Have you ever felt exhausted no matter how much rest you get? I’m talking about crashing at 3 PM every day, dragging yourself through tasks, and mentally beating yourself up for not being able to push harder. For nearly four years, that was my life.
Everyone told me it was motherhood and old age induced burnout. Doctors, podcasts, even my own inner critic. But deep down, I knew something bigger was going on. Learning how to advocate for your health changed everything for me – and it can for you too.
Why Learning How to Advocate for Your Health Matters
Doctors are experts, but they don’t live inside your body. For years I brought up my symptoms: extreme fatigue, sudden weight gain, and an inability to function after work. Every time, I was told I was “just getting older.”
If I had accepted that answer, I’d still be stuck on the couch. Instead, I learned how to advocate for my health by questioning, researching, and refusing to settle for vague answers.
When you listen to your instincts and push for clarity, you’re not being difficult. You’re being responsible.
How to Advocate for Your Health with Providers
Here are the exact steps I took:
- Ask for referrals even when your provider doesn’t suggest them.
- Switch doctors if you feel dismissed or unheard.
- Request testing for conditions you suspect, even if your doctor hesitates.
- Research your symptoms so you can ask informed questions.
I eventually found a provider who ran extensive testing. The results revealed multiple vitamin deficiencies and a genetic condition that explained everything. Within months of following the right plan, I had energy again.
Building a Personalized Plan
The biggest lesson I learned was that no one-size-fits-all wellness plan exists. Your body’s biochemistry is unique. What works for someone else may harm you.
For example, I don’t have a gallbladder. A nutritionist once told me to follow a low-fat diet to lose weight, but my body actually needed healthy fats to process vitamins properly. Once I trusted myself and adjusted my nutrition, everything shifted.
When you know how to advocate for your health, you stop blindly following generic advice and start building a plan that supports your real needs.
The Mind-Body Connection
There’s another piece to this: if your body doesn’t have what it needs to function, no strategy will stick. You can meditate, set boundaries, or work out daily, but without balance in your physical health, those systems won’t hold.
That’s why I talk about “lack of conditioning” as one of my five Overwhelm Culprits. If your body or mind is running on empty, you can’t lead with confidence. But when you get the right answers and the right support, you don’t just get your energy back – you get yourself back.
Take Your Next Step
If you’re wondering which of the five Overwhelm Culprits might be draining your energy, take my free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] If you are constantly tired, no matter how much rest you get, and I’m talking zero energy by 3:00 PM like you’re dragging your body through molasses, then this video is for you.
Because despite what your doctor, your wellness podcast or your inner critic might be telling you, it’s not just burnout. And you’re definitely not broken.
I’m gonna walk you through the real reason that this could be happening and what finally helped me myself get my energy as well as my life back.
I talk a lot about overcoming overwhelm and the systems that high performers, especially women, need to thrive, especially when you’re balancing leadership in life.
So if you wanna stop just surviving and start feeling strong again, make sure that you subscribe.
I am Corrie LoGiudice a keynote speaker, leadership coach, and upcoming author of The Five Overwhelmed Culprits.
And the reason I care so [00:01:00] deeply about this topic is because I was. For the past nearly four years, my personal overwhelm culprit was lack of conditioning, which is your physical and your mental health and wellness. And as a result, I spiraled into exhaustion that no amount of rest or mindset work could possibly fix.
So let me paint this picture for you. I’d wrap up a day of work. My kids would come home from school and boom, I was done. Could not move, could not function. I would crash on the couch at 3:00 PM and proceed to mentally beat myself up for it every single day because I physically could not move anymore.
And mind you, I’ve always been a very active individual as well as highly attuned to my physical and mental health. I used to be an athlete. I’m obviously a high performer. So [00:02:00] that said, during this timeframe, I tried all the typical advice. All the advice I would give my own clients. I worked on my work-life balance hacks.
I exercised or tried to at least every day. It became a, difficult point of contention for myself because I was so exhausted I could not get myself to exercise or do anything beyond yoga. I kept cutting back on caffeine. I worked on my boundaries. Nothing worked, nothing. So I knew that there was something much bigger going on, and here’s what I learned in the process.
I tried all the typical advice, all the things I would even tell my own coaching clients, right? Everything from I tried, all the typical advice, all the things I would tell my own coaching clients. Everything from work-life balance hacks to make sure you exercise, to cutting back on caffeine, working on my boundaries.
Absolutely nothing worked.
. So here’s what I learned.
I didn’t know this at the [00:03:00] time, but what I thought was burnout wasn’t burnout. It was my biology being completely out of balance.
What felt like burnout to me was actually my body screaming for help. And it wasn’t something that went unnoticed for me. I, every single year would show up to my general practitioner for four years in a row and would cite these challenges. I had, at one point I gained 20 pounds over the course of two months, and I kept getting told that I was just getting older.
I was just getting older that it was normal, but truth was, it wasn’t at all.
learned is you have to advocate relentlessly for your health. It wasn’t until I knew things weren’t adding up and I didn’t trust what my doctor was telling me, and I started to push back and I started with things like asking for, referrals to specialists who [00:04:00] dealt with specific things that I knew ran in my family, right?
Things that could point to the different challenges and different symptoms I was having. And she wouldn’t even make the connection for me to do it, but I still kept pushing. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have a referral. I found somebody else. I switched providers. I went and I got extensive testing and everything was based off of, again, my own research, right?
Because I couldn’t just trust that this doctor knew everything about my own body. For me, I had specific symptoms. I had to take some kind of accountability to understand what those symptoms were trying to tell me and be able to collaborate with a health provider to find a diagnosis in what was working for me or what wasn’t working for me, I should say.
And after finally finding a provider that was aligned with the different things that I felt I was having difficulty with and who wasn’t professional in it. I got [00:05:00] extensive testing done and it turned out I had multiple vitamin deficiencies as well as that genetic condition that I suspected for years.
But no one ever had taken it seriously before this point, and it wasn’t until I relentlessly advocated for myself that I was finally able to turn it around.
The thing that’s super important to recognize when it comes to both physical as well as mental wellness, and again, I am not a health provider. I am not a personal trainer. I am none of these things, but the one thing that I can tell you for sure is what works for others might not work for you, right?
Your biochemistry is unique. And I’m sure that there are tons of health providers and fitness trainers and nutritionists and folks who see this, who will comment below to advocate for this point. Your biochemistry is unique. There is no one size fits all wellness plan.
I ended up having [00:06:00] to create one that was completely my own right, and it changed everything. Even when you look at things like for my specific instance, I worked during this four year timeframe with a nutritionist and gave ’em all the things that I was having difficulty with and that were my actual challenges.
So in fun news, I don’t have a gallbladder. After having a daughter, I have different digestive issues. I would tell her things like, I know I feel best when I eat Paleo, right? I know I feel best after doing a round of Whole 30. And I was told, more or less to go into a one size fits all approach, that if I wanted to lose the 20 pounds that I had suddenly gained, I had to eat low fat.
And I later learned that a lot of the issues that I was having stemmed from those nutritional choices because even though I didn’t have a gallbladder. My specific biochemistry needed that extra fat so that I could process certain [00:07:00] vitamins, right? So it, your body knows what it is that you need. It’s up to us as individuals to listen to our own unique biochemistry, and to pay attention to it. Because I know for me, when I finally started trusting myself and my body and knowing that something wasn’t right and advocating for what actually does work for me. It changed everything when it comes to my health and wellness
at this point. It took four years. Of trying to get answers, but I could confidently tell you that after only I wanna say three months at this point of finally receiving the supplements and the medications and stuff that I needed, that all of my other lifestyle interventions that I was doing all along between meditating for stress and working out everything is finally starting to work in harmony again, and I have full energy all day long.
I’m no longer crashing on the couch. At three o’clock and it had absolutely nothing to do with me being [00:08:00] burnt out with work or with stress or with any of that. It had everything to do with my biochemistry, not having what it needed to be able to function correctly.
So I’d love to know, have you ever been dismissed by a doctor or felt like something was wrong, but no one would? Listen, tell me in the comments. I know I’m not alone. I would love to hear your story too. Okay.
Once I had the right answers and I had the right support, everything shifted, I didn’t just get my energy back. I got myself back, right? For years I would look at photos of myself and I would look at myself on video, and I didn’t recognize the person that was in the camera because it just didn’t look like me, and there was reasons why.
And this is what I, this is why I talk about the overwhelmed culprits and I talk about lack of conditioning, as one of those five overwhelmed culprits because your body and your mind, if they’re running on empty, right? Whether that be through stress or through specific, like physical issues or vitamin deficiencies or medications that you might need, if [00:09:00] they’re running on empty and they don’t have what they need to function, no system or strategy is ever gonna stick.
No matter how hard you try,
if this resonated for you and you are wondering which of the five overwhelmed culprits might be stealing your energy, take my free quiz to find out and just a few questions you’ll get a personalized result as well as the exact next steps that you should be taking to start getting relief.
Thanks so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. I’ll see you there.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.