Parsley Health’s Dr. Robin Berzin wants moms to start listening to their bodies

As moms, we are accustomed to thinking (and thinking and thinking) about our kids’ health. From what they’re eating to the exercise the are getting to any ailment they experience, we’re ready to do what it takes to help. But, don’t our bodies deserve the same care and appreciation? As a mom of three and the founder of Parsley Health, Dr. Robin Berzin challenges women everywhere to say, “Yes, I am worthy of wellness.”

On the latest episode of The Motherly Podcast, Berzin talks to Motherly co-founder Liz Tenety about the importance of prioritizing your health and how a holistic approach can offer long-term healing.

For Berzin, in particular, life isn’t slowing down anytime soon. In her role as the founder of Parsley Health, she helps women around the country connect with a best-in-class medical team to discover a science-backed approach to holistic healing. Inspired by her medical training at Columbia University and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and coupled with her real-life experience practicing modern holistic medicine, Berzin believes in the importance of addressing the root cause of ailments.

“Functional medicine for everyone. Listening is an approach to medicine where we ask why,” Berzin says, explaining, for example, the cause of your migraines could be completely different than the cause of your friend’s migraines. “We [look for the root cause] through a very in-depth history… Because we know that these things drive 90% of health outcomes, but they’re not even addressed in the conventional medicine setting.”

Making matters worse—especially for busy moms—is the reality that one in five women feel dismissed by their healthcare provider. As Berzin says, “Many more feel unheard. Women with chronic illness are often spending seven years living with that illness, bouncing between primary care specialists, doctor, Google, whatever, trying to figure it out and just suffering with it and not getting an answer.”

With Parsley Health, Berzin sought to change that—because every individual deserves individualized care.

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With a combination of blood testing, hormone analysis, nutritional analysis and more, functional medicine can put you on the path for a hyper-specific treatment rather than a suggestion that is supposedly one-size-fits-all. And, as Berzin explains, you can start this process by turning your attention inward.

“The symptoms that you feel—the body pain, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the inability to sleep, the digestive issues, the brain fog—these things are not there as irritants,” Berzin says. “They’re there because your body’s trying to tell you something. Your body has wisdom and a message for you. And it’s trying to get you to listen… If you don’t listen, eventually it’s going to be louder and louder and louder until it takes you out.”

In her new book, State Change: End Anxiety, Beat Burnout, and Ignite a New Baseline of Energy and Flow, Berzin has an especially resonate message for moms like her. “I know that I have to fill up the tank as much as I take it out,” Berzin says to Tenety. “And I see a lot of women and a lot of my patients forgetting that step. They just keep drawing on an empty tank rather than filling up that tank, knowing that it’s going to be drawn on again.”

How that self-care looks will vary from person to person. What matters the most, Berzin says, is finding what works for you.

“I just think that building that time in for yourself that makes you feel good every single day is not a luxury. It’s not a nice to have. It’s a need to have,” she says. “It’s a survival mechanism and it is the moment when you refill your tank because it will be empty the next day. And so I encourage everyone who’s a parent to think about it that way.”

For more actionable tips and inspiring advice from Robin Berzin, listen to her full episode in The Motherly Podcast.

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