Interview with Vicky Spencer -changing the narrative on ageing

Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop: I had the pleasure of speaking with Vicky Spencer, a woman whose objective is to give confidence to women during the peri-menopause to post-menopause transition, encouraging women to embrace responsibility and to take control of their health.

Susan Dunlop: Welcome to Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop. I’m Susan Dunlop, a professional coach and 3 Vital Questions certified facilitator living in Noosa, Australia. If this is the first time you’ve joined me, welcome, and if you’ve been tuned in before, thank you so much for coming back.

People passionate about what they deliver to the world intrigue me and make me want to know what, how, and why they do what they do.

I choose to surround myself with people who set visions and take risks to do good things in service of others. People who are kindhearted, purposeful, and wise. In service, life, or the books they’ve written, they’ll change lives, including their own. Guests joining me on the Coffee and Contemplation Podcast are invited to share their personal stories with vulnerability for the benefit of others. They are people with either or both professional or experiential knowledge of the theme of each episode.

Today’s guest is Vicki Spencer, the founder and facilitator of a private group on Facebook called Inspirational Ageing. Vicky is a qualified naturopath, herbalist and personal trainer with over 28 years of experience. She’s a health education specialist and author of the book Ageless Vitality. I did some pre-chat due diligence as you do, and what I came to find outside of our initial chat that Vicky and I had some weeks ago is that Vicky’s on a mission to change the narrative around ageing.

Her objective is to give confidence to women during the peri-menopause to post-menopause transition, encouraging women to embrace responsibility and take control of their health. So Vicky specialises in healthy ageing, emphasising movement, herbal medicine, nutrition, emerging work and meditation.

Vicky, I’m about to introduce you to say hello, but I will probably have to sign up for all of that.

Vicky, I’m contemplating what you’ve got to share twofold. One, for myself, at the stage of life I’m transitioning, and also for this show’s purpose. So Vicky Spencer of Maroochydore in Queensland, welcome!

Vicky Spencer: Thank you so much, Susan. That’s great. We’re here in Queensland, melting away in the heat; as I shared earlier, I do not have air conditioning, so you may see me wiping my face. It is hot. I’m not having a hot flush. It’s hot weather.

Susan Dunlop: Vicky, we’ve got a nice little path we can follow for our chat today that will give some meaning to the people listening, and I will benefit from learning what you’ve got to share. So I’d like to start with, if you’re okay with this, talking about your profession choice of naturopathy and herbalism. Would that be okay with you?

Vicky Spencer: Yes, I mean, there are so many places we could start, but that seems a logical place to start. Okay. I didn’t choose to be a naturopath. It wasn’t something I grew up making potions in the backyard or anything like that. But my father was an amazing gardener and very keen with the earth.

So I suppose there’s that in my heritage. But it really came out of years of being covered in eczema for most of my childhood and teenage years. Probably the turning point for me was my early twenties, I was literally covered in eczema. I’d wake up in the morning, I’d be stuck to the sheets. I’d be bleeding, I’d have scratch marks. You couldn’t see any normal skin on me. And you know, through that journey I’d been from doctor to doctor and pretty much they said, you gotta live with it. And for many of my younger years, I was literally slathering on cortisone creams.

I liken it to putting a lid on a boiling pot.

The body’s trying to relieve this inflammation, and the skin is trying to do that, and then we’re putting that on, and it goes, where do I go now? So I found that it was always coming back, and I knew specific triggers, but it wasn’t till I was probably in my early twenties that I completely changed what I ate and was doing, and it completely transformed my body shape as well as my skin.

And it was terrific. I went to raw food. Now I do not recommend people do that necessarily, but for me, like anything with naturopathy, we get caught up in different diets, but changing is just enabling the body to have a bit of a flip. Going, we want to avoid going in that trajectory. How do we turn? But then, how do we maintain it?

So it was in my early thirties that I decided to get into working in the health food shop, and I decided to study to be a naturopath because I wanted to come from a place of more knowledge rather than, well, this sort of worked for me. I love plants. I love what the human body can do when we give it the proper support. So becoming a naturopath and herbalist was from my own trying to seek answers, a common place to start for many people.

Susan Dunlop: Okay. Gosh, eczema’s quite painful, isn’t it to live with?

Vicky Spencer: Most people think I was just a bit of itchy skin, but you know, it can be raw, it can be dry.

It was on my face. It was just going through your formative years, like your teenage years, and the skin is what we show to the world. I was chronically shy as a child, like chronically shy, so it’s like, it’s this internal manifestation of what you’re presenting to the world. So it makes perfect sense now. But at the time, no.

Susan Dunlop: Well, good on you for working through to do something for yourself and then obviously taking that into your career. You were saying in our chat that you were blessed with different experiences in that evolution into the work of naturopathy and herbalism. Shall we intermingle that into the first section that we’re talking about? What were the blessings that you had?

Vicky Spencer: I think the first, she wasn’t actually a mentor, but was related to what made the change for my skin. There was a journalist in the UK called Leslie Kenton, and she wrote the book Raw Energy and also Ultra Health. She’s actually passed now. She was a leader and I still look at her books. She was amazing at understanding the power of what the body is capable of with healing.

When I was studying naturopathy, my children were young, and I needed work. I was asked if I wanted to work as a secretary assistant at BioConcepts, owned by one of Australia’s leading nutritionists and biochemists, Henry Osiecki.

And I get goosebumps when I say that because I still remember Karen, who asked me to work. She was the office manager, and she comes in, and she says, ” Oh, Henry said this…” and I just looked. “You call him Henry?” Because to me, I had him up on this high pedestal. So I worked there for four years; he was a fantastic biochemistry mind.

In my office, I had these huge biochemical pathways. Well, I had just studied that stage of my course. I’d done my chemistry, and I thought, why hadn’t I met Henry before this? I would focus so much more because if we understand what’s going on in the body, we’re not just treating symptoms; we’re getting to the cause.

This is so important because I see even young naturopaths coming now, coming through, and they get taught protocols. Clients come in with this; you give them X, Y, and Z protocols. I go, no, no, that’s not what naturopathy is about to me. It is what’s going on for this person. How do they relate to their environment, food, and what stage of their life?

How are their emotions? What is all that? To help them understand what they’re manifesting?

Henry Osiecki helped me understand biochemistry.

Then, I was fortunate to be asked to manage a bustling naturopathic practice by Maria Forbes. So that allowed me to experience… She’d been practising for ten years, so she wanted to go into politics, so I’m looking at all her client history and opening up all this history.

I was learning what she was treating and was exposed to quite a few patients each week. And that’s when I realised I wanted to avoid sitting in an office. And I found I was saying the same thing over and over again. I had a receptionist making up the herbs, so I wasn’t even making up the herbs.

I didn’t have that fun of putting my witches hat on and making up the herbs and I realised I was saying the same things over and again.

I thought, you know what? I wanted to get into education, so, I left there to be a rep for a while. Talking with my husband at the time, well, I was having a bit of a whinge about what I wanted to do, and he said who’s doing what you want to do?

I said the only one I could think of would be Dr Sandra Cabot. And he said, well, give her a call. I said, oh, don’t be ridiculous, as if she’d take my call.

Well, six months later, I’m working with her, and I worked with her for seven and a half years.

Sandra wrote the Liver Cleansing Diet book. She was a doctor but had a naturopathic mind. I learned from her; we did a lot of public talks; she wrote books, and that’s where I got the confidence to write my book Ageless Vitality. That’s the journey of the mentors and the evolution.

Susan Dunlop: You just reminded me; it was the first time I did anything that was a fundamental shift towards better health when I found that Liver Cleansing Diet book after we first moved to Queensland.

Our children were young. It felt like it cost me a fortune in vegetables and whatever to follow it. But I remember doing it and feeling like that was a real change in me from typical suburban Sydney living of eating meat and three veggies, that way of eating. I changed how I saw food, and it’s the most leafed-through book in my collection of recipe books here.

So, Vicky, of those you mentioned, is there a most important professional mentor in all three?

Vicky Spencer: Oh gosh. They all played a crucial role in different ways, almost like putting my pieces together. But you know, then when I started to be a personal trainer. I’ve always been into movement. So there have been people I found along the way, like my personal trainer, who had terrible brain cancer. He went over to Germany, couldn’t eat, and would be fed through a tube. So trying to condense a story, but it’s like he shouldn’t be alive. He should not be alive.

So the gift of seeing beyond what we get told and what possibly is a scenario that we’ve got this terrible disease, and we can’t do anything about it. That’s one story. If we choose to believe that, then more than likely, we will only have a little longer, but it’s not as simple as that; I’m not trying to simplify.

Pedro, to this day, he’s this amazing physical trainer. As I say, they’re all pieces that have helped develop who I am, so there’s no single person there.

Susan Dunlop: Vicky, we’ll now talk about your private Facebook group, Inspirational Ageing, and your book, Ageless Vitality. Let’s talk about the inspired thoughts, the challenges, and what made all that happen.

Vicky Spencer: Mm. So Ageless Vitality came first. That was a book I wrote probably 12 years ago. I was in my late forties and working with Sandra, and it was interesting because she wanted to publish it, and I wanted to do it on my own because I wanted to have my style. It was challenging, but Ageless Vitality came from a place where I was doing lots of public talks, and people would be writing notes, so if I put it all into a book, they’d get that information there.

They can sit and listen, and I often just gave the books away, but it was interesting when the book came out. It was when I’d done the artwork for the book and got the print of what the cover would be like. And I can still remember this week so clearly.

The book came out. I was very excited. My daughter got engaged, which is very exciting. And I got diagnosed with breast cancer, which was not so exciting.

So I had people coming up to me, saying, ” Oh, Vicky, I heard about your book. That’s exciting.’ ‘Yep, that is.’ And then they’d tell me, ‘Alicia’s getting married.’ ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And then someone else would hear about the other side. I got diagnosed after the book came out, so that story is not in there. And that taught me we can get caught in high and low emotions.

How do we ride this wave?

With that, I obviously went on another journey through breast cancer.

I was going through peri-menopause and menopause at that stage, which is typical. These things happen at that time, and it was really after that just noticing the dramatic change that happens once we go through menopause.

Menopause is pretty much 12 months of not having a period. It’s one day. And then from then, we’re post-menopause. Just knowing when that oestrogen starts to drop, the changes in the body. And women have been kept out of the research for so much of health and fitness. So much of the information women follow on health and fitness is based on men and not only average men; it’s 18 to 25-year-olds.

It’s only in the last five to ten years that we’ve had excellent female scientists coming through, changing that, and it’s been mandated that women have to be included. Because we have these hormonal cycles, we’ve got too many variables, or women might be on the pill, so there are too many variables for these studies. That’s why women had been excluded.

For me, Inspirational Ageing was planted as a little bit of a seed in my head maybe three years ago. I was witnessing this neighbour I had, and she was in her late eighties, and she was told she had diabetes.

She didn’t want to believe it, and no doctor wanted to help her, so she got on the Internet. Eighty-eight, she got onto the internet to contact this doctor in Canada, who told her to eat this, this and this, and do this exercise. And she’s just amazing. She was inspirational.

It gave me inspiration that, oh, this is what I believe aging should be about. Yes, our body’s going to change. And it’s not about holding onto youth; it’s embracing that wisdom that we’ve gathered over the years and being proud of our life, being proud of the wrinkles, the grey hair, and embracing it all, but also looking after the body, looking after our spirit, looking after our soul, and being authentic.

Inspirational Ageing is a private group for people who understand it’s not just about the physical body. It’s not a quick fix. This is about a daily practice, and what I share on there are any articles I might find. It might be new fitness; it might be regimes.

I’m doing a webinar talk next week on the fascia.

The fascia is part of the matrix of our body that helps with flexibility, movement and all facets of our body. It might be recipes I find, or it might be a book I’ve read or something on hormonal issues, or something I might find comes up in just topics of conversation. And then I might do a little video clip giving my perception of it just to support and help change that so it’s not all doom and gloom, especially when we’re over 50.

Susan Dunlop: So from a credible source, which I always look for when I follow anything.

Vicky Spencer: It’s also what I love too. I gain so much from it as well. And people send me little messages. Each morning I see the sunrise, and I’ll post my sunrise photo and maybe a motivational quote or something like that, and now and again, someone will say, oh, Vicky, I appreciate that. It’s just nice to have that motivation, and I go, oh, that’s great. I’m glad it’s reaching one person or two people. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It helps me too.

Susan Dunlop: The emotional turmoil that comes about when you are trying to work out, whether it’s peri-menopause or someone else and all of that type of thing, do you get a sense that women feel pretty alone in this space?

Vicky Spencer: I think there are two camps. There are the ones that blame it on menopause, and this is where I am. I can’t do anything about it. Poor me, I hate it. And then there are the others that withdraw.

I think we shared this when we had our initial chat: I believe that menopause is a transition.

We can’t take the old life that does not serve us into the next stage. Every woman needs to retreat in some fashion to review who she is and what she wants to carry forward. How does she find that? So it is a time of really regrouping, and that’s where it can seem isolating, but that’s when you can only really find your authenticity if you spend that time in reflection.

For definitely three to five years, it is such a fluxing time. There were so many things going on at that time. When I went through it, my mother was going to a nursing home. My daughter had her first bub; I was at the height of my career.

I was flying around Australia feeling fantastic, but in the meantime, I was going, whoa, where am I going? I can do this!

I can promise, to be over the other side; it’s okay. You know, we don’t fall off the cliff. We’re okay. It’s okay. It’s good. We’re not driven by our fertility cycle; we’re not driven by that need to bring forth life or that menstrual or that hormonal urge.

We find who we are I believe.

Susan Dunlop: So you are changing the narrative on peri-menopause and menopause, trying to remove the mystery and confusion with information. So let’s talk about that and how you are helping women. What else do you do besides the Facebook group to get this out to people?

Vicky Spencer: I do community talks, public talks, as I say, webinars, which are open to anybody. I also work as a naturopath in a pharmacy, which I love because I’m getting to people that may not normally see someone about natural medicine. They’ve got their reassurance of mainstream.

To my way of thinking, because I’ve worked with Sandra: she was a doctor. Naturopaths didn’t like her because she was a doctor. Doctors didn’t like her because she was a naturopath. It’s not about alternative medicine; it’s about medicine. You know, it’s about health, and it’s not an either-or. In this situation, I have people I speak to daily, and many people are dealing with stress.

For women going through peri-menopause and menopause, one of the best things she can do is understand and support their adrenals. Her adrenal glands must start regulating her hormones and the fat cells. That’s why we put the weight on. It is normal to put weight on. I know we don’t like it. I know we don’t want it, and I hear women go; I wish my body was how it was. It can’t be. It can’t be.

The alternative of not going through menopause is not an option. You don’t want that option. Okay.

For me, it really is giving that confidence and going through the basics of what you can do in your day to set a foundation of good health to allow then the hormones to do their dance, which they will do, but at least they’re not fluctuating and dipping and all over the place when you’re not going to bed at the same time, or you’re not eating well, or you’re not drinking and moving your body.

If you get the basics of what a healthy body needs, the hormones can do their dance, which they will do because that’s the natural way we are going through this time in our life.

Just like we go through puberty, puberty was all exciting. We’re going to become a woman. This is fantastic and exciting… but now we don’t have that same excitement. But we can do it because we can let go of what we’ve been told and look for role models showing us that it can be great over the other side, and that shift is happening.

It’s reassuring people on many levels of where I cross in my life that when we positively support our body, it’s not just the physical body, but when you are comfortable in your own skin, each day is a gift.

It is easy when you think this is my life, and this is what I will do today. It’s not looking beyond that; it’s living in the moment, supporting yourself and understanding what drives you.

There was a time in my life, and I’ve had many dark times; before we had the internet and social media, you’d buy magazines. I went through a phase where I had one of those visual diaries, cut-out pictures, and have different pages: this is the environment I like to live in. This is the food I like to eat. These are the people that motivated me, et cetera, et cetera. And I’d have all these different pages.

When I had difficult times, I’d flick through this and go, oh yeah, that’s what makes me feel good, and that feels good; we all know when we realise it, and we feel good from the inside out, that’s when you know you’re living authentically. And that’s what I wish for everybody not to try and do this and try and do that, and what you’re supposed to because I’m doing this because they tell me. How does it feel for you, and is it right for you?

Susan Dunlop: Hmm. When you were talking about working in the naturopath position in the pharmacy. And I’m sitting here going, hmm, that’s me. That’s who I would go to. And I would self-diagnose what particular herbs I need to take now. Apart from having a pap smear, I rarely go to my GP, which is all I ever really had to go for. I don’t see a naturopath anymore. It’s almost like I’ve pulled back to not want to know what’s happening. Do you find that is something that happens regularly? Or is it just me?

Vicky Spencer: No, it’s not just you.

Okay. We could say it’s just you, Susan, but it’s not because there is so much information out there, and whatever we look for, we will find. So if you want affirmation you’re on the right track, you will find that. If you wish to confirm that there are better things to do than that; you will find that too.

The trouble you’ve got when you self-diagnose and self-treat is often; we don’t see what we don’t want to see or know what we don’t know. But most importantly, we don’t know what we don’t know.

I’m not saying you have to go to a doctor. I’m not saying you have to go to a naturopath, but I would advise if you want to look after yourself the best before you choose a doctor and find a naturopath, keep a journal for three to six months and know who you are. Go to the doctor and get blood tests. You go to the doctor and say; I’d like to get some blood done. I recommend everyone gets bloods done at least every 12 months.

Because what happens, and I hear this repeatedly, people will come in, and I’ll say, have you had your blood test for that? Let’s choose, I don’t know, iron is a classic, and even vitamin D is a classic. They’ll come in, and they’ll want an iron supplement.

I’ll ask, have you had your iron checked?

No, I’m just feeling tired.

I’m going, well, please know whether you need iron because too much iron can be detrimental. So that’s where a blood test is important. Vitamin D is another one. The range in Australia for vitamin D is between 60 and 150 on a blood test. That’s not a regular blood test, it’s something you generally have to request, and it can only be done once in 12 months.

The number of times I say to people, have you had your vitamin D checked?

They go, oh yeah, it’s normal.

I ask do you know what it is?

And they go, no.

You only know how much to take if you know your range. Before I got cancer, I got autoimmune, and my vitamin D was 32. Vitamin D is a precursor to our hormones. It’s important for calcium; it’s extremely important for the body. It’s the sun; we get it from the sun. Anyway, so a long story, trying to keep it short. I’ve got my vitamin D up, and some people don’t hold onto it because most vitamin D supplements are a thousand international iu. So most people think I’m just taking one a day.

Well, for my level at 32, if I just took one a day, it would do nothing. So I had to take quite a high dose, which I got from my doctor. He put me on for three months to get it up. I got over a hundred and thought, okay, great; it’s up. But after six months, it dropped. So some of us don’t hold it.

So, so important. Get your blood test; know where you are in that range because the doctor will say, oh, this is your range. Well, that’s good, but where are you in that range? And are you moving in that range?

You can only have that conversation if you have your blood test regularly and the doctor can see well, oh, actually, there’s a drop here on whatever test you’re doing, and with each pathology, there’ll be a slight variance. It’s not just one or two little increments, but if it’s dropping and you are changing… a classic one would be thyroid. The thyroid is a common one in the peri-menopausal phase, and you know, just checking TSH gives you goalposts or what your thyroid’s doing.

So many people go, oh yeah, I’ve been told it’s normal. Well, it’s working out where you are in that range, and is it changing from possibly 12 months ago? Then you know, you can ask more questions, and maybe then you’re getting more blood tests to get more information to make dietary changes and then understand what supplements at what amounts you’re meant to take, and then you go back, get it rechecked if that helps?

Susan Dunlop: Okay. That was a personal feeling question I needed to ask.

Vicky Spencer: No, it’s a common one. I promise you it’s super, super common because the information’s on the internet, and everyone thinks, well, okay, I have to take this.

I had a classic example yesterday.

This woman’s husband had been diagnosed with this Post-viral condition, and she’d Googled and got these needed supplements, and I said, did anyone advise you to take this? She goes, no, no. And I said, well, these aren’t treating the virus; they’re just treating the symptoms. It pays to talk to someone and whether you take that advice but gather the information. That would be my advice.

Susan Dunlop: I feel like I diagnose by feeling, and I don’t know, but that’s not safe to do either. So anyway, message on board!

Vicky, we’re coming close to the end already, but if you could go back and give your seven-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Vicky Spencer: Don’t give men the power.

I’ve been married twice, and I’ve had relationships where I’ve given my esteem away to other people’s opinions. And I grew up in a family where men had authority; women were seen and not heard. You know, girls need to look a certain way. So I was very much indoctrinated with that.

I would tell my little seven-year-old self that I’m important and to use my voice and get out there and give it a shot.

Susan Dunlop: Mm-hmm, such wise words.

Vicky, do you have a go-to mantra or an affirmation to use when you need to get through a challenge?

Vicky Spencer: This could take us at another tangent, but there’s a technique called Ho’oponopono, and it’s a Hawaiian technique and carries me through any time I don’t know the answer or I’m trying to figure out what to do. I’m thinking of his name, the man who wrote it, but if you feel yourself reacting in a situation or don’t know, this is not for the other person but for your inner deeper self. For example, something might come up that I wish I hadn’t done something a certain way.

And I will say to myself, please forgive me. I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you. I say it to myself, and I feel it.

You’ll say it over and over again and you’ll feel it resonate and what you’re doing is not dismissing what’s happening. It could be something someone else has said or done that is triggering you or you want something a certain way, and it’s not happening. It’s really for me, it resonates, internally. It might otherwise be: I love you first. Please forgive me. I’m sorry. Thank you. And then it could be, thank you. You know, something’s happened and it’s looking for the good things as well. It’s going, thank you. I love you. Please forgive me. I’m sorry.

It’s feeling those things and that I would say would be the first thing that comes to mind.

Susan Dunlop: That’s a gift. I could feel that in my heart when you said it; I was like, oh, that is lovely to say to yourself. Yeah, I get that.

I want to thank you, Vicky, for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure to have you and to share the origin of the work that you do. What makes you, you. I think the work that you’re doing it’s so beneficial to many, many women and the people that are attached to those women because anything that makes a woman change also lights up the world around her.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Vicky Spencer: Thank you so much. And thank you for what you are doing, Susan. And welcome to grandmotherhood which is very exciting. Very exciting. So enjoy that journey as well.

Susan Dunlop: It is; it’s an exciting time of life. I can feel that space of being surrounded by the wise woman and feeling into that myself now, and it’s quite a beautiful space to be in.

Vicky Spencer: Enjoy. Thank you. Lovely.

Susan Dunlop: I’m forever thankful to people like Vicky, and I’m sure you’ve appreciated what Vicky shared, whether you took that one snippet like I did to go and get your bloods done. It’s interesting to take in some other person’s story, and a very good friend of mine put forward Vicky. She said this woman’s going to be interesting. Could you get her on the show? I’m very grateful for that referral.

If you would like to join me as a guest to talk about your dreams, your interesting life journey and how you are changing lives, please don’t hesitate to reach out and chat. And in the meantime, trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed and take care of yourself.

I look forward to being back soon. So bye for now.

Susan Dunlop

3 Vital Questions and TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic) Facilitator and Coach

Noosa Australia