"Perhaps you have a good night's sleep but you still don't feel rested. This is when you're running on adrenaline and cortisol."
Amy Down is the author of Back from the Brink: How to Get Your Mojo Back, a certified nutrition, health and life coach, a master hypnotherapist and an EFT and NLP practitioner. She spent nearly 12 years at Blackmores before founding Living Mojo, where she has been helping people get their energy back for over a decade. She joined Lee and me in the cabin for episode 17 of The Lee & Irene Show.
In 2010, Amy was bitten by more than 40 tiny grass ticks after a swim in the ocean. It took four years of "relentless specialist appointments, bloods, MRIs... screenings" before a doctor finally found a tick-borne infection. Her book shares her story and her recovery blueprint, "trying to help people not make some of the mistakes that I made along the journey."
You can listen to the full episode here:
Here are the 3 things I learned from our chat with Amy
1. Listen when your body whispers
Amy was raising two kids under five, working full time and studying on the side. She calls it the superwoman complex. "It's like a silent thief. And for me, it stole my vitality, my joy, my clarity, and then eventually my health." Her body tried to warn her. "My body was whispering, but then towards the end, I started getting some real symptoms."
Amy says "a busy woman will have a good night's sleep and then she'll wake up feeling rested or she'll get a little break and be able to reset things." The signs to listen for are "ongoing digestive issues, recurrent colds, energy crashes... Perhaps you have a good night's sleep but you still don't feel rested. This is when you're running on adrenaline and cortisol."
She says we've "normalised pushing through and keeping as busy as you can". For years, she "rationalised a lot of these symptoms" because she didn't feel she could stop.
2. Heal the terrain with MOJO
Treatment helped, but Amy wanted to know why the infection took hold in her body in the first place. She calls this the terrain, the state of her body and her life when she got sick. "What was the ground that this, you know, was living in? What was the terrain? So it's not just about killing the infection."
For Amy, it was a mouldy house, genes that made her sensitive to mould, stress at work, a sick child and broken sleep. "From that, that's where the Mojo framework came from."
MOJO stands for mindset, oxygenation, optimisation and joy. Mindset is calming the nervous system, which she did through hypnotherapy and emotional freedom technique. Oxygenation is detoxing and "using all the clean beauty products". Optimisation is "the good food, it's the healthy gut microbiome". And joy can be as simple as "playing with my dog".
"The real magic is when you can stack it. So one of my favourite things to do is I go for a walk with a dog, I'm by the ocean, I'm present and I can sort of cover all bases then."
3. Advocate for yourself
Amy's steps are simple. "It's first trusting your intuition." Then keep "some records of your symptoms, the timings and those sorts of things because they're less likely to turn you away if you've got some facts at hand." And "make sure you get some more opinions."
"I honestly believe that no one's going to advocate for your body better than you will."
For mums feeling guilty about not being the parent they want to be, Amy says "there's no such thing as a perfect mother and don't strive for that. The most important part is to be a present mother. And if you take care of yourself as well, if you show your kids that you actually matter, that you need to be prioritised, you teach them that they matter too."
Amy's Mojo Reboot
Amy's free three-day Mojo Reboot is a good place to start. "My programs aren't just if you've got a chronic illness or recurring symptoms. It's for anyone who just wants to have a reset. Feel a bit better. And I always look at mind, body, spirit."
It looks at "how you can cleanse your body, stabilize and balance your hormones", with "little tips and little ways of doing things that just bring you back more into health." You'll find the reboot, her coaching programs, free recipes in her newsletter and her book at Living Mojo.
Listen to the full episode
We also talked about why tick-borne illness is so hard to diagnose in Australia, what to do if you find a tick, and alpha-gal, the red meat allergy a tick bite can trigger. You can listen to episode 17 on Spotify.
About the Author
Irene Falcone is the founder of Clean Nectarine and co-host of The Lee & Irene Show. She started her first clean beauty business in 2011 with $100 in her garage and grew it to $20m in four years. She has spent over 15 years reading the backs of beauty and wellness labels, is a Telstra Business Women's Awards winner and an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and has been featured on A Current Affair, The Project, Sunrise, Channel Nine Mornings and Sky News.
About Irene · Instagram · Podcast
Leave a comment