Debbie Potts: My story…
Did you know I grew up always fighting my weight and fitting in with others?
I moved to Seattle (Bellevue) Washington from Vancouver, B.C. Canada in March of 6th grade – as my mom wanted my sister and I to meet new friends before summer started. I was 12 ½ years old and found it easy to meet friends in 6th grade but it was harder for my sister in high school as she is four years older than myself. I understand why high school was more of a struggle for her now that I look back at my own confidence struggles that started in high school.
AS a teenager, I was always taller than others- especially the boys in high school. I wasn’t overweight but I believe I struggled with body-image and self-esteem because I was a little taller than the rest of the kids as they were later bloomers. I wasn’t not popular but just not as outgoing or confident as others – so I was more friends with multiple groups and perhaps didn’t quite fit in to any specific group.
I blamed being taller for not being asked out to dances or on dates. That contributed to insecurity and trying to fit in the with the “popular kids”. I always preferred to be friends with friends from each group- the “popular kids”, the “smart kids”, the “rockers and smokers” and everyone else. I didn’t have just one group that I wanted to hang out with – so perhaps that contributed to my lack of self-esteem and confidence growing up.
In high school, I started to feel better about myself once I found the 4:30 PM aerobics class after school. My mom had to drive me to our club (Bellevue Athletic Club) and I started to find my passion – exercise. I used to love hanging out with the aerobics instructor before class and I started being the “class helper” checking in the other students with their punch card (it was the late 80’s!). Then my aerobics instructor tried helping me lose weight as I was exercising doing aerobics classes each weekday after school, but I wasn’t losing weight. Soon I was experimenting with different diets as the “Soup Diet” … I had our freezer filled with vegetable broth and started my long journey of dieting. It obviously didn’t work very well!
My senior year, I remember my mom had me meet with the club’s nutritionist. Soon I was tracking my food on a food log and getting obsessed with dieting, calories and losing weight. I was never fat or really overweight but probably had an extra 10-20 pounds to lose. This logging my food was probably the beginning of my obsession with tracking food and counting serving sizes or calories – and why I can never do it again. I find now that counting my calories or macronutrients – or just writing down my food just messes with my head and takes the enjoyment out of enjoying what I am eating and listening to my body. Instead of just going to aerobics class after school, I added in an hour cardio in the evenings while watching T.V. shows as I did two-30-minute sessions on the Stairmaster or alternated time on the Nordic Track. The passion for exercising started – along with eating healthy real food… but how does a passion become an obsession? We will see what happened over the next decade- read more in my book LIFE IS NOT A RACE on Amazon as I shared everything!
My high school graduation was excited…not because of the actual graduation process but because I had lost a lot of weight and felt amazing! For once in my life, I was getting attention from everyone – including looks from the boys. I remember feeling on cloud nine during our graduation all-night party at Wild Waves water park. I was so happy, confident and energetic. Why the sudden change? Does exercising more and dieting really make you happy? I was feeling pretty amazing at the time and perfect to enter college that fall feeling beautiful and suddenly I forgot about being too tall for so many years.
During college, I continued to love aerobics and eating salads. I remember my first year in college was spent partying and getting sick – as I was lean, fit and probably not used to drinking all of the sugary alcoholic drinks. My body quickly learned it didn’t do well with metabolizing alcohol or sugar! My love for aerobics and exercising continued during college as well as being known as the “Salad Queen” in the dorm cafeteria. I would only eat salads for lunch and dinner as I was afraid of fat and eating meat. My body quickly became a little too skinny as I was getting the reputation for being so “healthy” and only eating “good foods” as well as exercising daily at the aerobics studio. Then I started to eat bagels (best bagels in Bellingham at the Bagelery) as they were fat free and “healthy” – especially if you had the fat free cream cheese. I was really only eating carbs – including my later years in college living in a house with other friends that we ate pasta or rice with some chicken plus popcorn with water sprayed on it to hold the spices or fake cheese. The relationship with food started … as well as my body image and dependence of “looking good” on the outside for improving my self-esteem and confidence.
Fast forward to post college years in my late twenties when I discovered my love for endurance events as training for marathons, cycling events (STP and RAMROD) and then triathlons. My vitality and confidence improved when I was spending hours outside training for endurance events -then my confidence increased even more (finally) when I started racing and placing in my age group. Triathlons was my sport- endurance distance as the 70.3 and the full Ironman Triathlon. I felt happy when training with other like-minded endurance athletes and enjoyed the process of training for a race- then thrived on race day- especially when I had a great race!
Early in my athletic career, I was still in the phase (as most of us) eating high carb and afraid of any fat as “fat made you fat”. I also TRIED to follow the recommended fueling strategies for endurance sports as “carbo loading” the days leading up to your long run or bike or race. Also, the fueling strategies we were told to eat and drink around 300 calories per hour of our ride then on a run have a gel every 30-minutes to an hour. Talk about loading on carbohydrates – especially refined sugar carbs as gels, bars and gel blocks plus high carb fuel replacement. My stomach was a balloon and quickly was curious on how I was to get my body to BURN fat for fuel when I kept eating before, during and after workouts or training sessions. I was fit but still fat…and probably healthy on the outside but not on the inside (but I didn’t figure that out until the past eight years).
When I started racing Ironman triathlons in 2001, I lasted until 2003 with the recommended standardized carb fueling plan for endurance athletes until I figured out this was not the solution for ME. Each season, I would alter which fuel drink I was going to train and race with that season – but I ended up with similar results …throwing up most of the fluid that I consumed during my bike segment of the triathlon. I was training by heart rate and probably great at burning fat for my main fuel but when I started throwing down all of these sugary athlete’s “fuel” then I started having problems. BUT that is what I was told to do!
Around 2005, the Zone Diet book was published, and the diet started to get popular. I became interested in nutrition and learning how to burn fat. My morning breakfast of a “healthy” bagel, banana and orange juice to “wake up my metabolism” then I had to eat again in two hours due to be hungry again. Wow thought I had a great metabolism -but I really was just stuck on the “blood sugar roller coaster”. I thought I was so healthy eating real foods and eating every few hours to keep my metabolism working right but I was so wrong, and that philosophy was so far from the truth on how our body burns fat. The Zone Diet started to open my eyes to balancing carbs to protein to fat as the “Zone Diet” was 40/30/30 ratio of macronutrients. We were on the right track to lowering carbohydrates and burning fat! I became more curious in the low carb world and started my own self-experimenting as an athlete and coach. My low carb journey began as well as my quest to teach people how to burn fat. At this time, I also started conducting metabolic efficiency exercise and resting tests to determine individuals fat burning points, metabolic cross over point (where they switched from fat to carbs – or some people didn’t even burn fat!) and how life stresses impacted the test (as when running the test on clients after the work day!).
Then fast forward to 2013… after years of training and racing 15 Ironman triathlons plus many marathons, half marathons and 50k trail runs, I was “suddenly” broken and “burned out”. All of my body systems seemed to stop “working” at optimal level anymore. I “lived life as a race’ for too many years. The major contributor to my “burn out and breakdown”, I say was probably adding a major source of additional stress to my already busy life- I opened up my own boutique fitness studio in 2010 to offer a top “all in one” personal training studio in a very high rent town (Bellevue, WA).
Chronic stress impacts all – but we don’t know about it until it is often too late. Since my own health journey started in 2013 to find help, get answers and solutions, I have also started down a new path to become a health coach and practitioner. At the time of my own “adrenal exhaustion” started in March 2013 (technically called HPA Axis dysregulation), I was in a health coaching program with Ben Greenfield called the “Superhuman Coach” program online. Actually, in February 2013, we had the (one and only) Superhuman Coach Conference in Spokane, WA with now top experts and leaders in our industry as the speakers. Dave Asprey, Jimmy Moore, Peter Defty, and other leaders talked about cold thermogenesis, fat coffee (of course Bulletproof), heart rate variability and more “bio-hacking” methods that we discuss today! We were ahead of the trends in 2013 but I also was learning so much about what was going on with my own body at the time… I was a real-life example of the signs and symptoms of “adrenal exhaustion”.
Soon I was searching for answers as I was feeling depressed, tired, and FAT! I literally gained 30 pounds in just a month of so… it felt like overnight. I went from finishing the best triathlon race season of my career in 2012, to starting my worst health condition state in just three months later. I wrote my book “LIFE IS NOT A RACE” on Amazon to figure out my WHY… why me…why did I get fat, tired and depressed and other people could survive the fast paced life I was living. The biggest challenge for me was to get answers- to find help, solutions and guidance.
The struggle was real. I felt alone and no one could understand my frustrations.
I went to about nine different doctors and practitioners locally as well as online trying to get help and get results.
The main weekend when all of this started (March 2013) during a Mastermind Retreat in Torrey Pines, San Diego area, I was scheduled to talk to Sean Croxten at his office before I flew home. Ironically, he was in the middle of taping a video podcast with the found of FDN Practitioner program- Reed Davis. I have listened to them both on Sean’s Underground Wellness Podcast- and I found them “talking to me”. You can read all about my weekend in my book as this experience will never be forgotten in my memory bank. A life changing experience happened, and my life has never been the same since.
Since that weekend briefly meeting Sean Croxten and Reed Davis, I have continued my own transformational journey in helping my own self-heal but learning how to help others avoid going through what happened to me since that weekend in March 2013. In 2015, I became a CHEK Institute Holistic Lifestyle Coach then in 2017, I became a certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. I was involved in the KION Coaching program with Ben Greenfield and Kelsey Hess…then finally I decided it was the right time in May 2019 to take the FDN Practitioner program to become a certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner. I finally started to see all of the missing pieces of my puzzle- why I wasn’t getting my body and vibrant self-back. I was always taking one step forward and two steps backward towards healing and rebuilding the WHOLE me. Now I understood the external and HIDDEN internal stressors that we can identify with our investigative process as an FDN Practitioner or as I say, “health detective”.
Why did I wait until 2019 to become a student of Reed Davis and become a “health detective”?
I finally closed my fitness studio in October 2019, so I knew after ten years of being a small business owner with a huge overhead that caused me monthly stress, it was time to prepare for my real passion and purpose – to become a health practitioner. Now I am focusing on helping others avoid going through what happened to me over the years- living life as a race. I learned so much about my self the past eight years- my triggers, my red flags and my chronic stressors on the inside out. If I didn’t run all the five main functional lab tests for my own self then look at the BIG picture – I would never have seen the hidden internal stressors that continued to be re-activated from my crazy fast paced life and my constant stress as a small business owner in a competitive industry. If I took the FDN Course earlier, I would have been adding additional stress to my stressed business owner lifestyle! In May of 2019, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and I knew this was the time to follow my passion and purpose.
My passion is to help solve the unexplained health complaints or concerns clients struggle with each day- and help be that person that will work with them as much as needed to put the missing pieces of the puzzle back together by working on the WHOLE person with the functional lab testing we recommended in our FDN practitioner program but also assess their nutritional therapy needs from our tools used in our NTP program- then I combine other training as lifestyle habits and genetics that I have gained from people as Ben Greenfield and Paul Chek plus DNA Fit and soon StrateGene. Someday I would love to take other programs as Mark Sisson’s Primal Coach but there are only so many hours in the day and days in the year.
Today, what drives me is knowing there are not many people out their that understand what is like to not get results and treat each client as an individuals since most practitioners or doctors seem to just look at my lab results and give me supplements.
We are all unique bio-individuals with different genetic makeup, microbiome, food sensitivities, lifestyle habits, families, work schedules, exercise goals and sleep routines. My happiness is found when I can help guide an individual who was lost and not getting results by doing all the “right” things told from others and help them find the right transformational path so they can love who they are and be the best version of themselves.
One of my biggest pet peeves, or two, is when people blame the aging process for how they feel and accept this as their new “normal”. you don’t have to settle for mediocracy- you can choose to strive for excellency, vitality and resiliency. We have a choice… I know I want to live my life to the fullest. I want to be traveling around the world when I am 70 plus years old and walking up the hills without assistance! I want to wake up with energy and thrive each day.
What about you?
I will leave you with nine tips from Dr. Lipman that correlates with my “The WHOLESTIC Method” program to optimize your mitochondria -which help you burn fat, improve athletic performance and enhance your longevity.
These are my goals in life but what are yours?
Let me know as we can set up a discovery call to learn more.
The HEALTH Detective Coach on a mission to help you get your body and vibrant self back!!
Ask to schedule a complimentary call to discover more here.
Debbie