Dr. Sonya Jensen

About Dr. Sonya Jensen

Dr. Sonya Jensen is a Mom of two boys, a business owner, a yoga teacher, a workshop leader and a Women’s Health Expert. After years of working closely with Women and their families her mission and purpose has become clear, to Inspire Women so they can live free and balanced lives.

She’s a graduate of British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University where she received a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology. Pulled in the direction of helping others since the age of 5, Dr. Sonya pursued Naturopathic Medicine after University to explore the body’s healing potential and learn how to share it with patients.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Caitlin:
Hello everybody. It’s Dr. Caitlin here and I am so super excited to have with me Dr. Sonya Jensen. She is an amazing naturalpathic doctor up in Canada, and the reason she is with me is she is going to drop some super cool information as to what she’s going to be talking about in Newport Beach in November, so November 14th through the 16th. And Dr. Sonya, why don’t you tell us why these practitioners need to come to Newport and hear you talk?

Dr. Jensen:
Well, there’s going to be obviously really great speakers there talking about some very important topics and I love that it’s so women focused because I work with women a lot, and bring in tools like fasting and detox. And what these practitioners need to understand is there’s a real art to working with women because we are complicated. Let’s admit it, we’re complicated beings. And when it comes to our healing process, there’s some complications that could show up then too.

Dr. Caitlin:
So are you saying that working with women is very different than working with men when it comes to detoxing and fasting?

Dr. Jensen:
Oh, absolutely. So I see it from a lens of hormones and our hormonal system is intricate. There are certain hormones that get very affected by creating that extra stress in the body, so we have to admit fasting is a stress and it’s a conscious stress so that we can create adaptability in our body, so it’s flexible enough to deal with life, deal with the toxic load that we are bombarded with every single day. And specifically our cortisol will rise, which will not only affect our thyroid, but it’s also going to affect our progesterone levels, which will then affect our hormonal state. So working with women, there’s different stages that we’re at. Maybe we’re in childbearing years, maybe we’re peri-menopausal, maybe we’re menopausal. So for each stage there’s different factors that you have to consider.

Dr. Caitlin:
And I love it because with women, our hormone cycles shift throughout the month too. And that could potentially be one of the reasons why women aren’t getting the same results as their counterparts.

Dr. Jensen:
That’s right.

Dr. Caitlin:
Because I’m sure you’ve seen quite a bit couples tend to do this together and women get so frustrated when their husbands start to lose all the weight right away and they start to see all of these amazing results and their symptoms subside, but they take longer. And why is it important for practitioners to understand this when working with individuals and couples, especially? Because it can be really frustrating seeing you put all this hard work in and your husband is getting all of these amazing results and you still feel the same, not much has changed.

Dr. Jensen:
Well I think it’s important to manage expectations, right? Like you said, it’s really important for a couple to do this together so that they can support one another, but they too have to understand that their results are going to vary. They are going to be different according to their own individual history and their individual makeup when it comes to their hormonal system, their nervous system, how they’re responding to their daily stresses.

So for women when they’re cycling throughout the month, the beginning of the month may be easier to fast, whereas the second half of the month may be not so easy. And so if a woman’s thyroid isn’t working as optimally as maybe her husband’s is, that’s also going to contribute to a longer result period.

For men, we find they can fast everyday all day and women try to do that, all of a sudden their hair’s falling out, they’re feeling fatigue, now they have brain fog, now they’re crankier than they were before so they’re not getting the results until they really learn how to find out what works for them. And it’s a practitioner’s job to figure that out with them.

Dr. Caitlin:
Right. I love that because every woman is going to be a little different too as to how they respond and what needs to actually happen. And I’m sure you’ve seen this too, once women are able to fast, they actually do better than their male counterparts.

Dr. Jensen:
That’s right.

Dr. Caitlin:
You’ve recognized and seen that also, right?

Dr. Jensen:
Oh absolutely. In my own life, I can get into ketosis like this whereas my husband who’s been fasting for years takes a lot longer, and I can do a partial fast and get the same results as a water fast whereas for him, he needs to do the water fast to get those results. So yeah, once women really learn how to get into that state and really manage their insulin and their cortisol and their hormones and all of that, things shift very quickly for them.

Dr. Caitlin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I know. I’m in the same boat with my husband and he gets so frustrated because he’s like what in the world? Why are your ketones like double mine already? And it’s just once you get your bodies adapted to that kind of stressor, then it’s much easier for us just to get into it.

Dr. Jensen:
That’s right.

Dr. Caitlin:
So why do practitioners need to come? Like what is it that you’re going to share with them that is going to take their practice to the next level? Especially with their current clients or potentially future clients?

Dr. Jensen:
Yeah. Well, we’re going to talk a lot about the art of listening, listening to that individual woman in front of you, her story and what factors are affecting her results. What stresses in her life are affecting her results? What belief system, what mindset is holding her back from really changing that relationship with food? Because with women, and men too, there’s always triggers when it comes to food. We have addictive behaviors. We have behaviors where it’s going to trigger other responses physiologically that we’re not even consciously aware of. So I’m going to bring insight into those factors so that they can take those tools, so the next time there’s a woman sitting across from them, they’re not just seeing, oh, this is somebody I need to teach fasting and ketosis to. This is an individual that needs different techniques in order for her to see the results that she wants.

Dr. Caitlin:
Well, and I that it is woman focused, because like you mentioned initially, we are more complex. We are more complicated, especially when you look at the hormones and the cycles and where we are in our stage of hormonal cycles, but everything that you just said could really be applied to our male clients as well.

Dr. Jensen:
Absolutely.

Dr. Caitlin:
Figuring out what they need to do, so it’s not just going to be helping women from what I’m hearing, they’re going to be able to take all that information and use it for women, but also apply it to their male clients as well.

Dr. Jensen:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s just easier for women to talk about these things, and men don’t necessarily go there. So if you begin to learn as a practitioner how to talk to both counterparts in a way that’s going to relate to them. For instance, just to give an example, for men, their feel good hormone is testosterone, so they need to be doing and solving problems and really can thrive off of that original stress with fasting. Whereas for women, it’s oxytocin. We need to just be, we need to feel heard, we need to be in community, so there’s so many little factors that they can see, and who knows, you may even save a relationship by knowing this information because they say happy wife equals happy life and happy partner will help the men out absolutely.

Dr. Caitlin:
So what are a couple of the big blocks that you see women have when they first start either fasting or they first start detoxing that you think these practitioners need to know about and start to recognize?

Dr. Jensen:
Yeah.

Dr. Caitlin:
And you can pick whichever one you want.

Dr. Jensen:
Yeah, so one of the big ones I think with fasting is body image. So if you have a woman in front of you that maybe is hitting the gym five days a week and is really attached to that muscle growth and all of a sudden you’re telling her to fast, in those original weeks, all of a sudden she’s losing muscle. So to understand why that’s happening and how you can shift her mindset out of that is going to be really important. Or you may have a woman in front of you that maybe has a history of anorexia or bulimia and these different relationships with food, so we really need to start understanding the psychology of fasting in order for us to be able to better help everyone in front of us.

Dr. Caitlin:
And so why is fasting so beneficial for women?

Dr. Jensen:
Fasting is beneficial on so many different levels. For me, the first time I did a water fast, I feel it was the first time I actually went into a grief state that I needed to move through and was hiding for so many years. So I feel like it brings out that intuitive center, it brings out this knowing that women already have, and it gives us this space and time to actually tune into what we need to work on and actually start listening to our bodies. Because we’re really good at not listening, and our bodies are always telling us when there’s something that needs to shift, but we’re busy with our everyday life. Whether you have kids or not, whether you have a career or not, there’s just always something that’s taking over the space in our mind and we’re not listening. That headache that keeps showing up, we just kind of push it aside or that irritability that just comes up every month, we push it aside. But I find when you’re fasting all you’re doing is going deep in and checking out what it is that the body is telling you.

Dr. Caitlin:
So is fasting one of the tools that you utilize with women to help rebalance hormones?

Dr. Jensen:
Oh, absolutely. Yes. It just creates so much more sensitivity around the receptors, and I utilize a lot of bioidentical hormones and we utilize herbs and we utilize these things, but we educate women that until you can clean that communication process between the hormone and the cells, you’re not going to get the results that you want. You’re not going to lose the weight. You’re not going to get that clear mind where you can remember the person’s name that you just met. So there’s so many different factors that fasting allows us to dive deeper into so they don’t have to rely on these hormones or these herbs or any of those other things.

Dr. Caitlin:
So in closing, every practitioner that wants to incorporate either fasting or detox really does need to come because they’re going to learn a whole bunch of techniques and ways to look at it and things to do and change. What… If you want to end us with this, this would be fabulous. Can you give like a little story about somebody that you worked with, a female, taking her from either detoxing or fasting and some of the struggle and then the end result. So what was it that she actually gained by going through it?

Dr. Jensen:
Yeah, there’s so many. I was trying to think in my mind right now who would be the best example. But I think that I would use this one woman, because it was a longer process with her so I think that’s important to understand. And she was menopausal, losing hair, low libido, and getting like swelling in her eyes, her skin was breaking out. So there was… you could see that there was a big toxic picture and there’s a toxicity picture in her relationship.

So when we started implementing detox, that’s kind of where I went first is educating on the cells and how we need to remove that toxicity, and then slowly bringing in the fasting tools that we teach with the window and the 24-hour fast, so we’ve been doing that over the last two years. Now her husband, who she was having troubles with, is doing the fasting with her. Like it’s moved from a state of like they separated to a state of, oh my God, I’m so in love with this man that I’ve been with for the last 40 years. And she has lost weight and now she is like an ambassador for fasting and teaching her community all about it because it’s shifted her relationship with herself.

Dr. Caitlin:
Oh, I love it. And I love that both detox and fasting had to be incorporated in for her to be able to get to that level of health for herself and her relationship.

Dr. Jensen:
Yes. They go hand in hand. It’s like you can’t do one without the other.

Dr. Caitlin:
Absolutely. All right, guys. You need to come to this event so that you can learn more tips and tricks about how to get women to detox more easily and to get into a fasted state because the outcomes, the benefits, are not just health related. It really can change families. So we’ll see you there and thanks so much for being here with me, Dr. Sonya.

Dr. Jensen:
Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you. It’s always so fun.