Anaya Is Back To Full Strength With The Paddison Program For Rheumatoid Arthritis

We discuss in this interview:

How Anaya has been able to recover from severe pain by following the Paddison Program to a T, and dropping painkillers in the process
Her view on RA as a great transformational opportunity and how she has found positive ways it has affected her life
Anaya’s progress in physical activities, which led to her being able to run 6-7k with ease
Managing inflammation in the knees
Isolation exercises, laughter Yoga and other healthy practices
Expanding the diet
The importance of movement and exercise
Fully realizing the power within us

Clint – Sometimes our guests on this show have lots of passion, and determination, we are going to turn that up a notch today. I’ve invited Anaya back onto the podcast to tell her story. The last time she was on the podcast, the episode was released on the 11th of July 2022. She talked about mindset, and so the focus was on a lot of the knowledge that she has around this area and that she teaches professionally. In that episode, which I highly recommend you go and check out, she talked about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and how they influence stress and inflammation, imagination, and remembering things in ways that can self-cycle and recreate emotional negative energy inside of us. Neuroplasticity, how to eewire your brain. Meditation the benefits on that, the power of laughing. You can hear her giggling in the background as I’m doing this, she doesn’t stop. And a whole lot of concepts that are really really really valuable around mindset.

Clint – Today we’re going to focus on her story. She’s come so far in such a short period of time and she already does so much coaching in her professional life outside of rheumatoid arthritis that she’s going to be brought into the coaching mix that we offer as part of our program and part of our services. And so as I have become full, so to speak, with the amount that I can coach people on our live weekly one-to-one. Anaya is going to take up that role as well and be able to handle people in need and assist them with breaking through challenges. So before we get to that, let’s hear from Anaya. How are you feeling today? Give us your first of all, before we hear your sort of before and after snapshot. How are things where are you located? What’s happening?

Anaya – Hi. Oh, everything’s really, really great. I was so looking forward to this podcast. I think after I’d been doing the program, it was like a month or two or three months. It wasn’t very long. Anyway, I messaged you and said, I’d really like to do a podcast, and I was like, Oh, okay, hang on a minute. I have to hold, this has to be consistent and I have to keep going. So since then, I’ve been, biding my time, really looking forward to being where I am today and being able to tell my story, really. And it’s pretty close to my one-year anniversary, which is very exciting. And obviously, it’s a time when you look back at how far you’ve come in the last year and feel really grateful and really good about it. So I’m very excited about that.

Clint – Yes. Every time we connect, whether it be, in our support group, which you’re a member of and now transitioning to being able to be a coach and also offline when we’ve had some private conversations about some things. I always love your energy, and your passion. You’re obviously not just good at the diet, the physical side of things, but as I mentioned at the top, the mindset. And so you have this 360-degree approach that is necessary to be able to identify opportunities and see, oh, it’s that or it’s that or it’s that. And so, yeah, congratulations on all you’ve achieved. Let’s hear about it, let’s focus on you today. Give us a quick sort of commercial level before and after of your achievements. Then we’ll dive deep.

Anaya – Thank you, I will. And just with reference to what you’re saying, into, rheumatoid arthritis was a real opportunity for me and it was my greatest teacher. For me, it’s been transformational, it’s it’s changed how I am in the world and it’s made me prioritise things. It’s brought me closer to myself. It feels like it’s really aligned me with my purpose and certainly my passion. And so it’s very easy for me to feel good and to feel happy about that. It was also the hardest thing I’ve ever had to live through, and it brought me to the depths of despair and not wanting the life that I had. The most incredible things are available to us if we are asking ourselves, what can I learn from this? How can I nourish myself more? How can I love myself more? And if we go deeper into it, the life that we can have or as a result of these experiences can just be so far beyond what you could possibly imagine in only good ways.

Clint – I think to put my take on that. I think that the benefits that you have the potential to achieve in the non-physical sense can be equal and opposite or if not greater than the cost physically.

Anaya – Yeah, absolutely.

Clint – As long as we address the physical costs with our utmost attention to minimize them. Those people who in our audience might be very debilitated and feel that this is a concept that is not possible. Yeah, I completely understand, because the physical impact can be enormous. But from every position that we’re at, we can at least take small steps forward in the right direction to prevent further impact and to what we can on that front and all the other fronts.

Clint – Absolutely. Yeah, so the before was I had a really unusual presentation, I think. I had a viral infection and a couple of months later it wasn’t COVID, haven’t hit that actually, I had a viral infection and because I was working with young children and because of them, it’s, it’s good. But anyway, I didn’t really take the time off work that I needed. I’d been training for this adventure race and it was my dream, so I wasn’t willing to give it up. So I did it anyway, and then it was amazing. Like I loved it the whole day, everything was fantastic. And then that night I had a coughing fit and I suplexed my know Sterno-Clavicular joint and cracked a couple of ribs. And so my whole torso went was under pressure and when you do something like that, it just everything completely screws up. So everything seized up and I wasn’t able to breathe properly, cough, laugh, all sorts of stuff, and massive pain, I couldn’t lean back against the chair, nothing was comfortable, I couldn’t sleep, it was it was horrific. And what happened from that as my CRP went from being under one because I was plant-based before, and so I just had bloods every year or so just to check that everything’s okay. And gradually it crept up and crept up and crept up over a space of, I think a few months after about 3 months, it was about 11, and four months it was 14. And then I could feel it literally at night. I felt the inflammation go up into my neck and to my sacrum. And I felt a travelling down through my quadriceps and to my knees and I knew it wasn’t good. The first time I went to a rheumatologist, I think my CRP was only 14 and that was, I think in maybe 4 months after the injury. And he was like, No, no, you’re fine, you’re fine. I’m like, I’m not fine. I’m not fine. And he’s like, Oh, you range emotions normal. I said, What? For a 99 year old? I said, I’m an athlete, this is not normal, this is not normal for me. And he just, wasn’t super interested, so I wasn’t very happy about that I made sure I wrote him a letter and said, look, I don’t think you really listen to me. I don’t think you really heard what I was saying and just sort of left it at that. Then things carried on and I didn’t get referred back to him and basically the inflammation and my knees and everything which went up and up and up. No one knew what to do, they just kept giving me more and more painkillers. And I was like, there’s something else wrong, there’s something else wrong.

Anaya – I felt like I was on a train that I knew was going to crash and my husband knew it was going to crash. And I was trying to tell people, Hey, hey, something’s wrong. You know, this is going to crash. And no one believed me. My knees were like giant potatoes, they were massive. I had a back assist rupture in my left knee, a tennis ball sticking out of my calf. And I sent it back to the rheumatologist and I said, do you believe me that something’s wrong now? And he’s like, Oh, you know, come, get up here immediately. I said, well, I don’t really trust you anymore. And so he rang me right? Free of charge, rang me, I mean, he is great now we have a great relationship. He rang me and said, You need to come and see me right away. I saw him as a private patient because for some reason my doctor hadn’t put me on the public thing. But anyway, in order to go and see him, because by that stage I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t sit down. I had maybe 20 degrees of range of motion and my leg, I couldn’t straighten it. I couldn’t bend it. I was like, I really felt like I was 99 on a Zimmer frame. I couldn’t lift up a cup of tea, brush my hair, I couldn’t get dressed. You know, when I got dressed, I’d like rock back on the beard and I’d like to try and lasso my undies around my feet with my feet in the air and, you know, pull things up and on. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t great at all. I wasn’t sleeping, I was in so much pain, and the only thing that was helping after trying many painkillers, of which I’d never had before in my life, was Voltaren. And I knew that as I was taking it, it was destroying my gut, but I didn’t have any other options at that stage. I was miserable, I was crying every day a number of times. I was, you know, God, why, why, why, why, Why me? You know why? Why? I don’t want this life, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

Anaya – What kept me here was really my husband and my dog, because I knew that they wouldn’t be better off without me. But it was just a miserable existence, absolutely miserable existence. So in order to get to the rheumatologist, it’s about a five-hour drive, I had to take Prednisone to be able to sit in the car that long and get up there and whatever it was on my neck whenever I was in a vehicle, you know, those bubbly things that you have in cars, my neck felt like that, it was really disconcerting because it kind of felt like my head was just going to fall off my shoulders. So I got up there and he was like, you know, I wanted to the first time. I mean, it’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest, because it was such a deeply traumatic time that I’ve the dates and some of the sequences are about messed up. But he wanted me to start on methotrexate straight away and he wanted to do steroid injections on my knees straight away. And I was like, you know, I was in tears and it was terrible, and it was just so shocking. It’s such a shock to get such a diagnosis, it was very hard to make any decisions. And bless him, I asked him if he could leave the room so I could talk to my husband, what he did, which was fantastic, and not only did he do that, he actually canceled his next appointment. So I actually had a two hour, basically a two-hour appointment with him for the price of one bargain. And I didn’t want to have those steroid injections to my knees at that stage. But I accepted having a generalized one and shared between my butt cheeks. So I had that and then that was supposed to keep me going until the methotrexate. And so I took this methotrexate home and they I took them for a few weeks. They made me feel really awful. So I stopped taking them and it didn’t work very well for me. Things got really, really bad and I felt like I was dying. The inflammation would wake me up at night, you know, it uses so much energy, it would wake me up at night. I was so hungry, I had a snack prepared for the middle of the night. Unfortunately, this might make you vomit. Mashed potato, And I didn’t actually eat I was plant-based. I didn’t eat cheese, but I had mashed potato mashed up with cream cheese and probably butter or olive oil just to high fat to try and keep the calories and keep the weight on. And that was a buy recommendation of a doctor. So, you know, I was like feeding, having to feed my inflammation a couple of times, I was so hungry. And then I got to the stage where every time I ate, I felt violently ill, it was awful.

Anaya – Then I was sitting down on the couch one day, and the sun, I was like, Help me, I need some help. I need some guidance with this. And I don’t know what I Googled. I think I just Googled, you know, rheumatoid arthritis programs or something. And I found you and you had a podcast or a webinar or something starting in 10 minutes, like, Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is a got on. And then so I started the program. When I started the program, my CRP was I think it was around 69 and I was in a shocking state. I would lie down on the floor, which took a long time. You know, when you’ve got any bend in your legs and your shoulders are falling apart, it’s really hard to lie down. And I could feel my tailbone on the floor. I’d lost more than 20 between 20 and 25% of my body weight. I’d gone from being athletic and doing, you know, six or ten-hour events or whatever to not being able to walk to the toilet and not being able to sit down on the toilet, having to have help to get up from the toilet. My husband was getting out of the chair. I mean, I’d fallen to the chairs because I didn’t have the strength to love myself down and then to get out, my husband would put his feet on my feet and sort of lever me, you know, pull me out of the chair. So I was debilitated, about as much as you could be in some ways.

Anaya – So I started the program and it was a choice to start the program, but it wasn’t a choice. You know, I want my life back. I wanted it better. So there was no question in my mind it was very black and white for me, and normally I see things and shades of different colors, but I had to do it, it was my only choice, it was my best choice. I felt like I was literally and figuratively fighting for my life. So I did the program, I did it to a tee, I didn’t take any shortcuts. There was no little voice in my head going, Hmm, just chocolate, yum, yum, yum, none of that at all. And I was so lucky because my husband just went on it with me, cooks me, we cooked together. He’s still on it, he eats his own thing every now and again. But he was 100% supportive. And I didn’t have a lot of support, but I didn’t need it because he was absolutely amazing. He was there with me every step of the way. I’m so grateful for that, and that was just really amazing.

Anaya – So, yeah, I started the program the day I started the program, I stopped Voltaren diclofenac, I stopped painkillers. I didn’t have any more. I had a steroid injection in the bum a little another one a little bit before that, but it wasn’t as effective. The first one was like, Oh yeah, this is good. But the second one wasn’t quite so great. Yeah. So I just, I did everything pretty much to the T. I’d restarted methotrexate and that was a couple of weeks before the program so it hadn’t kicked in when I started and I was, I was 20 milligrams of the oral the pill but it made me feel really sick, so I went to the subcutaneous which alleviated a lot of the symptoms for me and my stomach honestly just couldn’t really handle anything. So I was on 15 milligrams subcutaneous for a while and now I’m down to ten. So that’s really cool. And I took that on a Friday because I didn’t mind feeling a bit on the weekends I took it. So I started taking that on a Friday and that worked for me a lot better than taking it on a monday. Beginning three weeks into the program, I also had my first COVID injection, which caused a little bit of a shock as well. So yeah, and I had to stop again. Obviously I had to stop the methotrexate for that. So probably was quite a bit later before the methotrexate started working, but I never actually really noticed it, I never noticed a difference. It’s hard to you know, it’s hard to tease out what was methotrexate, what was the program. But I hadn’t had that continuity with the methotrexate, so I had had the continuity with the program.

Anaya – Gotcha. So if I can repeat back and you can yes or no. So you got started, you felt you were immediately able to drop the painkiller. You were feeling better, but we haven’t sort of crossed that just yet with you. But you’re about to tell us that you were feeling better. And then a couple of only a couple of weeks after methotrexate, you had to stop it for the injection and then restarted again. And so the methotrexate onboarding was probably longer and a less impactful than what it otherwise would.

Anaya – Yeah, Yeah. And I mean, who knows? I still don’t really know how effective it is because obviously I dropped down and didn’t notice the thing. So it’s entirely possible, it’s not really doing anything much at all. Who knows?

Clint – Could be.

Anaya – But I still thank it, every time I do that injection, I call up my sunshine poke because it’s the color of sunshine. Well, and I just I hold it in my hands and I thank it for the life that I’ve got, for the support that it’s giving me and healing and any tiny, any weeny little thing I can think to think it for and be grateful for, I do. And then I just inject myself every week.

Clint – Yeah. Wonderful. Tell us how far you’ve come. You’ve set the scene of very, very, very big challenges that you are facing.

Anaya – Yeah.

Clint – You have shared things that have blown my mind, like doing three consecutive pull ups.

Anaya – Oh, yeah.

Clint – I don’t want to actually steal your thunder, but you’ve done some incredible things. I don’t even want to give the topics. Just tell us what you’ve been able to achieve.

Anaya – Well, yeah, that was pretty cool, actually, being able to do pull ups. I hadn’t been able to do that before well, maybe since I was 14 or 15. So that’s one of the really cool things that I’ve been able to do. I haven’t actually done any pull ups for a long time. I’ve been working with a personal trainer to basically ensure that all my movement patterns are really adaptive and positive and to retrain any that I have that aren’t. And the focus has really been on running again. It’s funny, I’ve been working with him for three months and he’s incredible. You know, he works with Olympic athletes, but he also works with people like me, people were doing rehab, people doing pre hip, people with Parkinson’s disease, he’s just amazing. When I started with him even just three months ago, I was not running very far at all. And now I’m running 6-7 K non-stop easily. I’m faster, I’m a faster runner than I was, I’m a stronger runner than I was so I can run up hills with so much more ease it’s incredible. I know that next year I will be doing adventure races again. I know that next year I’ll be able to go and do what I used to do, which was pop off on the weekends for a good 20-30 K run in the hills. I know that that’s going to happen now. For a long time I was, you know, I had actually found a place of peace that, okay, I might can’t do that, but I’ll still be able to mountain bike and do those things and that’s okay. I can live with that. That’s all right, because I felt so happy with other areas of my life. And so, yeah, I just accepted it, I felt peace. Well, I don’t know that I accept it, I felt peaceful and okay about it, but lo and behold, here I am and I’m going to able to do those things. I do 50 kilograms easily, so I’m lifting my body weight. Wow. There’s quite a.

Clint – For folks who don’t know. Women do them at the gym every time I go.

Anaya – I’m growing a butt, which is awesome. So basically if you’re sitting down on the floor in the gym and you sort of lean back so that your shoulder blades are on a block or something like that. Yeah. And you’ve sort of got your hands here and you put your, your knees are bent in front of you and if you sort of reach forward and you can touch basically the back of your heels and so they are in front of you and you’ve got a barbell across your hips, across just sort of below your belly button, and you are basically picking your butt off up off the floor and sort of making out upside down table or something. So. Yeah, I can push do my body weight really easily. So and I mean, I’m not pushing it like, we don’t push it. We don’t push it, but I can do that. And, you know, there’s quite a few things that I’m doing in the gym now that are and there’s another one that I’m doing my body weight with as well. So I’m starting to really build up strength now. Whereas before I was sort of working on patterns and neural patterns within different planes of movement, now wanted a dynamic movement. So I’m jumping and things like that. And yeah.

Clint – How are the knees through all this? You mentioned your knees were a nightmare. Did you ever get the steroid shots into the knees? How did you get the inflammation down in the knees? Were there anything interventions other than the program and physical therapy? Talk knees first, please.

Anaya – So the one that had the Baker’s Cyst all the inflammation left within a month or two of starting the program and my CRP was down to under one within a month, so from 69 to under one. The other knee was a little moodier, shall we say, and it was pretty good. And there wasn’t much inflammation in there, but it just was really, really hard to get rid of. For a long time I had that sort of strangulation feeling like someone’s wrapped tape around the top of your knee. And it just wasn’t quite I mean, it hasn’t I haven’t had any pain, it doesn’t hurt, but it just wasn’t, you know, really highly functional. And then I bumped it and it didn’t like that very much and it was getting better. And then I had some needling, dry needling around the top of it, probably about that far away from the actual knee, and that did not go down a well at all it just went, ooh, not as bad as it was before by any stretch. And then I sort of like, you know what? This knee has been inflamed in some way, shape or form for over a year and a half. I think it’s time to get a steroid injection, so I did. And they took out quite a lot of fluids, which is amazing and awesome and disgusting. And it’s been fine ever since. It’s still not what I would say 100%, I’d say it’s 95%. But I’m getting there and it’s getting there and it’s less reactive. They’re both less reactive now and I don’t knock them. If I do knock them, I laugh because that’s my way of telling my body that everything’s okay and it releases serotonin and dopamine and my body’s kind of like, Well, hang on a minute, she’s laughing, everything must be okay. And that sort of overrides that reactionary immune response and laughing moderates the nervous system and also the immune system. So that’s my little technique, if I ever bump myself or do any of those things, I just laugh for 10 minutes. And so that’s been very effective actually for me. And so now I can get a lot, you know, I’m having sort of myofascial release and we’re just starting to sort of go to a bit close to my knee and just to move things a lot more. And, you know, it’s it’s awesome. And running really makes it feel a lot better as well.

Clint – Now, isn’t that counterintuitive for many of us? You know, you just said the following statement, running makes my knees feel much better. That’s hard to comprehend if your knees are in a really bad way. But that was going to be my next question. What helps besides the steroid injection and the diet, what physical interventions help the knee?

Anaya – So it was really funny. Like I remember the first time I tried to run and I was like I was trying to like 50 concrete blocks. And because I had not been able to walk for such a long time, I forgot how to walk, I had to retrain myself, I had to learn how to walk again. And that takes a lot of energy and a lot of concentration and a lot of focus. So when I tried to run, it was the same thing, I had to consciously think about one foot in front of the other and it was very, very cumbersome. So it’s been a very long, gradual process. But so worth the exercise pretty much. First thing in the morning I would get on my bike and I would just spin, I would just warm my body up and now I will take my dog for a walk. I would do something first thing in the morning that wasn’t my exercise. That was just me getting into my day, fast tracking any pain that I did have. If I did have pain, I would get straight on my bike and I would do what I needed to do to reduce the pain that way. I mean, I love cardio, you know, being outside and exploring and all that kind of stuff is my joy, my passion. So if it’s not fun, I’m not going to do it. So I spent a lot of time outside doing things outside. I also with the knees, squats and things like that, I haven’t actually done any squats for a while, but I’ll be coming back to them. I’ve just been really focused on the movement patterns that I’ve been relearning.

Anaya – Isolation exercises for particular body parts that I was struggling with, I really focused on those, there’s also the cardio. At the moment, what I’m doing is I’m doing my gym sessions a couple of days a week. I do sessions on the bike and often I will go to laughter yoga classes and sit on my bike at the same time, so doing like half an hour of spinning. I do some cycling hit stuff a couple of times a week and that is to increase the number of mitochondria that I’ve got. And also because if I can train my body in all different energy systems, then I become more efficient with those, and my body can then respond to that stress and respond to whatever’s happening to it more efficiently. The more efficient you become, the less free radicals you produce within a particular energy system when you’re using it. And you can increase the number of mitochondria as well, which has a real impact on the amount of free radicals and the free radical damage as well, so I’ve been learning anyway. I do that. I walk every day, I run a couple of times a week. What else do I do? I laugh, I do laughter yoga almost every single day, and I did it every single day for quite a long time.

Clint – That’s something that you’ve been hosting inside our memberships for some time now. I think that what’s going on just must be nine months or something or I’m guessing that you’ve been doing that.

Anaya – I’d love to see more people there, and I’m doing it regularly every second week now, so it’s a lot more straightforward.

Clint – Yes. So those of you who are part of our community, Anaya does these laughter yoga sessions and they are fun sessions every second week that she’s running those. So dial in, look at your live upcoming live call section in your membership area and you’ll be able to attend those. So you’ve told us about the physical side of things back in the episode released on the 11th of July. That’s where you go into tremendous detail and provide us with a, yeah, really an in-depth display of your understanding around the mental side of this. And so that’s been huge for you and that area is one of your real strengths. In terms of the diet, how have you expanded from the close adherence that you said you had at the beginning of the program to now into more of a diverse food base? Have you been able to incorporate more foods?

Clint – Well, I have been. I’m not especially, you know, I feel I love what I eat. I don’t feel any particular need to expand too much to be honest. Eating enough is a big thing for me, I’ve got a pretty fast metabolism. I eat more than my husband and he is 6’4″, you know, X kg a lot heavier than me. And um, you know, it’s always been that way, so this is sort of no different. But I went down to 46 kilograms, 45 and a half kilograms, 90-something pounds and now I’m 50, 51, so I guess it’s 110lbs or something. And I was very slow to introduce foods and I really trusted my intuition. I can’t remember what it is, it’s something that I haven’t eaten yet in Milazzo. So it didn’t do anything. But I was just like, No, it doesn’t feel good. And, you know, sometimes you introduce something and it might just be a no for now, and two weeks later it might be great. So it’s really important that you know, the whole phase is temporary. Things will improve, and things will change, nothing ever stays the same. I don’t eat out a lot at all. I mean, I don’t really want to risk it, and, you pay all this money for I can cook better food at home.

Anaya – So it’s as much about an experience than it is about the food. I mean, some would argue that’s not true. But for those of us who treat food as medicine and not food for mouth taste, indulgence. Those of us in this healing journey, then we more appreciate the value that the food can provide us from a health viewpoint. And when you go to a restaurant, it’s hard to match the value that we can provide at home, isn’t it?

Anaya – Yeah. And it just feels so good knowing that you’re nourishing your body. Yeah. And, you know, in some ways people think, oh, restrict diet. For me it’s been really freeing because it allows you to engage creativity with food in a way that you haven’t before necessarily. And so the combinations and the things that you eat, I mean, I’m not sure whose recipe it was for the buckwheat pancakes, but honestly, I ate one or two of those a day for months and months. It was a big part of me putting on weight, thank you very much. Because yeah, I mean, I ate them till they were coming out my ears. I remember on the Paddison Program the first time I got to eat fruit and I chose to eat cantaloupe. And you know, they’re not cheap here in New Zealand where I live, they were about $12 New Zealand each, which is seven U.S. or something and nine or ten Australian. Yeah. And I remember just, you know, I was sitting outside and the sunshine on my bean bag watching. We had a lot of little tiny little frogs in our ponds. So sitting out there watching the frogs and the pond and I was about to eat cantaloupe and I was so excited because that was my first fruit well, melon and I ate it. And honestly, I swear I could feel it healing as it went down. I could feel it nourishing myself was just deeply, deeply nourishing me. And it was such a profound experience. And because, you know, you get so connected with your food and what it’s doing for you, you notice these things and they feel amazing. So you’ve gone from being not very conscious with your eating and your nutrition and your nourishment to being very conscious about how you’re nourishing your body and how you’re looking after yourself. And every single meal you eat is an act of love and compassion. It just feels so good to live that way, it’s just so beautiful, so beautiful.

Clint – Absolutely. I’m going to take your quote there and put that I’ve just mentioned that you’ve got you’ve featured in the book a couple of times now. So, again, yes, I agree. You just geek out about so much of the value that food can provide when you realize the potential that it can provide for your health and future.

Anaya – Yeah.

Clint – Anything that will reduce the pain you fall in love with.

Anaya – Oh yeah. Cause pain and is not fun, not fun at all. And, you know, just little tips and things like I would be when I’m cooking. I actually just put a plate of greens out and I just literally stuff my face as much as I can and I eat the greens while I’m cooking. So I’ve already had a whole lot of greens, you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and I eat them as I’m cooking and that’s really great. And another thing that I do is I put seaweed and my salt and pepper shakers and sometimes and I made a shaker for nutritional yeast and things. So just learn little ways that help you ensure you’re getting everything that you need to get.

Clint – We actually found our health food store, there’s actually a seaweed salt and so we use them and the kids eat it as well. Seaweed, salt. So it’s got ground up dulse sea in the Celtic Sea salt and so it’s a mix. The kids love it too, in fact, we have to stop them from using too much.

Anaya – Yeah.

Clint – That’s funny, because e found the same thing. It’s great tasting and you get that dried seaweed in there as well, as opposed to just the salt. Awesome. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you.

Anaya – Oh, no, I’m. I’m just trying to think. What else about food?

Clint – Well, it becomes second nature, doesn’t it? But you and I like, I talk more about exercise these days because at the food for me is feels more like that metaphor of the concrete slab of the house. What happens is that when newcomers to our community, it’s 100% food. They want to know every single nuance about how much celery juice they should have on day one and what ratio of cucumber juice and celery juice and how much should you eat? How much should you drink, exactly? And like, is bok choy better than cos lettuce, Right? We’re at that level. And then you realize after a while that just eat the way that’s outlined with and a few little mistakes, a few little variations of things like that don’t matter at all. What matters is, to get everything else in parallel to the diet going and you’ll get momentum.

Anaya – And it’s such a foundation and once you’ve got that foundation, you build other things into it. And I think, you know, when you’re starting, you need a really good daily routine that works for you. So you build that foundation for healing, and once you’ve got that good foundation in a way that works for you, then you can start building more and more. And obviously food doesn’t. I mean, as you introduce things, it’s building that foundation as well. But exercise is something that can evolve and change and support you as your body changes and you get stronger. What it looks like changes. But yeah, 100% exercise was my pain relief for sure. Going back to Baseline didn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference for me. Like when I had the COVID injection, it was the exercise that really made an impact and also made me mentally feel really, really good. And when you exercise, it releases again your serotonin and your dopamine, you feel good hormones. And also when you’re feeling like that and you could have get into a fight or flight state, the act of moving and doing something in taking action helps calm the body as well. So when you exercise, you are moving, you are taking action, you are doing something positive and conscious for yourself. So I think there’s that sort of aspect of it as well.

Clint – Definitely, Yeah. Studies show that those who exercise regularly handle stressful occurrences without the negative consequences as much as those who don’t. So let’s talk I guess we didn’t really have a plan for this. Next thing I’m going to ask you about. But you’re about to assist some of our community yourself with helping them, with finding a path forward. What’s going to be most exciting about this for you? Because you’re already doing coaching. Tell us about your existing coaching and then we’ll talk about what you’re looking forward to in terms of helping those specifically with strategies and rolling out strategies for reducing pain with rheumatoid arthritis.

Anaya – What I do right now is really support people with chronic illness and predominantly that’s chronic fatigue in a long COVID. And the reason I do this is I had chronic fatigue myself a number of years ago, which I fully recovered from. So a lot of the credit for a lot of the strategies that I have and the knowledge that I have and the resilience that I’ve developed, although that was severely challenged by RA was hard won from my experience with chronic fatigue. I work with people to support them, create a really good foundation and platform for their healing and then slowly introduce things that will support them in the ongoing recovery and healing. I just want people to be better and feel better, and I want them to know that they can heal and they can recover no matter what. You know, doom, surfing, it’s not great. And the stories that you hear, the things that doctors say, they’ve got a certain amount of understanding and they’ve got a knowledge base and they have constraints and expectations on what they say and how they do it and all that kind of stuff. And there’s so much more to the world.

Clint – We are so powerful. We can choose what our life is going to look like. The best way to predict your future is to create it. So we are incredibly powerful, but we get into these systems that disempower us, and we also allow other people to decide for us our course of treatment and what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. It’s time for us to take that back and learn to really trust ourselves with what we know that we need. So building awareness is really, really important, and learning to trust yourself and learning to trust your body and know that your body has not let you down, that your body needs to know that you’ve got its back. I mean, your body is amazing and incredible, the things it does without any of your input are amazing. You know, healing, healing cuts, going to the toilet, breathing, you know. And if we just get out of our body’s way and we provide it with everything that it needs and support it in every way, shape or form, it will heal, everything will be okay.

Clint – Absolutely. I often think that we mentally get in the way of the body’s actual capacity and interrupt its natural abilities to do what it can.

Anaya – Yeah, absolutely.

Clint – For example, I better not move that elbow because when I do it, it’s a little, little tender, I better not move it. Whereas that elbow tenderness is craving like a crying baby to be moved back and forth. Like rocking a baby, we can rock that joint into relief.

Anaya – Oh, I love that imagery. And it is so important because I didn’t, with all my background knowledge and psychology and sport and exercise and all that stuff, I didn’t know what to do when I couldn’t move. And my doctor didn’t tell me, no one told me to move. You’re scared of it because you don’t want to do any damage and you feel a bit paralyzed because you just don’t know what to do. So this is the great thing about the Paddison Program, thousands of people have done this and it’s worked for thousands of people. It will work for you, too. And just to have some good, trustworthy, reliable guidance as gold.

Clint – The way that we’re doing this, if people are interested in either speaking with me weekly on the small group live zoom coaching calls that we do or if you would like to speak with a Anaya, Nana That’s our nickname for my daughter Anana, because she couldn’t say Angelina when she was growing up. So when she was one year old, she would refer to herself as Anana. So to this day we sometimes call her and because it makes us feel silly and gooey on the inside. My apologies.

Clint – So and if people are interested to speak with Anaya, then the process is similar. We have a beautiful lady called Rita and she is a eCornell-trained, plant-based expert with rheumatoid arthritis who’s been on the podcast in the past. And she’s doing a free 30-minute discovery calls with anyone who’s interested to learn more, telling them about the process, to listen, to show compassion, and then to provide these lovely folks who are interested in getting help with options with our availability. That has been a little bit hard because my availability hasn’t been tremendously great given that there are a lot of people who are in need. So now Anaya is going to be available and if you’d like some help from myself and check my schedule for Anaya, who’s opening up her own coaching, then go to RheumatoidSolutions.com/apply and book a free call with Rita and have a chat. There’s no obligation she can maybe provide you with some help that’ll make a difference too. So that’s the process. And then Anaya, if someone’s thinking about this process and thinking, oh, I’m not sure, what would you say to them right now?

Anaya – Do it, Do it. You know, you can spend a lot of money on things that don’t work and that might help a little bit. But this is really, really comprehensive. And the rheumatoid support forum and particular the bunch of people, there is a wealth of information on everything that you could possibly want to know. It’s a really supportive place, it’s a really positive place, it’s a very encouraging place. It’s a wonderful place to to ask questions, to get answers, to support somebody else, to not feel alone. There are other people who’ve been through what you’re going through and they can offer you incredible advice. And, I mean, I just really love it, I feel really grateful to have found it to be part of that community. And it’s also a place, you know, if you are struggling, if you are having a tough time, just let people know and they are there. The information that’s on there it’s just trying to even think of the word comprehensive doesn’t really even do it. It’s just on everything, you know.

Clint – 700 just videos related to short problem solving such as that in just the rheumatoid solutions module within the support group.

Anaya – And it would be the best money I’ve ever spent in my life. Without a doubt, it’d be right up there with my dog.

Clint – And of course that online community is just part of the inclusion. So you would also, with the breakthrough package that we’ve set up, be able to speak to and they are almost self every week on Zoom and have that personal connection that you can certainly get more value from by solving things quickly and making jet really fast progress. So if people are interested go to RheumatoidSolutions.com/apply set up a call with lovely Rita and perhaps myself or Anaya will speak to you soon.

Clint – Anaya, your story is so awesome. You just really have such a just a calm demeanor and a very sort of well positioned and control sort of attitude towards this, I find that really reassuring. And also what it makes me feel is tremendous confidence about your future. You just really have embraced the challenge and turned it around and then lifted yourself personally to a whole nother level because of it. And it’s just wonderful to observe.

Anaya – Yeah, Thank you. And you know, we didn’t mention this, but one of the things I did do was set goals every month and it’s so important and they were aspirational lot of them. I was like, Oh, so now I’m going to do that. And I set goals for this last, year. And I mean, I smashed them and if I didn’t, I was okay because I was focusing on something else, it was fine. But I’ve smashed them. I was wanted to run 5K by December. Well, I’m going to be running 15 probably. I wanted to do Child’s Pose by December. This is still in progress, but I can sit down with all my weight on one of my knees now. The other one I’m about this far away from my hilt. They felt like really big goals and it helps you track your progress. Recording your small ones is positive, it shows you you are making progress. It gives you feedback about what you’re doing and that it’s working and it makes you feel really, really good. And so I really feel the world is my oyster again, a different oyster, a more beautiful oyster with maybe diamonds instead of pearls. I don’t know. But it’s just been incredible and I’m so grateful for it.

Clint – Well done. Well done. I think because you got on top of this so much faster than a lot of us. I mean, your first year, you were already sort of going through hell and then already started the program easily within that first year. In the first year, I was still denying methotrexate in agony with elbows, wrist, fingers left, and knee, struggling to get out of bed. So I hadn’t even begun my drug by the end of the first year and was a nightmare and hadn’t even discovered food and exercise relationships until maybe at the end of the second year. So like, Oh, I was so slow.

Anaya – You did all the work for me, to be fair.

Clint – I was completely in the dark as to how to go about it. But congratulations for doing that, and I think that definitely puts you in a position where you’re on the minimum dose of methotrexate that is prescribed.

Anaya – Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. I was wondering if they had five.

Clint – I mean, there there are pills that are 2.5 and five mg and so on, but you’re on the dose that I started on at 10 milligrams. You said anything less than that we don’t start people on methotrexate. So 10 milligrams, you’re at the start a dose. And some rheumatologists say at this point, if you want to lower, just might as well just come off it. Whereas I’ve seen people taper at 7.5 down to 2.5 and actually it’s down 2.5 for a year before coming off that because of maybe a mental side of it, but whatever. So you’ve gotten to this very low-dose methotrexate.

Anaya – And I have permission to lower it if I want.

Clint – You’re in high performance physically, thrilled with your diet, and thriving. A high-performance goal setter, all of the goal setting you’ve done that I’ve seen inside the rheumatoid support is just amazing. Then you come back and you show accountability to how they went and you really follow that up. And then your mindset stuff and your knowledge of the nervous system and deep breathing and laughter and meditation, it’s all world-class. I’m sure that you’re going to help lots of people and help them to get on a journey that’s as successful as yours.

Anaya – Thank you. Well, that’s I want to help people. I want to help them recover and heal and get their life back. That is my that is my mission.

Clint – Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us tonight, and we’ll connect soon. I hope everyone else has enjoyed this episode. If you do like this episode, make sure that you go and book a call with Rita, have a chat with the beautiful Rita, and see whether or not you’d like to join us with some intensive breakthrough coaching. Thanks, Anaya.

Anaya – My pleasure. Was so wonderful to be here. Thank you.

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