Your Body Isn’t a Shopping Cart: What If Your Symptoms Are Telling One Story?

What if you are not missing another answer—you are missing the connection between the answers you already have?

In this episode, I am talking about why so many women are treating fatigue, weight changes, sleep, digestion, hormones, and stress as separate problems when they may be part of a much bigger picture.

I’ll share the question I’m asking my patients more often—and why looking at when everything started changing can reveal something a symptom-by-symptom approach may miss.

Because your body isn’t a collection of symptoms. Your health has a story.

To join us for our next free masterclass: Connect the Dots: Why You Still Don’t Feel Well After Everything You've done:

https://www.wellnesscornernj.com/connect-the-dots

To schedule your Root Cause Consultation to help you find the true reasons behind your diseases and illness and help determine your next step click here: https://www.wellnesscornernj.com

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Transcript

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Welcome to Health, Life and What's Next. with Dr. Jennifer Ginty. This is the podcast where we explore what it really means to live well through honest conversations about health, life, business, and everything in between. Because remember, healing is about more than medicine. I'm so glad you are here. Let's get into today's conversation I wanna talk today About how women are being sold solutions one symptom at a time, and almost nobody is stopping long enough to ask whether those symptoms belong to the same story. I saw something recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. The FDA had issued warning letters to over 30 telehealth companies over false or misleading marketing claims involving compounded GLP-1 medications. Initially, I thought, "Okay, this is just about GLP-1s," right? This is about marketing. This is about advertising. This is about telehealth. But the more I thought about it, I realized this is much bigger than weight loss medication because look at what is happening around us. You can open your phone right now, and almost every symptom has a product attached to it. You are tired, someone has a cortisol supplement. You are gaining weight, someone has a weight loss program or an injection. You are 43 and older and don't feel like yourself, someone tells you it's perimenopause. You are bloated, there's a gut protocol. You can't sleep, there's a magnesium. You are anxious, nervous system reset. Your libido is gone. Guess what? Let's look at your hormones. The brain fog is increasing. Another hormone conversation. Hair shedding. Here's a supplement. And I remember looking at all these and thinking, when did women's health become a shopping cart?" It's like you're shopping, right? Like you go to the grocery store, you have a shopping cart, you're putting stuff into it. One symptom, one explanation, one product. The next symptoms, another explanation, another product. And meanwhile, the woman taking all of these things is sitting there thinking, why do I still not feel like myself? That's the conversation I wanna have today in this episode, because I think there's a health problem developing that we are not talking about enough. We have more access, We have more testing than ever. Big pharma is producing medications rapidly every day. Supplements are being exposed and released and marketed to us every single minute. There are more health influencers, more podcasts, more wearable datas. AI has just taken over. More information than women have probably ever had. And yet, I am seeing women who are more confused about their bodies, not less. Not because they are not trying. Actually, I think a lot of people, specifically my patients, are trying too much. They are trying everything, and they are trying everything separately. So let me paint you a picture. This is not just one specific patient. It's, it is a combination of patterns that I see again and again, over and over. A woman walks into the clinic, professional, successful, very capable. She sits down, and before I can even ask her anything, she has her phone out. She has screenshots, lab results, supplements she's ordered. She has things saved from Instagram. She has something an AI tool told her to ask me about. She has a list. "I think I have insulin resistance," according to her symptoms, according to Google. "I think my cortisol is high. I think I'm in perimenopause. Maybe I need progesterone. I think my gut is causing inflammation. And I've been thinking about studying GLP-1 because I can't lose this weight." And I say, "Okay. All right. I understand. You did your research. You like, you know, in the middle of the night because you want to get rid of the symptoms. I got it. But before we decide what you have, tell me what happened." And sometimes they'll look at me like, "What do you mean, Dr. Jay?" And I'll say, "No, when did you stop feeling like yourself?" And that's very different question. Not when did you gain the weight? Not when did your hot flashes start? Not when did your digestion change? Not when did you stop sleeping? I want to know when did this whole thing started changing? And then the story starts coming out. "Well, about three years ago I took a new position," or, "Maybe after I had my kids," "Maybe I went through some stress in my life," and like, like the whole story start pouring out. And what happened next? I started traveling more." "Are you sleeping?" "Terribly." And your cycle?" "Oh, actually, that's when it started changing." "So what happened to exercise?" "I stopped because I was exhausted." "What about eating?" "Well, I started skipping meals during the day and then eating everything at night." "Alcohol?" "I probably started drinking a little bit more at night because I needed this drink to relax me." "Relationship?" "Honestly, not great. I'm stressed." And then she'll laugh. "Dr. Jay, you don't even get me started." And suddenly we are no longer looking at six random symptoms. We are looking at a timeline, and that is different And this is where I think modern wellness is getting very interesting and very dangerous. Sometimes a headache is a headache. Sometimes you have two complete unrelated medical problems, but they are really connected. Sometimes the symptoms needs a specialist evaluation. Sometimes there's a medication that is absolutely appropriate, Hormone therapy might be appropriate. Weight loss is something you need to look at. You need treatment. I'm a doctor. I'm not going to romanticize symptoms and tell you to meditate your way out of disease. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is before we turn every symptom into its own independent problem, somebody needs to ask whether there's a larger pattern, because the body does not experience your life in categories. We do or you do. The healthcare system does. Social media definitely does, and your body doesn't. Your body doesn't know, oh, this symptoms belongs to this endocrinologist. Oh, this belongs to your gynecologist or your GI doctor, your mental health. This one is a lifestyle. It all happening to you And here is the part that I think nobody wants to say because it makes the conversation uncomfortable. There is money in keeping the dots separate. Yes, there's money in keeping you sick. I'm not saying there's some giant conspiracy. I don't know. But think about the incentives. A simple problem is easier to market. Your cortisol is making you gain weight. That's easy. Take this, Your hormones are the problem. Okay, but this test will, will prove it. Your gut is causing everything. Take this protocol. Simple explanation sells. Algorithms like simple explanations. 30-second videos like simple explanations. Product like simple explanation. Complexity doesn't convert as well. Maybe there are five things interacting, and we need to understand your history before I can tell you which one matters most. It's not a sexy Instagram reel, But sometimes that's medicine. Like, the things that we think about that's unsexy is the thing that we need to focus on the most. And women are increasingly turning to social media for women's health information, where clinicians and researchers have raised concerns about misleading menopause content, unsupported terminology, and commercial products being mixed with legitimate education. The problem is not that everything online is wrong. A lot of it is right. That's actually what makes this harder. You can hear something completely accurate, and it still may not explain you. Let me give you a perfect example. Let's take weight for an example, right? Because we all wanna lose a few pounds. A woman gains thirty pounds over several years. She's frustrated. Nothing fits. She doesn't like the way she looks in the mirror. She doesn't recognize herself. She's embarrassed. She's not as vibrant, and the stamina's not there, or she's struggling. Maybe she tried multiple diets, and now she can go online and potentially access weight loss treatment through a telehealth model relatively quickly. The access itself isn't automatically bad. The concern is whether the medication becomes the entire conversation. The FDA's recent action now showed how aggressively this market has expanded and why the quality of claims and oversight matters Maybe she's an appropriate candidate. Okay, great. But I still want to know why now? When did the weight started changing? Like her sleep, like her medication she's taking or not taking. What happened to her cycles? Yes, we can discuss hormones. Her activity change. What does her metabolic picture looks like? What happens when she eats? Is she drinking alcohol? What's happening in her life? Did something medically significantly change? Because losing the weight and understanding the context in which the weight appeared are not necessarily the same conversation. That's the difference. I'm not against the tool. I'm not against for people to do whatever they're doing. But if we are being honest, are these things really working? Are we really losing the weight and keeping it off? Is it sustainable? That's the question we need to ask. And I think women are exhausted by this by now because imagine being told your fatigue is one problem, sleep is another one, weight is another one, your digestive symptoms are another one. At some point you think like, "How many things are wrong with me? How many things I need to fix separately?" That's not the right question. Maybe you are not falling apart in several different places. Maybe two of those things are connected. And to be honest with you, as a functional medicine doctor, they are all connected. All four of them are connected. Like these things are not happening in separate areas, separate part of your bodies. Again, you are one machine, one vessel. So that's why connecting the dots is not about forcing everything into some magical root cause. Sometimes we have to dig deeper. So I think functional medicine gets itself into trouble when we pretend every complicated human being has one hidden thing underneath everything. Well, life is messier than ever. Sometimes there's a worth system, several factors interacting, amplifying each other, and our job is to determine How they all fit into the system. Here is the other piece of this that make people uncomfortable. Sometimes when you connect the dots, you discover that the solution isn't something you can order. That's where it gets real because maybe the lab work does matter. Maybe you also have to stop pretending five hours of sleep is sustainable. Maybe your body's also carrying a life where you are responsible for everybody except yourself Maybe it's not just about insulin resistance. Maybe we also have to talk about why every night ends with food becoming only your comfort. Maybe you eventually have to talk about the job that you hate, the toxic people you have in your life, the marriage that you are miserable in, the boundaries that you don't have, the fact that every person in your family has your phone number and apparently believes emergencies happen exclusively when you're trying to rest. What? That's not me saying your illness is all in your head. That is quite the opposite. I'm saying your life belongs in the medical conversation, too. So when you are on a journey to heal your body, do not isolate what is happening in your life Healing has to happen inside the life you actually live right now. So I'm starting to think about this differently with my patients. Sometimes a woman comes in asking, "Can I take this, Dr. Gentille?" And I understand. I understand the question. She wants relief. But sometimes my next question is, "What are you willing to change?" These are two completely different questions. Because you may want better sleep, but are you willing to stop working in bed? Are you willing to have a night routine? Are you willing to look at the things that are preventing you from having a better sleep? You may want more energy, but are you willing to stop saying yes to every single person? Are you willing to put yourself first? Are you willing to wake up in the morning, take care of yourself, sit with yourself, meditate, connect with yourself, do all the things, right? You may want less stress, but are you willing to disappoint someone else? But are you willing to acknowledge that the version of you who created this life may not be the version of you who can heal inside it. So you have to shed the old version, let go of the old version, And make space for the new version or the version that you were when you were in your healthier state. And that is the part of healing that doesn't fit neatly on a supplement label. Now, I know this because I've done my own version of it. You heard me talk about marriage. For years, I had individual reasons for wanting to postpone the wedding, It was money, COVID, business. Like I talked about it in the previous podcast. If you look at each one individually, it made sense. But when I put them on the same page, I saw pattern. I saw controlling, fear and dependence, avoidance. I saw work becoming a safe place to hide. The individual dots were true. The patterns was more true. And once I saw the pattern, I couldn't unsee it. That's what I want women to understand about health, too. Sometimes you've been treating each dot correctly, but nobody has shown you the full picture And I think there's another reason this matters right now. We are becoming a society obsessed with obtaining answers quickly. We can ask AI, we can order things. We can actually stay in our, like, pajamas, go online, order things, have it delivered within minutes, within hours, You can research symptoms and then have access to specialists virtually. You can buy all these fancy devices to tell us what your body did while we were sleeping. All that is incredible, but data without context can become noisy, And the more information you collect, the easier it is to become convinced that everything is important. It isn't. The skill I think we are going to need more and more is not simply access to information. We need to understand what matters and what doesn't. What changed? What deserve evaluation? What is a distraction? Where do we begin? Because when everything is urgent, nothing is prioritized. I see women trying to change 10 things at once. New supplements, new diet, new exercise plan, no sugar, no alcohol, bed by 10:00, meditation, all of these things, Cold plunge. And by Wednesday, they are exhausted from her wellness plan, and she thinks, "Well, see? I have no discipline." No, maybe you have no sequence. Maybe nobody helped you decide what comes first. That is completely different. That's why in my programs we have phases of things, We don't try to do all of the things together at once. No, that creates chaos, like, overwhelming feelings, burnout, and we don't want that. We're not working on that yet. That's what I tell my patients. "Well, Dr. Gentille, can we fix this?" We are not working on that yet. Let's address this first. Let's see what changes. Then we'll reassess this. That's exciting. It is often much more useful than throwing 15 interventions at someone and having no idea wh-which one made a difference. So this is the trend I'm paying attention to. Women are becoming incredibly informed about individual health issues, while sometimes becoming increasingly disconnected from the story of their own health. They know the symptoms, they know the terminology, they know the supplements, they know what TikTok says the cortisol is doing. They may even know every number of the lab report. But ask, what changed in the year before you stopped feeling like yourself? That's what I'm getting from my patients. Because your history matters, your timeline matters, your medical information matters, your life matters, and somebody needs to be willing to look at all of it without immediately trying to sell you the answer in the first five minutes. Now, that brings me to what I'm doing about it. On September 16th, by the time you're watching this- If you missed this, then look below. There should be a link for the next one. But September 16, I'm hosting a masterclass called Connect the Dot. And now you understand why I call it that, 'cause I don't teach another class where I'm giving you 25 wellness tips. You do not need another checklist. You want to slow the conversation down. I want to help women look at their health differently, to look at the timeline. Again, like as I mentioned, the pattern, what started first, what changed, what are we treating, what keeps coming back? Where the life and the medical story may overlap. What question you should be asking to yourself, to your doctors, and where you may be spending enormous amounts of energy trying to fix the wrong dot. This is not about di-diagnosing yourself. This is not about deciding every symptom is connected. And it's definitely not about blaming yourself for being sick. It's about becoming a better observer of your own story, of what your body's trying to tell you. Because when you can see the picture more clearly, you can have a completely different conversation about what comes next. So between now, September 16, I want you to try something. All right, not another supplement please, not another detox, not another protocol. Get a blank sheet of paper and write this on the top: When did I stop feeling like myself? Then build backwards. What was happening? What changed medically, personally, at work? Sleep, cycle, weight, energy, eating, all of that, and don't diagnose yourself. Just look at it. Because sometimes the most important breakthrough isn't finding another answer, it's finally seeing a pattern you couldn't see when you were standing too close to each individual problem. Maybe you don't need another person telling you what to take for the next symptoms. Maybe you need someone to stop, look at the whole page and ask, what if these dots are trying to tell us a bigger story?" That is the conversation I am creating on September 16th, and it's the conversation I think women's health separately need more of right now. Because your body is not a collection of problem to shop for. It's one body living one life, telling one story. And before we rush to buy the next answer, maybe we should finally listen to the whole story. I can't wait to see you during the Connect The Dots masterclass. Again, look below to see when is the next one, and let's actually explore before you go and spend money, energy, time, and get frustrated because you are not getting the result. All right. See you in the next podcast That is fantastic. You completed another episode. So thank you for spending this time with me. If today's conversation gave you a new perspective, I hope you carry it with you into the rest of your week. If someone you love needs to hear this today, share this episode with them. Until next time, take good care of yourself. I'll meet you back here for our next conversation.