Allie Chandler: My name is Allie Chandler, and I am eager to be healthy.

Michael Scott Eger: Today on the show we have Allie Chandler. Allie is the founder of Upsell Health, where she helps functional medicine practitioners and supplement companies grow through heart-centric marketing strategies. With 11 years scaling wellness brands, she brings both corporate expertise and personal healing insight to marketing that actually works — and feels good doing it. Welcome, Allie.

Allie Chandler: Thanks for having me.

Michael Scott Eger: Good to have you. Let's get right into it. Have you always been healthy?

Allie Chandler: No, I haven't. I was healthy growing up. As a kid I really didn't have any health issues beyond the normal viruses and things kids get into. My story started when I was about 25. I went on a backpacking trip to Europe and basically overnight went from completely healthy to having probably 30 to 40 rotating symptoms, and I had no idea what was going on. So mine was not a chronic, long-term buildup. It really was night and day. I was on this trip with some girlfriends, and then overnight I had neurological symptoms, cardiac symptoms, digestive, mood — all of these things changed completely. It was quite a journey.

Michael Scott Eger: Do you know what prompted those changes?

Allie Chandler: It took me about four years to get a diagnosis. But I do remember camping at the base of the Swiss Alps and getting a whole bunch of bug bites. I guess one of them was from a tick. I don't remember it being embedded, but it's possible. I did end up getting diagnosed with Lyme disease and co-infections about four years later.

One of my worst symptoms was POTS. When I was sitting, my heart rate was fairly normal — around 55 resting. Whenever I would stand, it would jump to 160, even 180 beats per minute. It was impossible to do anything. I had to sit down and rest very often. Walking was hard. Stairs were hard. The heat made it worse. That symptom affected my life the most; it impacted everything I did.

And then I became sensitive to every external stimulus. Food, noises, lights, crowds — everything sent my nervous system over the edge. I became hypersensitive, which made it difficult to live a normal life.

Michael Scott Eger: That must have been frustrating.

Allie Chandler: It was very frustrating. One thing I talk about often is that I was going to start grad school after this Europe trip and move from Michigan to California. I'd gotten into a really good school. I did still go. But I had to change a lot of my plans, because I wasn't able to function the way I was used to functioning. A year later I got married, and I was sick for about ten years after that. It was a change of pace from the life I was used to. And especially those four years without answers — I think that was the hardest part. Not knowing what was going on.

Michael Scott Eger: Have you always been happy?

Allie Chandler: Not always. During my illness I really struggled with my mood. I was very lonely. I didn't have the energy or the health to hang out with my friends. I spent a lot of time inside, laying in bed, not interacting with people. I've always been a very social person, an extrovert. I love people, I love learning about people. To have that key part of my life and personality taken away was really hard.

I got a little bit trapped in a victim mindset — this isn't fair, I can't believe this is happening to me. I was in my mid-twenties and I couldn't make myself a meal. I couldn't go on trips. I was struggling to take care of the house or go get groceries. I couldn't really enter a grocery store for a couple of years. Naturally I had some pretty extreme frustrations, and a little bit of depression. I had really severe anxiety, and I was having bad panic attacks multiple times a week, even without triggers. Sometimes just sitting at home my heart rate would jump to 200, 220, and I'd go to the ER trying to figure out what was going on.

Since I've been healing — the last four or five years — I've felt a lot better. I've done a lot of work to get my mood and my stability back, to get into a mindset of growth and abundance instead of living in fear of what could happen next. I would say I'm really happy now. I wouldn't say I always have been. It was really difficult when I was in the middle of being sick.

Michael Scott Eger: Can we walk through the process of discovering you were not well, and then the struggle to find the answer?

Allie Chandler: Definitely. It was very obvious to me that something was severely wrong when I was in Europe. The most vivid memory of that time — I was flying from Ireland back to the US, at the very end of our trip, and I felt like I was barely functioning. Like my body was shutting down. But I thought, I just have to make it home, and then my family will be able to help me and I'll have health care.

I remember going to the bathroom on the plane because I felt really dizzy and really off. I ended up fainting. I woke up and there were all these Irish women around me trying to give me water and feed me granola bars, because they thought maybe it was blood sugar. I've often experienced the kindness of strangers, because I would have symptoms in very weird places.

I got back to the US, barely, and was admitted to the ER right away. They ran a lot of tests — blood panels, an MRI, a day and a half of testing. They didn't test for Lyme. When the results came back, they said there's some stuff that's off, but we can't really diagnose you with anything. They gave me pretty strong antibiotics and steroids and said, well, whatever it is, hopefully this will take care of it. It actually crashed me pretty hard. It made things a lot worse.

A week later I still took a road trip out to California to start grad school. For the two years I was in grad school, I was seeing different specialists. Cardiologists. I was having really extreme pain and burning in my lungs — if you've ever run outside in the middle of winter and felt that painful burn, I was having that all the time. So I saw a pulmonologist. I saw a gastroenterologist because I was having throat issues, and an ENT. I probably saw every kind of specialist there was. In every case they'd run their tests and say, yeah, some of your stuff's off, but it's not like you have anything specific. They thought I had a brain tumor for a while, because my pituitary levels were high and my prolactin was very, very high. So I had to go through that too. We ruled everything out. Nobody was really helping.

Then I turned to functional medicine and the more integrative side. I saw naturopaths, chiropractors, and some MDs and DOs who had gone more alternative. That's when I started understanding that there were root causes I'd possibly been dealing with my whole life. Maybe I didn't have extreme symptoms of those things before, but once you get something like Lyme, it really impacts your immune system, so the other root causes you have — your body isn't able to keep them in check.

Long story short, I ended up seeing an energy healer in Monterey, where I moved after grad school. She said, has anyone tested you for Lyme? Because your symptoms are so random and they change all the time. It seems like it'd be something like Lyme. She sent me to a doctor in San Diego. He did a couple of Lyme tests, and they were very positive. Co-infections — Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia — and of course Borrelia burgdorferi.

This doctor was known as the Lyme doctor, and he said, I understand why you feel so sick. This is the most co-infections I've ever seen come up on one of these tests.

So that was the second half of my journey. Four years of searching, and then a diagnosis. But you still have a long way to go to get better. Yes, you know what one of your root causes could be, and probably is. But then there were a couple of years of protocols and detoxing and doing all the limbic system retraining. It was quite a long process to get where I am now.

Michael Scott Eger: A lot of functional medicine providers don't take full insurance, if they take insurance at all. How did you manage to pay for that?

Allie Chandler: Most people I saw in the functional space did not take insurance. Sometimes labs were covered if they were basic blood labs. But the Dutch hormone testing, the GI Map, the OAT testing — none of that was covered. We paid out of pocket for everything.

I was in grad school working three part-time jobs, still sick, trying to make ends meet — and San Francisco is very expensive. My fiancé at the time was in his PGA training to become a golf pro, so he was kind of in grad school too. Neither of us was really making money. One thing that helped was CareCredit. We put a lot of things on CareCredit, which is nice because they don't charge interest for a year. It sits on a credit card, but you're not gathering interest.

One of the side quests I did was seeing a biological dentist. I had eight or nine root canals. I was a tooth grinder — I'd stress-grind my teeth at night, crack a tooth, and they'd say, we need to do a root canal. Later I learned that sometimes root canals can't clear all of the infection out, and you may have lingering infections in your mouth. So one of the things we paid out of pocket for was about $16,000 to get all my root canals cleaned out and take care of my teeth.

It is very expensive to go the functional medicine route. Most aren't covered by insurance. But most practitioners are pretty good about payment plans, or CareCredit, or working with you on whatever payment you can make.

The hard part for me was that I had such severe heart issues that seemed urgent. If your heart rate is at 220 beats a minute, you're not going to say, oh, it's fine. You feel like you're dying. Like you're having a heart attack. So I had a lot of ER visits that were three, four, five thousand dollars a visit, because we didn't have insurance. We didn't have really any coverage at the time. It was difficult. It's hard to heal. I feel for people who are trying to do it and don't have a budget, because we really had to almost go into debt to pay for a lot of my expenses. It's not fun to have to worry about money on top of just trying to survive each day.

Michael Scott Eger: Finances are a huge additional stress. People don't factor that in. That said, the providers spent time in school and deserve to be compensated. You've got to find a happy middle ground.

Allie Chandler: Right. And if you're open about it, they're usually very good. Hey, I can't pay this whole bill right now — is there anything we can do? Can we split it up? They're pretty understanding if you can just be open with them. You're right, they do deserve to be paid, and it's worth it in the end if you feel better. Just be open and honest with your provider and have those conversations.

Michael Scott Eger: So what were the fixes?

Allie Chandler: It was multiple things. Really three basic things.

The first was a protocol very specific to Lyme — the physical side. That included drainage support: supporting your liver, your kidneys, your colon, your lymphatic system. Basically your organs of elimination. Making sure those are supported before you start actually killing anything, because once you start killing the spirochetes there's a lot your body has to deal with to clear them out. So I did drainage first, and then we got into additional pathogen and parasite protocols to knock the spirochetes and the Lyme down. Within that, there were a lot of things I did on the side — infrared saunas, castor oil packs, a lot of alternative support for my body.

The second side, which I think helped perhaps the most, was limbic system retraining. I did a program called DNRS, the Dynamic Neural Retraining System. For people who feel like they're stuck in fight or flight — because they're sick all the time, always looking for that next symptom, panicking, overly sensitive — it was very helpful for me to understand that the brain actually does have neuroplasticity, and you can rewire some of these reactions.

For me, walking into a store and passing the cleaning supplies, I would be on the ground. My body would be so overwhelmed. Any tiny stressor, I just couldn't process. So yes, you're going to work on clearing out toxins and getting that total toxic burden down. But for me a lot of it was: that did happen when I was super sick, so now my brain expects that every time I smell anything I'm going to go into a severe panic reaction, because I'm anticipating what's coming.

Not to say it's only that — there was a very physical reason it was happening at the time. But I did get trapped in this loop of, every time I've walked this far I've had a really severe heart issue, so now I'm just going to expect that's going to happen. I had to pull myself out of those expectations. I did that through limbic system retraining. It was a good six months of probably 30 to 60 minutes a day of visualization, telling my body that it's okay, that we're safe, to calm down. A lot of it is internal processing.

And then the third thing was learning about the nervous system. It goes hand in hand, but it's about how to get out of that high alert, and how to get my body into a place where it feels safer to heal. I was so agitated all the time that no matter what I took — even if I had the most perfect protocol — I was in such a panic that my body couldn't use it properly. I wasn't sleeping. I had anxiety all the time. I wasn't digesting. There were so many things I needed to get aligned first before the physical side could really work.

So those were the three stages of my healing.

Michael Scott Eger: Your brain started to get programmed into a kind of panic. Then your body started to react to that panic, whether the threat was real or perceived, and you got physical responses from it. And then you had to take some time to retrain your body into appropriate behaviors — because as much as we think we have a higher self, our bodies have robotic responses that most people don't want to acknowledge.

Allie Chandler: Right.

Michael Scott Eger: So you did all that. And then what was next?

Allie Chandler: The story is kind of sad. At the end of this journey — I had gotten married in the midst of all of this, we were together about ten years while I was sick — we moved into black mold, unknowingly. I was doing okay, and then I crashed again.

I was probably up and down quite a bit on my journey, but I had been doing pretty well for the last year or two. Then the black mold exposure brought back some of the really severe symptoms. One thing I did learn is that it's never linear. As you're healing from something really severe and chronic, you're going to have good weeks, good days. You're going to be up and down.

The important part for me during that exposure was understanding that I needed to create more capacity for my body to heal. I'm doing all of this work so that next time I have an exposure, it doesn't knock me back so far. Because we're exposed to things all the time. We can't really go anywhere without being exposed to mold, or toxins, or glyphosate. There's stuff everywhere — in the air, in the food, in our water. It's important to get your body as healthy as possible so it can handle those little hits. My body couldn't, still.

That ended up leading to a divorce. It was a very sad situation. I moved back from California to Michigan, where I'm from, and got a little apartment on my own with my beagle puppy that my husband and I had gotten.

What I did then was continue the limbic system work, but I also focused on the physical side, because I'd lost a lot of weight. I wasn't really able to eat — I was choking on a lot of food at the time with the mold. So I decided to add on. I've always been a pretty active person. I played competitive volleyball, I've always been a weightlifter, but I hadn't been for many years.

The end of my journey was really building back my physical body. That ended up being a really helpful thing, because with POTS I had a lot of blood pooling in my legs. Basically, when I stood, my veins would stay open. They wouldn't constrict. Normally when they constrict, that helps the blood get back up to your head and your heart. Mine lost that mechanism. So the blood would stay down, and my heart would race trying to pump it on its own, and I'd get dizzy. My legs would turn very dark purple, because the blood would just stay there.

So I focused on building my muscle back. I don't know what the science is behind it, but I do think it helped a lot with my circulation and with all those heart-related issues.

I spent a good year getting back into the gym. Because I was struggling to even walk, what I did was — okay, today, all I'm going to do is put on my tennis shoes. That's all I can handle. I'm exhausted after I do that. And I'm just going to sit with my tennis shoes on and do a visualization of what it would feel like to be able to go work out. I used to love it. It made me feel really good.

So I did this progressive training, where maybe the next day I'd put my shoes on and take two steps outside my door. At the time I had so much fear — the further I got from my apartment door, the more I thought, something's going to happen, I'm not going to be able to get back, I'm going to be trapped, I can't walk. I really had to work on my mindset along with my physical body. I probably spent a year once I was back in Michigan doing both of those things.

And then there was a day where I was like, I don't really have many symptoms anymore. That was probably five years ago, and it really never dipped back down. I'd say I'm 98 to 99 percent free of symptoms. I really don't worry about it or think about it anymore. I'm able to work out six days a week for 90 minutes, and I don't ever feel like I crash from it. I don't feel afraid.

It was a lot of work. A lot of mental work, a lot of internal work — not just the physical side. That was the end of my journey: ending that marriage, coming back, starting over, and really focusing on building my body back. I'd been sick for ten years. It took me probably six months to be able to really lift anything, and then progressively getting stronger and stronger. Now I feel like I can't live without it. Every morning my alarm goes off at 5:12, and I'm able to lift for 90 minutes and not even think about it. It's amazing.

Michael Scott Eger: What were you doing for a living during all of this? Just so we can frame your lifestyle — because it sounds like this was a full-time job.

Allie Chandler: I never stopped working, actually. I'm very type A. I'm definitely a perfectionist, a high achiever, and I never took any time off. I was working remotely the whole time I was sick.

For four years I was head of content at CellCore Biosciences, which is a supplement company — and coincidentally makes the protocols I used to get better from Lyme. They work with people with Lyme, heavy metals, and mold. I did their content and affiliate management. Then I was head of marketing and events at Microbiome Labs, which makes MegaSporeBiotic. It was funny, because I got into the supplement industry and had some pretty serious VP-level jobs while sick.

The good thing was I could do most of it from home. I did have to travel a bit, which was quite a struggle. I didn't fly for probably three or four years, because of my heart. But there was a meeting I had in Miami once, and I drove from Michigan to Miami so I could be there. I made it work.

Somewhere around 2019 I started my own business, doing marketing for supplement companies and practitioners.

I don't know if I'd recommend being as type A while being sick, because I didn't rest very much. But it was a good distraction, and it gave me purpose. I was in the midst of my own healing, but I was helping people who had similar issues, and I could say — I'm not all the way better yet, but I've been where you are, and it's okay. There's hope. You can get better. I'm doing it, slowly.

I was able to use my story and turn the pain into purpose, and encourage other people going through the same thing. Surprisingly, there are more than you think. There are more people with these weird chronic conditions who aren't sure what's going on. I got to create marketing assets that would help people feel seen and understood and heard.

So, yes — I never stopped working. I had to schedule everything. At 5:30 a.m. I'd get up and do my hydrating water and my supplements and the sauna. I had a pretty strict schedule. I don't have that now. My life has a lot more freedom, besides the gym. The gym is the one thing I have to do to start my day. I think it's okay as you're healing to be a little bit regimented — and also make sure you're taking time to rest and relax and decompress. I didn't do a great job of that. I stayed very busy through all of this.

Michael Scott Eger: Your background is in what?

Allie Chandler: English and Spanish and secondary education. I was a teacher for four years. My master's degree is in writing, which is helpful for marketing, because there's a lot of writing in marketing. Then I did some certification courses for marketing, digital marketing, things like that. Went to a lot of conferences, learned on the job. But I definitely used the writing and English background and the communication skills to create marketing assets for people. I taught for four years before I went to Europe and got sick.

Michael Scott Eger: I can see how being able to get words onto paper for everyone to understand builds the talents you'd use in marketing. Copywriting is an art.

Allie Chandler: It is.

Michael Scott Eger: Did you get introduced to these companies through your illness, or did you just happen to apply to a job in the wellness field first?

Allie Chandler: Kind of both. Right when I got out of grad school, a couple of people sent me a job opening. She owned Green Smoothie Girl, and I'd been following her for a couple of years. She had a "we're hiring a copywriter" post. I applied. She hired me somehow, out of a thousand applicants. So I was working with her for a little while.

And then, when I got recommended this Lyme doctor, I went on a physical retreat with him. I was in Monterey, he was in San Diego — maybe a six-hour drive. My husband at the time said, it's really important that you go, I think this retreat is going to be really helpful. So we went, and I was so sick. Everyone else was walking on the beach in the morning and doing rooftop yoga, and I could barely walk from the car to the couch inside this little Airbnb.

But I overheard this doctor say that he needed help with marketing. Being a type A person, I thought — well, I can help you. Let me get an interview. I just got my writing degree. Long story short, he interviewed me at this retreat, even though I was very sick, and hired me part-time to do customer service, write blogs, do some email marketing, and help with a summit.

So it was both. I got in because I applied for the one job, but then I ended up working for my Lyme doctor, and then he started a supplement company. That's how I got pulled into the supplement side of things.

Michael Scott Eger: And then what was your next pivot?

Allie Chandler: His name is Dr. J. When he started CellCore, I'd been doing his brand for three or four years. Then I moved over to be his head of content, and I did that for a couple of years, and then they sold the company. They were so successful. So I ended up leaving, and then starting my own business.

They had sold supplements to doctors. There's an event called Eco, which is CellCore's big conference. I had met a lot of our accounts doing events for a couple of years. So when I left, a bunch of doctors reached out and said, hey, are you doing your own marketing? Can you work with us? So I ended up working with practitioners who use those products, helping them grow and scale.

I wasn't really planning on starting a business when I left. I didn't know what I was going to do. It kind of started itself, because people were reaching out saying, can you do copy for us? We saw what you did for this company. So I quickly made a website and came up with an idea. I remember one weekend where I thought, okay, I've got to get my email address and make my website and design my logo. I spent a weekend creating my business, and then it grew. I have an agency now, with eight people working for me. It's gotten pretty big in the last couple of years.

I feel very grateful, because I feel like I'm doing what I'm meant to be doing. I'm working with doctors who are helping people like me. When I was sick, I didn't know who could help me. And now these are the doctors I'm helping to support — to grow their brand and get their protocols and their ideas out there into the world. It's a very meaningful position to be in. I really care about what I do.

Michael Scott Eger: Translating these wellness concepts into things the mass market would want to try and experience is an art. Because you also have to let people know how it works, why it works, why it's worth giving a shot — and make people feel safe. Feel that trust.

Allie Chandler: Definitely. I think the biggest takeaway for me from being sick was that urgency — I call it used-car-salesman marketing. If you don't buy this right now, this deal is never coming back, it ends in four hours, and you're going to be sick your whole life. That doesn't work well on people who have dysregulated nervous systems and chronic symptoms. They just want to be seen and understood. They want education. They want someone to respect them and say, look, maybe you don't know what's going on with you right now, but here's what I know. Here's a lead magnet. Here's an email. Here's some education.

That's why, when you mentioned my intro — I call it empathy-led marketing. Because I've been sick, and I know how desperate I was for someone to look at me and say, you're not crazy. It's not just anxiety. There's something going on. And maybe you don't know yet what the root cause is, but there's always hope for healing.

I'm able to infuse that in the marketing I'm doing, even for big supplement companies with a hundred or two hundred thousand followers. The messaging you put out into the world matters, because you want to attract the right people — and you don't want to push people away with false urgency or direct-sales-type marketing. I know sometimes that works, especially if you're selling a physical product. But I don't like to take that approach. I like the more value-driven, education-forward approach. Let's create a video about this. And then maybe there's a short call to action at the end that says, hey, if you're interested in spore-based probiotics, here's one you can try if it's a good fit for you. People know. They don't need to be pushed so hard when they're that sick.

Michael Scott Eger: Because the pressure makes you distrust. It's the marketer's and the salesperson's pressure for their needs, not their concern for my well-being. Experience has taught me that. And I've done some time in sales, so I know that pool of water quite well. There are some sharks, and they just want to feed. What you want is to find a school, and swim together.

So, to frame it as we wrap up — you provide marketing services to wellness brands.

Allie Chandler: Yes. There are two sides to my business. I work with big practitioners and wellness brands — either we do the marketing for them, so they hire my team and we take care of strategy, implementation, copy, all of it. Or I have some DIY courses, if practitioners say, I can't afford to bring a marketing person on, but I want to learn how to write an ebook. So I have these one-off modules.

The other side of my business is for people who relate to the nervous system and limbic system side of things. I have a course called High Vibe Frequency. It's essentially mindset. How do you get in the right mindset for healing? How do you get out of the victim loop? How do you understand how to regulate your nervous system?

I wouldn't say it's a protocol at all. It's really a combination of resources where I can say, here's all the things I tried. The concept here is, how do we do limbic system retraining? Here's all the programs I tried, here's what I think about them. It's kind of a guide, but also education on what was most helpful for me to get into the right mindset and framework of healing — as someone who was having daily panic attacks and really severe anxiety, and the PTSD side of things. What was helpful for me in processing trauma.

So I do work with practitioners, but I also work with anyone who's looking to heal and get into a safer body for healing, in order to absorb the healing better.

Michael Scott Eger: And where would people go if they'd like to know more about you?

Allie Chandler: The easiest way in is upsellhealth.com/archetype. I have a patient archetype quiz and a practitioner archetype quiz. We also have one for wellness brands. It's a short, five-minute quiz that tells you — if you're trying to heal — what's important to you. What type of healer are you? One example is a research warrior: someone who loves to look at the studies and do deep research before making a decision. That's one of the free resources we offer. So take that quiz, and we'll get you folded in with everything else after that.

Michael Scott Eger: Sounds good. I want to thank you for coming on to Eager to Be Healthy, with great gratitude. I hope you live a long and healthy life, and maybe we'll talk again. Thank you.

Allie Chandler: Thanks for having me.