Terrain Theory

For years, Amaia Bengoa believed her body was something she needed to fix. Then she began asking a different question.
Amaia grew up in the mountains of Idaho, surrounded by nature, raised on real food, and encouraged to question the world around her. By many measures, her childhood reflected the very principles of health and living that we so often discuss on Terrain Theory.
But a healthy upbringing doesn't guarantee an easy life.
By her teenage years, Amaia was struggling with depression, and at seventeen, she experienced a devastating personal loss. What followed were years of working relentlessly, unhealthy relationships, substance use, and a growing disconnect from herself.
Eventually, her physical health began to deteriorate, too.
Chronic fatigue, digestive issues, and recurring skin symptoms led Amaia down a familiar path: increasingly restrictive diets, supplements, and attempts to identify and eliminate whatever was supposedly making her sick. She became consumed by the pursuit of health, carefully controlling what she ate and constantly monitoring how her body responded.
And yet, the harder she tried to fix herself, the more trapped she felt.
Then came a realization that would change everything: perhaps her body wasn't fighting against her. Perhaps it had been trying to communicate with her all along.
In this Terrain Transformation, Amaia shares the deeply personal journey that brought her to that realization, from the darker chapters of her adolescence and early adulthood to the road trips, moments of introspection, and experiences that helped her reconnect with herself.
We explore the emotional and physical toll of constantly striving to improve, the difference between supporting the body and trying to control it, and how a change in perspective helped Amaia move away from fear and restriction toward nourishment, trust, and self-compassion.
Amaia also shares how a car accident and concussion introduced an unexpected new chapter in her journey, including her experiences with craniosacral therapy, emotional release, and rediscovering a sense of vitality she hadn't felt in years.
And importantly, this isn't a story about someone who has everything figured out. Amaia still experiences fatigue. She still has questions. Her transformation hasn't been about arriving at perfect health, but about fundamentally changing how she responds to her body, her symptoms, and the challenges life presents.
It's a story about the cost of trying to control everything, the connection between our emotional lives and physical well-being, and the freedom that can come from no longer treating ourselves as problems to be solved.
Support Terrain Theory and get bonus episode content at https://patreon.com/terraintheory.
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
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Music by Chris Merenda
Afterparty Music by Brendan Daniel

Children aren't born broken. The medical system tells us otherwise.
Several years ago, Dawn Lester and David Parker joined us on Terrain Theory to discuss their groundbreaking book, What Really Makes You Ill?, a nearly 800-page examination of the assumptions underlying modern medicine, germ theory, and the true nature of health and illness.
Now Dawn returns with a new book, A Fresh Look at Childhood Illness, turning her attention to perhaps the most consequential place to begin rethinking health: the very beginning of life.
From pregnancy and birth to childhood vaccinations, fevers, rashes, and routine visits to the pediatrician, parents are confronted with an enormous number of decisions, often within a medical framework that encourages them to see their children as vulnerable and in constant need of protection.
What if we've been looking at childhood illness through the wrong lens?
In this conversation, we explore Dawn's terrain-forward understanding of childhood symptoms, the medicalization of childhood, and her critique of the scientific foundations of virology. We discuss the labels attached to conditions like measles and chickenpox, the tendency to suppress symptoms rather than investigate their underlying causes, and the importance of questioning medical interventions rather than simply accepting them as inevitable.
We also revisit a theme from our first conversation: the language we use shapes the way we understand our bodies. What happens when children grow up hearing that they've "caught" something, that germs are everywhere, and that their bodies need constant protection from the world around them?
Dawn also explores the relationship between a child's terrain and the physical and emotional environment in which they're raised, from nutrition and environmental exposures to parental stress, beliefs, and behavior. We discuss the body's capacity for self-regulation, the importance of listening to children, and why tending to our own terrain may be one of the most important things we can do as parents.
And we arrive at an idea that reframes parenting itself: children aren't just sponges, absorbing everything around them. They're mirrors, reflecting something back to us about ourselves.
Most importantly, Dawn challenges the fear-based messaging that has become increasingly common even within alternative health circles. Her message and her book promote curiosity, critical thinking, parental responsibility, and learning to make decisions from a place of understanding rather than fear.
Learn more about Dawn Lester and her work at https://dawnlester.com/ and https://dawnlester.substack.com/.
Get Dawn's new book, A Fresh Look at Childhood Illness, at Amazon.
Support Terrain Theory and get bonus episode content at https://patreon.com/terraintheory.
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda
Afterparty Music by Brendan Daniel

It's been nearly a year since Ben and Mike sat down for a Wellness Check on the Terrain Theory Podcast, and a lot has happened in that time. A new marriage, a growing family, a milestone birthday, plenty of music, and a few unexpected challenges have given them plenty to reflect on.
Ben shares what life has looked like since welcoming Hazel into the world, blending a family, and marrying Kelly in an intimate ceremony that carried more spiritual significance than he anticipated. He reflects on the difficulties they've navigated together, the strength they've found in one another, and why some of life's most challenging experiences can also be the most transformative, especially if you see life happening for you and not to you.
Mike checks in on life at 50, from touring and playing hockey to recognizing that the habits and expectations that served him at 30 or 40 don't necessarily serve him today. He also recounts a meaningful return to a music festival that had excluded him during COVID, and how choosing connection over confrontation opened the door to something he hadn't expected: forgiveness.
Then Ben and Mike turn their attention to the terrain between our ears.
What stories do we tell ourselves about who we are, what we're capable of, and what success is supposed to look like? How often do our expectations become the source of our own frustration? And what might change if we stopped trying to control other people's journeys and allowed them to hike their own hike?
Along the way, they touch on sleep, movement, sunlight, aging, eyesight, raising children, and the daily practice of taking responsibility for their own well-being. But the conversation keeps returning to a common thread: the beliefs we carry, the relationships we nurture, and the things we're willing to let go of may be just as worthy of our attention as the physical aspects of our terrain.
As always, this conversation is for educational purposes only and reflects personal experience. It is not medical advice.
Remember:
You are light.
You are love.
You are your Primary Healthcare Provider.
Support Terrain Theory on Patreon! Our member platform gives you access to a ton of free & exclusive content. Check it out: https://www.patreon.com/TerrainTheory
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda

What really makes us ill?
Once you begin questioning germ theory, another question quickly follows: if germs aren’t the cause of disease, then what is?
For past Terrain Theory guests like Dawn Lester, David Parker, Tom Cowan, et al, The answer comes down to some familiar forces: malnutrition, stress, and toxins.
In this conversation, we focus on one of the most pervasive of those toxins: glyphosate.
Michelle Perro, MD is a conventionally trained pediatric emergency physician whose work gradually moved toward environmental medicine, nutrition, homeopathy, GMOs, pesticides, and the growing toxic burden she was seeing in chronically ill children. That journey eventually led her to GMOScience.org, where she now works to educate families about the relationship between food, environmental exposure, and health.
We start with glyphosate and Roundup, but expand into the bigger picture: pesticide exposure, the gut and microbiome, intestinal permeability, mineral depletion, ultra-processed foods, children’s developing physiology, organic and regenerative agriculture, household exposures, water, personal-care products, and the cumulative load created by modern life.
But this is not an episode about becoming afraid of everything around you.
It’s about what you can actually do about it.
Michelle makes the case that the first step is reducing the toxic load: changing what comes into the home, becoming more conscious about food and water, paying attention to what is being sprayed around us, and supporting the body’s ability to recover. She talks about her work with children and families and how some simple shifts in lifestyle and food choice led to vastly improved health outcomes.
Then onto the activation piece: rebuilding community around food, supporting local farmers, growing some of our own food again, and refusing to outsource responsibility for our health entirely to institutions.
Because awareness is only the first step.
Agency comes next.
And if we want healthier people, healthier children, and healthier communities, tending our own terrain may also require tending the terrain of the communities immediately around us...and the terrains of those with whom we share that community.
Learn more about Michelle Perro, MD and her work at https://gmoscience.org/ and https://makingourchildrenwell.com/.
Support Terrain Theory and get bonus episode content at https://patreon.com/terraintheory.
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda

When Lisa Strbac first joined us in 2023 to talk homeopathy, tissue salts came up almost in passing. Since then, she’s written an entire book about them. So we invited Lisa back, along with her colleague Natasha Andreo, to give the subject the attention it most certainly deserves..
We begin with the twelve tissue salts identified by 19th-century physician Wilhelm Schuessler, how they differ from classical homeopathic remedies, and the notion that all dis-ease can be traced back to mineral salt imbalance in the body. 
Lisa also raises a question that sits right at the heart of homeopathy: are these remedies supplying the body with a substance, or could they be providing information? She shares the story that first convinced her to take tissue salts seriously, and she and Natasha explain how they choose individual salts, what they look for in the face and body, and why taking all twelve isn't necessarily the same as finding the one(s) you need.
There is, however, another piece to this system that Mike and Ben were very keen to explore: each of the twelve tissue salts has also been associated with a sign of the Zodiac.
Natasha, whose work combines homeopathy with medical astrology, explains how she uses birth charts, the Sun, the Moon, and planetary cycles to think about constitutional tendencies and timing. That leads to a fascinating discussion about surgery and lunar cycles, inherited patterns, generational trauma, and a reframe of that notion of "generational" that we hope gets used more.
Somehow Human Design enters the picture too, at which point we learn that Mike is apparently a type reserved for only one percent of people...which immediately made sense.
Join the conversation as we make connections between our cellular health and the cosmos above.
To learn more about Lisa and her work, visit lisastrbac.com, follow her on Instagram at @lisastrbac, and explore her homeopathy courses and practitioner training at the Academy of Integrative Homeopathy.
To learn more about Natasha and her work, visit natashaandreo.com.au and follow her on Instagram at @natasha.andreo, where she is most active.
Support Terrain Theory and get weekly bonus content at patreon.com/terraintheory.
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda