🚨🚨🚨Get your inflammation score & root causes of inflammation guide here: https://www.christabiegler.com/inflammationrootcause

In this episode, I’m giving you a little life update and answering a question I get all the time. 

Where do I start with my health?

Using a story about my son’s back pain and how a trained eye caught what others missed, I walk through why assessment has to come first. So often things look fine on the surface. Compensation can look functional. Symptoms can feel normal. And you truly do not know what you do not know.

When it comes to your health, guessing creates overwhelm. Assessment creates clarity.

I explain how I use symptom patterns and an inflammation score to help identify root causes and determine which systems need support. Instead of jumping straight to restriction, random supplements, or excessive testing, we start by looking at the full picture.

This episode will help you understand why restoring function to systems changes everything and why more symptoms often mean more opportunity for improvement.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Why assessment is always the first step
• How compensation can hide dysfunction
• Why higher symptom burden often means more room for improvement
• The questions I ask before recommending testing
• How restoring function shifts you out of restriction and into clarity

❓Questions for Christa? Submit them here: https://www.christabiegler.com/questions

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:
Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎 Use code LESSSTRESSED10 anytime for 10% off!

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Hello, happy New Year. How are you? I am, just surprised that it's February, I'm just getting used to writing 2026. That's where I am in the new year. So this year I'll give you a little bit of an update about what's happening in my life. So I guess to preface that. The winter is my husband's summer.

In the summer. He works a million hours. So in the winter I call it the honeymoon period where we actually spend time together and he's home at 5:00 PM and it's like we're a, what I would call a normal couple. And then sometimes the rest of the year is not so much like the honeymoon period at all. So anyway, we've been spending more time together and as part of that I'm also doing something that I never ever thought I would do, which is I'm homeschooling my children.

And that was really a reason I had a big why for that. Like the last 10 years I was working so much of their childhood. I felt like I was like they were being raised by my. Husband and my in-laws, and I was certainly there, but there was just things that I wanted to be much more involved in.

And let's be real, like I was very involved, but I just felt like some of the things I wanted to see in them could only be solved through time. So I spent about a year recalibrating what was happening. In practice to gimme back more capacity and more space and time, which is just important sometimes to do that for your nervous system anyway.

Let's be real. It was also really uncomfortable in a lot of ways as well. I really said no to a lot of clients, a lot of income just 'cause I needed to breathe for a second. And that ultimately like just makes me better on the other side. It's in no one's best interest to have a burned out practitioner or coworker or employee or anything.

One of our first missions here is that we all deserve a less stressed life. Our other, I actually redid lots of things. So this year I also used another mission that maybe easily ran more prominent. Which is that we wanna help you heal yourself. So anyway, I can always talk about that anytime.

But really what I just wanna give you a little bit of an update. So I'm homeschooling, which is when people ask me how that's going, I say it's going exactly how I expected it to go. It's like a little bit interesting, a little bit chaotic sometimes, and it just takes a lot of recalibrating and flexibility all the time.

So it's interesting. My entire intention is really just to do it for this semester. Now we'll be together all summer. And so that's my plan at the moment. But to be honest, when we started this semester, there was also a little bit of calm around it. Where things are not calm is when I'm trying to hit deadlines around certain things or have a bunch of meetings scheduled.

So that's a little bit of what's going on here. We did a nice little. Loop through Canada at the beginning of the year, in relativity with it being our time together as family. And my loves to ski, so do my kids. And so that's something nice we get to do together. And turns out Canada had snow and Canada is affordable for skiing, unlike the United States.

And hugely recommend. Happy to talk more about that if anyone is interested in a little 10 minute side episode. But this episode is really around this framing or this concept of where do I start? And I wanted to share this with you because something happened recently. My husband was seeing our friend, our mutual friend for physical therapy.

He's like such a structural guy, has always been really into, he was really into chiropractic forever and now he's really into pt and so more whatever, more power to you. So he's seen our mutual friend he's with our youngest and she remarks about my son. Oh my gosh.

He has terrible kyphosis. Which is a condition where there's like a curvature to the back. And what can happen, apparently, and hopefully I'll paraphrase this correct enough, is that in the growth, and by the way, her trained eye caught it and other trained eyes had actually missed it.

And I remember thinking like he has a lot of arch in his back. But I don't know what's normal and not normal around that. Like I'm not a body. Practitioner, right? That looks at body structure and alignment. And like I said, you can get different opinions from different people. And so she was explaining that during growth patterns if you get in some kind of accident, it can worsen something that can already start because of growth patterns.

And then there's always like compensation can always happen which is like most, a lot of pain or a lot of structural or alignment issues are really a lot of compensation. And it can look functional, right? Like he's a capable kid, he can run around and play and whatnot, but he's complaining. Of back pain and I couldn't decide if he was complaining of back pain because he hangs out with old men all the time.

Like he really does. Back to the homeschooling, he was hanging out with so many old men. I was like, are complaining of pain 'cause of who you're hanging out with all the time? Or the sum of the people we spend our time with or is there really a problem?

It's hard to discern. Because I had taken him to physical therapy locally and, whatnot. Anyway, so my friend says, okay, he's got this is really bad. He should be seen yesterday and for six weeks. And so every week I'm at pt three hours from my home. For six weeks, but in the first week, we can see an improvement.

So the point of that story is that sometimes things look okay until a trained eye notices it, and in theory, like I could have missed this forever. I was very likely if I didn't have someone to help me see what I could not see. And it got me thinking about how do you know if you need to do something?

How do you know where to start? How do you know if something is off? And I got to thinking about that for us because even about a month and a half ago. Dr. Michael Robinson. I've got two guys that have interviewed that have really similar names. So Michael Robinson, who is a naturopathic oncologist.

I've had him, it was at least his second or third episode here, and I really enjoyed him. I have an unusual interest in cancer. I'm not a thousand percent sure why. Maybe because it's prevalent one and two. And so anyway, I had him come on and it was such a good angle of what he does first, right?

What do you start with? How do you start? And I learned. So much on that episode, you should totally go back and listen to it. It was like, oh, this is what they're talking about when they're doing genetic testing to, to customize treatment or whatnot, right? Like knowledge is power. I was thinking about this for me as well, like how do you know what you don't know?

Like my example with my son and the physical therapist, and I've been asked this a lot on other podcasts, like it's usually one of the last questions if I go guest on another podcast. And last fall I guessed on lots of podcasts. It was, insightful. And what it reminded me of is there's a lovely podcast right here and I have lots of pearls I would love to share with you now that, I've whew, caught my breath and got some capacity and I would just love to share like clinical pearls and whatnot.

But it's one of the last questions they usually ask and they say okay, where should people start? What should people do first? And so when we think about, how do you know where to start in general? I think always and where do you start? It always comes with assessment. And I have a sort of a rule where I tell people that I don't tell people they have a problem that they don't think that they have, or I try not to.

If I'm gonna have a one-on-one conversation with someone and they don't think that they need to resolve something, then I'm not gonna tell 'em. That they need to resolve it. So if my friend had said, oh, he has a terrible curvature on his back, and really it should be resolved, I have the right to say, oh, I don't think so.

I disregard, your opinion about this. But I trust her fully. There's so many like patterns here and this is. It is with all of us, right? We all want someone we can trust. And something else that made it really remarkable is sometimes there is like a triggering factor that exacerbates something or makes something worse, and that tends to be the thing that sort of drives us to action.

In past winters, my son has gotten dry hands that can crack and bleed. I found that giving him at least 300 to 600 milligrams of high quality fish oil really resolves this in a few weeks. This year I started him on jigsaw's Alaska cod liver oil because it's the best value for high quality US sourced cod liver oil.

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So for my son, he had a pretty significant dirt bike wreck this summer and then another little accident this fall. And they were both. Sucked. They're both pretty scary. But because of that, I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense that this injury would cause more issues. And I always look for things to make sense in my brain, and I always want for my clients to make sense of what they're doing.

So where I always start is when I say assessment and screening. There's a new training I created at the beginning of November. I spent like a full month developing it and creating it and whatnot, and at the very end of it I do an inflammation score and it's a assessment or a questionnaire that we've used forever and we've adapted and it's got all these different symptoms.

That are not necessarily diagnoses and the issue with symptoms is that if you have been compensating for a while, you usually don't really realize how you're compensating. Like you don't really realize if you're walking around with your mouth open and like breathing outta your mouth, you don't really realize that's not normal and you don't realize that you're resting.

Tongue position is supposed to be on the roof of your mouth, behind your teeth. If no one taught you that and you don't see a benefit from it, right? And again, that's not even on the assessment. It's just the first one that came up from other stories recently. So you don't know what you don't know. And so I think when we have something in front of us that has a lot of different symptoms on it, it can help get our memory going and start to bring forward some of these things.

And as we start to recall these and give them a numerical value. Then we can look at that overall numerical value, and you can look at it on your own. If there's an interpretation score some, a practitioner can look at it and see patterns. Overall, like for me, like pattern recognition is my.

Favorite thing. It's a very big strength of mine, and so it's a big thing. I try to equip my clients with long term. I want them to be able to see patterns and symptoms because that'll point back to what needs to be supported, and when you support systems to optimal function, then most of the symptoms. Go away or dissolve or reduce or disappear in general.

And I think that's worth underlining and highlighting. That's like the bulk of how I function in work is I look at what's going on. I categorize those. One we look at like the severity, which is helpful and how that's actually presenting because here's the good news. The more severe, the higher the number of the inflammation score, the more opportunity to fix it is.

So I've always loved, like when something's a hot mess because it's oh, awesome. That just means more improvement. Typically, like when the inflammation score is 130 instead of 65, both of 'em are like significant. Lots of room to improve them both. It's just that, the 131 can get. A normally like at least 65 points of improvement, whereas the one that's at 64, it'll get, 32 points of improvement.

That's like very normal results to see 50% overall improvement to these symptoms when you're addressing the root causes. I was thinking about this and apparently since I'm recording this, I'm gonna do this, but at the end of that training we do that inflammation score, but I also just created a little bit of a guide on like root causes of inflammation, and I think I should just combine those two and include the inflammation score and the root causes of inflammation.

And then that sort of points you to like the next steps after that. It's okay, here are the systems that then need support. And so this is a little bit different way to think about it. I'm just inviting you into like my brain right now, and I hope that's okay, and I hope that's welcomed. I think we can all improve or change how we think about things and when we think about things in a new way or we renew our mind around things, like there's a lot of opportunity.

And honestly, it can go from being overwhelming to an opportunity. It can go from overwhelming to exciting when it's oh, turns out. When I have a whole bunch of things wrong, there's just a lot of room for opportunity and improvement, and this is optional. Like I don't have to have all of these things, or I don't have to have some of these, even low grade things that I've been told are nothing or the most common thing.

Something really common that I see, and I think I'll do another episode about like how we interact with our health and take big pendulum swings. Next is very often people change their diet as first line therapy, and I think that's fine. 10 plus years ago when I was going into private practice, when I was starting private practice, I helped people change their diets to really custom anti-inflammatory diets.

But after a while. I was just getting in the people who had already done some of that stuff or they were in too much of a restrictive place and so I really needed to dig deeper onto what was causing those food reactions in the first place as well. So a lot of people sometimes go to a restrictive mindset.

I stood. I still think that's quite pervasive, but the goal is like how do we restore function? And it's really not, I always think it's fun to look at common denominators and I always think because I hang out with this colleague of mine, this physical therapist friend of mine with some frequency, I always just have a great time like analyzing.

Oh wow. That's the same in my business. That's the same in my field. That's the same over here. Like she is restoring function to the body. Like they're helping you strengthen something to restore function overall. And that's what we can really do inside the body with organ systems, organ triads, et cetera.

Like when that is working in this beautiful symphony that it's supposed to, the symptoms really resolve. Okay, so back to the top. Looking at my notes, where do we start? The first step is always assessment and screening. So many ways to do that, some. And if at first you don't succeed. It's okay. Like sometimes different people will find different things, and I think that's the case with testing as well.

So often people think that testing is the absolute first step, and it can be, it's a form of assessment. It's a form of screening. And you also have to realize that tests are imperfect and they don't show you everything and one test won't show you everything. And I can't imagine that there will ever be a test that will show you everything.

So I have a really, a couple really uncomfortable rules that I share with clients, or I invite them. Two. It's like one, what do you hope to learn from the test? And two, are you okay if you learn nothing? And if I'm being perfectly honest, really made testing optional since last year because.

I was like, why don't we just restore function to systems? And then if we need to, we can test. Or if we're, if we have reason to test. And I think that's probably most uncomfortable for moms of pediatrics and they're so welcome to test. 'cause they're, they feel really out of control in general when working with a child.

And they feel really just uncomfortable and they'd really like some validation. And tests are helpful for valid validation, but they can also feel really invalidating sometimes. You'll get a test and it's why wasn't there anything wrong on the test? And. At the end of the day, like you still have to understand enough.

And so that goes back to when you do some assessment and you start to be able to pattern those things, it can start to point you in directions of like, how do I restore function to systems? And I also talked about like when we start sometimes from a restrictive pattern or something, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I think we all have the opportunity.

I think one of my philosophies is that we should all have whole. Whole food or like as close to whole food as possible? As much as possible. I just expect that like we could all agree about that at this point in life. That's not really a debate, and if you choose to only eat animal pro, if you choose to eat carnivore versus paleo versus whatever, again.

That will be a different episode. I think. To be honest, like I don't really care as long as it's not going to hurt you. And I think that there's lots of right and wrong ways to do that. So happy to share if that's where someone is in their journey, if that's what they wanna do. I think that going through that process can be an important part of the journey.

'cause it's hard to change your diet. And even though I'm not really doing that much with clients, it's like we learn a lot through hard things. Of course, as humans we also try to avoid hard things as much possible. All of that is very human. Okay, off on a tangent, so assessment. Screening. And then from there, that'll actually tell you what to do next.

It informs those next steps and different practitioners, different people, we all have different ways to do things and the really good news is that there's multiple ways to do things. For me personally, I really want people to leave feeling empowered, leave knowing what to do leave knowing how to like, restore a function of systems.

So that's how I do it. And I think, like my PT colleague, like we have some real similarities in that overall. So I hope that this little tangent on where do I start is helpful. I'm gonna add the inflammation score to my root causes of inflammation. Document. So you're gonna be able to get that in the show notes.

You can get that if that's of interest to you, if that's something that you want.

So happy to have you check that out. And until next week, I will see you then.