Pharmacist and health coach Amy Behimer joins host Zach Gurick to share her journey of navigating four autoimmune diagnoses while building a vibrant life. Instead of relying on fear-based health choices, she outlines how to leverage sustainable habits to manage chronic illness. You will learn the six controllables of health that help prioritize nervous system regulation and mental clarity. We dive deep into the science behind habit formation and why frameworks are essential for overcoming the overwhelm of chronic conditions. This conversation provides a practical roadmap for anyone looking to reclaim their vitality and live with greater intention.

The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

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Reclaiming Control: Autoimmune Habits With Pharmacist Amy Behimer

Welcome back to Fully Alive, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. We’re diving into a topic that impacts millions of people, but honestly has lessons for every single one of us, and that’s autoimmune health habits and what it really means to reclaim control of your life and your health. My guest is Amy Behimer.

Amy is a pharmacist. She’s a certified health coach, host of the Autoimmune Health Secrets podcast, and someone who personally understands the emotional and physical challenges of living with chronic illness after being diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis. What I love about Amy’s approach is that this conversation isn’t about fear, perfectionism, or trying to biohack your way into a stress-filled version of health.

It’s about sustainable habits and mindset shifts and nervous system health and learning how to create a vibrant, meaningful life, even when circumstances are not perfect. We’re going to dive into why so many people feel powerless after a diagnosis and the biggest myths surrounding autoimmune disease, how tiny habits can create massive long-term changes, and why healing often begins long before symptoms disappear. This is a hopeful, very practical, and deeply human conversation, and I think it’s going to encourage a lot of people. Please enjoy my conversation with Amy Beheimer.

 

  

Amy, you’ve lived such a remarkable journey, and you have so much of your own life experience and wisdom and expertise from your own journey to share with us. I’m really excited for our audiences to hear from you and excited to have this conversation and dive into all the things that you’ve experienced and learned and can share with us. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks so much for having me.

I’d love to start. You’re a pharmacist, you’re a health coach, you’re a life coach. More than that, you’re someone who’s lived with these four different autoimmune diagnoses. Could you share a little bit of your story? How did all that come about? At what age and stage did you receive those diagnoses? Could you just share a little bit of your background story with us to help us understand what you’ve lived through?

The saying necessity is the mother of invention. Everything I’ve come to absolutely, I go first on myself with me. The first time I heard the word autoimmune, which is a big part of my life and health story, I was in my teens, and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition on my skin. A few years later, I was in pharmacy school, learning all there is to know about what goes right in the body and what can go wrong. I heard that word autoimmune again. I was learning how they tend to cluster. If you get one diagnosis, there could be another one.

Turning Diagnosis Into Opportunity

I am thinking, “What is happening in this body that I got a diagnosis so young?” In my mid-twenties, I was diagnosed with a thyroid autoimmune condition. That was number two. A couple of years later, there was some autoimmunity happening in my GI tract. It was at age 27 that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I would never rank autoimmune diseases or put one above another, but that one was the big one for me that really had me listening to my body and looking for ways to change the equation of what was happening.

With my pharmacist hat and my person living with this big diagnosis hat, I thought I’m going to go all in and look at what is at the root cause of this. I really explored functional medicine first for myself and then decided I wanted to help other people. Instead of becoming a practitioner, which is something that you and your audiences may be familiar with. Going and seeing a functional medicine doctor or a PA or an NP that does all the testing and supplement prescribing and things of that route. The year that I was looking at it, they opened a coaching academy.

I was like, “That’s what I want to do. I want to actually help people make the changes that they know they want to be making. They’re very simple when we look at them, but not simple to execute. That is where I landed in terms of, really for myself, wanting to use the diagnosis as a reason to be healthier and be happier. Naturally, it was very hard not to want to help people do the same.

It’s such an interesting mixture of your background and then a unique path to choose as a result, I would say. Most people will probably have gone the other way, but I love how you find that.

It’s interesting because being an expert in the pharmacy world, you see how having all the facts does not change people’s behavior or experience with life. What really changes us is something completely different. While I am a scientist at heart, I love the science part of habits. Not only what these lifestyle habits can do to our physiology, to our biology, to change how we function. We also have such a pool of scientific knowledge on how to change habits. We all know better habits can help us feel better and function better, but I’m just fascinated with how we actually do it in a way that does not feel like this thing we have to slog through, white-knuckling until the end of something.

How do we actually enjoy this journey? Because we all have a diagnosis of aging, all of us are showing up every day, and we want to be intentional about it, and that’s just the key. Spoiler alert all the way to the end. How do we change habits? We have to do it in a way that feels good along the way so that we’re not trying to get to some destination where we just get to be done. If we can enjoy the process, then there is no need to be done. That is going to serve us in living not only healthier, but what you are here to show. Healthier lives and longer lives.

I love that. I would love for you to maybe break it down from your perspective too. What is the root cause of something like MS from a functional medicine or root cause analysis perspective, since you understand that, personally, you’re feeling it, you’re living with it, but you also have this pharmacy and functional medicine background? I’d love to just hear you break that down for us and help us understand it deeply.

If I had gone the practitioner route and become an expert in all the pathways and supplements and things, the enzymes, I would probably be giving a very different answer for the root cause of what’s causing all these diseases. I have a pretty good understanding of that, but I think the root cause that I shine a light on here is essentially what we’re feeding our bodies and our brains. You hear the word feeding, and yes, food is a big part of what can either draw us towards health or potentially away from it, but we also are feeding ourselves how we move our bodies, thoughts, emotions, relationships, how we rest, how we sleep.

I’m going through these different pillars of lifestyle medicine, the things that really help a body thrive. When we go through these things, it’s good to know that I have not invented some area of lifestyle that is not already very well documented. The fundamentals, the basics of what helps us feel good. There’s the Institute for Functional Medicine, there’s the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science. We all are saying the same things. It’s these basics that we go back to, but really asking ourselves, are we doing it in a way that feels good?

Your diagnosis isn’t the end of your vitality. Use it as a reason to be healthier and happier.

Are we really looking at the basics and not worrying about all these fancy things before we really nail these? I call them spokes of a habit hub. The habit hub is the way I have made sense of the world in terms of life with an autoimmune condition. It’s the things that we can control in a disease, in a life, in a world that has uncontrollables and controllables.

Defining The Six Controllables

I call these six areas of our lifestyle the controllables because when we want to get, or when we are getting too lost in all the things we cannot control and the loss and the grief of certain symptoms and certain diagnoses, it’s a gentle nudge back to what, in this situation, can we control? That’s where we land on these six controllables in health, where when we shift our attention and focus, it really just feels better because we can start to see and feel progress of doing our part, so to speak.

I love that. Can you just recap the six controllables real quick?

Why Mindset Is The Foundation

Number one is mindset. I call these our inner habits. They are like the mental and the emotional habits that drive a lot of our happiness and our experience in life. Not many people are talking about how we think and feel. How we think and feel. Our brains just want to revisit the same stories. Our bodies like to stay in the familiar emotions, even if they’re really uncomfortable, even if fear or uncertainty are uncomfortable. That’s what our body knows. They’re really habitual. Number one is mindset, and that is used throughout all of them. It’s its own spoke, but it’s also such a key for changing anything that we want to change.

The Science Of Feel-Good Food

Number two is food. Let’s have fun with that. We get to practice it many times a day, every single day. Taking away some of the stress around food and just stepping into your uniqueness, I call it a feel-good food protocol because it is impossible to say what is going to work for every single body. We can draw on what the science says. We are pretty darn certain that too much ultra-processed food is going to impair how we feel and function, and more and more whole foods or real foods are going to help.

Simplifying it and really just asking, what am I feeding myself? Not only today, but the building blocks of what my tomorrow body is going to be made of. We have a mindset. We have food. Three is movement. Multiple sclerosis is one of many diagnoses that impact movement. There are things I cannot do that I used to be able to do years and decades ago. Some people live with a lot of pain that affects movement, but these bodies were made to move.

Rest As An Antidote To Stress

Pulling in the mindset, it is how do we keep moving in ways that we are able to, because without it, a body in motion stays in motion. There are so many physical and mental benefits to movement. That’s three. Four, everyone can guess these as we go along. They are nothing new. Four, I call rest and relaxation R&R. That includes sleep. That includes the kryptonite to stress, which is rest and safety. How many times can we get ourselves back into this restorative state?

We know that that is what helps us feel better and sets us up to function at our best as well. Number five is one that not many people are talking about in a habitual way, but connections and relationships, and how do we intentionally craft our days and our weeks and our months and our years to really set ourselves up to benefit from belonging in certain spaces with different people? Connection is such a huge one. Also my favorite, if I’m allowed to have a favorite.

Sure, you are.

It’s always like picking children. I do not have children, but connection is a good one. The last one I call good stress. In the functional medicine world, that’s sometimes called hormesis, where we challenge our bodies in a way that we know is uncomfortable, but we do it because on the other side of that, we know we get a little bit stronger. That’s like a metabolic good stress. For autoimmunity, that could look like hot and cold therapy. It could look like fasting of different sorts. Good stresses also can include cognitive good stresses. If we’re trying to keep our brains active and working well, we can be intentional about the habits that we make related to challenging our thinking.

There are good emotional stresses. I say good stress is good as in quotes, because it’s that short-term stress that we’re not going to let drag on for a long time. A lot of my clients, you have to learn that we can feel a difficult emotion, and it tends to pass through us better when we’re not resisting it and not avoiding it. Feeling those emotions can be a benefit, and the last type of good stress, which is a little bit of an overlap with movement, is physical good stress. We know that we’ll get sore and break down some muscle to build more, so that same concept applies in all these different areas in our life.

Thanks for sharing those. It’s always helpful to have a framework. I love that these different spokes create this hub. I want to go back to a few things. There’s so much I want to pack a little bit more with you, but you mentioned how much of our inner habits are habitual. I’ve learned that roughly 95% of our thoughts are the same from one day to the next. Think about that. We’re just basically living on autopilot then.

Yes, and similarly, they’re estimated to be 95% repeated from the day before, even the crappy ones, especially the crappy ones. A lot of them are under our conscious radar. A lot of them we may not even be aware that we have these sneaky sentences and stories and very strong opinions running through our brain that ultimately are not serving us. That’s one of the amazing things about getting to be a coach. Having someone on the outside be able to spot what it’s really hard for us to see ourselves is just such a testament to the profession and to the support that me and other coaches out there doing the work can offer.

If we’re just kind of running the same narrative and same neural pathways, they’re well-grooved, then it’s a blind spot for us oftentimes. You’re able to spot those things pretty easily, probably with your training.

Our life is driven by our strongest thought. Change your narrative to change your direction.

Also, you can have two people with the exact same diagnosis. There’s a parallel world where there’s another Amy living with MS with the same symptoms, the same circumstances, and she may have a completely different thought about her diagnosis. Our life is going to be pulled and driven, and it will go in the direction of our strongest thought, whether we know it’s our thought or not. This is a good segue into my approach, and my offering to everybody is what is our main thought? Most certainly, when I was first diagnosed, I had the thought, my life will always be worse. This is terrible.

My nervous system has lesions on it, and this is progressive, and a textbook can back up all that. It’s progressive, it’s disabling, it’s neurodegenerative. If I allow that to go on unmonitored and unquestioned, then most certainly my life will head in that direction. This has been over ten years for me. Instead of saying the same diagnosis, same symptoms again, I add in the possibility that I also am pretty healthy in some ways, and I also can get healthier in these other ways. I still get to affect my metabolic health, my relational health, my mental health, my emotional health, my gut health.

All of a sudden I am getting curious, and I’m saying, “How could I do that? What about that?” That one thought, that one sentence of, “I could actually become healthier in some ways,” actually starts to pull my life in a very different direction. Knowing what those thoughts are, as you mentioned, that are just on repeat and feel true because that’s just what a lot of them are, are very baked into society and a lot of people think them, but it does not mean that we have to keep thinking them.

You’ve really painted a really clear picture for us there. Would you be willing to take us back to that day when you were 27, and you got that diagnosis? Obviously some of those things you just mentioned probably went through your mind, but what else? Just emotionally, a lot of people listening probably have received a diagnosis over their lifetime or a loved one has. What was that like for you? Can you walk us through that a little bit?

I was really crushed. I knew a lot about what was happening in my body. I could really understand the implications. What I did was I decided, I am going to eat perfectly, and I have quotes going up over perfect, but I’m going to not let inflammatory foods pass these lips. I’m going to exercise compulsively now. When I look back at it, I really just hyper-focused on the outer habits, on what I was doing, not doing.

It was being driven out of fear. We could be doing the same actions, the same things, but the emotion and the belief behind it impacts how our bodies receive it. They actually do studies where they’ll tell someone this is a delicious, indulgent, fat-laden, sugar-laden milkshake, and people will drink it. You can measure insulin spikes and blood sugar. When you think, “I’m doing something bad,” your levels look one way. If you give me that same drink at a different time and you tell me this is a health drink, this is delicious, or it’s going to help you with all these things, we actually receive it and absorb it differently. Insulin looks different, blood sugar looks different.

Our thoughts and feelings behind what we’re doing impact how our bodies receive it. That mind-body connection, that ancient wisdom and modern science keep proving true, is so real. I’m like, for myself first, again, we always are our first guinea pig, but how can I really translate that into our everyday? What are we doing about it today so that we can enjoy life more? Again, not be driven so much by that fear? Fast-forward, instead of fear making me choose these things and do these things, it started to be curiosity, saying, “What if this, what if that?”

A lot of love for what could be, and this sounds a little bit I try to keep it as tangible as possible, but sometimes it goes into a little bit of, “How are you going to do that?” Again, when we approach how we’re thinking and feeling as habits, we get a whole lot of strategy behind it because we know repetition works. We know the various things that work to shift our thinking and our feelings, just like our actions. Does that make sense?

Yes, no, absolutely. I love that. That study and analogy you just mentioned. How much our thinking about something impacts how it affects us. It’s so true, that mind-body connection.

Similarly, let’s say you just forgot to eat because you were so busy. You had three guests to record, and you forgot to eat. You’ll have a totally different biological response than if you wake up and you say, “I’m going to fast for this reason, this intent.” Just the thought behind it can change so much.

You are probably describing a lot of this, but you mentioned earlier the science of habits. Could you walk us through some of the science of habits and how that actually works when we are creating these habits and trying to change our habits?

I have never worked with somebody who does not have Atomic Habits on their shelf, or have you heard of it? I am guessing, of course. People have read it multiple times. Another one is B.J. Fogg. He wrote Tiny Habits, another amazing book about habits. Another one is Gretchen Rubin, whom I love. She talks a lot about habits. Charles Duhigg. There are these researchers out there who are applying evidence-based medicine to learn and try to teach us how to change habits. If the sales of those books were correlated to how healthy we get, then we would be doing well, but we continue to get more unhealthy as a country because the information is on the page, and it is just not being translated into a way for many people on how to actually use it.

You mentioned before about the fact that Habit Hub is this framework, and we like that. It is very on purpose because one of the science-backed reasons that change can feel hard is that we do not have a framework to help make sense of everything. Everything I teach and everything I coach through and everything I live is with this in mind. Frameworks help us to be able to sort information as it is being pummeled at us. There is an infobesity crisis, and AI is not helping anything. Overwhelm is the number one emotion that people finally say, “Amy, I will give this coaching thing a try,” because they are just, they are over it.

They are confused. They are overwhelmed. Frameworks are one of the ways, based on the science that I use to combat that, because if there is a framework that is all-inclusive, holistic, and accounts for all the things that are going to get in the way, then that’s a pretty darn good framework, especially if it’s catchy and you can remember it, and you can learn it and live it. Moving forward, you get to filter things through this framework and make it make sense for you so that you do not just forget things.

 

  

That makes a ton of sense, that we’re like you said, all this information is coming. I love that word you said, infobesity. I have not heard that one before. I love that.

I do not know where I first saw it. I definitely did not make it up. When I say it, nobody even needs an explanation. It is like, “Yes.” I have an image when I give talks because I get to give a lot of talks at conferences and things, and it is like a woman sitting in front of a computer and there’s just piles of papers and books being flooded. We all feel that.

What our brains need is a framework to categorize things, to put them into place. You can actually begin to make a difference in each of those areas.

All these tools, everything that I created, are with science in mind. I have a one-page habit tracker that is a big-picture tracker, and you guys listening can hear this and steal any of these ideas, but it allows us to calm the overwhelm of everything we could be doing. You and I both have shows, right? We have amazing suggestions and ideas, but it is like, “What do I do with it? If I am not ready to act on it today, then what is going to happen?” Let me try to act on it, but then I’m overwhelmed, and now is not the time. In this big-picture tracker that I use and my clients use as well, it has six different areas. It has the spokes of the Habit Hub, but then it also breaks down which ones I am working on now.

Which ones do I want to get to soon? Which ones do I want to worry about later? That way, when they come in to listen to an episode of your show, they may hear about I’m making something up, red light therapy, but they’re already really nose-deep into working on a habit of exercising consistently three days a week and increasing their vegetables with every meal. I do not want to forget about this red light therapy. What am I going to do?

I am going to place it in later. I have a couple of other ones soon, and it just allows us to calm the brain a little bit and remind us that it is all a balanced approach. If we only look at food like I did for years, it’s like you cannot out-nourish your credit mindset. If we only look at one area, then we can get down in the details, but zooming out and seeing that big picture can really help.

That reminds me of years ago, there was the book Getting Things Done. That was a whole productivity framework and system. The idea was like you have a system where you can place all of the things that are on your mind and capture them all so that then your brain is freed up. Your mental capacity is freed up to just be creative and imaginative and work on the work that is right in front of you. It’s a similar idea.

Great example. We’re pulling from the same science. A lot of people speak. It’s like finding your person that speaks your language. It always really resonated with me. After all my combing of all the habit research. I have read and studied those books. I give them credit even though someone calls this one thing. I may call it something different. I have this strategy, this playbook of plays to make and break habits. We may not know which strategy is going to work at which time, but knowing that, we keep coming back to what we’re going to do about it, how we show up, how we take it from page into real life.

What I saw was, through years of coaching people, there really are six research-backed reasons that goals fail. I actually just did a mini seven-day series. One is an introduction, and then the next six are each of the six reasons on my podcast to go through these reasons. Once we know why a habit is going to we have a hard time making or breaking a habit or reaching some health goal, once we know what is likely to get in our way, we then can be proactive and come up with a strategy around it. It’s like having the answers to the test or the questions to the test.

I will give you the answers, but you still have to take the test. We still have to show up and take the test. The reason I set all that up was that the second reason goals fail is that we forget them. How many of us are relying on our brains to be containers and not processors, which are similar to what you mentioned? They are made to process things in real time. They’re not supposed to be storage containers. Having a system to remember the things that you want to be doing and the goals that you have set is one surefire way not to let them just drift away into no man’s land.

Metaphor processor, not a container or analogy. Can we shift gears for just a minute? You with MS, you mentioned lesions on your nervous system. For yourself, but also in your work with others, how do you help shift people’s and your own nervous system from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state? Can we dive into some of the work that you do around the nervous system?

That definitely falls into, again, tying back to a framework. How does this make sense? It falls into the R&R, the rest and relaxation. There are not many productive things that happen when we’re stuck in that sympathetic fight or flight. A lot of times it starts with calming the overwhelm of there are a million things I could be doing to “What is the one thing that I am going to work on next? What is the one thing that I want to set a goal for? I want to determine how I am going to measure progress and celebrate when things are going well. That is when we really start to see that we have control.

There is nothing more maybe like nourishing or safe-feeling than proving to ourselves that we do have more control than we originally thought with a diagnosis like this. Again, building up that evidence is a really beautiful thing to do for our nervous system to show ourselves our power. Another section of that habit tracker that I mentioned is we had it soon. I am going to do it now, soon, or later. There is another section on there called quit on purpose, and what that section is for is that let us say you set a goal to do something but then you change your mind and you’re not forgetting about the goal, you’re not saying it’s too hard, I cannot do it, but instead you have decided you want to take it in a different direction.

We too often do not follow through on our word with ourselves, so we train our brain that we will forget about it. She does want to eat better. She does want to exercise consistently, but if she just keeps going long enough, she will forget about it. What it does is it starts to show ourselves. We start to build trust with ourselves. This comes back to your question. We build trust with ourselves that we can follow through on the things that we know we want to follow through on. That trust is what I see time and time again in people who can feel really safe. It can feel really grounding. It can feel really restful. As I said, the antidote to stress is not worrying about how to stress less.

Rest isn’t just sleep. It’s the ability to get yourself back into a restorative state daily.

Why don’t we just find more ways to get ourselves into that rested state, that trusting state, that grounded state, because it kind of crowds out the rest. The rest of the stress. I am using the same word, but in two different ways. It crowds out the other stuff. Again, the habit approach to that is habitually getting ourselves into that safety, either by what we’re doing or, a lot of times, it can be by what we’re thinking. Really looking at what are the thoughts that have me feeling I’m in that amped up, overwhelmed state?

How do I start to shift those, even if it’s something like, “There’s so much that I can be doing,” or “I’m so confused too. This is what I’m focusing on now?” That is such a subtle thing, but I’ll ask people. How does it feel to tell yourself all week, this is the only thing I need to worry about? You can see them sigh, relieved. This is all I need to think about. Anytime you find yourself like, “That feels pretty good. That’s the one that we want to nurture and make more of a habit.” That was a long, long dance around to your question. I hope that it was useful to you and anybody tuning in.

I love calming the overwhelm, focusing on one thing, quitting something on purpose. I know I have one friend and mentor. Every Thursday, he quits something.

I love that.

Eliminate things that are not helping you any longer, right?

We do a spoke of the month inside my membership, and so that ensures balance. When we get to the rest and relaxation month, similarly, say, “Habit, am I going to take off my tracker? Just that it’s a goal to not do something is a really nourishing way to use goals.” It does not have to just be more. We definitely need less in our equation at times.

We have to fight against that infobesity, right?

Yes.

When you start working with a new client that is a part of your ecosystem and your membership club, what does that look like? How do you start with someone? How do you help them get into this framework or diagnose where they’re where they need help the most, or how do you help someone get started?

A lot of people say, “Where should I start?” Even if we’re not working together, I created a quiz based on the research. It’s seven questions. It takes about three minutes, and it helps you identify which of those six areas is your best place to start. Again, we are all we all have different things going on, and a lot of that is driven by questions trying to ask you where you want to start, because so many of us think that we should be doing something, and a lot of the habit research says that we need to start where we want to start.

Quitting Habits On Purpose

Let’s start to get some wins. If you take the quiz, you will get a response, a result in one of those six key areas, and then you can trust, let the other ones calm, go to the wayside, and just worry about this one goal that you’re going to set for a habit in this area. The same thing when someone joins the club and enters my membership. We first decide what our first goal is. We want to practice this stuff. We want to practice the theory and the tools and the ideas on something real, right? I do not really want people to just come and listen to me talk and take notes.

I want them to leave our time together and go put it on. It’s game time, right? “I’m going to put this into play.” We are not going to win every single one, but we’re going to get better data from trying to use it in real life. We come back, and we say, “What happened? What went well? What did not go well? Then what are we going to shift or tweak? What strategy are we going to pull in to get back out there and try again?” Over time, what we do is we just learn how to set a really good goal, how to follow through on it, and then how to come back and repeat. That really is the basic three steps.

If you know how to decide what you want to think, feel, or do, because a goal does not have to just be something you’re doing. It could be to think a certain way. It could be to feel a certain way or to not feel a certain way. You follow through on that, and then come back, and we repeat, and I have been doing this for fifteen plus years. I am not done. It’s how we opened. It’s like, I am doing this work with you all, whether you’re in my club or not, because we do not go lift at the gym and then we never have to again. This is maintenance.

I, at 42, have different things happening, not even related to my autoimmune diagnosis, but this process is so holistic that it does not even matter other than really learning how to do that. Whatever the first goal is that you’re working on, just trust that you’re learning a skill that will apply to every other goal. That’s the coolest thing. New Year’s resolutions, like 70-plus percent of people want to eat differently, 60-plus percent of people want to move differently, but something like 16% say they want to learn a new skill.

Western medicine helps us live longer. Lifestyle medicine helps us live well longer.

I always say, if we learn a new skill on how to change any of the other things, then all the other things become a whole lot more possible. You’ll get your one area, you set a really good goal in it, and then you stick with it until you learn more about yourself to actually change it. That is the process we get to rinse and repeat over and over again.

Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for distilling it down to us. A seven-question quiz that takes three minutes. Where can people take that quiz if they wanted to?

My website is www.AmyBehimerCoaching.com/Quiz.

Perfect. People can certainly check that out, take that quiz, establish one small goal, get a small win, and then now you’re on the path.

When you take it, I’ll say hello in the inbox. It’s always me. If you want to hit Reply, tell me what you liked about this conversation, what question you have, what you did not like. I also equip you with a little mini habit playbook. I mentioned those different, there’s twenty strategies in the habit playbook that we use to make and break our habits. I pick out three of the top strategies and help you get off to the races on whatever your quiz result is. Hopefully you can again start to apply it in your life the same day.

I just want to say thank you for the work you’re doing because I think this is such a helpful conversation because we’re always talking to people on this show that some of them have these amazing medical breakthroughs or different supplement companies or exercise frameworks. All kinds of things. Get red light therapy, as you mentioned before, but none of it will really matter if we do not.

Make a habit of utilizing it. This is actually the behavior change. Before we wrap up our time here, how do you see us as we move forward into the future, bridging that gap between allopathic medicine, lifestyle medicine, emotional health, and then behavioral change? We cannot make changes in any of those areas without all the things that you’re talking about that you’re working on. How do you see that being bridged?

Bridging The Gap In Care

Hopefully more voices like myself. I have my feet firmly planted in both worlds if we want to look at the conventional or maybe the non-traditional, and I’m really trying to convey to everybody that they lift each other up. I will speak with physicians who are so worried about their patients ditching what Western medicine can do because they want to heal only naturally, or they should not need this. I see why they’re afraid. There are some very clear benefits that Western medicine can bring.

I do take a disease-modifying therapy that I trust, and I’m not saying everybody has to, but we just want people to be making a decision that is based on real facts of the benefits and the risks. If people who are talking about food and exercise and all these wonderful conventional medicine side of things can recognize, it can be synergistic. Western medicine has saved so many of our lives with the advances and has people living longer. It’s almost like Western medicine keeps us living longer, and we need the other side to keep us living well longer, as you mentioned, that health span.

The biggest thing I got to do was a research study with a large society where I coached people for six months. There were two different groups, and we measured quality of life. We measured how people were able to make and break habits and what their fatigue and their different symptoms were. Patients got better, and I was presenting the results at a medical conference, and a physician said, “What’s the biggest barrier to coaching?” I said, “Honestly, I think the biggest barrier is people thinking that they’ve failed if they need to get support to do it.”

How many times do people, all of us, go, “I know what to do, I just need to do it.” To bridge that gap is for all of us to give ourselves a whole lot more grace and recognize that we’re human and our humanness is what keeps us stuck because that’s how we evolved to get to this age. We look for danger, and we conserve energy. We do not change. That’s why old habits traditionally die hard. Once we learn how to work with our brain and body, it can get a whole lot more enjoyable. To recap, there’s a synergy between the two, and it’s not your fault.

If change feels hard, it’s not your fault. Just look at it as any other skill that makes your life better. Any other learning, like a new instrument or any skill, playing a sport. “I’m going to get really good at learning how to change habits that I want to change,” I tell a funny story of how I drive my husband crazy. I would leave my paper towel in my dish after dinner, and he’d go one day. He said, “If you’re so good at making and breaking habits, why don’t you make it a habit not to leave that there?”

It gets stuck. This is a silly example, but I thought, “You know what? You’re right. I will do it.” Picked some play strategies from the playbook, and it’s just fun to change, change your habits, especially if you can benefit other people. Sometimes during the month, I’ll say to my husband, “What’s a habit that if I made it or broke it would make your life better?” The first few times he’s like, “You do not have to do that.” Now he’s ready. “I need you to turn off the lights in the basement.” He has got all sorts of opinions.

He’s just waiting for that month to roll around.

 

  

He’s waiting for it every six months. One time I said I do two steps to set up his coffee so when he gets up, it can take away some of the heaviness of it. We just realized that it can be fun. It can actually be enjoyable.

This is, like I said, such a helpful conversation and so practical. It applies to every other conversation that we’ve had. Without that behavior change, without being able to change those habits, even if it’s like, “I want to start taking this new supplement that’s now scientifically backed in research,” you have to make a habit to take it. Otherwise it does anything for you.

That’s a good point. At the end of every episode of mine, my podcast is Autoimmune Health Secrets in case anybody is curious. I do a do of the day, so it’s like, we’ve learned something. Now, what are we committing to do so that we implement and apply the information? Today’s do of the day could even say, what are all the great episodes you’ve heard here? Are they on your soon, now, or later list in terms of how to wrangle it and determine which one you do want to actually make habits? Maybe some of them are on the never list.

There you go. AmyBehimerCoaching.com is your website. AmyBehimerCoaching.com/Quiz is where they can take that seven-question, three-minute quiz to get started. They can connect with you there as well.

Absolutely. You can explore the club, which is the membership that’s at AmyBehimerCoaching.com/Join, if you’re curious to see what else we offer in there. My fellow clubbers and I said.

Great. As you said, we all need support. Let us not let that be a barrier to entry. Thank you so much for being with us, Amy. This has been really fun, uplifting, and practical. Thanks for the work that you’ve done and that you continue to do personally to lead the way and lead the charge in this. I just wish you all the best. Also, if people want to check out your show, Autoimmune Health Secrets is the name of your podcast, right?

Yep, it is. It’s over there. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you and everything you’re doing.

Thanks, Amy.

Thanks.

—

I hope you enjoyed that episode. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. I know I have a lot of takeaways. A few things that really resonated with me is one is having a framework. We have this idea, or the idea that we talked about, is infobesity. Much information comes at us all the time. How do we categorize that? Our brains really are helpful to have a framework. She mentioned the framework, the spokes of the habit hub. She has those six areas or six controllables.

That’s mindset, food, movement, rest and relaxation, connection or relationships, and then good stress, which is hormesis or positive stress like cognitive, metabolic, emotional, and physical that can actually help us grow significantly. We talked about the science of habits, and a lot of the ways that new habits are formed and how we can go about that. Utilizing her quiz as well is another good way to get started, and then getting those small wins so that you can grow, move towards your goals with one small win, and then reinforce that as you go.

You can find that quiz at AmyBehimerCoaching.com/Quiz. You can find her show at Autoimmune Health Secrets. That’s the name of her podcast. Lastly, she mentioned, what are the takeaways from this? In her framework, there’s that now, soon, later, or never on the habit tracker. Which of these episodes would you say, “I want to do that now?” Sometimes you might say, “I want to do that soon,” or later, and be able to categorize things in those buckets. Some you might say never, and that’s fine too. We hope you have a fantastic day. Thanks so much for being with us here on the show. We’ll see you back here next time.

 

Important Links

• Amy Beheimer
• Autoimmune Health Secrets
• Amy Behimer Coaching Quiz
• Amy Behimer Coaching Join
• Atomic Habits
• Tiny Habits
• Getting Things Done