Hi Guys. This is Lindsay, your host for the Untethered with Lindsay Tuttle NP podcast, where we go deep on truly becoming untethered in your life and health, and experiencing exponential freedom.

We have the radical and uncensored conversations you have been craving and give you the tools for expansion and growth. I’m so glad that you are here and I can’t wait to connect with you.

Hey Guys. I am still in complete disbelief that I am recording this episode for you. This podcast has been just a birth of a big dream that I’ve had for many years now to. So to be sitting here, speaking in my microphone on Zoom, it just, it feels wild, uh, just to know that this is going to be something that you guys get to listen to. That, gets to just, I believe, inspire you and encourage you that you can be experiencing a completely different life.

And with this first episode, I really wanted to make sure, to really explain why the name Untethered, because when I started really thinking about bringing this podcast to fruition, the different names that came to mind, there were many. And Untethered just really stood out. I a hundred percent have read The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. I love that book. I didn’t really get it from that book though. I think definitely there’s some inspiration there.

But when you look up the definition of untethered, it means not physically connected or fastened into something. Not tied down or limited. Not confined or restricted. I really want you to just let that sink in, right? Like not confined or restricted. And I truly believe what is the game changer when it comes to experiencing greater health, greater wealth, greater connection in our relationships is to truly embody being untethered. To truly embody that I D G A F, like mind, body, spirit, and knowing just what you have to offer.

And so with this podcast, guys, I am so stoked with just this first season of guests; it is going to rock your world. Like even just looking at this list of guests now, I am just like, I’m just like on the edge of my seat because this is just, these are women that inspire me. So much. I look up to them, they are rocking the industry when it comes to both business, health, mental health, doing things a different way, and that’s what we need. I really personally had just kind of gotten a little tired, honestly, of just the same old, same old, with health podcasts when it came to something else that I should do, something else, that I should be buying another hack. And yeah, like, I mean, there’s a place for that too, right? And there’s different things that I promote that I love.

But what I hope you can experience from this, and I kind of hope you’re doing this right now, if not, I give you permission to do so, is that this is something that reminds you as if we were just sitting across from each other at your favorite cafe or just hanging out at a restaurant catching up or on the beach, right? Like so off the cuff, so casual, so encouraging.

So, with that, guys, I’m so excited you’re here. And with the first two episodes of this podcast, I really wanted to break down my story, which is a little both, both I would say like intimidating and exhilarating because I am just so grateful. I’m so grateful for my story and for getting here, and I really wanted to be able to share a, a few of those pieces because I think, you know, it’s so easy when we hop on and, and see what somebody’s doing on Instagram, on, on social media, and we’re like, yeah, like, you know, we, we just see the here and now and we have no idea what got them there, right? And you and I both know Instagram and social can often just be like a highlight reel of what’s going on in our life. And it takes time to get to where you want to go on the healing journey, on achieving what you want to achieve with business, with anything, you know. It is the consistent small things over time, small steps.

I like to say healing happens through micro shifts. Not breakthroughs. So it’s those small, small steps over time, the consistency pays off. And I wanted to be able to share my story because it may not be something that you know about me and I hope can be really encouraging and really just a springboard for the amazing guests that we’re going to have this season and why I chose the people that I chose.

If you’ve connected to me for my practice, you know that I, I birthed the Lindsay Tuttle NP practice in the past year, and that was coming from being in a completely different place in my life. And thank you Third Child for, for helping me get there. I, I truly believe that every time we give birth, it is just another metamorphosis of our body and soul. And Atlas, has been, my third child has just been my, one of my greatest teachers, I mean, all my kids are, they’re always introducing you to the mirror work. But Atlas guys like, dude, something changed for me in that pregnancy and especially postpartum. It was this awareness, and I think there’s a mix of like 2020 in here. Like if you’ve gone through the 2020’s, like shifts. I feel like it’s happening to so many people in my community, right? Like there was this invitation that we can no longer do life like we were doing it before. And it was like this whole group of people upleveling and getting this awareness, and it just kind of almost felt like this separation of dimensions.

And by the way, I talk about this stuff all the time. So if you’re like, where is Lindsay going? I’d love to talk about dimensions. I love to talk about the matrix and just all these things that in a sense, can keep us tethered and we can be untethered. And so that said, with 2020 there was just this major, major shift. And I had Atlas and I just knew I couldn’t go back to the same person that I was before.

I couldn’t like practice health the same way that I did before. And that’s been part of my own unraveling and my own healing. So, with that, I want to be able to introduce you to what even got me to this point and more of my story. So truly, I believe so much can be said here, but I’m going to just really highlight some of the key points here and some of the lessons learned along the way, and some really great resources and tools that you’re going to want to take some notes, type it in, the reminders in your phone. Take the mental note. Record the sound, like all of it, right?

So starting when I was nine years old, was when I started developing an eating disorder. And I remember being at Camp, sleepaway camp and some of my most fondest childhood memories were at the sleepaway camp, still are. Whenever I do meditation, I like go to the spot. But there was this awareness when I was at this camp, I remember saying to one of my best friends, named Rachel. I said, you know; I really want to lose weight. I, I’m, I’m fat. I don’t want to be eating all the different stuff here. I shouldn’t be eating that. And she said to me, Lindsay, why do you care? Just have fun. Just enjoy yourself.

And so what happened was I was starting to do that, but I also started creating a reward system in my mind. So, if I did something as far as working out, like running, like doing extra exercise. Whatever I did that counted as more physical work or doing something, I would then reward myself with something that I would consider a treat. And dude, like I grew up in the nineties era, which if you did too, I mean, we’re miracles. We’re walking miracles. We grew up in the sugar-free, fat-free era and with microwave lean cuisine meals and with lunchables and the most trashy food. And somehow, I mean, I guess like a good 50% of the population deals with an autoimmune illness.

But you know, we, we had it, we had it interesting. It was like the best of times and the worst of times right? So that said, when I was just in this mode, i, I was like, you know, I’ll reward myself when I, when I do something. And so I treat myself to things I was never allowed to have at home. And my dad was diabetic and so I was very strict in my home as far as like sugar. But we now know so much about sugar-free and how that’s really just crap, right? So, that said, I just started developing these patterns and this was a story that I held up until a few years ago in my life, and that was, I will reward myself when I do this. When I work hard, when I exercise, when I do this, when I make that my first six figures, when I do X, Y, Z, then I’ll reward myself, then I’ll rest, then I’ll do this.

That was always the tit for tat in my life. When I do this, I will reward myself with that. It was never from a place of self-love, self-care, actually wanting to do it for myself because it’s just my birthright and it’s just part of my being that I deserve that, right? And so, this was the story for a while, and then when I was 13, I moved from Connecticut to Florida, which was really devastating. I mean, I had grown up in Connecticut. I would never, ever live on the East Coast ever again, but I loved it for my childhood, and moving to Florida was just absolutely disastrous for my mental health. I really felt like I went from this just innocent small town to being placed in like an episode of Riverdale.

That’s what it felt like, if I was to compare it to anything. Now I, I mean, I, Riverdale kind of comes to mind. It just really was culture shock for me and I feel like it just really kind of, put me into a really depressed state. And so it was around that time I had already developed all these eating disorder habits, but then it really went full fledge and I started to skip meals throughout the day. I would only reward myself with something maybe at the end of the day that was like unhealthy. I would just eat in secret, eat in hiding, and I was scared to feel and I was scared to lose control.

And this started the cycle where I would get, I would get really thin. I maybe, you know, was, had, had lost so much weight. I was skin and bones and yet all I saw in the mirror was somebody who was fat. And I want to be really sensitive here because I’m touching on a, a lot of issues and I know that this can be in some aspects triggering, and so I really just want to be mindful of anybody listening to this with, with, with this kind of conversation. But what I do want to say is that what I really appreciate now and I think needs to be said, is that the human brain doesn’t fully develop till age 25. And I had this complete body dysmorphia at the time where this, literally skin and bones person in the mirror, I saw the mirror and I saw somebody who was fat and that was a psychological issue.

And unfortunately, I think our society does so often now is normalize this and it’s, it’s unfortunate that there’s just lack of awareness that there are real psychological issues happening and instead we normalize it and we’re not really getting to the root here. So I just felt it was important to mention that. But you know, I, I thought that I was fat and so I kept on seeing different psychiatrists. I got placed on antidepressants, which really didn’t do a thing.

But it also felt like it was my identity and my thing, and this is really important guys, because this is something that I see 90% of the time, if not more with anybody that I work with, with health coaching, with my body spirit, release with any sort of one-on-one container. And that is that so often people are coming to get help when their identity is in the disorder, the disease, the trauma. They still have not learned to be, in a sense untethered, right? Like there’s this attachment and there’s some more to say about that, right? Like, I’m not going to do a whole session sitting here right now on the podcast, but what I want to say is that there’s this awareness that there is like this identity that happens.

And for me, my eating disorder, or I should say the eating disorder was my identity. So that said, I was on different antidepressants, I started being admitted to the hospital. Because I had just lost so much weight. At one point in time, I had a feeding tube down my nose. I was being given high calorie shakes all the day long. I had a psych sitter because I was considered risk to myself. And this would just go on and on. Every couple months I would land myself in the hospital and then I started going to treatment centers, which basically I would say was just a camp for people to learn more bad habits because I didn’t want to get better.

I was probably like 14, 15 years old. And the last effing thing that I wanted was for somebody to take away what was mine. In my mind that was mine and I didn’t want it to be taken away, and I also just wanted to be left alone. And so I, just the patterns here that were happening was that was my source of control. That was my way that I protected myself from pain and hurt. And the same thing happens now when we’re in a place of people pleasing or not setting boundaries or not optimizing, choosing to self-sabotage with our health.

The end of the day, it’s truly having that be, in a sense, our moat around our castle. We’re protecting ourselves from feeling. We’re experiencing more because we have to lose part of the story. We have to lose part of ourselves to write the new story, and that is some of the most scariest shit, right? Like, no, no doctor’s going to tell you that, okay.

I was going to these treatment centers, started developing more problems. I actually started purging and so I was, had an anorexic purging type where I, anytime was eating a lot, I would make myself purge to the point that I landed myself in the hospital. Uh, from swallowing something accidentally making myself purge, and they had to do an emergency endoscopy. And so this was my life. This was my life for years, and then I went to a treatment center that was in Nashville, Tennessee. And there was this awareness and this glimpse that I could be experiencing something different. I got introduced to God, which I had been before, but it was in just a different way, and I think in many ways lend itself to my relationship with God today and my spiritual journey.

But it was just this awareness of, dude, I could be experiencing a different life and be happy. Like I saw people laughing around me. I saw people enjoying life and I really still did struggle there. And I still dealt with a lot of eating disorder issues during the whole time year that I was there and when I left. But there was a big shift that happened, and it was a shift that I could experience a different life. I just knew that, and I had had multiple people up until that point say to me, hey; we never think you’re gonna be able to get off antidepressants. Hey; like, we don’t know if you’ll be able to have kids. Hey; we don’t know if you’re gonna make it another year, because I was so, so sick.

And so I started actually working with a psychiatrist who helped me get off all my medications, and that was quite the process. But it also started becoming eye-opening to me that, hey; maybe I don’t have to have the medications anymore. And I was motivated to do that. It was almost like I, I felt like I could release that. And so this was a really pivotal part of my journey because it was learning the value of being able to release and shed. Shed the layers I no longer needed, right. Like that bless and release things that are just no longer in alignment. Allowing for the change, allowing for the flow.

And so when I was 18, I went to college on the east coast of Florida. And it was one of those things that I had a very conditional contract of being at college. I had to like do weekly weight check-ins. It was, I hated it. It was the worst and truly, I felt like I was just being controlled. I hated it. I, I just wanted people to leave me alone. And truly what was happening guys, was I just was in this relationship with addiction and addiction where I just had to feel like I could just escape. And so I actually wound up doing less with just the eating disorder. I still had those patterns, but I started shifting it more so into over exercise, and it was during my early twenties. I fell in love with running, but to the extent of not knowing how to take care of myself when I was running.

And so I would be running, I mean, especially in my mid twenties anywhere from 40 to 50 miles a week and really did not take care of myself nutritionally to do that. And so it was like this tit for tat that I had to be, pouring into something. It was either, you know, if I felt like I did anything wrong with how I ate, I would translate that into, okay, well I need to exercise more. And I know that there are people listening to this who can a hundred percent relate to that story. That, okay, well I did this wrong, I am wrong, and therefore I do this, right? How many habits, how many decisions are we making for our health, out of feelings of shame and guilt and autopilot, honestly, right? Like 95%. That’s even being conservative. 95% of the thoughts and actions that you take on a day-to-day basis are rooted in the subconscious. And those subconscious thoughts were primed in your early childhood and often even in utero and generationally.

So how you are acting, how are you are behaving today was largely primed in your childhood. So, I mean, there’s so much we could unpack there. Essentially, this was what was dictating my stories. So for me it was like, well, you’re not good enough and you need to fill this wound, this wound of feeling abandoned. So you do X, Y, Z, and that’s how you take care of it, right? And so what wound up happening was there was a year that my dad passed, he died of lung cancer. He had many, many health issues while I was growing up. And, I had hurt my back in a bad accident at the hospital, and it was like this combination of all these things going on. I felt out of control because I was a workaholic and I was an exercise-aholic and I couldn’t do any of those things.

So I, you know, was constantly stressed out that I couldn’t do any of these things, and then I wound up getting a Tdap shot for my master’s program in nursing school and within 24 hours, my body completely failed. I thought I had Guillain-Barre. I thought that I literally was dying and I continued to feel worse and worse over multiple months. Until I was given a diagnosis three months later after getting that shot, or actually I guess it was two months later of fibromyalgia. And I remember getting that diagnosis and being like, this is shit, right, like two months after getting this jab, I go from being a marathon runner to barely being able to get out of bed without extreme pain.

And I just knew something was off and I knew I was being called into a shift and I knew my life could never look like it did before. It, that was, it was scary as hell, ’cause I remember knowing even at that time, my life would be on a completely different trajectory than it was before. And, and guys like, I hope you see, you know, any of these things that have happened in your life that have been big events are so often rerouting you, because you are just not on the right path. Like you are not going down the right path. And that I remember at that time thinking that, well, you know, I’m going to graduate with my nurse practitioner and I’ll probably just work in the hospital, even though I was starting to become more interested in like integrative health at the time. I just didn’t know if there was any money there, and I was very, very driven by money.

And so, and I mean, I still love making money, but at the time I was very driven by that being my deciding factor. And then there was this knowing of like, I cannot go down this path ever again. I’m being called to, to help people in a different way. And so interestingly around that time, I got pregnant with my first child. My sweet Jace, who is just the most beautiful, caring soul. There’s just a special relationship that happens with your firstborn. It is just so sacred. Uh, he is, I feel like in many ways a mini me, which I, I love, I do secretly love. I, I think my husband always mentions that. He’s like, yeah, yeah, he really is a mini you, which I love. He’s just the sweetest soul.

And so, I got pregnant and all my symptoms started going away. And this is actually very common with autoimmune processes, where processes where you’ll actually have symptoms start to go away from the increase in hormones. And so I actually felt really good during that time, but then during postpartum, all the symptoms kept returning and they actually were worse than they were before. So I started doing some investigative work, wound up seeking out different diagnostic testing. I literally, the day that I graduated with my, uh, or I had my, um, passed my nurse practitioner certification, and at the time I wasn’t having too many symptoms; this was maybe a year out from having my son.

That very same day I got a voicemail on my phone saying that my test was positive for Lyme. And so it was definitely a day of mixed emotions. It was like celebrating, but also like what the F, right? Like I had learned absolutely nothing about Lyme disease in my graduate program. You learn almost nothing about it in nursing school except, hey; put people on like two to three weeks of antibiotics. Gosh, so much has changed. I’m so glad that there’s a lot more awareness about Lyme, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot to unpack even with Lyme. And I’m not going to go there right now, but I’ll say like there’s a lot to unpack with Lyme.

So I wound up having all these symptoms and I decided to start doing some treatments, but I just kept feeling worse and worse, and to the point that I became completely bedbound. I could no longer work in my practice. I was almost completely bedbound for six months and that had to have been one of the lowest lows of my life, ’cause here was this person that was supposed to, like, I had this high standard on myself of sharing holistic health and you know, looking the part and I could not get out of bed.

It was one of the hardest moments of our marriage because my husband honestly thought that he was going lose me. I was taking high doses of kratom, which is a natural, it’s, it’s not an opioid, but works a bit similarly. And I was just taking the edge off when it came to the pain. And I started doing some different IV treatments, which then I would feel a little bit better for a while. Then I’d feel back to feeling worse. And it just went back and forth, back and forth. And then I started doing stem cells.

So the stem cells, I went to a clinic in LA, fell in love with the west coast. That is where I’m at now. I’m in Idaho. I would probably live in the west coast or on the west coast in a dream life. Uh, but not within the last five years. The last five years, I, I have zero interest in being in California, but I like to visit. I will say that I like to visit. So, I was doing the treatment there and I really started feeling good. I started feeling good initially for like the first year, and then I started feeling poorly again, and that’s when I was pregnant with my second child, Harrison. It was a really, really tough pregnancy. There was a lot of trauma in that pregnancy of just so feeling, so unpredictable. I started dealing with mass cell activation syndrome. I was dealing with just crazy issues with that. And I wound up having a free birth with Harrison, but it was, like I said, a very stressful pregnancy.

And during that whole time I had been vegan, which definitely not a great fit for my body. Uh, it was definitely something that I think I got very, very depleted during that entire pregnancy and into postpartum. And I remember laying on a couch three months postpartum and being like, dude, I need bone broth. I told my husband I need bone broth. Bring it stat and, and fortunately my foundation in Weston A. Price kicked into gear and I got the bone broth. And I want to mention too, just a little side note here, what had gotten me even aware bone broth and gut health and all of that was when I was in my early twenties, somebody had introduced to me the GAPS Diet and the GAPS book.

And GAP stands for gut and psychology syndrome. This is what initially got me into holistic health and knowing that there was a root to different mental health illnesses. And it was this book that I was like, I had an epiphany. I was like, oh my gosh. Like there was a reason that I started dealing with all these mental health issues. It wasn’t just because it was in my family or because of, I don’t know, just like there’s always this outside blame. But it was finally helping me connect the dots of how gut health was impacting my mental health. And I was forever changed from that book. Forever changed from it. And so that’s really what put me like really pushed me into the holistic health world.

Also, when I saw the documentary of the Business of Being Born, which was right before I got, or maybe it was when I was pregnant with Jace, or right before I got pregnant with my oldest. And I just knew like from that experience, birth was completely like, it could be the complete opposite of what I learned in nursing school and at the hospital, which was that birth was a scary, fearful thing and that you need 20,000 people and tubes and equipment around you, which is not, not what birth is or what it can be.

So that said, you know, I, this is not a, a podcast episode on birth, but I wanted to be able to just share how these different things along my journey introduced me to a different perspective. And that, you know, you can hold those multiple perspectives introduced to me that things could look different than what I learned and I’m forever grateful for that.

And so, when I, after I had Harrison, I started dealing with symptoms again, about a year postpartum. We moved from Colorado to Idaho. This was in 2020. And that was when I actually started dealing with a lot of mass cell and chronic fatigue issues again. Uh, the chronic fatigue had not been an issue for me. Pain had been an issue. I was fortunately not dealing as much with pain anymore. I had done these specific magnet treatments and guys, this was like over the span of a, I would say a six year period of just constant treatments, constant supplements, constantly shelling out money for these things where I would get forward a little bit. Then I would go right back to where I was, if not worse.

It was the worst merry-go-round, worst rollercoaster of just feeling constantly stuck. Constantly like I could not find the answer. Constantly, like, what am I doing? Like, what is this? You know? And honestly just being really frustrated. And knowing, knowing that there had to be something else better out there. Better out there to really, truly heal. I bet there is someone listening to this right now who can relate to, who can relate to feeling stuck. Stuck in health or in your business or just feeling like you’ve spinned all the tracks and you’re like, what else could I possibly do? It’s wild to see how many people lose so much money and so much time and so much energy because we just keep on pouring into things that are not solving the problem, not getting to the root, and not giving us long lasting results.

And so with that, I am going to be wrapping up this first episode, and I will continue with my story. The magic. The magic that I was introduced to and discovered that created the shift. And the shift that everybody can be experiencing to finally, finally get unstuck and finally be experiencing their dream life. So I’m excited to be able to continue the conversation, to continue the coffee date, and I will see you in the next podcast episode.

Thank you so much you guys for listening to the show. I’m so glad you’re here.

Come say hi on Instagram at www.instagram.com/lindsaytuttlenp, which is my practice page, or find me on www.instagram.com/lindsayonthehaven, which gives you the behind the scenes of our day-to-day intentional living on our homestead.

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Chat soon friend.