In this episode, Sachin interviews Cynthia Thurlow on her early career as a nurse practitioner, and why she took a leap of faith into beginning a holistic healthcare practice focusing on the health of perimenopausal and menopausal women. She speaks of her two TEDx talks, how the second one became viral, and led to her writing her first book. She speaks of intermittent fasting and what it did for her health and her practice. Listen to learn more about how Cynthia helps women in the second half of life live in their best health.

Key Takeaways:

[1:00] Sachin introduces today's guest, Cynthia Thurlow. Cynthia has done two TEDx talks and created a revolution around intermittent fasting. Today, we're going to go through the chapters of Cynthia's journey to inform you about the perseverance it takes to succeed.

[2:28] Sachin thanks Cynthia for hosting him on a past episode of her podcast. Sachin and Cynthia met through Mindshare. Sachin is grateful for the collaboration in that community.

[3:29] A great deal of why Cynthia does what she does is wanting to help women understand that navigating the second half of their lives does not have to be fraught with poor quality sleep, weight loss resistance, and gaslighting by well-meaning healthcare providers.

[3:54] Cynthia started her journey in ER medicine and then cardiology as a nurse practitioner. She got to a point where she was no longer inspired to write prescriptions. She felt that so much of what she was seeing were lifestyle-mediated issues.

[4:18] Cynthia says that so much of what we do in traditional allopathic medicine is focused on urgencies and emergencies and there's clearly a place for it but where we fall short is in prevention and chronic disease management.

[4:33] Cynthia no longer felt aligned with writing prescriptions for lifestyle-related issues, so in April 2016, she took a massive leap of faith and left traditional clinical medicine. She assured her husband it would work. She felt there was a need to provide support in different ways.

[5:27] Women started coming to her who felt they were misunderstood by providers who had 10 to 15 minutes to talk to them about multiple concerns, women who were being put on anti-depressants instead of checking hormones to see whether they needed oral progesterone.

[5:51] Cynthia started creating programs in 2016 in response to consistent symptoms and concerns that women had, which led to one-on-one work. Nurse practitioners in her state were not autonomous. She knew she needed to be in lifestyle medicine.

[6:16] Cynthia's colleagues didn't have time to talk to patients about sleep, nutrition, or exercise, so they referred those patients to Cynthia. That was how it evolved initially, and it was gratifying, but Cynthia still felt something was lacking.

[6:56] In 2018, Cynthia wanted another challenge. She wanted to do a TEDx talk about the issues and changes women go through in perimenopause and menopause.

[7:14] Cynthia did a second TEDx talk that went viral. It validated to Cynthia's family that her work was needed and that she had a genuine business. Cynthia speaks of the stress of going from being an employee to being an entrepreneur but says that great risks have great rewards.

[8:22] Cynthia says she was meant to be married to her husband and have her boys. Occupationally, the work she is doing now impacts more people than being in an office or the hospital where she was seeing 16 or 20 patients a day. Now her message is amplified.

[8:44] Her message also serves as a reminder that you are capable of so much more than you realize. Some of what you do is a leap of faith and some of it is understanding you have a message that is worth amplifying. Aligning with that concept allows you to propel forward.

[9:47] As an entrepreneur, understand that things take time; they don't happen overnight. What you see on social media are highlights. They don't show you the tough part. They don't show you the 80 hours a week you may be working as an entrepreneur. It's so easy to doubt yourself.

[10:12] Put your blinders on and focus on your vision and impact and the people you know you can reach and inspire. Sachin adds, some days you step in grass, and some days you step in mud but you just keep moving forward. As you go, you learn and develop skills.

[12:07] Cynthia tells what it was like to resign from the hospital. Cynthia says in Human Design, she is a Manifesting Generator. She leans into what feels intrinsically right, viscerally. She loved her patients but she was not happy with writing prescriptions. She was mentally tired.

[13:41] Cynthia's body was telling her she had to make a decision. One day, her feet hit the floor and she said, "Today is the day." Her husband didn't understand. She was fearful to tell her employer but once she did, it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders.

[14:16] Cynthia spent six weeks mourning the decision because she loved the people she worked with. She loved her patients, but not the environment. She was no longer growing intellectually. She was not aligned with the model of treating symptoms with prescriptions.

[14:58] Cynthia felt that there was more that she could do by focusing on lifestyle and helping people understand that poor sleep, inactivity, poor eating, poor relationships, and poor spiritual practices do not lead to good health.

[15:40] Colleagues and her parents told her she was having a midlife crisis but she disagreed. She had put much thought into it and had a clear vision of where she saw her business going. She couldn't do it in the context of continuing to work in that environment.

[16:19] Looking back eight years, Cynthia sees she is now exactly where she is meant to be. There's a reason things happened on the trajectory that they did. She had to take that leap of faith. Now Advanced Practice Nurses reach out to her and ask how they can do as she does.

[17:35] Cynthia says all of us listening to this podcast need to realize our work is so needed and valuable. We have to have faith in ourselves. We need to build an army to help support people's health and wellness needs. Cynthia says the current system is broken.

[17:55] Sachin quotes Dan Sullivan who said that every system does exactly what it is designed to do. Sachin's take on that is that the system is fixed to be rigged against the patient and the practitioner so a small percentage of people benefits from everything that's happening.

[18:28] Sachin is thankful that the system is great in emergency situations but eventually, it grinds down practitioners, patients, insurance companies, and governments. He can't see how it will play out over the course of 50 or 100 years.

[19:12] Sachin addresses the mid-life crisis issue. For a lot of people, going into a holistic style of practice happens around mid-life. But it's not a mid-life crisis, it's an opportunity to be reborn. Reframing that in people's minds can be helpful. It's a new world, embrace you.

[20:36] Cynthia is the first entrepreneur in her family. Her parents instilled in her a strong sense of self-confidence. She comes from a family of people who are in service to others, both in medicine and teaching. She speaks of how she and her husband balance each other.

[22:17] Cynthia has a child she suspects will be an entrepreneur. He's constantly figuring out strategies and solutions. He wants to go to business school and work on Wall Street with complex computational models.

[22:50] Cynthia invested early in her mindset and her business. She got a business coach early and she credits every coach she hired with helping her drive her business further. You cannot do it all on your own. Hire people who know more than you do to help you expedite your growth.

[23:24] Cynthia joined Mindshare in 2019, After her talk went viral, she had felt the universe telling her it was time to leap again. After joining the mastermind, she felt like a little fish in a big pond, amazed at the quality of people she was around, people she could learn from.

[23:51] Cynthia is a proponent of being a lifelong learner. There's no greater joy for her than learning. She is very coachable. Give her a suggestion and she gets it done. Her business is not a hobby. She wants to make an impact and as a result, generate an income.

[26:33] The American Heart Association produced a document on time-restricted feeding at an epidemiological conference. It looked at two days' worth of data, wasn't a research study, and wasn't peer-reviewed. It linked time-restricted feeding to heart disease and morbidity.

[27:45] Intermittent fasting may deserve to have more research done, particularly within women, Cynthia says you can't draw a conclusion from two days' worth of information that is self-reported at an epidemiologic conference. It goes back to clickbait.

[29:01] Cynthia did a video on Instagram a couple of days after the article came out. She told her audience it does not impact her decision to continue talking about intermittent fasting. For most of us, it is not going to change utilizing that as a strategy for ourselves or our clie...