What if your body is already warning you long before the health crisis arrives? 🚨🌿 In this episode, Jessica, founder of Phoenix Functional Health, shares how 90-hour workweeks led to a public breakdown—and ultimately transformed the direction of her life and career.

Jessica explains why symptoms like fatigue, headaches, poor sleep, and caffeine dependence may be common, yet aren't signs to be ignored. Through functional lab testing and personalized health strategies, she helps entrepreneurs listen to the body's "whispers" before they become screams. 🧬✨ Her message: your health is one of your greatest business assets—invest in it before you're forced to. 💛

Free gift: The Adrenal Mocktail Guide: https://phoenixfunctionalhealth.com/adrenal-mocktail-guide/&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=evergreen&utm_content=show_notes

If you’re eating well but still running out of energy - or relying on another cup of coffee to keep going—your body may need better resources, not more pressure.

The Adrenal Mocktail Guide includes 10 simple, mineral-rich drink recipes designed to support hydration, steady energy, stress resilience, and recovery. They’re quick, practical, and easy to work into a busy day, because supporting your body shouldn’t become another full-time job.

My Non-Profit – Girls Matter - https://girlsmatter.ca

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Introduction video about Girls Matter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3-xqzJLZW14om1PhFClcU_oRSZ8zgip/view

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Episode Summary:

Key Takeaways

• Personal Burnout as Catalyst: Jessica's 90-hour workweeks led to a public nervous breakdown, which she recovered from using functional health. This experience became the foundation for her practice, Phoenix Functional Health.
• Proactive Health Strategy: The core message is to address health issues early ("whispers") to prevent major crises ("screaming"). This proactive approach treats health as a business asset, enabling founders to operate at their peak.
• Functional Labs for Precision: Functional lab tests are the cornerstone of the method. Unlike standard medical tests, they use optimal health ranges to identify subtle imbalances in hormones, gut health, and more, eliminating guesswork.
• Holistic, Phased Implementation: A 6-month program uses comprehensive lab data to create a "Performance Blueprint." Implementation is phased, starting with small, high-impact changes to avoid client overwhelm.

Topics

Jessica's Origin Story: Burnout & Functional Health

• Jessica's career began in massage therapy (2008), focusing on the mind-body connection through Shiatsu and Qigong.
• A period of extreme overwork (90-hour weeks) led to a public nervous breakdown, characterized by severe irritability and feeling physically fragile.
• Key Insight: Recovery showed the limits of "soft" healing arts alone. Functional health testing revealed fundamental imbalances (gut, hormones, stress) that were the root cause.
• Outcome: Correcting these imbalances restored her resilience, allowing her to handle a 70-hour workweek without feeling overwhelmed. This experience inspired her to help other founders avoid the same path.

The Problem: Normalizing "Common" Symptoms

• A critical distinction was made between "common" (frequently experienced) and "normal" (a sign of optimal health).
• Common but Not Normal Symptoms:
• Headaches
• Over-reliance on caffeine
• Fatigue
• Poor sleep (e.g., waking at 2–3 a.m.)
• The Body's Communication Analogy:
• Whispers: Early, subtle symptoms.
• Yelling: Major crises or disease.
• Societal Pattern: Waiting for a major crisis before addressing health, which leads to longer, more difficult recovery.

The Solution: Functional Lab Testing & Personalized Plans

• Functional lab tests provide objective data to interpret the body's signals, removing guesswork and client self-blame.
• Key Differences from Standard Medical Tests:
• Standard: Uses broad "normal" ranges based on a sick population, often missing subtle issues.
• Functional: Uses optimal ranges for thriving health, identifying imbalances before they become severe.
• Melissa's Example: Daily migraines were resolved by identifying and correcting low progesterone via functional labs, a cause her doctor missed.
• Core Principle: Symptoms are not isolated.
• Same System → Different Symptoms: Hormonal imbalance can cause headaches in one person and fatigue in another.
• Same Symptom → Different Systems: Headaches can stem from hormones for one person and inflammation for another.
• Conclusion: This requires a personalized, non-cookie-cutter approach.

Phoenix Functional Health Process

• 1. Comprehensive Lab Testing: A suite of tests provides a full picture of interconnected systems.
• Tests Cover: Hormones, immune function, inflammation, gut balance, minerals, food sensitivities, detox capacity, blood sugar, and thyroid function.
• 2. Performance Blueprint: A personalized plan is developed from lab data and client history.
• Includes: Diet, exercise, stress management, sleep hygiene, and targeted supplementation to resource the body.
• 3. Phased Implementation: The 6-month program introduces changes incrementally.
• Rationale: Prevents overwhelm by focusing on small, high-impact steps.
• Goal: Not perfection, but learning the body's language to make informed choices.

About the Guest:

Jessica Van Antoine, FDN-P, is the founder of Phoenix Functional Health, a performance health practice for high-achieving female founders who are doing many of the “right” things—eating well, exercising, taking supplements, trying to manage stress—and still don’t quite feel like themselves.

After nearly 20 years in health and wellness, Jessica has learned that fatigue, brain fog, restless sleep, irritability, and slower recovery rarely belong in separate boxes. They’re signals. Her work combines functional lab testing with personalized nutrition, lifestyle, and nervous-system support to uncover the larger pattern, reduce the guesswork, and identify what matters first.

This work is personal. During a chapter of 90-hour workweeks, Jessica kept pushing until the glass finally shattered: she found herself curled beneath her desk, sobbing, unable to carry one more demand. Rebuilding taught her that the answer wasn’t less ambition. Her body needed better resources.

Today, Jessica helps women listen before their bodies have to scream. Her goal isn’t to hand them another overwhelming wellness plan, but to help them understand what’s draining the body and brain their business depends on—so they can feel like themselves again and have enough of themselves left for the lives they’re building.

Contact info:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-van-antoine-fdnp/

Website: https://phoenixfunctionalhealth.com/&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=evergreen&utm_content=show_notes

About the Host:

Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and a Board Designated Master Trainer of Hypnotherapy, Trainer of NLP, Time Line Therapy®, and NLP Results Coaching, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.

Melissa has launched Amplify Impact Academy, with business partner, Billie Aadmi and together they train other coaches, practitioners and counsellors in the 4 mind-body healing modalities mentioned above, giving them powerful tools to use with clients to get results with greater ease, speed and grace. These courses teach life skills and anyone can take them, if you want to be a better leader, parent, partner, be empowered in your own life, these courses are for you!

Melissa’s passion project is her non-profit, Girls Matter (www.girlsmatter.ca), breaking the poverty cycle 1 girl, 1 family, 1 village at a time. The mission is to keep girls in school and stop teenage marriages, because school isn’t free in over 50 countries around the world and when parents have to make the difficult choices of feeding their kids or paying for school, food wins. And when the girls hit their teen years, they will often be married off so that someone else becomes responsible to feed them. Keeping girls in school instead creates a generational ripple effect, because an educated girl is more than twice as likely to ensure her own children are educated. Educating girls also grows the GDP of countries, when they get into the workforce. This is how together, we can change the world.Guests on this podcast are invited to donate to this important cause. Learn more here in this short video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3-xqzJLZW14om1PhFClcU_oRSZ8zgip/view?usp=share_link

Melissa is also the winner of the 2024 Women in Podcasting Awards in the “inspiration & motivation” category and the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022, 2023 & 2024 for Whistler.

Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 90 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started.

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney

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