Hello and welcome to pursuing health. I'm Dr. Julie Foucher, family physician and former CrossFit Games athlete.

Here I bring you information and inspiration to help bridge the gap between

fitness and medicine and support your journey toward your healthiest self. Thank you so much for

joining me. Now let's get started with this week's episode. What I wanted to share today was a

powerful experience that I had showing me just how important

our deep sense of purpose and meaning can be.

And so you may have heard me before talk about a particularly stressful time during my life.

And this was during my first year of medical school,

while I was also training to compete in an international sport called CrossFit. Now, there was a lot

going on. Obviously, those two are big endeavors in and of themselves, but also there was a lot of

transition during this time period.

I had graduated from college, moved to a new city, started medical school, also training

and competing for this competition, which fell within that same time frame. And I had lost my

grandmother, who I was very close to, and then unexpectedly, my uncle also, who

passed away in a plane crash. And so there was a lot happening in a short amount of time,

and I certainly did not have the tools and the emotional capacity to be able to process

all of this. So it became very difficult. And I

developed physical symptoms at that time. And as I started to come out of this period and process

some of those emotions, I still was finding myself with very little motivation to continue with

my CrossFit training. So I would find myself

where I used to really enjoy going to the gym and enjoy pushing myself hard in my training.

I was finding myself driving to the gym and just sitting in the car and crying and then

...