E.5 Featuring Elissa Goodman: Healing from Cancer & Saving the World

I am sooo excited about this Episode, where I get to have a very healing conversation with Elissa Goodman. Elissa is a holistic nutritionist and lifestyle cleanse expert who believes that proper nourishment, healing by listening to your gut, and a daily renewal practice are essential for optimal living.

Elissa’s mission is to educate and encourage healthy, mindful living, helping others embrace the concept that we are a product of what we eat and how we treat ourselves. Based in Los Angeles , Elissa works privately with professionals and celebrity clients to develop personalized wellness programs that encourage true health from the inside out. Creator of the food based “S.O.U.P” Cleanse and “Cleanse Your Body, Cleanse Your Life,” her approach to cleansing is gentle and accessible for those looking to renew, recharge, rejuvenate and maintain their healthy lifestyle. Elissa collaborates with health and wellness partners throughout Los Angeles and is the creator of M Cafés macrobiotic RESET Cleanse, signature juice blends at Erewhon Market and multiple food creations that can be found at Earth Bar LAX. Elissa’s International Bestseller book, “Cancer Hacks” is available on Amazon and she can be found at www.elissagoodman.com. 

Please join me in welcoming her to the show where she shares her best kept secrets for preventing and curing Cancer naturally.

TRANSCRIPT: 

[00:00:40] Hey everybody welcome to the talk show today.

[00:00:44] I have Elissa Goodman with us today. 

 I'm so excited to bring this guest to you!

Elissa is an international best selling author and holistic nutritionist who is on a mission to educate and encourage healthy mindful living while helping others embrace the concept that we are a product of what we eat and how we treat ourselves.

Elissa I'm so happy to have you with us today welcome.

[00:01:09] Well I am so honored always to share my message and touch whoever needs to be touched with it.

[00:01:33] Yes I can totally relate to that and I know you have so much to share with your own personal story as well as some tips for our audience. So why dont you give us a little bit of background about how you got started in this work as a nutritionist and then a bestselling author.

Elissa: [00:01:53] Thank you. You know it is. It's funny as we were chatting earlier. I really think it's a long story and I'll keep it really short but I did not go into this nutrition business with wanting to be a nutritionist-  I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 32. It was an early phase of cancer. I was really lucky. I used my gut instinct and I chose to do a little bit of radiation. I said no to the chemo and some of the other things that they wanted to do because I was 32 and it was an early stage and I hadn't had kids yet.

My husband and I had just moved from New York to L.A. So there was so many more opportunities to eat healthy and to do yoga. I started meditating. I actually went into therapy because a lot of my cancer and a lot of my illnesses - I had every illness known to man growing up - were emotional.

I was on the fast track.

I had parents who were very Type A -  very successful - but my body couldn't keep up with them or myself.

And basically I just I burned myself out.

And I didn't take care of myself. But emotionally I kept beating myself up because I wasn't up to par. You know I wasn't up to par in the family I wasn't up to par in the world like I was just really really hard on myself.

I think my cancer and my wakeup call is that I didn't really love myself enough to have myself come first and really make sure that I was taken care of before everybody else. And all of us women can relate to that. 

I basically healed but then I went on to have two girls, but after my first pregnancy I got hyperthyroidism and Hashimoto's and it took four doctors to actually diagnose me.

[00:04:16]

Dr.S: So that word is kind of used a lot nowadays and a lot of women have said that they have it but I'm not sure clear what the symptoms of that are - can you explain it.

Elissa: [00:04:31] So many women have this. It's a lot - it has to do with some emotional stuff as well because the thyroid is really your where your vocal - you know where that chakra is - speak your truth - alot of us women kind of grew up going oh you know we look good but we're not we don't really want to hear you. Right. Be seen and not heard. So we never really got to express ourselves. And also when your adrenals are taxed which is the first thing to go because of studying hard or even running marathons or whatever it is, then the next thing to go is the thyroid. 

So it's toxic it's it's emotional you know it's mundanely overtaxed is kind of the three things. And that was definitely me. But I also was radiated to the thyroid for my for my Hodgkin's lymphoma. So that didn't help that.

And then when you have a stressful environment in your life or a trauma and having a baby which sounds really bizarre is traumatic on your body. So I had my daughter and then the Hashimoto's came up. Hashimoto's for me is like viruses that we had as a younger child or young adult where we had Mono or chickenpox, those are viral related issues then they lay dormant in the organs.

We usually take antibiotics for them but they don't do anything for a virus so we don't really talk about lowering viral loads the viruses go into the organs and they hang out with the other toxins. So when you are trapped you know you go through a trauma you're really stressed and not sleeping and not eating well these viruses can raise their ugly head in all different forms.  They can go into your reproductive system. They go into your thyroid do they go into your liver. So I mean they can cause you know PCOS and infertility and they can cause liver issues. And so in a nutshell thats what all of that is. 

And then after I was diagnosed with cancer, 11 years later my husband was diagnosed with cancer. He had Hodgkin's lymphoma and he ended up battling it for a year and a half - he had two bone marrow transplants and after a year and a half passed away.

It was traumatizing and just horrible to watch him just disintegrate.

So I had this 10 and 7 year old at home. I was traumatized. I hadn't been really following a really healthy protocol. I was just surviving. So I decided - I don't know enough to be healthy. So I went back to school to get certified in eastern and western nutrition.

So I spent two years doing that. I found out that it was really fun and I loved it. But I didn't do it to become a nutritionist. Yeah I really just knew my girls were going to have a really hard time with knowing that both their parents have cancer. And I mean I I just automatically thought they're gonna think I'm going to get cancer - you know. 

[00:08:56] Dr. S: So when you look at like where you are now I mean thinking about your whole incredible story of healing through cancer and then unfortunately losing your husband and having this desire to go and study and learn western medicine and eastern medicine so you can really model for your girls how to how to heal yourself - what hurdles did you overcome in the building process.

Elissa: [00:09:45] I think the biggest hurdle was that I didn't love myself enough to take care of myself and my thought patterns were really negative a very judgmental. I was a perfectionist. I'm not happy about any of these things by the way.

You know I just I beat up on myself because everything wasn't just right. And I learned those traits really early on. And there's a book that I read that was so amazing years ago by Dr. Alice Reagan and it's called Mind over medicine and she talks about how your subconscious has fully downloaded at the age of 7.

-and you and I operate 95 to 98 percent out of our subconscious as we're talking today like we're barely conscious. And I wish I had known those things earlier in my life. But I think that there were like there is a mental story that we tell ourselves and we when we get imprinted early on by trauma divorce death or someone being mean to us or someone embarrassing us or someone telling us that we we are fat or never going to be smart - we get traumatized and it sticks with us.

And another book that came out you probably heard about called radical remission is one of my favorite books. Kelly Turner did a study and actually interviewed stage three and four cancer cases for ten years and she came up with nine modalities across the board of what of how these people healed and out of the nine modalities seven were emotional.

So when I read that too I was like oh my God you know that was so true.

 I don't think I ever gave myself the breathing room or like took enough exhales to really like relax and just fall into my body and you know just really honor who I was. I mean I think that was the biggest hurdle and then I was a sugar aholic you know because I was constantly needing that fix to keep up so I could keep performing.

And then I never had the knowledge of am I doing what I love in my life. You know am I passionate about my work I was in the advertising business because my dad was in the advertising business- so I just followed in his footsteps. I mean it was fun but it wasn't what I love.

So yeah those were definitely all things that I really to this day have realized wow I I wouldn't take back any of those years away. I had a lot of years of very hardship and very dark visiting very dark places and not feeling good and just surviving. But I would not take back any of those years because now I feel like I have so much compassion.

I'm 58 and I have never felt better my entire life. I mean I'm like I'm 10 years younger.

[00:14:23] I know the number of Sugar addicts out there I just I know it's. It is it's just like it's lethal. And yeah that saying it's more addicting than heroin. I mean that's scary.

I mean I personally feel like. You know we can we can enjoy our body can and just do things and talk to them. We just we just have to like try to find some balance with the stress and the sleep and you know hydration and you know trying to cut back some of the sugar and the gluten and the dairy and the processed foods. I mean it sounds so easy to say and it's so easy for me. But for a lot of people it's it's a hurdle.

Dr. S: [00:15:47] And I think especially you know if your if you're ill and have something like cancer you have to be even more careful about what you eat and what you put into your body. I'm wondering what your opinion is when you hear about people getting cancer and since you've been through it yourself and have supported your husband and watched him also deal with it. Do you feel like cancer is preventable. 

Elissa: [00:16:32] I definitely think cancer is preventable.

I definitely think you also can heal from it. I don't think it's a death sentence at all. I just think that we need to start to tune in. Like I didn't do in those early days. But I did afterwards. How we're feeling and what's going on in our body.

Our gut instincts are pretty powerful and we were born with these things for a reason.

Build up - you know keep your immune system strong and just deal with your stress and your emotional components for yourself. I mean even just those things can prevent cancer. And those you know those three things. I mean you don't have to eat perfectly.

Getting enough sleep you know moving your body doesn't have to be hard core exercise. And. Really starting to really honor yourself.

 [00:18:36] You know so I mean one of the things I just absolutely can't live without these days. And I know there's like you know - there's two schools of thought on this is juicing. To this day I'm still juicing and took a break during the years of kids but after my husband passed away started juicing again. No Apple, Pear or any of that stuff because that's too much sugar going into your bloodstream. But I cut my greens you know with like lemon and ginger.

So they are so powerful - they bypass the digestive system and they're able to go into the bloodstream and into the cells and the cells get the nutrients that they need.

So I started using celery and lemon because I hate the taste of celery but celery is a major liver detox. 

I've become like a little bit of a purist. But if you were to do cucumber and I mean celery is incredible it rebuilds the hydrochloric acid in your gut it detoxes your liver and it takes mineral salts the neurotransmitters into your brain. So it's like it's pretty amazing. It's a hot thing right now drinking celery. 

And of course ginger is very anti inflammatory and that's powerful and it's not expensive. You know celery cucumber and ginger are not expensive. And then what I do a lot of times they rotate in greens. Like one day spinach or Romaine. And if you do it five days out of seven. That's amazing. You don't have to do it 100 percent of the time.

Dr. S: Do you have any other tips you can leave us with?

Elissa: [00:23:30] Yes. Yes. So some other, I mean we talked a little bit about you know the sleep is crucial. And the stress. I mean for me I have to meditate throughout the day because I'm a type A person still - five minutes of listening to an app - unplugged - has an incredible app online that I absolutely adore and love. And there's all different kinds of meditations on there. There's five minutes ten minutes you know five minutes to get you breathing and back in your body is huge. So I'm in traffic or you know you've just gotten off a stressful phone call or you're you're getting up in the morning and you're anxious -  unplug is great. I also use an app called Karma. Oh yeah. Oh my. From her. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. It's really good.

There's a bunch of really great apps.

So that is a - that's a must these days for us women because we really are. We hold all the energy for the household and even potentially the workplace. I mean that's just what we do right.

But yeah as we talked about earlier sugar is just a killer. So if things have a lot of sugar in it that is just-  that is actually absolutely going to wreak havoc on our immune system. So I try to watch you know that I eat.

I eat my fruit - I don't put it in smoothies.

And another thing is just really making sure that we are hydrated - when we get dehydrated our organs shrivel up and they don't work properly. Our cells don't function properly as well

So the last and the last thing is to just focus on your gut and the gut is where the immune system is. 90 percent of the serotonin is produced in your gut.

Dr. S: If you can give yourself any piece of advice.

Ten years ago. [00:31:09] I suppose that's a hard question. It would be. To be more compassionate with myself. Acceptance has been the biggest lesson of my life.

Elissa’s International Bestseller book, “Cancer Hacks” is available on Amazon and she can be found at www.elissagoodman.com.