reserve skills. So I was gone for, I was a little over a year and then came back and lived with my parents and having had that break and then coming back you might think like, oh, well you got to see some, you got to make some friends and you got to see some good relationships. Coming back, you must have noticed that like your family was maybe a little off. I didn't see a lot of good relationships in the military either, so I still didn't know. I thought my problem was me. It's what everybody told me but I will tell you that the bulimia was something that my parents noticed at home. My mother noticed, and her way of noticing it was that, it was a very old home, like a late 1800s. It had been a carriage house and then reconverted into a little house and it had two pronged electric and had terrible plumbing so the toilet wouldn't flush all the way and so she would notice, but her only issue with it was that I was making a mess in the bathroom. It's absurd. [DR. CRISTINA] I'm sorry. I know listeners can't see your face, maybe you can't even see your own when you said that, but yeah, I, wow, if that was her only problem with it, that, wow, that speaks volumes. [MICHELLE] I mean, as an adult, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to speak over you, but --- [DR. CRISTINA] No, you didn't. [MICHELLE] As an adult I know now that she had no ability to express her emotions, none whatsoever, other than anger or dismay or all the negative things. I'm sure that that's what it was like when she grew up in her family household. I'd asked her about it, but she wasn't really able to tell me, "Hey, what was it like when you were growing up with grandma and grandpa?" She said, "Oh, it was fine." So it's sad to not know how to express emotions. I don't know how I became a product of that household because I'm so different. [DR. CRISTINA] But that actually just went through my mind wondering, okay, so you're back in this obviously, toxic environment where emotions are not expressed. I mean, that speaks volumes to why you turned to bulimia and so, fast forward a little bit here, so you obviously have turned your life around and are doing some amazing and wonderful things. That's more of what I want to get to now. I mean, I don't know if you want to share anything with the audience about like how you broke up with your eating disorder and how that all came about or not. I'll leave that to you, but --- [MICHELLE] Yeah, I'm happy to. I had all sorts of relationship problems and I would say work problems really going into my adult life. I would have relationships with, I chose actually really good couple of really good men to be in relationships with, really good people, but I wasn't capable of expressing my emotions in a healthy way. I didn't know how to, and so when I was given that opportunity, I would freeze or I would reject that and they would notice my issues with food and ask me about it in a caring way. It was so terrifying that somebody could see me or could see that thing about me that I would ruin those relationships. It was just kind of a serial problem. At work I was pretty bright definitely capable but when someone would want to give me feedback to say, "Hey, this is great, but could you change this thing, or I didn't really like the way that you did this, but you never did it before, so like, let's talk about how we can improve that," these are like healthy ways of expressing feedback. But I didn't know how to handle that. I'd only ever experienced very negative feedback. The way that I would deal with it was I would either just tune out completely. I didn't even hear it. I would just leave, felt like I was going to the moon or I would turn into my mother and I would respond in ways that I thought were appropriate because it's how I saw someone respond to constructive feedback. So I thought, that's what you do. I got into my mid-20s and realized like, oh, the pattern that keeps happening, the only consistent ingredient there is me. So I started to look for help and it was a good time to look for help in that. Like, insurance was starting to cover therapy, which was great. But it was hard for me to find a therapist that was equipped to deal with all of this stuff that I had and a lot of the programs with the therapist that I would get recommended for I wouldn't even disclose the eating disorder. I would talk about anxiety in order to get help and then I would disclose the eating disorder once I was in the privacy of the room with the therapist. Most of them just weren't, they weren't equipped to deal with it. They weren't comfortable. They would say that I would need to be referred out but then when I would look at what my options were to be referred out. There were very few options that allowed me to continue to live independently and work my full-time job. They wanted inpatient programs. Typically just like a small amount of it was covered and the rest would be out of pocket. It's like, how do you do that if you're not working. So I just sort of stopped talking about it in therapy and I would just talk about anxiety and I got some medications for that. I went through this went over a number of years, CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, biological behavior therapy. I didn't do EFT, but I've had some clients that have done that that looked interesting. But I went through that and I sort of got, I got sort of better in that. It wouldn't happen as often. I developed much better relationships skills, so I was like capable of having good relationships, I was doing better at work, but whenever there was too much stress in my life, I would go back to those old behaviors. They were just so familiar. It was so easy to slip right back into it. It wasn't until I was in my early thirties that I actually found a therapist that like really could tell what was going on and was able to help me further. So I'm going to go into that because we did a ton of work together. We did EMDR, I started to realize like, gosh, all that stuff that happened to me earlier in life was really bad and it wasn't my fault, but I still have to live with it. I'm the immature adult now and I have to deal with it. What do I do? How do I clean up this mess? I didn't even tell her about the eating disorder until I'd been with her for maybe three years. It was just hard. But once I was done working with her, I was pretty good but I would still feel the triggers. I'd still feel that calling to go and set up a binge session and I'd find those triggers at the weirdest moments wouldn't seem like there was that much stress in my life, but I just couldn't see the forest for the trees. I couldn't see it. It wasn't until later when I did some additional work and did sound healing, that I was able to break up some of those, like almost memorized emotions. It was like, it was comfortable, so familiar to be feeling those feelings of bulimia, which to me are like shame and guilt and gosh, like disgust and definitely a lot of anger was very easy to go back into that and I couldn't figure out, no, I have to be angry about I've got this great partner, nice home, my job is pretty good. What is there to be angry about? It was just that stuff that even though I intellectually dealt with it just kept following me around. But I did manage to get to the point where I had stopped doing it, just got less often and less often and less often and finally there was this point where like there was enough space between the trigger and my awareness of it that I could stop. I mean, I still feel the pull sometimes, but I'm just like, I'm not going there. I know where that goes. I don't want to go back to it. So it's been eight years now. [DR. CRISTINA] Congratulations. [MICHELLE] Yeah, thanks. [DR. CRISTINA] Not having that awareness, like not doing it. [MICHELLE] That's, but I mean, I still have that awareness and I see my, it's usually women that I'll see, I'll see my sisters at the store. Like, there's certain things where I just know and I just, I want to reach out to them. But I also know how I would've felt or how I would've responded at that time. It's just not my business to do it, but my heart goes out. [DR. CRISTINA] Well, this is you reaching out to lots of people right now, right? [MICHELLE] Absolutely. [DR. CRISTINA] To speak to where you're at now, sounds like you reach a lot of people in the work you're doing. [MICHELLE] I do. It's been really, really fulfilling. I mean, is it okay if I talk about what it is that I do? [DR. CRISTINA] Oh yeah. I was just going to ask because you do something that I think most people will be like, what exactly is that? So if you could maybe talk about how you got started and what you're doing and what it is that you do, it'd be great. [MICHELLE] Sure. I mean, my history, I was working in technology, so I didn't really, it wasn't bad. I didn't mind it. I liked the people I worked with, but mostly I was just there for the paycheck. It was pretty good. I didn't feel fulfilled but I didn't know what else to do and I had done so much work to get through my coping mechanisms. I mean, it took so many years and so much, it just took so long. I think most people can't hold out that long. So I was trying to figure out like, what are there, are there any other ways to deal with this that don't take quite so long or that would speed up the traditional model so if you're already on a talk therapy and doing CBT and maybe EMDR, if you've got trauma, if you're doing all that, maybe taking a medication? Like does it still have to take so many years, does it? No. And I had heard a lecture from a woman called Eileen Mcisk who had a modality called biofield tuning. This was I think maybe 2015, sometime around there. At that time I was looking to relocate and I took this long, I was in the Bay Area and I was looking to relocate out of there, I took this long trip. I think I took like six weeks off and I drove all around the United States and I stopped at Mount Shasta. I went into this store and I hadn't heard her lecture yet, but I went into a store and they had these tuning forks and I was just intrigued by them. I mean I grew up with a lot of, like, music was like another escape for me, so it was interesting. I bought a couple books and sound therapies, healing, and I bought a couple sets of tuning forks and just played with them. I didn't really know what I was doing, but then I heard the lecture from Eileen and I just thought, oh, that sounds amazing. I followed her for a long time. She had done this, in the book that she wrote that came out around that time, she talked about her own eating disorder. I was like, oh my gosh, somebody totally gets it and understands how to deal with coping mechanisms. That's literally what she does and what her modality is, biofield tuning is. It takes tuning forks into the area around our body. So there are some treatments that are done that can be done on the body where you hold the tuning fork on the body but most of the practitioners do the sessions virtually over the internet. So we're not touching the person. What these forks do is they find stuck energy, which is in the human biofield. I can break that down in a moment to explain how that works, that defines that stuck energy. When we find it, locate it with a tuning fork, so I have one here, so if I take one and bring it into someone's field, the spaces in the field that are fine, there's no resistance. The fork makes it sound, I hit it and it makes it sound. That sound is very coherent. It's a very like, structured wave, very consistent. As soon as they run into resistance, there's like the sub vibration in the fork, like in the handle that I can feel sense. There are different types of vibrations, different emotions have almost like a signature. So I can, over time I picked up on the language of what does depression sound like or anger or fear or anxiety, what do they sound like or feel like. The forks have over and undertones when they run into a dissonant frequency so there's a sound that will come up. I could play it for you. I didn't know if it'll sound very good, but if I do just the neutral sound, you'll just hear the basic sound of the fork and then if I bring it into my own energy, I'm a little excited right now because I'm talking about something that's personal. I bet that we would hear some fear or anxiety a little bit in an overtone there. So when we find that this coherent tone breaks up the incoherent tone and it takes energy to hold that incoherence in the field, so it releases that energy. So somebody who's got a lot of negative beliefs, negative ideas, they're more tired and more weighed down and they start to look heavy. It's literally because holding all of that negativity takes energy and so this breaks that up and releases that energy. If you can, if you're sensitive enough to see auras, you can actually see the light when it's released. It's very subtle, but you can see it. The fork acts like a magnet in the field and we bring that to the body and then that person takes it back. By breaking up that structure of incoherence, the person's able to digest that emotion. They get another chance to sort of go through it. But in a safe environment there's no need to talk about our stories. We don't have to hang, we don't have to rehash it and that's what therapy's for, so talk therapy. So in a biofield tuning session, your thoughts or experiences are your own, and you can speak about them, but it's not required at all. So for someone who feels really shy about that, they're able to experience it without having to go into the story. Then eventually that energy just, it cycles through and it has an opportunity to go back out into the field and be harmonious. Or something long-standing like an eating disorder, it takes it takes a little while to be able to break that down. It really depends on the self-belief, self-worth that someone has about themselves. If they're working seriously with a team, if they've got a good team, a physician, therapist helping them, they're usually able to get through it. Nobody ever comes out of it worse. There's always some lessening or feeling of lightness, like a lessening of that coping mechanism, the triggering, the space between the experience and the trigger gets a little bit bigger every time. So it's a cumulative effect. If it's okay, I can take a few minutes to explain why that works. [DR. CRISTINA] Yeah, that'd be great. [MICHELLE] Okay, thank you. So when I was in science class, I learned about the three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas. If I had gone on to post-secondary physics, I would've learned about plasma, which is the fourth state of matter. That gets into, I think maybe the easiest way for me to break this down is to talk about the earth's system because the earth itself has a magnetic field and it is a macrocosm of the, microcosm of our own human biofield that each person has. A shape, like a Taurus or a toroid it's a donut shape. If you sliced an apple and half it looks like that. On the inside of the apple skin, so to speak, that's the ionosphere and then the outside is in benitasphere and there's a double layer membrane that holds that all together. Within that ionosphere there is a resonance, the earth has standing coherent waves. It's about 7.83 hertz, which would be the resonance. Sometimes it's called the heartbeat of the earth, but that is the standard wave. Every individual has their own standing wave, like their own things are good. It's like natural frequency, everybody has that. When there's incoherence in the field, those are the stuck memories, the trauma, there can even be things from the DNA that can show up in there or things from what was going on like right at the edge of the field, what was going on with mom and dad around the time that we were conceived. There's a lot of information in the field about that. So we can even sort of inherit, I don't know that's really DNA, so to speak, but just energetically we can sort of inherit that vibration of, I think what parent isn't stressed before a child is born. There's a lot to think about there. So we all take on some amount of stress in life, but when there is trauma, like an accident or abuse of any kind, any shock to the system, if we aren't able to digest that appropriately and file it away, it can hang with us. Especially for younger, children don't always have the ability to deal with stuff. They're young and they haven't they don't have the maturity yet to process some of that. So a lot of people have some things in early childhood. It's typically trauma that shows up. The people that are on my table, typically, whether they're thinking about it or not, we typically find something and I'll find something and I can say, gosh there's something around age seven and it feels like intense anxiety. I don't know if you can you hear the tone. It's like that sounds like anxiety. I don't know if anything was going on there, but if there was, if there are any memories coming up that's just what I'm running into right now. Then I work on that area and it dissipates and then I can move that energy into the field and sometimes just a couple two or three sessions is enough for people to go on their merry way. My experience with eating disorders, the people who have disclosed them hasn't been so fast, but there's always been some improvement with the trigger response. [DR. CRISTINA] That's interesting. [MICHELLE] I hope that's helpful. [DR. CRISTINA] No, that is, I was just, my head's going in all different directions about how helpful that could be. Like you said, with the team approach and helping people just energetically move and maybe they couldn't in just with talk therapy, especially if they're clam up and aren't ready to open up and talk yet. [MICHELLE] Yeah, and I think my experience with eating disorder treatment was that it was focused on the eating disorder. That was my experience. This may have changed. It's been a number of years since then, so this may have improved, but the eating disorder wasn't the problem. I knew it was not good for me. I'd even developed mitral valve prolapse. I'm pretty sure I wasn't born with it but it developed and I had some incidents over the years. So I knew it wasn't good for me. It was more that I didn't have another way to cope with whatever it was that I was feeling and I didn't have healthy ways to express or, what's the right word, discharge some of the intensity that I would feel. I can't say that that's everybody's story. I don't know. I know everybody's journey is completely different, but I know that the eating disorder treatment that I experienced just didn't really address the root cause of my problems. [DR. CRISTINA] I would say that eating disorder is not the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. I think, it's why I've talked about on the podcast before, really trying to find a specialist because I think a lot of times the behaviors are more the focus than really what's fueling the symptoms. [MICHELLE] Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, the triggers could be something as, I mean, I experienced a lot of triggers actually switching jobs because I had this consistent for years. I mean a couple decades basically I had this consistent paycheck and full benefits and I didn't have any experience running a business and what was going to happen. I experienced those triggers coming up of, whoa I felt insecure. How are we going to pay the bills? How long will it take for things to, for the money to start coming in? What if I'm not good enough? I had all of these. I think it's not unusual to have this thoughts, but then how do you deal with it? I noticed when I was at the supermarket I would start to, I think for me, because I had done it for so many years I would see the old foods that I would pick and I'd start to go, oh, okay, that's not our way of expressing it. But to this day I still, I would still have those thoughts, the fears. Fears are normal, but I didn't have a healthy way of dealing with them earlier. Now I do. That's really the thing that has, well it's two things, I have a way of dealing with them and I have more space in between experiencing them and the processing instead of reacting immediately, [DR. CRISTINA] Which is the key, I think having that awareness and knowing what's happening and then being able to be more in charge and saying, okay, I'm going to choose something different, rather than the just automatic reaction is engaging in the disorder. This is so eye-opening. I haven't had anybody on here to just talk about this. I think people listening are probably going, wow, this is just so new. I've actually had somebody do the forks, the sound forks once and I felt like it was the most calming thing I always said, like, it was the most calming thing I've experienced more than a massage. It was --- [MICHELLE] Yes, it can be. People fall asleep all the time, which on the phone or on a Zoom can be a little problematic because like it's like, hello, can you hear me? It'll still work, but it works a lot better if you connect the what I'm feeling. There's usually a body sensation when I find something and I'll say, "Hey, you noticing anything?" Then they might say, oh yeah, I'm remembering something, or it's making, I'm feeling a tingle on my shoulder or something. When they make that connection, it usually is more beneficial. But I can still do it if they're asleep, but I prefer to stay awake, but even I do it, I still get tuned almost weekly because I'm able to trade with other practitioners and I still fall asleep from time to time. [DR. CRISTINA] All right, well imagining people will want to know more about you, maybe even go to your website, know you have a website, maybe even contact you work with you, how can they find you? [MICHELLE] Sure, I'm on Instagram. If you want to ask some questions first that, I can understand having questions, you can find me on Instagram as The Practical Catalyst and that's also my website, thepracticalcatalyst.com. You can book online or there's a contact form in there, so if you have some questions for me, that'll just send an email to me directly and we can start a conversation. If you definitely want to try it out, that's great. You can book online, but I wouldn't be surprised if some folks have questions because when you see the pictures up there, I show all of my tools and you'll see the forks and you'll see a crystal and you might think like, okay, what wacky stuff are we doing here? I use the crystal actually as an amplifier. So if we run into something sticky, I'll hold the fork right up to the crystal and it just amplifies it so it's a little more powerful. I'm not doing any spells or anything like that. [DR. CRISTINA] Awesome. All right. Well, I will put all of that in the show notes as well, so people will have direct links to you as well. Thank you so much. Any last final words before we end? [MICHELLE] You know if you're going through any eating disorder, you are not alone. I know it's hard to talk about. It can be embarrassing and there can be feelings of shame or guilt that go with it. You are not alone, not at all, not at all. Don't be afraid and don't give up on yourself. It's okay to ask for help and it's okay to learn new ways of dealing with things. Everybody experiences discomfort and the only thing that's different among us with our issues is how we deal with those feelings of discomfort. [DR. CRISTINA] Very well said and such true words. Again, Michelle, thank you so, so much for being here. [MICHELLE] My pleasure. Thank you. [DR. CRISTINA] This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.