Ep 576: What Every Midlife Woman Should Know About the Lymphatic System with Dr. Jannine Krause

In this episode of The Health Fix Podcast, Dr. Jannine Krause dives into the fascinating connection between the autonomic nervous system and the lymphatic system—two often-overlooked players in your health. She explores how stress, hormones, and lifestyle habits influence lymphatic flow and overall vitality, especially for women navigating midlife.

You’ll learn why symptoms like bloating, swelling, or shifting pain may be rooted in lymphatic congestion, and how movement, touch, and self-care can make a profound difference. This episode is all about empowering you to take charge of your health by supporting your body’s natural detox and healing systems.

🎧 Tune in now to discover how to unlock better health by caring for your nervous and lymphatic systems!

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Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 The Connection Between the Autonomic Nervous System and Lymphatic System
03:01 Understanding Hormonal Changes in Women
05:36 The Role of Inflammation and Lymphatic Health
08:56 The Impact of Stress on Lymphatic Function
11:32 Movement as a Key to Lymphatic Health
14:32 Practical Techniques for Lymphatic Drainage
17:18 Acupressure Points for Lymphatic Flow
20:11 Advanced Techniques for Lymphatic Health
24:59 The Importance of Sweating and Detoxing
26:08 Understanding the Nervous System and Lymphatic Health
29:34 Techniques for Stimulating Lymphatic Flow
32:41 The Connection Between Circulation and Health
36:35 Foundational Health Practices for Detoxification
40:21 Movement as a Tool for Stress Relief
45:04 Empowering Self-Care and Health Management

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Jannine Krause (00:01.656)
Hey, health junkies, on this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, I’m gonna do a solo one. We’re gonna be talking about the connection between the autonomic or automatic nervous system and your lymphatic system and how the two of them, I’m seeing so many connections lately in my practice that they work hand in hand and I think they’re causing a lot of trouble for people, especially in this timeframe in mid.

life and especially for women. Can’t speak a ton to men, but I do see swelling in men too. So it’s something to think about. And when we think about the lymphatic system, a lot of folks are going to be thinking about cellulite and things of that nature. But actually, what we want to be thinking about is swelling, puffiness, bloating, all things I hear from a lot of folks. But not only that, brain fog.

So if we look at the plethora of symptoms that one can have as they get older, this concept of aging, so the brain starts to go, we start to see our body sagging a little bit, certain areas sag, certain things are puffy, sometimes rings get hard to put on, you got ring lines, you got sock lines.

Can anyone relate? Does this sound familiar? So what I’ve been seeing is the, I would say the more someone is not moving, not working out, not walking, have more of a sedentary job, maybe they’re sitting more. Right now I’ve noticed with me because I’m driving more, because I drive down to my dad’s so I can sail and drive back up to my house, which is about three and a half hours.

away from my dad’s, I’m doing a lot of driving and I’m noticing I’m swelling a little bit more. And it’s because I’m not doing my pumping of my lymph. But not only that, there’s a little stress with going back and forth. And I’m sure a lot of you can relate with a commute to work or just when you have a busy life and who doesn’t have that. So in today’s podcast, I’m going to be talking about the connection to the nervous system, the lymphatic system and

Jannine Krause (02:18.988)
different signs you can pick out from your symptoms that maybe you wanna be looking at your nervous system and the lymph to help you out versus jumping towards hormones and hoping that they’re gonna be the end all be all.

I can’t say it enough. I love working with bioidentical hormones. They can be incredibly helpful for certain folks. They can give folks their life back. They can be truly life-changing. But we have to get the legwork in before. And for women in particular, we wanna be thinking about something super crucial because this doesn’t apply to men so much because men can make testosterone from their testes to the day they die. Women, we switch over fuel. We make hormones from our ovaries

until we go into menopause and then we switch fully over to our adrenal glands to make us hormones. So contrary to what the messaging seems like online is that we don’t make hormones after we go through menopause. That is not true. We can make hormones. Some women make enough. They don’t need hormone replacement therapy. I know, what?

because that’s not what it seems like right now. But the truth is, is that is the case. It all depends on what’s going on in someone’s individual world. A lot of people ask me, how do you age better? How do you not have all the perimenopause into menopause symptoms? Well, the answer is take care of your adrenal glands because the stronger your adrenal glands are going into perimenopause, menopause and beyond, the better adapted they’re going to be to make

hormones for you. All of the symptoms that we see in midlife that are hormone connected from hormone deficiencies, this is connected to the switching of the fuel from ovaries making the hormones to the adrenals making the hormones. So if you can see that connection there, if you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not sleeping well,

Jannine Krause (04:24.3)
You’re burning the midnight oil. You’re saying yes to too many things. You have vampire families. You have vampire friends, people that suck your energy. It is all going to catch up with you. This is the difference between someone who didn’t have a ton of perimenopause, menopause symptoms and those who did. Now the other kicker here that I’ve been kind of, you know, really diving, I will say I’ve been diving hardcore into it.

because I started to experience a lot of bloating myself. And if you’ve listened to any of my podcasts before, you’ve heard me say that I kind of inherited my dad’s gut. I’ve always had kind of gut issues, but this was something different. I would just bloat out of nowhere. And I had gone through and kind of taken out so many different foods to the point I was eating minimally chicken and veggies really was what I had brought it down to. I would still bloat. And I’ve worked with tons of people over the years.

where they’ve had different diagnoses of SIBO and IBS and this and that, and they’re eating like four foods and still don’t feel any better. There’s something else going on when we get to that point. There’s no like magic SIBO protocol they haven’t had, or there’s no magic antibiotic or no magic herb that hasn’t come into their life. Especially for some of my clients and myself included.

Yeah, I put people through the wringer. We tried all kinds of different things and guess what? Nothing worked. And what’s the common denominator here? We are all in our midlife. Over 40. And what I started to notice is like, wait a minute, I’m starting to puff up more and faster, like under my eyes. I started to notice my ankles swelling more, I have more sock lines. And then I started to notice I can’t get my wedding ring on. And I’m like, something’s up.

Not only that, I worked with a specific fitness trainer that was helping me with macros and things of that nature. And we had me down to 1400 calories a day and like dialed in my macros. And I would gain like five pounds one day and then like drop back down, lose seven pounds the next day. It was bizarre. But this happens to a lot of people. I know I’m not alone because I hear my clients saying this too.

Jannine Krause (06:48.93)
So to have a shift like that in weight so drastically up and down, that’s inflammation weight, that’s fluid. Where does that fluid sit? In your lymphatic system. What does your lymphatic system do? And I think I probably should preface this, because I think maybe some folks are like, well, I’ve heard of it, but I’m not really sure what it does. It follows your blood vessels. It’s like woven in between your blood vessels. And it helps you to drain toxins from the body.

Like trash, basically, you know, leftover stuff from when your cells have gone through making energy, the byproducts, I call it cell poop, goes into your lymph. But if you’re not clearing it, this can build up. And your body’s mission is literally to, if there are a lot of molecules on one side of a vessel, then the body’s gonna try to put fluid in there to dilute them. So you’re gonna hang on to fluids.

Now, what kind of things can be in your lymphatic system? Well, you know, if you’re exposed to a virus and your body attacks it, the debris is in your lymphatic system. That’s why your lymph nodes get big when you get a cold. That’s why with mono, they get really big. Some of us with the pandemic and the COVID virus, they got really big, just like mono, those lymph nodes in the neck. That’s a huge sign your immune system’s working. But it’s also…

a sign if they hang around for a long time that you’re backed up. And then if you’ve got chronic puffiness, now we have another deal. Now another huge, huge, huge symptom I hear over and over again is brain fog. And a lot of people will associate it like, I’ve got a thyroid issue. Doc, I swear I’ve got a thyroid issue. And hey, I’m gonna run the tests. I’m gonna run all the things so I can see what’s going on with the thyroid. But if everything comes back okay,

What governs the thyroid? Your brain, signaling, and what works with your thyroid hand in hand? Your adrenal glands. Those little triangular little glands that sit on top of your kidneys. You have two of them, one on top of each kidney. And those adrenal glands are in charge of blood sugar. They’re in charge of your mineral balance, so your electrolytes. They’re also in charge of your hormones and your neurochemicals.

Jannine Krause (09:11.69)
all the things that go wackadoodle as we go through midlife and as we age. And so one of the things I’m really noticing is that if we don’t look at this connection between lymph and the nervous system, we end up with things like high blood pressure. We end up with swollen ankles, cankles. We end up puffy and bloated in the belly. We end up with brain fog.

All of these things are getting blamed on hormones, but at the end of the day, what if it isn’t necessarily the hormones? Because root cause, there can be multiple root causes. Someone may have mold toxicity, maybe they have Lyme disease on top of these things, maybe they have chronic mono. Those are all there. They can keep your nervous system hijacked and busy along with your immune system. And they’ll keep your lymphatic system busy too because when the body’s trying to make you energy.

which it’s doing 24 seven. When it’s trying to repair at night, during sleep. What is it doing? It is dumping things into your lymphatic system from the brain, especially at night, but also into the lymphatic system, especially around your liver and belly.

So for those of you that wake up bloated, that’s a big deal. That means you’re really backed up. Time for a detox. Those of you who get bloated towards the end of the day, but wake up in the morning with a flat belly, your system’s working, but it could use a little tweak. Now here’s the connection with the lymphatic system and the autonomic nervous system that a lot of people probably don’t know. Your lymphatic system is directly a tie to fight or flight.

the part of the autonomic nervous system. So you’ve got the fight or flight, which is sympathetic, and then you have rest and digest, which is parasympathetic. Your lymphatic vessels respond to shifts between chill mode and stress mode. Sadly, most of us are living in stress mode. What does that do? It keeps our lymph from pumping like it should and moving things out of the body.

Jannine Krause (11:26.05)
The more stressed you are, chances are the harder time you have to sleep. Sleep is when you drain your brain’s lymphatics, known as the glymphatics. So if you have a foggy brain, are you sleeping? What’s stress like? And how good quality sleep do you have? If there’s sleep apnea or if there are multiple wakeups during the middle of the night, you want to get on top of that.

A lot of times sleep is tied directly to cortisol, but it could also be tied to sufficient serotonin production, melatonin production, and even deficiencies in magnesium.

There’s no deficiency in something called L-thionine or ashwagandha, but these are herb, well, L-thionine is an herbal extract, it’s amino acid, but these do help for us to sleep. But if we’re not sleeping, we need to go back to basics and go, what is happening within the fight or flight nervous system?

So many folks come to me and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, doc, the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight, I’m stuck in fight or flight. Maybe you’re stuck in freeze. There’s also something called functional freeze. Just learned about that not too long ago where you are working, you’re productive, but you find yourself freezing on email for hours, staring at screens for hours and not being as productive.

not making decisions that need to be made, procrastinating, that’s functional, freeze. That happens to a lot of us. And I mean, I’d be lying if I said it never happened to me. It totally has.

Jannine Krause (13:13.154)
But the question becomes how do we get out of the stress mode and how do we help our lymphatic and glymphatic systems?

Well, it’s not as complicated as you might think, which sounds strange because I feel like myself included a lot of us in the biohacking, bio-tuning, anti-aging, slowing aging space have made it seem like you gotta do a boatload of things to stay healthy. And gosh, help me if I can do them all. I can’t, nor would I ever expect anyone.

to do all these morning routines and meditate and do this and that and the other. mean, most people tell me like, hey, I’m trying to do my stress relieving things, but it’s not working. It very well could be.

that you gotta look at the lymphatic system a little bit and get it moving better. And so out of all of the health interventions that I could have people do, movement, I have found over and over and over again to be the number one thing. You do not have to run marathons. I don’t want people running if they haven’t been running throughout their life.

It’s hard on the body. But play, bouncing, the rebounders, those are amazing. These move your lymph. But we need to be thinking about other ways to move lymph with exercise that’s fun if we do not, if you do not like to lift weights, if you do not like to do hula hooping, like I absolutely love. Riding bikes. I think we almost all need to go back to our childhood days.

Jannine Krause (15:11.246)
and we would crawl around and we’d play and we’d make forts with our couches. Now, I know that might seem ridiculous and hey, if you have grandkids, by all means, play with them. Get down, crawl on your hands and knees. That is a really good workout for the body. Another really good workout for the body is doing what I’ve kind of been teaching some of my clients in Wisconsin to do. It’s a lymph movement exercise.

It’s modified from Qi Gong, it’s modified from Tai Chi, but it helps to pump your lymph. And it’s actually kind of fun. And so for those of you who are listening and can’t see me, I’m gonna try to explain as best as possible, because I think you’ll get the idea here. Most of the time, the…

Only time I guess I should say not most of time but the only time most people reach overhead is to put something up like a box or something of that nature and Maybe a suitcase in the overhead compartment if you travel a lot But for a lot of people if you’re not lifting or doing pressing you’re not pumping your arms up overhead if you’re not in yoga You’re probably not standing on your hands Going upside down is one of the best things

Now granted, I know a lot of people have dizzy issues. A lot of people have not gone upside down in a long time. I’m not saying that’s like step number one. I’m saying get your arms up. You know, like when they when they talk about dancing and they’re in a club and they’re like hands up in the air. Hey, you know what? This stuff works. It actually feels good and it pumps your lymph. I’ve been picking apples lately. I love picking them, standing up and jump to get them. Jump up a little bit, grab some more.

But the point here is getting your hands up over your head and pumping your hands almost if you’re like in a club and you’re like bouncing to the beat. That’s probably one of the best ways actually to get your lymph moving. Now another fun way is taking your other hand and pulsing down your body, just like you’re pumping, just pumping down. So from your wrist, for those of you who are listening, can’t see me and just squeezing and kind of moving your hand down like this. Now, are there devices that do this? Yes, there are.

Jannine Krause (17:31.416)
Do you feel like spending $1,000 for that when you can get a little bit more of a sweat on and if you put music on, you can jump around and do this too. I’m all about habit stacking and stacking things together because like I said, we’re getting pretty hefty on all the things that we need to do to be healthy. Anybody out there feeling a little overwhelmed? I know I am. So why not pair some movement with things? One of the

Biggest points, Chinese medicine wise, that helps to move lymph in your armpit. And lymph in your armpit, ladies, this is a big deal. Why? Because your breasts are right here. I would be lying if I said that so many people, when I touch their armpits to do body work on them, they’re incredibly tight. What do you think happens with tight armpits? We don’t move lymph.

Where does it go? It just hangs out. So what happens? We could have breast tissue hanging on to some lymph there. gets swollen breasts. Who’s had swollen breasts before the period? Who’s had swollen breasts while taking bioidentical hormones? Yeah. Why is that? Probably need to move some lymph here in the armpit. Right in the center of your armpit is a point called heart one. It is an incredibly emotional acupuncture point. It releases stress. It releases emotions.

You might find that if you touch this, might feel a little emotional. Probably not though, just from pressure. Acupuncture needles tend to move the blood flow a little bit on a deeper, deeper level. And by the way, that’s what acupuncture does. It’s big with moving lymph. How does it do it? You put the needle there, blood flow goes there, electrons go there, white blood cells go there, and it flushes the area. You could do the same thing with your hand. You do not have to go into acupuncture every single time.

Yeah, it’s nice to get a nap for 45 minutes while someone puts needles in you. Not gonna lie, I love it. I’m an acupuncturist, I’m biased. But heart one, this armpit point, amazing to help you to move lymph in the armpit. Subsequently helps the breast. Why do we want fluid moving through our breasts? I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want breast cancer.

Jannine Krause (19:53.378)
We wanna keep moving fluid and sadly, I’ve had more of my patients ending up with cancer in the last couple years. Maybe because we’re getting older, maybe because there’s more toxins.

It’s frustrating. For those of who’ve been listening to me for a while, maybe you know my mom died of breast cancer, 10 years of a battle. I don’t want anyone to go out like that. Catch it early, we get things moving. Or prevent it. And I wish for a lot of people I would have thought about these protocols sooner, where we could really get the lymph moving. And so those of you who watching me on YouTube, I am pressing in heart one again on the other side. We gotta do it both sides.

If any of you’ve ever had a massage where your massage practitioner puts their hand into your armpit and stretches your arm out overhead, it’s sometimes painful. It can hurt a little, but guess what? That pec muscle that comes across your chest, your lat that ties back in here, and also something called subscapularis. It is a muscle on the front side of your scapula. So your shoulder, those wing bones on your back. It’s the muscle on the front. It gets so tight in there.

That sucker will keep lymph from moving well in your arms. Now here’s the thing, lymph comes moving from your hands through your elbow. You’ve got some lymph nodes in your elbow. Definitely a good place to pump around there. Go up into your bicep, come into that armpit. All of that lymph from that armpit’s gonna go right into the heart on the left side. Goes in via the subclavian vein. Right side, you gotta bring it across to the left side of the heart. Anytime you’re pumping your lymph, you wanna move it back to the heart.

Big deal, really big deal. The reason I’m bringing up the upper half of the body is because we kind of got the lower half down. If you’re doing a rebounder and you’re bouncing on there, you’re moving lymph from your feet back up to your heart. If you’re walking, if you’re running, if you’re lifting weights, you’re gonna be getting that lymph moving. Where people struggle the most is upper body, neck, and hip area, the groin where those lymph nodes are.

Jannine Krause (22:00.482)
Those are tied in with the belly lymph nodes. And boy, can we do some good work in the belly if we get those guys moving. I just recently did an experiment on myself. I took a month of working on my belly lymph. And guess what? I got the bloating to come down. On Instagram, I put a before and after on it. It was like mind blowing how much and just making sure I did it every single day, how good it worked. Now.

Before I go to the belly, I want to show you another thing as we’re talking about the upper half of the body. And I also want to give a caveat of there were a lot of different points that I could show you to help move lymph. And I’m probably going to be coming out with a course or something on it at some point, maybe a master class. In fact, this week, September 18th 2025, I’m going to have a class on the seven

steps to decode your symptoms in midlife. And one of things I’m gonna be talking about is lymph and how to decode the different lymph things and show you where to go for the lymph. Now your collarbone, that’s this bone here across the top there, your collarbone has a lovely point right above it and below it. The point above it is more notorious for helping with lymph flow in the body. It’s known as stomach 12. It’s a Chinese medicine point. It is halfway

across your collarbone on your nipple line. where your nipples are, just take your fingers up, get up to your collarbone and then go to the top of it. That spot is awesome. You can tap it. I would tap it alternating so you’re not tapping it at the same time. You’re not gonna hurt yourself here. know, tapping is gentle. You’re not whacking on yourself. Now, if you wanna do acupressure, I recommend one side at a time. So holding one side, then holding the other side 60 seconds the most.

You do not want to be getting into the interior part of your neck because that’s where your carotid is, that’s where your jugular vein is. Do not do that. I did not tell you to do that. Don’t do it. Stick right above the collarbone. It’s a great place for moving lymph in the neck and helping to drain the brain. When’s a good time to do this? At bedtime. Help your body move this along. I’ve had some folks in my practice actually say they slept better by doing this. So if you struggle with sleep, this is something to think about.

Jannine Krause (24:22.146)
Big time. Now if you want to get to your neck and do any work in your neck behind, so we’ve got this muscle that comes on an angle, it’s called the sternocleidomastoid. Behind it, you can do some tapping downward from the base of your skull I’m showing on the video here. Like behind your ear, there’s a ear bone there called the mastoid. You can come down from that. Do not go in forward of that. I don’t want anyone having any issues with their veins or arteries and then coming back to me and saying I told them to do that, they did not. Behind.

Okay, so that’s neck, that’s arms. In Chinese medicine, or Tai Chi in particular, there’s something called wave hands like clouds. Hey, you know what? It’s like the new version of the Macarena. I don’t know, I’m a dork. So anyway, if you feel like dorking out like me, do some stuff like this. Or like I said, you could do the club thing, it works. We forget to do these things, we forget to our arms. Now, if you want the advanced version of things, yeah, go do handstands, kick up on a wall.

Crossfit style, yoga style stuff, go for it. I have rings in my house here where I hang upside down, I love it. That’s more advanced and if you’re prone to dizziness, probably not a good thing right now. Get the lymph moving just basic, how I said, with the arms up. Now here’s the other part about this. If you get the geek out a little bit, usually you’re gonna smile and laugh, right? You’re gonna be warm, like I’m kinda warm right now from doing that. If it wasn’t chillier outside, I probably wouldn’t.

I’d probably be taking my sweatshirt off right now, but you get warm, you warm up. And so what happens when you warm up, sweat. I’ve recently found that a lot of women don’t sweat. This isn’t a good thing. We need to detox and sweat.

If you don’t sweat, it’s time to provoke yourself to do it. How do you do it? Lymph movement can help. Your skin’s your largest organ. If it’s not able to release things through it, where does that stuff go? It’s got to go back into the lymph and you’ve got to try to pee it out. You got to get it out somehow. So start moving the lymph. I sound like a lymph commercial. Point being though is I’m really starting to geek out. And I might’ve said that I don’t know how many times. Sorry guys. So.

Jannine Krause (26:37.228)
Let’s get back to the nervous system for a minute here. How does the nervous system affect your lymph? Just like it affects your blood vessels, it clamps down. It prevents things from flowing well. What happens when blood doesn’t flow? It pools. What happens to the molecules that are in the blood? They’re gonna diffuse back and forth between your tissue space and your vessels. What’s in between your vessels? Like I mentioned early in the podcast.

your lymphatic system, things are gonna get stuck in there. Oftentimes, folks who have mold toxicity, chemicals, mean, lots of different toxicities, even just chronic viruses, those bugs hang out. Yes, they hang out in the spinal cord, like shingles and chickenpox, which is the adult version of chickenpox, those shingles. Where do you think these things live? They live in our spine.

but in our nervous system just waiting to come out when we’re immune compromised, but we also will have chronic debris from breaking down viruses. We’re exposed to stuff all the time. So if we get overloaded, that’s usually when we tend to end up getting cold sores or end up getting like reactivation of mono, reactivation of Lyme, reactivation of chickenpox in the form of shingles. So what’s the bottom, like not the bottom line, the common denominator here is work on your lymph.

Now you maybe have seen folks talk about dry brushing, just basic dry brushing. You can do that too. I have folks wash themselves differently versus scrubbing up and down, move everything towards the heart. That’s a lovely way to stack that. I think it’s just not enough. I think we need to do a little bit more. And that’s why I bring in the pumping, that’s why I bring in the acupressure points like heart one and stomach 12 above the collarbone. Now there are some points in your belly.

there are some points on top of your head that you could work on. In fact, let me show you a fun one on top of your head. So if you go from the tippy top of your ears and you draw a line up to the top of your head, that is a spot called do 20. If you tap on that spot, you can wake up your brain. You can help with basic brain fog. I don’t recommend doing this necessarily at night, but I would tap on this guy first thing in the morning. All around,

Jannine Krause (29:03.892)
that do 20, there are four points called Shi Shen Kong and they’re called smart points. They help stimulate the brain too. You could also do those four points too in the morning. So top of the head, four points around the top of the head. 60 seconds, try it out. Feeling a little foggy in the morning or afternoon? Try that out, see what happens. There’s another point in between your eyebrows called Yin Tong. This is another stimulatory point that is amazing for waking up.

The brain, the pineal gland is under there too. Pineal gland is all about connection to the rest of the body. So we have ways to stimulate ourself without having to take a ton of supplements, without having to eat certain foods, do certain diets. And these kind of things with tapping, this takes seconds. And you can pair it in with a shower, you could pair it in with drinking your coffee in the morning. I mean, there’s many ways that you can add these in because…

At end of the day, like I said, we’re getting complicated with all of the different things we need to do to be healthy. When moving your lymph can help with the nervous system and help with your immune system and help take out the trash, helps you detox. So this whole concept with moving the arms, getting the head going, all of that moves glymph and lymph in your arms.

Now for the belly, what do we do about that? So there’s a really cool Qigong move that I’ve been kind of raving about where you start. I’m gonna see if you guys can see me here. Yeah, you can see my belly. You start with your right hand and your left hand on your hip and you come up to midline, come around, go down to your left side. And you’re just kind of rolling like this in a circle. 12 of these guys before each meal, before you start eating.

helps you to tell your body like food’s coming, get ready, but it also helps move the lymph in the belly. Why do we have lymph that’s not moving? We’re sitting down, we’re crunched forward. We’re in the car a lot. We’re seated, we’re on computers, we’re leaning forward looking at our cell phones. All that crunched forward motion prevents lymph from moving well in your belly, but it also keeps the lymph in the groin stuck.

Jannine Krause (31:31.18)
And this is why rubbing the belly can help the whole area. Because like I said, for those of you watching on YouTube, I’m coming from my hip here, up, over, around, just like so. And I’m pressing a little bit. I’m not super gentle, but I’m making this nice circle. And here’s my hip. So here’s my hips, right hip, left hip. What’s right here? These are your inguinal areas. That’s where those lymph nodes are. Move those bad boys, like this.

This is what I found to help with my bloating. It was quite impressive to see it move in a month. So for those of you who are struggling with belly bloat, I challenge you to do that before every meal, before you have a bite, and consider doing it again in the evening. 12 times. That’s like 12 seconds out of your life. No big deal. You could do it while, you could do it one hand. You don’t need both. You can be on the phone and do it. No one knows what you’re doing. It’s easy.

and it’s just manual touch. Why is touch important? Well, let me ask you this. When is the last time you touched your belly? And is your belly cold?

I am kind of horrified by how many times I go to do work on someone. So I do a lot of Tui Na, which is Chinese massage. I do a lot of fascial release and I do a lot of acupuncture these days. I took a break from it for a while and dang it, I missed it. And you know what? I’m seeing why. It is very helpful. And one of the big things that I noticed is when I started to do body work again,

So many women have cold bellies and cold hips. There’s no circulation in there. If your belly’s cold, no wonder you’re bloated. We’re missing circulation. Chinese medicine will tell you that if you don’t have good circulation to areas, this is where we end up with disease. I think what they might’ve been trying to get at, they don’t talk about the lymphatic system. They call it something called the Sanjiao. It’s the triple heaters and the water channels, but it’s not.

Jannine Krause (33:44.876)
And I’m simplifying it a lot. If an acupuncturist was to listen to me or not, they’d be like, well, technically, but here’s the thing, because we’re not all acupuncturists. at the end of the day, really, we can simplify what Chinese medicine was looking at. And it was actually incredibly simple, but accurate. These channels where water flow goes, guess what? The Sanjiao channel follows where your lymphatics are in your arm. Makes sense.

But here’s the other thing. Chinese believe that your body gets diseased when blood flow doesn’t move. Where are your lymphatic vessels? They’re in between your arteries and veins. Where do we get this thing called blood stagnation that Chinese call disease? Like the process of where disease is starting, and blood stagnation. The longer you have chi, which is literally movement of ions in your body,

and ions meaning sodium, potassium.

Chloride, calcium, magnesium, they all signal from our cells. I’m moving my hands now because sodium and potassium are moving in my body. Calcium’s moving in my body. That’s chi, that’s what chi is. It’s not some woo woo thing. It’s legitimately movement of ions. They’ve captured it now multiple times on different images. But here’s the thing.

If that doesn’t move well and we don’t have blood flow to the area, we have potential for disease in that area. Why? Because as I said before, your lymphatic system’s between your blood vessels. If it doesn’t have the ability to drain, you’re gonna get stuck. Things are gonna get stuck. Trash is gonna get stuck in the body. What happens if you leave your trash outside for multiple days in a row and it’s 85 degrees out? It smells pretty bad. It’s pretty rotten, right? What’s happening in your body?

Jannine Krause (35:44.834)
I’ve had a lot of people say, gosh, you know my sweat. So for those who do sweat, they’re like, gosh, my sweat is really, really bad. Why does it smell so bad? You’re toxic, you’re not moving. You’re not moving your lymph, it’s trying to get out. You will smell less. Your sweat’s gonna smell to a certain point. But the difference between putrid sweat and normal sweat is how toxic someone’s body is. How acidic. How.

backed up the lymph is. And at the end of the day, the Chinese knew that if we didn’t move chi and blood, we would get stuck. Things would get stuck. So back to helping your gut, helping the bloat because so many people have gut issues. So many people struggle with swollen ankles. Why? Because the fluid coming back up from the feet through the groin

back up to the heart is getting stuck. The fluid’s not moving. Where’s it getting stuck? Likely it’s getting stuck in the groin area, the belly, and probably the lymph around the liver. Why is that happening?

We’re toxic. We need to move things out. How do we do it? Do we need eight detox rounds of all kinds of herbs? No, not necessarily. Can it help once? Sure, to kind of open up all the pipes. I do recommend it. In fact, I’m gonna do a detox challenge here soon, so stay tuned for that. Free, hang out with me. But what this is all about is…

We need to really prime our bodies to detox on their own so that you don’t have to keep taking so many herbs to detox. The goal is to have a body that cleans out itself. Autopilot. Then you’ll sleep better, you’ll move better, the bloat won’t happen, and gosh darn it, I am thinking we would be able to get on top of this breast cancer thing. Because it’s hitting me hard right now.

Jannine Krause (37:53.708)
I just feel like we’re missing things in healthcare. And one of the biggies is we’re really focusing on all of these fancy protocols when we have to go back to basics. Why do we get sick? We don’t have movement everywhere in the body. I have seen some people who are athletes who are really stinking sick because they’re tight. They’re not.

stretching, moving in different directions to work on mobility. I have some great friends that do mobility work. Julia Blackwell, she’s out of Golden, Colorado, but she has movement by Julia the website. She teaches on facial work at home, self-facial work. There’s also Anna Ray with GST. So G as in George, S as in Sam, T as in Tom, body, GSTbody.com. She’s also in Colorado. She’s in Boulder.

the movements the two of them do, they teach you how to loosen up the fascial tissue. It helps with pain, which is a whole nother rabbit hole that I could go down and I’m gonna dive into a little bit, but that’s in a whole nother podcast. But a lot of us do have pain on top of lymph not moving, on top of the puffiness, on top of the swelling.

It’s really popular right now to hear this concept of, pain is trauma stuck in the body. It’s emotion stuck in the body. Where do you think these emotions get stuck? My thought, yeah, the fascial tissue, but what’s the fascial tissue connected to? The lymphatics. Lymphatics are attached directly to your nervous system. Your fascial tissue will contract when you are feeling nervous, anxious, threatened, fear.

So many folks are fearful and in a worried state right now.

Jannine Krause (39:50.006)
And all of it is preventing blood flow and chi and lymph from moving. So we have to be thinking about these things versus going and buying the latest and greatest supplement protocol out there versus even thinking about things like bioidentical hormones or GLP-1s like semaglutide, terzepotide, retractotide, all of them now. Now I think they work. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think, I know they do.

I know that bioidentical hormones, like I mentioned before, can bring your life back if you’ve really been depleted. But sometimes we need the foundations there. The reason I wanted to have this podcast today and right now is because we are looking over the foundations big time. There’s so much noise about how helpful home, like all the hormone repair, I can talk, all the hormone replacement therapy is. But if we can give people a whole bunch of HRT.

But if we’re not moving the lymph and they’re not detoxing, what’s gonna happen?

We have debunked the idea that hormone replacement therapy causes cancer, but if we can’t detox and we’re putting more hormones into the system, this is a bad thing. It’s not good. So we really want to be thinking about how can we prevent this movement, movement, movement. Yes, I want people to exercise, but I want people to consider using the movement to help you to soothe your nervous system. Hear me out. The Chinese see stress as liver cheese stagnation.

Blood in the liver not moving. How do we move blood in the liver? Well yeah, we could try to calm down, we could meditate, we can do all those things. You don’t move with meditation unless you’re doing a walking meditation, which by all means absolutely do it. But here’s the thing, what if you could get into that zen state with movement, fun movement? Why? Because you’re having fun. Because I don’t know how many people tell me like, doc, I can’t meditate, it’s boring. Well yeah, me either, because yeah, I’m not moving.

Jannine Krause (41:51.424)
I soothe myself through movement, humans soothe themselves through movement. We need to be thinking about that. So I hope I haven’t overwhelmed anyone with more information and things you feel like you have to do. What I want you to be thinking about is basics. I want you to be thinking about how could you add a little bit of arms overhead, club dancing, maybe you’re doing handstands, maybe you’re going upside down, but what can you do to get the arms up over the head? What can you do to pump a little bit in the armpit?

What could you do? A little tapping above the collarbones. 60 seconds, it’s no big deal. Could you tap on the top of your head to see if you can get a little bit better brain focus? What about the four points? The Shi Shen Kong? Technically I’m tapping five when I look at my head. There we go, four. Four points around. Do 20. What about the belly circles? Easy, it’s not anything complicated, but the point is is it does seem that we could work on soothing our lymphatic system.

and our nervous system at the same time. A two for one. And not only that, I think this has some really good merit for those of you who are like, doc, I don’t know how to get control of my nervous system. I can’t bring it back in order. Like I feel fine, everything’s great in my life. I don’t know what’s wrong. Why is my body stressed? Maybe it just needs to take out the trash. If you help it take out the trash, then you can see how you feel.

Jannine Krause (43:24.396)
I challenge you guys to try this out. I’ve been doing it now for almost two months since I discovered the first month how well this worked for me and for some of my clients. The key here is consistency. You can’t do it like twice and expect it to do miracles. That’s not the case. And ultimately at the end of the day, my goal is to teach every single person that I come into contact with how to

take their health into their own hands. Why? Because you can’t go to acupuncture every single day. I mean, you could if you really wanted to, but it’d be hard, right? You can’t go on Saturday and Sunday. If someone’s open on a Saturday, maybe, but usually you’re not gonna have acupunctures open on a Sunday, unless it’s a fertility clinic. But the point being is we have lives. We wanna live them. How do we do that without being stuck in doctor’s offices all the time?

Learn to take care of yourself in certain ways to help move lymph, calm your nervous system, and keep blood flow moving. The more your blood flow moves, the better it’s going to be. I’m coming off of…

thousands of years of research in Chinese medicine here.

They know what’s up. And we’ve complicated everything with medicines and herbal protocols and fancy pants stuff. When really we could do all this stuff on our own if we knew what to do. And I’ve just shown you some tricks today to get started. Could I be on this podcast for like three more hours showing you other stuff? Heck yes. If you want to know more, I wanna hear from you guys. Drop me an email.

Jannine Krause (45:16.416)
info at Dr. Spelled Out, J-K-R-A-U-S-E N as in Nancy, D as in dog, dot com. I wanna know what you guys think if you wanna learn more about this. I am gonna be tapping into this in my master class. Sunday right now when I’m recording this is gonna be out Thursday, September 18th, 5 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Central.

I’m going to be talking about how to decode your symptoms to figure out where do you start with your health? What do you need to focus on? I found that so many people are going in so many different directions. They’re fed up. They are not getting results and we need to help rein it in. Find out what works best for you by decoding what’s going on with your body. And today is one of the ways that I think foundationally can really help folks.

is looking at the lymph and nervous system connection, especially if you’ve tried a lot of things and you’re still puffy, you’re still bloated, you’re not sweating, you feel blah and pain. If you’ve got aches and pains and they’re kind of nonspecific, nobody’s been able to really figure out and get to the bottom of the pain, look at your lymph. How can we help move it? See if that is connected deeply to your nervous system. And like I mentioned before, Chinese medicine, trauma in the body, I believe trauma can be stuck in your lymphatic system too.

and movement. Getting things moving is absolutely key.

Jannine Krause (46:51.298)
That is it in terms of what I wanted to go through today. I do have a program coming up, Love Your Hormones. My gal pal, Dr. Laura Connor and I are going to be talking about that as well on September 18th. If you are struggling with your hormones, you’re feeling like you’re aging super fast and you’re not sure what to do or maybe you’ve tried bioidentical hormones and they haven’t given you the results you were looking for, you’re curious about bioidentical hormones,

You wanna do hormone replacement naturally, you want to use herbs, this is the program for you. We are going to be talking about that as well after I talk about decoding all your symptoms in midlife and it’s really the foundation and the framework for the love your hormones protocol because I think a lot of people this time in midlife, myself included,

start to feel like your body’s betraying you, you’re not sure what the heck to do, you start to feel like, gosh, this body of mine don’t really like it anymore. What happened? And it shouldn’t be that way. I want you to regain connection to your body because that is the way to regain connection to your health and also be empowered to take care of you and do some of the things that you can do to take care of yourself that don’t cost money, they don’t cost extra cash.

A lot of what I recommend is going to be absolutely free, things you can easily incorporate into your life. And so I hope today has helped a little bit to give you a little bit more insight on the connection between the nervous system, the lymphatic system, and blood flow and how we can help you in that case to learn the tools to take care of yourself and keep things moving well. You do not have to have a membership in a gym. You don’t have to be even into fitness to do all of this stuff.

You just gotta be open to having some fun and creating your own system. So I hope you guys enjoyed this one. I’d love to hear from you. We’ll drop the notes in the podcast notes at drjkrausend.com. And like I said, I’d love to hear from you. Email is info at Dr. Spelled Out, J-K-R-A-U-S-E-N-D.com. We’ve got the free master class September 18th. That’s this Thursday. It is from.

Jannine Krause (49:12.054)
It’s gonna start at 5 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Central. It’ll last for about an hour and there’s Q &A at the end. And I’d love to hear you guys ask some questions and if you can’t make it live, we will be giving a replay. So just register and join us and if you’re interested in the Love Your Hormones program, we’ll be giving a little bit out more on that. And then the end of September, I’m gonna be doing a Detox With Me Challenge and we’re gonna be doing all kinds of things with the lymph in addition to some herbs.

which are going to be whole foods based herbs and foods to help you to clear your lymphatic system, open up your liver, move the bowels a little better and just give you a little leg up on getting the lymphatic system going. So if you’re interested in that, stay tuned. I will have that coming out on my next podcast. yeah, that’s it for today. You have.

survived another episode of the Health Fix podcast. I really appreciate you guys listening. If you know someone that could benefit from this information, please share the podcast. Please subscribe, please rate, please give me some feedback. I’d love to hear what you guys think and how I can benefit in the future. Coming in 2026, there’s gonna be a lot more of me doing solo podcasts since I have had requests for more of that and less interviews. So love to hear what you guys would like to learn about. All right.

Thank you for hanging out with me. You guys have a great day, whatever you’re doing.