Project Elivate: Episode 2 ft Maressa Coley, APRN

Project Elivate - Episode 2

Welcome back to Project Elivate. This is episode number two. This is probably going to be my favorite one, because we have Maressa here on the show. She's going to be on here frequently. She's our other nurse practitioner in the practice. Many of you guys, if you're a patient here at Elivate Wellness, you have met Maressa, but I don't know that you've had the opportunity to hear her whole story. So that's what we're gonna dive into today. It is exciting, but before let's catch up. So I don't know how if you all well, it's January. We've officially had our first big snow of the year. Have you stayed warm?

Yes, inside, indoors as much as possible you

You were able to get out of your driveway?

Yeah, I forgot the hill to kind of presumptively knew it was coming, because I was not about to get snowed in again

This week at the office has been kind of unusual, because we've been out like every day I felt like I wasn’t here at all. We're ready to get back to work, that's for sure. So anyway, okay, so how do you want to go about this? You want to start from childhood, like, what? How far back do you want to start? Because I feel like every piece of this contributes to your overall story.

Oh, Lord Yes. Like your psychologist always says, it starts in childhood. So we might as well start there. I guess wait.

Should I get like, a clipboard and start writing notes?

No, oh, Lord, might give me a panic attack. No, I'm just kidding. So Lord, as we I don't know, for people who do know or don't know what she's talking about, is at my biggest, I was about 265 pounds, but I've been, I've been a little Dunkin donut for most in my life. Okay, that's fine. At my smallest, I got down to about 140 45 and then now I'm little thicker than that, let's just say that!

What was your biggest? What was your highest weight?

265lbs okay, that I can remember.

Okay,

Because I avoided the avoided the scale quite a bit, so I'm sure it could have fluctuated me on that, but that's the only one I have visual proof of, yeah.

And now, what's that? Let's preface this by saying, like, we don't want to put too much emphasis on, like, the scale. We're just trying to give some context as to how

we got here.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, as we were talking about where everything starts in childhood, so as I can remember and recall, I was actually thinking about this today, and I was going back and look through pictures I don't through pictures at my mom's house. I was, I was a normal toddler, like small child, probably pre pubescent Middle School. I remember I was significantly bigger than most people. It didn't really phase me at the time. You have no concept. You're a happy kid. You know what I'm saying? Snack’ems galore. You know? I'm worried about my PB uncrustables. But my mother realized it was becoming a problem. She would acknowledge it, in the most healthiest way of, I guess, a parent can tell your child, like, girl, you’re a little thick, you know, when I got into middle school, again, a little rolly polly olly. Towards the end of middle school, I started to get interested in boys, so I think that kind of sparked the concept of, I need to lose weight. Well, I went into high school, and I'm pretty sure it was like over summer, because I remember going into school next year, and everybody was like, Oh my gosh, what happened? Like, I had dropped weight. And when I say I dropped weight, I mean, I dropped weight. I was Skeletor. Over the summer, I just - I went anorexic. I quit eating all I was diet culture in that aspect. And from what I had see in my personal life and in celebrity was just don't eat and run your butt off.

And you said, so this was going into high school. So when around 14/15, years old?

Yeah, I was probably actually, like, freshman year, I probably stayed pretty big. But then, like, as because I remember I went to my junior prom, I think is what it was. My junior or senior prom is when I was significantly small. I have pictures that I was my littlest then. So it was like in preparation for that is when I had lost it all. I gained it back just as fast as I lost it. Ain't no way around it. I got enormously big. That was when I probably got my biggest was around the time that I went to college and went into nursing school. I remember graduating on stage, and I was the sun. I was just glowing but so pretty much throughout my entire life, it was always a roller coaster. I would lose weight, I would gain weight, lose weight, gain weight. I didn't have any concept of what to do. Then, when I became a nurse.

Can I pause you just a second?

Yea go ahead.

What prompted you to become a nurse? Was it your health journey that you were or what you saw as your health journey?

No, at the time, okay, completely honest, I was a very lost soul. I was in school. I had changed careers. I had changed I had been several things in college when I was trying to figure out what I want to do, I lost my father during college. My mother was just kind of like get into health care, and she was,

Your mom's a nurse.

Yes, my mother is a nurse. She is actually an employee health nurse right now, but she's been a manager. She's been infection quality risk, she's been everything. She's very well versed, but she was just like, you have to get into school like you, or do something or get out. Yeah. So I did fall into nursing, which worked out perfectly, because I do have a giving heart it come to find out, you know, find out, you know, it's more of a passion than it is a paycheck, and it's it took growth to understand that honestly. So I started nursing big again. I had just when I was nursing school that was like, PTSD galore. Let's just be honest. I don't know about your nursing experience, but so I started working the floor. I was a med-surg nurse, and I seen girls my age that were not too much bigger than me, let's just be honest. And they were diabetics, and they had wounds and losing toes, and losing feet. I love patients. I will always give my patients the best care I can possibly do. But the realization set in that this is going to be me one day in this bed, and someone is going to have to roll me, someone is going to have to clean me and I'm going to do it, but not every person is going to do that. I'm sorry. That is just the situation, the reality of the world. Not everyone does their job well. So at the same time, I was introduced to weightlifting.

Who introduced you to that, like, what? Because part of that you had strictly relied on nutrition.

I was in the gym with girlfriends. We were doing, like, HIIT. It wasn't HIIT. It was interval training. Like I had always kind of played in the gym, but I had no concept of what you're supposed to do in it. I just went there, moved my body a little bit. Was not consistent, was not in there. But I actually started dating a guy that introduced me to weightlifting. We didn't work out. Obviously, I don't know if we should go into all that, but it was a traumatic situation, yeah, to say the least. But God puts people in our lives for a reason, absolutely. So he taught me the value of structure, and once I got into the gym - when I was a child, my emotions were in disarray. I was mature for my age, but emotionally dysregulated. I blame my diet. I blame lifestyle factors. We don't realize how, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, but we don't realize how much nutrition plays into your psychological effect, right? But I learned through working out, I was stronger than what I gave myself credit for. Simple as that, I started weightlifting. It taught me consistency. It taught me dedication. It taught me endurance. It taught me how to regulate my emotions. It taught me that nothing in life worth having is going to come easy and crash diet after crash diet after crash diet like, yes, I will be small for the moment, but it's not going to ever last me a lifetime, and this is a lifetime commitment, so I owe my life to the gym. I really do.

It's that same for me. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

It taught me how to regulate my emotion and understand the value of “I”,It is exactly what it is, and it kind of like reflects back to my patients. They say “I don’t have the time,” “I have this, this, this, and this…” and I say “You can’t pour from an empty cup - YOU CAN”T POUR FROM AN EMPTY CUP!”

Yeah, we've always said that.

And as I started to lose weight, I felt better about myself, and I'm not sitting here saying like, just because I was big, I didn't love myself. I just didn't love myself, is what it was, and found my I found my heart and my soul in working out, in nutrition and seeing that we can grow - you are not your circumstances. And that's something we have talked about too, is like people come in here and say, it's genetic, that's genetics. Well, my mother has struggled with her weight. I'm sorry to put her information out there, but it's just the truth of it. My grandmother has struggled with her weight. She's had gastric bypass. She's had a gastric sleeve. My dad was severely obese. He was a diabetic. I lost him to cirrhosis of the liver. I could easily say genetics is my problem and It’s why I was big. But when I look back, I had no concept of healthy. I knew the term. I knew what I thought it meant. But now that I'm educated, healthy is an umbrella term a lot of things.

It means a lot of different things for different people, and it's unfortunate, yeah, yeah.

So here I am now. I met you when I around this time, like I had significantly lost my weight, and I was starting to struggle in the gym and stuff like that, and that kind of how I bumped into you, and

So Marissa, I bet if I looked up your patient ID number, you're probably in the below 100s for sure, does it? Because, I mean, actually, I remember I was, I was working my second job.

Yeah, cause I called you. You were still at work.

Yeah, I wasn't even here full time. And she called and scheduled this. And go ahead, I'm sorry I didn't sell that.

No, you're fine. I had went to go see her. I went to go see her because I had lost all this weight. Obviously, like working out, but I was tired. I was just so tired. I was telling her I was like I was in the gym. I felt like a little weak, wet noodle. And then we were in my blood work, and here we are.

So what did we find out on where are some things that stood out on your blood work that you can recall?

I was significantly low in hormones. Obviously, my testosterone was low. I was on birth control at the time as well. We found out I had Hashimotos, which is a thyroid dysfunction. And honestly, that I just had been in such a severe calorie deficit for so long, I had kind of ruined my metabolism. I had to start back over.

Yeah, and that and that long term that has that affected your your hormone balance, like you had mentioned. So it wasn't and we took this into consideration. We look at blood work, but we were looking at the big clinical picture. What was your history? What led you to this point? Where are you right now? Yeah, go ahead.

So I started hormone replacement therapy with you initially, and then we, like, worked on my thyroid and things like that. Well, I came in, I don’t even know it wasn't my second visit, or second or third,

Yeah, probably second or third.

Yeah, that was your very first the Lord, yeah, the Lord had told me to write a resume up, because I was in nursing. I was in nurse practitioner school time, yeah, and he was like, give it to her. So I did. So I went in there, gave her my resume, got my blood work back, my results, started my treatment here. We worked on reverse dieting, yeah, yep. I started on testosterone injections, and then I was taking optimize my thyroid and getting methylated vitamins. Lord, we can, we can go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah, that is definitely a podcast in itself!

But, I gained some weight back, gained muscle back, anatomy changes, and things have really looked up. I recently had a tummy tuck. Yeah, I didn't well deserved, yeah, lost all your weight as a residual exactly, I rewarded myself.

So she looks fantastic. Y'all can’t see her waist when she's sitting down like this, but she's snatched Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so there's something else I wanted to ask you in the van. So with her resume. The other weird thing about that was she gave it to me in this black folder. I put it in my bag, and I literally carried it around for a year because I wasn't sure what my practice was going to do when I would be ready for a nurse practitioner. All I knew was that Marissa's history and her health journey to that point aligned with Elivate’s mission, and so when the time came to hire, I called her right away, and she's interested in all the things, so we do the wellness portion, the esthetic side, a lot of things that she's well equipped to handle.

So, yeah, I've been there. I don't know how to explain it, you know. And I think this is a good balance, honestly, just in general, for this podcast, because you have two people coming from opposite end of the spectrums, which I think will offer insight in general. But when patients come in and they tell me they struggle or things seem impossible, now I'm going to hold you to a higher degree, a little bit, because I've been there, yeah, and it's tough love, but it's still coming from a place of love, and I think that's what will help me help this practice grow as well, right?

That was going to be my question for you, was, what is your approach when you sit down with the patient for the first time, what is your approach?

I guess I start with, first of all, we part of our questionnaire, what brought you here? What is like? What are your symptoms, what is going on? And then two, also ask people, What is some realistic expectations? What are some goals of your for yourself, things like that. And then I have that conversation about, I can, I can lead the horse to water, but I can't make it drink, right?

And I have to make them thirsty.

And yes, yes, like we are with you 20% of the time. It's 80% of the time is you. So we have these conversations with them about, is it a realistic expectation? What do you think is required of yourself? What is required of me? This is a collaboration. I can help you on every part of the journey, but at the end of the day too, this is your life, honestly.

What is the number one piece of advice that you deliver to your patients? Or what do you find yourself delivering to your patients on a consistent basis that you feel like works or makes an impact?

I think it's the emotional concept of it. Sometimes we just need to, everybody wants to be the exception to the rule, and I want everybody to understand we all come from similar backgrounds and circumstances. And I don't know how to say that without being discouraging to other people's life journeys and things like that, but there is so much in our lives that occur outside of what we tell people that could have impacted how we do it. But we can either elevate the situation and rise above, or we can succumb to it and allow ourselves to live in this state forever. But you already see what that state is giving you. How do you feel because of that? So the only way you can rise above that situation is to take control. So I just tried to understand, like, when people, like, literally, one of our, people near us said something about she was like, well, and it was a joke, I'm so sorry. I'm not throwing you under the bus. But she was like, I can't lose weight. I got Hashimoto. So why am I even trying - hold on us. Yeah, we can work on this, we can work on this, we can work on this. And it's just like, again, you are the exception, not the exception to the rule. This is a generalized situation.

Yeah, all right, so I hope, obviously, I feel like there's so much more. There's so much more. I'm sure a lot of that's gonna come out in a future podcast too, just before you can come see me or exactly like, this is what we want. We want a relationship with our patients. We the purpose of this podcast is to educate and empower you, but also to hopefully give you an idea of what we look like in real life. None of this is really scripted. Yes, I have my notes here to ask her questions so I don't forget, but this is truly what's coming out from our heart. So yeah, I could listen to Marissa’s story 1000 times in a row and be inspired or hear something different every single time.

Because life is not just about singular events that led me to the situation, it's about everything that happened along the way. I just, I just decided I know what it feels like to be here. What if? What does it feel like to be there? You know? So I had to do something. I had to do something.

Well, thank you for being so vulnerable. So we've come to this, this segment of our show, we're trying to determine what to call it, so if you can think of a name, let us know. But it's kind of like a love it or leave it or elevate it or drop it, I don't know. But basically, we're gonna pick a topic and determine if it's important to us or if it's not something we could do with or without. Yeah, with or without, with or without, okay, I mean, with or without, with or without, it, I don't know. Help us come up with a title. That's all we know. So today's though is gonna be, it's controversial. Yes, it's cold plunge. Y’all Crazy. So cold plunge, do you what is he just saying? What are we calling with or without? Are you with cold plunge or without it? I told you my opinion. I understand the benefits of it, but sis it's cold, that is cold. I'm gonna start with a cold shower. That's what I told them this morning. I'm gonna say I love it. You already doing it.

I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I love it. I think even if it does nothing, because the jury's still out, I get it. All you haters out there, that hate cold plunge, all the tomatoes at me. I don't care.

But you know what? I want to do cryotherapy. So that was the same thing. Just free, free market for water, exactly.

Get your water trough and put some water in and get in it. So, but even if it does nothing for physical health, it does something for my mental health, and it'll go like I could turn the world over after I get out.

So yes, It’s that rage from coming up out of that ice like a popsicle. But anyway, thanks for tuning in. We'll catch y'all next time.

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