Healing Beyond the Label with Erin Kerry’s Journey | ANEW Ep 91

In Episode 91 of the ANEW Insight Podcast, Dr. Supatra Tovar sits down with certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach and host of Sparking Wholeness, Erin Kerry, for an unforgettable conversation about trauma, healing, and the powerful connection between mental health and nutrition.

Erin opens up about her early years of emotional struggle, being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, and PTSD by the age of 18, and the defining moment when a middle school teacher saw through her high-achieving exterior and recognized the emotional pain she was hiding. That single experience of being truly seen inspired Erin to pursue a life dedicated to helping others reclaim their mental wellness and heal from the inside out.

Once a middle school English teacher herself, Erin’s path evolved into coaching and advocacy after seeing how both kids and adults were suffering in silence. Now symptom-free from bipolar disorder for over 15 years, Erin shares the tools, mindset shifts, and integrative strategies that helped her reach lasting stability—without the shame that so often surrounds mental illness.

Listeners will gain insight into:
 – The early warning signs of emotional distress in high-performing children
 – The role of gut health, nutrient deficiencies, and inflammation in mood regulation
 – How trauma, especially in childhood, creates patterns of emotional dysregulation
 – Why birth control, antibiotics, and processed foods can impact mental wellness
 – How Erin’s journey from medication to holistic healing reshaped her life

This episode is filled with compassion, clinical insight, and lived experience. Whether you’re a parent, educator, healthcare professional, or someone navigating your own mental health journey, Erin’s story offers hope, practical tools, and a reminder that healing is possible.

Plus, we explore how food is mood, how being raised on a Standard American Diet impacted Erin’s development, and why it’s critical to create a healing environment for both the body and mind. Erin also shares the story behind starting her podcast, Sparking Wholeness, and gives a preview of her upcoming book.

If you're ready to reject diet culture and build a sustainable path toward mental and physical health, explore Dr. Tovar's award-winning online course, Deprogram Diet Culture, at anew-insight.com.

Here are the links of her social media channels : https://sparkingwholeness.com/, https://erinbkerry.com/, https://www.instagram.com/sparkingwholeness/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-kerry-655a59111,

Don’t miss this deeply human, eye-opening conversation.
 Stream now and stay tuned for part two next week.

 #mentalhealthpodcast, #bipolardisorderrecovery, #traumahealing, #integrativenutrition, #gutb

Thank you for joining us on this journey to wellness. Remember, the insights and advice shared on the ANEW Body Insight Podcast are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine. To learn more about the podcast and stay updated on new episodes, visit ANEW Body Insight Podcast at anew-insight.com. To watch this episode on YouTube, visit @my.anew.insight. Follow us on social media at @my.anew.insight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads for more updates and insights. Thank you for tuning in! Stay connected with us for more empowering stories and expert guidance. Until next time, stay well and keep evolving with ANEW Body Insight!

Transcript

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the ANEW Insight podcast. I am Dr. Supatra Tovar, and I am so lucky to have integrative nutrition coach and Sparking Wholeness podcaster. Erin Kerry with us today. Welcome, Erin. Thank you for joining us. So I'm gonna read a little bit about Erin and then we're gonna get right into our questions. Erin Kerry is a certified integrative nutrition health coach and owner of Sparking Wholeness, a nutrition coaching company. After teaching middle school English for 11 years, she transitioned to focus on her passion for holistic health and wellness. Yeah, we are. We have like same brain for sure. So I wanna know, I wanna know about this personal journey of yours. You know, starting out as a middle school English teacher, then becoming a nutrition coach. Tell me about that journey and what led you to coaching. And she picked up on it through my writing, of course, like an English teacher would. And that really stood out to me because I had worked so hard to put on a mask to separate what was going on inwardly and what was going on with the suffering that I was experiencing inside and how I presented myself outside that the fact that she saw through really spoke to me and made me go, wait a minute. I wanna be that person. Because once I came out of that experience and kind of was on the journey to healing, and it was a very rocky path, it was like, well, I wanna be that person for kids. And so it started out for the same reason that I do what I do now with coaching, because I very soon found out right that especially with teachers in the teaching world, adults are also struggling with their mental health, and adults are struggling with feeling overwhelmed and overcommitting to things and being overscheduled and not really being able to stop and take a breather. Teachers specifically, I know I sometimes lump teachers and nurses in, in the same category because they're so, um, in it for people, for the, but they don't even stop to go to the bathroom. But I'm wa definitely walking symptom free from bipolar disorder and depression for close to 15 years, maybe longer. Sometimes I joke, ask my husband, because been married for 15 years and he always says he's, he's a trauma therapist actually, and he always says, I've never really seen you hypomanic.

Erin Kerry: 0:06

So many factors and I, I think just for listeners to hear that it's never just one thing. I think sometimes we get caught up in this, especially now as functional medicine is getting more popular, people are like, I wanna find the root cause, right? As if there's one. There are so many layers, and my story is a very multi-layered story. I just, I just kept eating 'em. It was this strange, I just had this insatiable desire for sugar and sweetss. I don't know if I was looking for serotonin or dopamine or, um, even if there's something going on with my gut. I was nine. They were seven, they were twins. And every single one of us, and I know you'll appreciate this for sure, from a psychology perspective, every single one of us was impacted in a different way. My sister did not really experience PTSD symptoms. Kind of got over, I, as I say, get over it very loosely, right? And that's when I first entered freeze mode and I started dissociating. And so that freeze mode and dissociation turned into depression. So around that same time I was having hormonal imbalances and I was put on the birth control pill and in order to suppress my cycle so that I would not, um, have such strong periods so that I wouldn't be anemic. that, that I had been prescribed as a young child. And so then you throw in the birth control pill and deplete me of B 6 and mess with the gut. And it was like, well, pretty soon they put me on, uh, I think the first antidepressant I was on was Zoloft and Zoloft. And this will tie into what we probably will be discussing. And a little bit, but Zoloft caused me to gain about 25 pounds within a year. And so, you know, so you just keep adding to these layers of, I just felt like I couldn't catch a break. And even with the Zoloft, I still struggled with depression. I still crashed. I still had these periods of extremego, go, go do and achieve.'cause they knew it was, I was either tired, I was, you know, my throat hurt 'cause I had chronic strep things going on. I mean, it was just wild. So by the time I was a freshman, in college, I was diagnosed with mononucleosis, but I could not slow down. That's when I started experiencing symptoms of hypomania and I would stay up for all hours of the night. Eventually I found out that I could, once I got on medication, the heavy duty psych meds, I could self-medicate with alcohol. Really just kind of take myself outta my body until I ended up finding myself pregnant, my, um, senior year of college. And that was the ultimate wake up call. Like, oh my gosh, what is going on? Um, now I really need to figure out what to do. Somehow I made it through college okay. But I just, my social life, my, my inner, um, critic, critic was very, very loud. I felt so broken. I felt angry that I had been given what I thought. I, I, I had been given gifts to write and to, um, achieve academically and to get involved in activities. I felt like I had all these gifts and abilities that I could not use, because I was broken, because my brain couldn't work right. And it was extremely frustrating, and I know so many, so many people are experiencing this right now. Right? And, and especially in the, our teens are suffering from this. And so. I thought I was alone at the time. Now we're seeing an abundance of this, but I didn't know anybody else growing up that struggled the way I did. If they did, they did it in secret, you know? It wasn't as talked about. I didn't know anybody else taking medication. I didn't know. I definitely didn't know anybody else on Lithium or Depakote or Tegratal or these extreme psych meds that many of them cause me to hallucinate or have terrible side effects or things like that. So, um, that's kind of the, I'll pause there. I will say getting pregnant with my daughter, even though I thought that was like the ultimate, worst, scariest thing that could happen to me, um, because I had to get off of my meds at that point to have a healthy pregnancy. Um, it ended up being the thing that saved my life.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:14

What, when you examine your childhood, and I think that this is so important when we are counseling, parents in how to take care of their child in terms of what nutrition to provide them, what do you feel like you might not have had enough of or too much of when you were young? She's like, there is no Facebook. You know, how, how would I have gotten this information? Except we knew dieting, we knew diet culture. They knew maybe what not to eat or if something was fattening, which is always a funny phrase, right? Because who knows what that means. Um, they knew Diet Coke was out there. I thought healthy food didn't taste good. Um, and I, and of course I say healthy food loosely because I'll say, um, nutrient dense food. I thought nutrient dense food didn't taste good. I wanted to eat what felt good in the moment that gave me fuel in the moment or turned my brain on from a, maybe from a dopamine serotonin standpoint, but there wasn't a lot of staying power, so I was just constantly hungry for sugar and sweets, and that's, that's what I ate, especially by the time I got my driver's license.

Erin Kerry: 0:17

Yeah. Gosh. I would, I would say, I would talk to my mom about learning to make vegetables more flavorful and tasty 'cause I love flavor. Give me all the flavors. Give me the salt and the garlic powder and the pepper and the paprika and the, you know, I, I would suggest that, because I think that that would've been helpful. I did enjoy, and she did try to feed me a lot of eggs. And I think at that point it was, there was some nutrient density thinking there. We, we've talked about this and I've felt pretty good eating eggs. But yeah, eating a lot more. I joke, we, I think the phrasing now is called, um, being an ingredient household, right?

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:18

came out and you had like Rice o Roni and you would make meals from Campbell Soup remember how you'd like make a casserole from your Campbell soup So to have the convenience foods were really helpful. And they were also, convenience foods were touted by like astronauts and stuff, we would like, oh well the astronauts use this food. Well Tang, we should probably, uh, feed that to our kids too, because, they're so healthy. That's not how it was for me. Right? But I still lived with the shame. I mostly, and at the time when I was diagnosed, they didn't distinguish between bipolar one, bipolar two, but um, I think now looking back, I mostly probably identified with that heavier depressive episodes, but then I would have those brief periods of hypomania. Right? Um, so I would say things here and there because I am a very vulnerable person and I have struggles and that's just a big part of, of how I share and how I relate to other people is that I'm not exempt from struggles. But I never really went public about anything until it was 2018. I started sharing my story and at that point I felt like my symptoms had stabilized enough to where I could share about it and it wouldn't be super triggering for me to even get any kind of weird, 'cause I've gotten a lot of really interesting responses when I started sharing about my struggles. It's amazing. What, what will fill your inbox when you get that vulnerable right? And one person was, I've been accused of being anti-medication even though I was medicated for 18 years. One part of my story is that I'm not, I, I've been med free for over 10 years because I've been able to find stability with other tools. But I have to say that very carefully because I don't want anyone to think that there's something wrong with them for taking meds. I don't want people to think there's something wrong with them when the meds don't work, right? Like it's a such a nuanced topic. So I didn't start sharing until 2018, and when I shared, I received all sorts of input, but mostly positive. It was mostly positive. People wanted to know more, people wanted to learn what I had done to keep my symptoms in essentially remission and what daily habits I was incorporating to feel so good for such a long period of time, because that's not always talked about. Right. And for me, I was told I would always struggle and that's just not true. And so I experienced a massive wave of positive feedback when I started sharing. And then I started digging into things more because at that point I had already gotten my certification from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and then I was like, well, I gotta learn more. But it could be, specific issues that are root causes. It could be, I interviewed somebody recently about, what was the phrase? It was chronic fatigue, but she called it myalgic encephalitis neuroinflammation. And so it's just getting really nitpicky about topics has been fascinating for me. And so, the podcast has just been an amazing outlet for me to learn, but also to share more stories of hope and healing because there are so many people out there who are sharing, yes, we can heal.

Erin Kerry: 0:25

what is the interplay with hormones and nervous system and detoxification and gut health and um, circulation, and how are we all just. complex web spider web of symptoms and causes and issues, and how can we unravel that and learn to heal again, essentially create an environment for healing complete sisters in this way. And I think it's just, it's such a wonderful way to just, open up and communicate and, you know, just delve into subjects that you just don't have that much education in and then really learn. That's what people can get from these podcasts as well. So