My Story

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Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom, I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to SYNC your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in this podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health visit SYNC.jennyswisher.com that sink s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

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Hi, ladies, welcome to the first ever podcast episode for SYNC Your Life. I’m so grateful that you have taken the time out of your day to listen to my story and to tune into this podcast. And I really hope that over the course of the next several weeks and months that I can really bring a lot of value to you as it pertains to your hormone health. This is something that I would have never believed if you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be coming to you as a hormone health expert through a podcast, I would have thought you were crazy. But you know, that’s how life works. And I feel extremely called and sort of like I’ve been given this mission to reach women everywhere to educate them on their hormone health to help them become more hormone literate, so that they can really understand what’s going on in their bodies, what could potentially be going better for them, and what to potentially be working on with their practitioner. So, let me just say that I thought it was I thought it was important that the first episode that we have be a little bit about my story and a little bit of just telling you where I come from with this and what my knowledge background is with this. Over the course of the next several weeks and months, I have lots of different interviews planned with different experts in the field, everywhere from breath experts to fitness nutrition experts to even herb ologists and occupational therapists and pelvic floor dysfunction therapists and all kinds of really great people that I’ve met over the course of my own personal journey that I really just think the world needs to hear from. So you’ll get a little bit of a mix with this podcast, you’ll get a little bit of me, and you’ll get on a solo round episode per se every once in a while. And you’ll get a lot of interviews as well. So it’ll be a great combination of just really making sure that we’re covering all of our bases as it pertains to hormone health.

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So I wanted to just take this very first episode to say you know a little bit about myself to give you guys my story to really, hopefully connect with you, maybe there’s something that I’m going to say about my personal story that that helps you understand more about your own or more of what’s going on with you. My story really honestly started in my early 20s, if you would have told me when I was 20 years old that I would be sitting here at 37 recording a podcast as a hormone health expert, I would have thought you were completely crazy. Because at that time I was working in corporate America, I was working for a book publisher. I was newly married. And I had no idea that the struggles that I was about to go through, were going to be hormone related. And in fact, I struggled for several years not knowing that that was the underlying cause of what was happening for me. So, you know, fast forward to now I’m on this personal mission. I’m on this mission. I’m starting this podcast, I have my digital course, really because I feel called to reach more women and to help you live in alignment with your physiology. I didn’t know what I didn’t know years ago, and I’m learning that a lot of women are reliant on modern medical systems and modern medical doctors to really help them get to the you know, get to the issues that are at hand they want them to treat their symptoms, they don’t understand what’s going on with their with their bodies. But they’re relying on on on the wrong people. A lot of times what we need as functional medicine, what we need is getting to the root cause and what we really need is being becoming our own best doctor, which is a lot about that really is a perfect sentence to summarize my personal story. So what does living in alignment really mean? You know, before we even dive into what I’ve gone through, what does it mean to live in alignment? I get that question a lot because I’m constantly saying that I’m looking to help women live in alignment with their physiology. But what does that mean? Well, I’ll tell you it means it means one thing to me and that is waking up Every morning with this sense of energy and vibrancy, this ability to listen to your body, and to be the absolute best person you can be not only for yourself, but for the people that you love. To me, that’s what living in alignment really means. And there are too, too many women out there, honestly, who are walking around in their daily lives with their check engine light flashing. And they sense that their check engine light is flashing, but they have no idea where to begin. They have no idea how to work with the right type of doctor to get to the underlying cause of what’s causing them to feel that way. They’re, they’re kind of going through the motions of life, not paying a lot of attention to themselves, honestly, like they’re, they’re pouring into other people. But they’re not taking the time to really figure out what’s going on with them, because they certainly feel off. That’s usually the phrase I get from people, I feel really off. But they don’t know where to begin, and they don’t know what that means. So I’m here to help you kind of connect those dots. That’s That’s what I feel like I’m called to do is to kind of help you make help you make those connections and make some progress in feeling better.

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So who am I? Well, my journey in hormone health started when I was probably about 16 years old, unknowingly to me, I was started on oral contraceptives, I was started, I started on a low estrogen, birth control pill. And honestly, it’s a kind of a crazy story because my mom came home one day from her OB GYN appointment, her annual exam. And she just handed me a package of birth control pills. I had started my period when I was 14. This was like maybe not even a couple years later, was just 16 years old. I just turned 16. And she said here, you’re going to go on these birth control pills. I talked to my OBGYN he prescribed them for you. Hopefully it’ll get your your facial acne under control. I was having issues with facial acne, I had issues with it through high school and a little bit into college. And that was the solution was to just take birth control pills, and that that would get my acne under control. I never saw an OBGYN. I never even had to go into the doctor’s office to get the prescription. He just willingly wrote it for my mom, she brought it to me and I started taking it. So that’s really where my journey began. But I didn’t realize that it was going to lead me on this really long winding road of issues. But when I was in college, which was you know, handful of years later, I started to have some issues with that actual pill was causing me some issues. So so the doctor that I was seeing at the time decided to switch me and try different types of birth control pills. And when I went through what I call the roller coaster of college, it was a crazy time in my life. It was about a year and a half. Around my sophomore year of college, I started kind of playing around with different brands of birth control pills. And when I was going through that I was absolutely crazy. I was sleeping in the cold dorm in college, which for those of you who are aware I was in a sorority house and the cold dorm is a place that’s freezing cold, especially in the Midwest, all the windows are open in the winter to alleviate germs. And I was having massive hot flashes in the middle of the night in the cold dorm at the age of 20. And so I knew something was off. I had a good friend of mine take me to the school psychologist, I started having some therapy sessions. Because we didn’t make the connection. I didn’t make the connection at the time that these oral contraceptives were really messing with my hormones and that I was feeling crazy because of because of that. So I finally started to make that connection. Around the time that I got engaged. My husband and I are highschool sweethearts. We got married about a month out of college. So we graduated college in 2006. And we got married right after in the month of June. And I decided to go off of birth control because I was having some issues with feeling crazy. I was dealing with some weight gain issues, and I just didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel myself so when I went off of the birth control pill. I started to notice more frequent migraines happening and pretty quickly within about six months of getting married. I started to have what they considered chronic migraine, which is basically constant migraine. I didn’t have a single day for two and a half consecutive years that I felt good. I always tell people it’s no one really understands chronic pain until you’re in chronic pain. Like to wake up in the middle of the night. Having the same headache you went to bed with just it’s always there is depressing, and it puts you in a really dark place. And so from the time we married, I started having these issues with the migraines once again didn’t make a strong connection to it being the birth control pill or coming off of the birth control pill. But from the age of 22 to 27, so for five consecutive years, I felt like I was a modern medicine guinea pig. I went to a total of 11 different doctors and specialists, headache doctors, spinal specialists, chiropractors, neurologists, obg OBGYN. You name it. I’ve been to it. I went through a couple different general practitioners, nobody could figure out why I was having this status. Migron. osis is what they called it.

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Over the course of that five years, I had four total neck surgeries, where I had different nerves ablated in my neck, thinking that that was causing the pain but No, still had the pain. I had Botox for migraine multiple times, I’ve done anti seizure IV infusions, I’ve done dozens of different prophylactic drugs, preventative medications, which ironically, those medications started leading to kidney stone issues for me. So I dealt with, I dealt with kidney stones in the middle of all that. So you could kind of say that my mid 20s was a little bit of a roller coaster for me. From the time I entered college until my late 20s. I was in this sort of dark, scary place. But I was also navigating a new marriage. And my husband and I had been together since we were like 12 or 13 years old, we started dating, we were together basically boyfriend and girlfriend all through high school. In college, even though we went to different colleges. And we were I was miserable. And I can remember, you know, Friday nights, I would push through the work week, I would take all kinds of painkillers just to get through the week. And then on Friday night, we would go out to dinner as sort of our date night. And then he would take me to the local urgent care to have a narcotic injection, that would kind of knock me out for 24 hours on the weekend. And I would just sleep to try to regain energy and become pain free. And it was just it was an it was an endless cycle. I found myself just constantly in the waiting rooms of different doctors, hoping that each doctor was going to be the answer, I needed the person that I needed that was going to look at the right thing. And so I finally found myself on a walk with my friend Jen, who’s going to be a podcast guest here soon. She’s also happens to be my yoga instructor. That’s how we met. She started doing corporate yoga at my employer. So I started taking her lunch hour yoga classes. And ironically, she had a nephew, who was also dealing with migraine. So sometimes I would stay after class and I would talk to her about what what I was going through. And we just we established this great friendship. And one day, in my mid 20s, we’re walking, we’re hiking at a local nature park. And I pulled out my painkiller out of my pocket, which I used to keep handy all the time in my pocket, just so I would have it. And I said I have to take this medicine. I said, you know, Jen, I’m about to give up. Like I’m just in a really bad place with this. And I just can’t keep living like this. And she said to me, you can’t give up. You are your own best doctor. Try someone else. And I said, Jen, I’ve seen like 11 Different doctors, like I can’t you know, I’ve had surgeries, I’ve done all these things like nobody knows what’s going on with me. And she said, Well, she said try this one more doctor. So she gave me the name of this person that she had started seeing who was a an MD, but she specialized in holistic health and holistic hormone health. And she said, Just go see this doctor, if nothing else, she’s really well connected. So maybe she can connect you to the right to the right person. So this had been the endless cycle for me. You know, I’ve been navigating this for quite some time. So I kind of rolled my eyes I’m like, sure, whatever. So I get into this doctor. Before I even get into her door. Her nursing staff called me a few weeks before they they tell me all this different testing that I needed to do. And I got all the bloodwork and testing done before I met with her and I had never in that five year span of time ever been tested on the same things that she tested me for. So my OB had run some tests, my general practitioners had run some tests of course my neurologist had done everything from MRIs to scans and you name it.

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And so she started running these panels on a lot of endocrine things on a lot of different you know, my thyroid, my, my sex hormones, my my cortisol, my sugars, like all these different things. I was like I don’t think anybody’s really done this comprehensive of a panel before. And so I walked into her office the very first day and she said very competently. She said your progesterone is rock bottom, and she had a little bit of an accent so I can’t mimic the accent but I still can hear it in my head. She said we need to get you on bioidentical hormone on onto progesterone and you will feel better She said, and it may even help you with your fertility, which at that time, my husband and I hadn’t really addressed fertility because I had been in such a dark place with the headaches. But I started making the connection that maybe I have, maybe I was having other signs and symptoms, but I just wasn’t paying attention to them because I was so engrossed in the headache pain. So long story short, she started putting me on different vitamins supplementations, based on deficiencies that I had, she started putting me onto bioidentical progesterone cream compounded at a local pharmacy. And within three months, I had gone cold turkey on all of the different pharmaceutical drugs that my neurologists had been trying, I went cold turkey off of those 100% on to natural, holistic remedies, including that progesterone therapy, and my life was forever changed. And I still to this day, credit her and credit my friend Jen for not giving up on me. Because when I when I started feeling better after three months, I knew I was onto something. And I knew that I had finally gotten to the root cause of what was going on for me. Now, at that same time that that happened, which looking back this was around 2010 2012 I started to feel better, because of the different therapies that I was on, I started to feel like I was making progress with the pain. I was also simultaneously introduced to home workouts and to these this whole concept of proper nutrition, which you know, prior to this, my husband and I were like Hamburger Helper kings and queens like we were the box dinner, make it easy people. And so because I was sort of being introduced to this holistic world of health and medicine, and then simultaneously another friend introduced me to, to these home workouts in this whole concept of nutrition. I really did a complete 360 In my life, which honestly caused a lot of uproar in my family. Or, you know, my parents and my husband’s parents kind of started looking at us, like, what are you doing? You’re working out on vacation? Like, what are you doing, you’re you’re eating so many salads, and so many greens and so many vegetables like, this isn’t the person that we knew, right? And so we started really both of us changing our life.

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I’m so grateful that he has come alongside me. Chris is my husband’s name. He’s come alongside me in this entire journey. If I woke up early for a workout, he woke up early with me to do it with me. If I said, Hey, you know, we’re supposed to eat these colored greens on our meal plan today he would, he would just suffer through it with me. So that’s how the journey really started was really taking a full 360 degree turn from being a medicinal guinea pig to being someone who was really pursuing underlying root cause through Functional Medicine and through fitness and nutrition. So this was, you know, like I said, 2012 2010 through 2012. And at that time, I was pretty miserable with my corporate employer, I was really starting to question my original dreams of being this corner office, book publishing giant that I always thought I would be when I was in college, I finally decided that wasn’t for me, I didn’t like sitting in an office, I was I really enjoyed being active. I really enjoyed being around other people. And I wasn’t getting that sort of fulfillment in my corporate career. So I went all in on a home based business, I went all in on a network marketing opportunity that led me to health and fitness, it led me to getting my certified personal trainer license and my nutrition license. It led me to opening a 4200 square foot gym facility in 2013, which we owned for three years. It led me to becoming a top 200 health coach in my organization for multiple years. So it really changed my life. I went from this sort of suffering dark place girl to really a thriving fit personal trainer, health nut with over the course of probably five years. So around the you know, in my early 30s, I would say I started to say, okay, you know, we’re going to start looking into family, you know, what is that going to look like? And if I’m being completely transparent, which I want this podcast to be completely transparent. I realize this might not resonate with a lot of women, but I know for some women it will. From the time I was really young, I knew that I wanted children. But I didn’t necessarily have an innate desire to birth a child, which sounds so crazy. Like I love children. Just give me all the babies I will take all the babies and I will be a great mother to them. But I just didn’t have a desire to be pregnant. And I don’t know where that stems from but that’s just kind of always how I’ve been And when my husband and I were engaged, and we were talking about our future family, it was something that kept coming up. And we both had decided, well, you know, we can play around with with pregnancy, we can see if that’s something we want to do when the time comes. But we always knew that we wanted to adopt. We wanted we wanted to adopt, I was adopted at birth, my brother was also adopted at birth.

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So I don’t know, it wasn’t necessarily something that I felt like I needed to pay forward, it was just something that I was like, you know, there’s a need, and I love all babies. So I will take all the babies. So in 2016, we were, by the grace of God connected to someone. The story itself is I can save that for another podcast someday. But it was such a beautiful connection that we made randomly, like not even trying, just we’re connected through a mutual friend to someone who was pregnant and who wanted to give her child up for adoption. And we decided that that would be best for us was to would be to become her parents. So we adopted our daughter in fall of 2016. At that time, we were I was still working in the gym, I was teaching boot camp boot camp classes at 5am and 6pm. And around the same time, our four parents moved to where we are. So they were about two hours away, they all moved basically to our neighborhood. And we decided that we needed to step out of the gym, we needed to we needed to sell the gym and focus on family, and really amplify my online business. And so that’s what happened. We sold the gym, we moved into a new house, we moved close to both of our parents, and we started raising our first child. Now here we are 2021. We just adopted our second child in December. So we have two little girls. And I feel so blessed and so grateful every day to be their mom. But in 2017, I started having probably around the time that Ellory, my oldest was a year old, I started having the headaches creep back again. And I also started to notice that I was having issues sleeping, I was dealing with some anxiety attacks, I was starting to see a little bit of weight gain in my hips. And I was like what’s going on? Like, this isn’t right. You know, I felt good for so many years, like what’s going on. And so I started diving even deeper into hormone health. That’s when I started doing more testing on myself, I started working with my my beloved practitioner and increasing my supplementation really kind of playing around with my body to see what was going on. And turns out my you know, as as every woman does, my progesterone was declining even more. But given that I was already deficient, it was causing a lot of a lot of issues again, so I started to become introduced to a few different people, experts, you could say in the field of hormone health, I started to I got certified in the Stacey Sims course the women are not small men course I started to learn more about how to really, you know, take fitness to the next level when you are syncing with your cycle. And it’s funny because when I was in the gym, you know, I would have female clients come in every day. And they would complain everyday like I’m doing all the things like I’m exercising five or six days a week, I’m eating healthy foods, I’m even eating the right macros, and my body just isn’t changing. And I have heard it so many times. And then when I experienced it in 2017 I thought you know, there’s something to this, like hormone health plays a bigger role. For women. It’s not just calories in calories out when it comes to women. And so I started digging deeper. And I like I said, I became certified in Stacey Sims course, I started digging into the science of people like Dr. Laura Bryden, Sara Gottfried, and so many other hormone health experts and really became sort of self certified in hormone health in holistic hormone health. And so I just you know what, like anyone if you’re interested in something, you tend to dive into it deeper, some people are into video games, some people are into, you know, my husband’s into into running, he was a division one all American runner, he loves everything having to do with running. For me, hormone health is where I really rooted myself into, because I have struggled so much with it. And I wanted to be able to learn for myself originally. And now it’s more about how can I learn more to help more women understand this because I’ll say this and I realize again, I’m all about transparency. I’m going to say this and be honest. I, I value, the right information. And I spent years of my life in doctors waiting rooms, trying different pharmaceutical medications trying to treat my symptoms as opposed to getting to my root cause. And so if this podcast if my digital course if what I’m doing reaches women in a way that helps them get to what’s going on with them the root cause and saves them time and struggle, then it will be 1,000% worth it. So in early 2020, before we adopted my second child, I decided, okay, here’s the COVID pandemic, right? Like, all of a sudden, now we’re all trapped at home. What’s going to happen now? Like, okay, my husband’s at home all day now like, here we are just, you know, let’s go to the yard today for a picnic like, traps, right? And there were other people trapped and struggling. And so I thought, you know, I should create something that really helps women, just the basics, like how can they get started with a functional health journey? How can they start to sync their fitness with their with their cycles? How can they start to know how to eat nutritionally, for hormone health. And so I put together what I call sync, how to fuel and train with your hormone cycle, which is a digital course. And the rest is history, I launched it to just my social media. In early 2020, around the time of the COVID, pandemic hitting, I had about 60 women in the initial beta launch of that course. And over the course of time, their testimonials, even to this day, they blow me away on a daily basis, every single day, I wake up to messages from women, like thank you, I just left my doctor’s office, I for the first time in my life, I feel like I understand what I’m asking, I understand what they’re telling me and I understand what I need to do. And, you know, I’ve had lots of women lose the weight, I’ve had lots of clients rave about how they can finally sleep better again, or they or they’re not having anxiety issues, or they feel like they’re finally on the right supplementation. And so while I am not a doctor, or any sort of licensed practitioner, I am someone who cares. I’m someone who’s been in your shoes. And I’m someone who would like to just sort of walk alongside you in this journey, and bring you resources and tools and people that can help you get to that next level and to feel good. So this podcast was the next logical step. For me, it was the next logical step to be able to reach more women to be able to spread this message, and to really help you live in alignment with your life. So I’m so grateful you’re here. And I’m so grateful that you took the time to listen, I hope that you’ll continue to over the course of the next several months.

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So what’s to come? Okay, I’ve got solo rounds coming up, we’re going to be covering lots of different sort of basics as it pertains to hormone health. I’ve got interviews with experts in the field, I’m even going to be interviewing some of my course takers, just for their testimonials for them to share their journeys. I’m hoping to provide you also with a lot of free resources, like downloadable guides, and different things that you can take with you and use to your benefit. So I’m so excited to be launching this. I’m so excited that you’re going to be tuning in. Thank you so much for taking the time to even listen to my story today. I thought it was an important piece to this relationship that we’re about to have, right? Like you need to know a little bit about a little bit about my story, so that you can understand where I’m coming from and what I’m hoping to help with with when it comes to you. So I promise to deliver you amazing content on the subject of women’s hormone health and syncing with your cycle. I’m so ready for you to feel your best. I want to get to know you. So reach out to me, you can visit my website www Jenny swisher.com. Feel free to reach out to me through the contact button or schedule a phone call. I’d love to get to know you. But until next time, my friends. I’ll see you then

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Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy you need to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time