We all know that having a passion behind why you're doing what you're doing helps you build a successful business, not only because it helps you through the dips when business gets hard, and you have to find that reason to keep pushing through or else. Just stop doing what you're doing. It also helps you in relating to your customer and knowing what they're going through to be able to provide the best services possible.
And on today's show, I have Dr. Vaish Sarathy who is an expert in non-linear education and her passion for it has grown out of her own experience with having a son who's now 15 years old who is diagnosed with autism and Down syndrome. And I'm not gonna explain her whole story here, but she has been able to learn how to help her son learn in a non-linear way to help him express his genius within to now at 15 already have a poetry book published and he's learning algebra even though he's still non-speaking.
And so now she's helping other parents with children who have learning challenges and disabilities help their own children to be able to expand in ways they never thought possible. And she is having so much success in her business, and I'm excited for you to hear more about her story.
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Welcome to the Breakthrough Mastermind Show. I'm your host, Jen Argue and I facilitate masterminds for women entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses to help others and create financial independence. I'm so excited today to have Vaish Sarathy on the podcast. Vaish has been a client of mine for a while this year as a one-on-one and in my mastermind, and she has a very Interesting business.
I really see her as a leader in her field, so we are gonna find out more about what she does as I let her talk here? Hi, Jen. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. How are you? I'm doing great. Great. I am so excited to get you on the podcast and for people to hear about your niche and what you do and why you do it.
So instead of me trying to, uh, share that with everyone, why don't you go ahead and explain what you do and tell a little bit about your story, about how you got into it as well? Definitely, I am a nutrition and learning consultant, and I work with families that have children with disabilities. And specifically, this could mean down syndrome or autism, or ADHD or it could also mean generically some learning challenges or if the child is being diagnosed with a learning disability.
So put it very simply, my mantra is to optimize learning and to simplify nutrition. That's what I do because I believe that the path to learning is, you know, it really comes from gut health, which leads to brain health. That's one aspect of what I do. I really focus a lot on functional nutrition leading to gut and brain health.
And on the other hand, I believe in, uh, you know, radically assuming intelligence, and the word presuming competence is used a lot in the disability field, but I, you know, I like to push it and move it towards intensely, radically assuming intelligence in your child no matter what their disability or no matter what their diagnosis, rather.
And I work with parents to help them find learning strategies. So we work on a two-pronged approach. We're working on health and nutrition to make sure you have the foundations for, um, you know, brain health and learning. Also once the foundations are set, then you also need to kind of, especially with kids with learning challenges, you really need to think out of the box or help parents come up with, um, learning strategies that can help them just push the boundaries on what their child is learning.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit how you got interested in that? Yeah, well, as with many people, it comes with a personal story, and um, my son is 15 now and he has a diagnosis of Down syndrome. He's also autistic, he's non-speaking. He may even have a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, but so... this is a long story, but when my, uh, when my son was young, you know, he couldn't sign, he couldn't gesture, he couldn't make eye contact and he couldn't speak.
So we really had no window into what he was experiencing inside. And what everybody told us was that he was severely intellectually delayed because that's all they could see when they looked at him. And I've given TEDx talk about this, and I, you know, I, if anybody's interested in really understanding what assuming intelligence means, you know, maybe I could talk about that later, but I believe the experts for the longest time in when my son was young and we, you know, uh, I had started with high hopes as every parent, you know, no matter the diagnosis, all parents start believing the best for their kids.
And slowly people tell you that, that's not happening. The teacher, the doctor, the autism specialist, the therapist, everybody's telling you that they've never seen a child. As delayed as your child or they've, they've not seen a child that, you know, or they don't think that anything, you know, your child's going to be able to really communicate in any meaningful fashion.
I was told that he's in the... I think it was, I believe it was a 0.1 person tile of intelligence of his peers, which whatever that means, right? Means that he's in the bottom 0.1 percentile. So slowly the way the system is set up is that it, you know, you just break off any chip of hope that the parent has.
And I kind of resigned myself, uh, to this fate until one day. It was, uh, I believe, I think it was in second grade, and then it was, we kind of had a surreal experience where the school that he was supposed to join had asked us to give him a multiple-choice test. And I was like, there's no way, my son doesn't even know how to point to something.
Forget about giving him a test. He doesn't know anything. You can't, I mean, my son's not ready for any kind of testing is what I told them. And they said, just humor us and give him the test. I remember asking him a question and placing four choices in front of him and he bated at the right answer.
And I was like, this has to be a fluke. Let me do it again. [laugh] And he batted at the right answer again. And I remember like that one event just like, you know, just completely being mind blown. I mean, I don't have another word for it, and I would say the rest is history from there. Because that was one when I was like, something is going on here that I don't understand, and if I keep testing him, I'm gonna completely miss the boat.
So let me just say I have no idea what he's capable of. Let's jump into presuming competence. But, and at the same time, he also had a lot of health issues and gut... um, you know, challenges with this gut health, which a lot of children with disabilities have. And so we had, uh, stepped on the boat of functional nutrition around the time, and I remember also thinking that I'm a chemist.
If biochemistry is not that far from my area of expertise, maybe instead of going from nutritionist to nutritionist, I should just train myself. And I did. And it turned out that the combination of presuming competence and radically changing my son's diet, and it's not that radical, we just made it anti-inflammatory, but give him the boost that he needed.
Today, he's in a regular 10th-grade class. He's still non-speaking. He still struggles with a lot of issues, but he's learning algebra. He's learning US history. He has... he's published a book of poems and he's on his way to publishing his next book. Oh my gosh! [laughs] I have goosebumps. I feel like you just took me on this whole journey, like your story about in when he was in second grade and he tapped that choice.
I mean, you were talking about how the whole system is like chipping away at your hope the whole time, and then all of a sudden to have this hope renewed is incredible. And I'm sure because you're a Ph.D. in chemistry, right? Mm-hmm... and you know, you had this son who was born into your family. You and your husband are both geniuses.
And you have a son born with Down syndrome and autism and possibly other things, and to have this hope renewed that you have... some hope here of something that is possible and you don't know what is possible, but something's possible. And instead of the opposite of what you've had for all those years, up until he was seven of your hope chipping away, all of a sudden you have this... crack in that whole belief that you can't have hope.
That hope is possible for something is incredible, and to think about your son being so blessed to have... you in his life to help restore whatever is possible for him to draw that out and to bring that out, that is incredible. And please go on Vaish's Instagram and also check out her son's Instagram. Her son has an Instagram too @downlikesid and see his poems that he has written.
It's truly inspiring. So one thing I'm curious about, once you noticed that gut health was so important, what were some of the... changes that you saw, and actually even before that, did you change his gut health like all at once? Did you change your approach all at once or did you ease into it?
I personally did change it all at once. We went cold Turkey and that was a very hard thing to do, but it kept me going and I kind of persisted through. So we changed his diet to a gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free diet, and then... from that, we actually moved to a more restrictive diet called the Gaps Diet for a short time, it was, uh, it was for just for six months, but this was coming in from a diet where he was eating abundant amounts of gluten and dairy.
He was still eating home-cooked food, but he was very addicted like many kids can get, in fact, one of the signs, uh, that I see these days is that when a parent tells me if I don't give my child gluten and dairy, they're not gonna eat anything. That is a sign right away that they need to go off gluten and dairy.
Because sensitivity to foods can often coexist with addiction patterns. And this is a true food addiction. I mean, we don't wanna go down that rabbit hole, but we're talking about addiction. Similarly, we're, we're dealing with brain chemicals and, you know, the pattern is very similar to addiction, to anything else.
So this can be a thing. Anyway, so when we changed it, we did change cold Turkey and cuz my son was young enough and he wasn't like putting up a fight, he wasn't like, he was very listless. He wasn't like, we weren't getting any feedback from him and that the first two weeks were very hard because you could tell that he was even lower in energy than you would be normally.
After that, we saw a turnaround. Now, gut health can take a long time too, I mean, it's not as the... it's not an on-off switch. So it's really important in this particular area to persist. And even if you make the change slowly... once you make the change, to commit to the change and to stay with that for a few months, and that can be three to six months for us.
When we tried to go back to our previous diet, the change was so obvious. His energy levels were immediately would not in, within a couple of days they would drop and his, you know, he would get into a brain fog. He wouldn't be able to th, you know, answer questions that easily. So it was very, it was a no-brainer for us from the age of four and a half to 15.
So we've been on that diet and now what happens in all of these cases is that the body develops in intelligence. The longer you do a thing, the easier it is for the body to develop its own intelligence. So he doesn't even want to eat gluten, because I eat gluten occasionally. And he doesn't want it, he doesn't want sugar.
We'll go to an ice cream shop and he'll spell on his letter board that, sorry, I don't want anything today. And I'm like, really? And he says, "No he doesn't," it’s just that he just knows it internally that it doesn't work for his system and he's fine with it. Wow!
That is incredible. That is incredible. Ugh, that's in direct opposition to my daughter, who's all over [laughs] the ice cream shop. Slobbering her way through every flavor. I mean, we're talking about gluten and dairy and I mean, who doesn't love gluten and dairy? Everybody loves. Exactly! Oh my goodness. That is amazing.
And so, so tell us a little bit about your journey into entrepreneurship, because now you help, there are children who have challenges, learning challenges, and disabilities. Um, you help them with their children's diets, you help them with their intelligence approaches. Mm-hmm. And tell us a little bit about your journey, how you started out, and then what was the point where you decided to start helping other parents because you were doing something else before this.
Yeah. As you know, I'm kind of, I'm multi-passionate, so where I do multiple things together when I used to work for Intel, um, this is before I started making the changes with Sid, my son and I, uh, the day I left Intel was, um, you know, I had been dreaming of leaving Intel, like a lot of people probably do.
I was like, one day I'm going to leave this and become a teacher. So it was always in the back of my that I would be in some profession related to teaching. And there was a day that I came back home and I remember that Sid was shouting or crying. He was about three and a half at the time. And he used to be with a nanny all the time because I had really long hours.
And, uh, I remember thinking, I have no idea what this means. I have no idea what his body signals mean. He's saying something, he's communicating some discomfort, and I have absolutely no idea what he's saying. That realization was such a shock that I actually went and submitted my resignation the next day.
It's like, I, this can't work, I mean, I don't know what's going on and I don't know what he's trying, I mean, like whether a child is speaking or not speaking you kind of get an idea. This is why my child is upset and I had no idea. So I turned in my resignation and within a few months, I'd started tutoring, um, chemistry and math.
And I was having a really good time. It was very part-time, it was very casual, so I was kind of in the teaching profession and I continue now to teach, uh, chemistry and math. And because it really helps me on, uh, this journey of about 11, 12 years of tutoring has helped me understand the learning process is really deeply, and I teach, uh, AP courses.
I teach neurotypical kids. I teach a lot of artistic kids. That was one part that continued, in the meantime, like I said, I'd realized that I needed to be trained in nutrition because I just had this idea that I need to know what's going on. I felt like I know enough to figure out what's going on. Let me just get formally trained.
When I finished that training, a lot of, um, what do you call them? A lot of things started clicking in my brain. I said, oh, this is learning. This is gut health and they're not separate. They are connected to each other. And, um, the dots started connecting in my brain and I realized that I have a special insight into learning that I wasn't privy to.
Well, if you're lucky, a lot of parents don't hear anything about learning. They just hear that the child has a learning disability, and that's like a death sentence and that's it. But if you're lucky, sometimes people will say that you know, you teach your child this way and they'll learn.
But what I noticed more and more with Sid, because you have so many diagnoses and so many challenges, is that I could teach them all. You know, the fanciest stuff. But if his gut wasn't in good shape, he was in no position to absorb any of it. I kind of, um, like the analogy that I give is, if you are running a raging fever or if you're feeling horrible, if you're having a splitting headache, I can come and teach you whatever…
Let's say you want to, um, You want to learn math or you want to learn economics, or you want to learn history, I can come and sit next to you and be the best teacher. It doesn't matter, you're not going to be able to learn it if you're not feeling good. And that doesn't mean you're not intelligent. It simply means that I am not setting you up for success, or we're just not playing fair.
Honestly, I feel like if we are expecting learning to happen when the body is in chronic discomfort, it's not gonna happen. At the same time, so this is the first gap that I noticed is that we're talking about learning without talking about comfort, and that doesn't work. And then the second gap is… I noticed is that in the functional medicine world that I was becoming more and more part of, and I would say I'm very integrally a part of these days, we're talking about gut health and gut health and gut health.
Okay? We can heal your gut, that's fine. Then what a healthy gut does not a brain make, right? If I sit with you and I teach you the alphabet for the rest of your life and I'm feeding you the best food, you have bone broths and you have chicken and you have six cups of vegetables a day. That's not going to make you a mathematician if I just teach you the alphabet for the rest of your life.
So, unfortunately, when functional medicine is applied to kids, there's a huge gap in presuming competence. Gut health is the only thing that's spoken about, and I get it because that’s… the function. And there is no bridge to these two worlds. Uh, for the longest time. Now they're starting to be people that, and when I was starting to talk about this, I had actually heard no other voices talk about this bridge and these days I think the recognition is slowly building up, but it's still very low.
Is that this understanding that these are two pillars and they both need to be there? One is a foundation, gut health, um, is and brain health and in, just in terms of biochemistry is a foundation. And then the next is you can't live on a foundation. You have to build the insert word of choice, your house, so [laughs]
So you have to , um, you have to build a house. So, and then that is where learning strategies come, and that's where presuming competence comes in. You assume intelligence and you teach your child based on the ways that they learn best. On the foundation of solid gut and brain health and well, that's the why to the whole thing.
And because I realized that I was sitting on this niche that… only it seemed to me at the time that only I was sitting on, which may not be true at all, but that's what it seemed like to me at the time. That's what I started doing. And it was really give difficult to give it a name because there wasn't a name.
So I called myself a nutrition and learning coach, brain Health, whatever you wanna call it, right? So, but that's what I'm doing right now, and that's where I started consulting with families that have children with disabilities to help their children learn and thrive. Gosh, amazing. And like you said, there's not as much out there as there is with, you know, gut health coaches as far as learning strategists.
Mm-hmm. for this niche. What do you see is possible when you combine the two as you've been teaching both and you know, the results that you see with your clients? In terms of results, what is, um, what is possible and not just possible? What happens is that, you know, you actually see growth because otherwise…you're kind of like going back and forth and you see a little bit of possibility and then you're back to square one, and then you see, and then the growth.
I think you see an exponential growth with as opposed to a linear growth. And that's what happens. And that's it, and I think that it really helps you, a parent break the… what should I say? The confines of their mind, uh, mm-hmm, because, you know, I am such a fringe presence in the down, not me, Sid is such a fringe presence in the, or both of us, in the Down syndrome community.
For the longest time, people wouldn't even believe us, you know? Um, he has written a poetry book. Yeah, sure. I mean, it would, that would be the response I had to really work hard on pulling my mind out of like, because I had to really work hard to find a community where people just trusted. And, and we did.
We did we, I mean, because there are citizen, by no means the only kid who's, you know, thriving. There are right now hundreds of kids that, non-speaking autistic kids that, um, are in similar positions as Sid, but it really… so much of it comes down to mindset as a parent of a child with disability, because we believe what our children, because of their maybe limited motor skills and whatever is going on in their bodies, it's up to us to kind of break the first wall or to break the first chip or to, you know, to push the boundaries first.
And that for that we have to push our own boundaries before we can push theirs. So, this is the only way that I know of because this is what worked for us is that when you're comfortable and when you can start learning, that's when the walls start breaking. I mean, we know everything is about growth and learning, right?
So, and in order to learn, um, you need to have a bare minimum of comfort. I won't say health because health is missed, the word is misused so much. But I would say comfort. Health is not being typical. Health is not having down syndrome or autism. You can be healthy with any diagnosis, but when I say health, I mean a stability in the body and some peace in the mind.
Yes. Yes. And what I think is so amazing about what you're doing is, like you said, you're helping to push the boundaries of what's possible in the parent's mind first. Which goes, you know, which helps them, their child. And when we start to see that our children with disabilities have potential that we didn't see before, and we give them a voice like you've given Sid a voice because you've been able to give him a level of comfort in his body that he can express himself through poetry.
Mm. I feel like that is opening up whole new perspective of the world from people who before didn't have a voice and now have, you know, are getting a voice. Mm-hmm, what are they going to say about how they experience the world and what they see happening in the world because they have a perspective and if they're finally able to express it?
That is going to bring so much beauty change. It's going to really add value to our world to have their voices. It is and it has already. So, and if parents are watching this, I would recommend you go to, you know, Instagram's a great place to follow. Uh, non-speaking Autistics, honestly, just put the hashtag non-speaking and I think you'll find a lot of, there's a lot of advocates these days that have been non-speaking for years.
One of my good friends, Danny, His last name is Whitty, W-H-I-T-T-Y. He's in his thirties and he has a beautiful Instagram profile where he does a lot of advocacy for non-speaking autistics that have started spelling to communicate and like him. There are many people that have not been, Sid was lucky that he started spelling when he was seven or eight, but there are many people that didn't have this opportunity until they were later, and there's so much richness to their perspective.
Like you said, Jen is that otherwise, we're just hearing the, you know, we formed our opinions about our kids and about our, um, you know, kids with disability from hearing people that don't have that disability. And that's just, that's just ridiculous. Honestly, like because our opinions on how… what they're capable of comes from people who have no idea, and I include anybody that calls themselves an autism expert as well, because how can you be an autism expert?
How can I be an autism expert even, right? I don't have…I’m not autistic. I can't be an autism expert, so there is… I think like the bare minimum qualification to be an expert should be that you are artistic. I think so, um, or, or you have true significance experience listening to people who are artistic.
And a lot of times, at least until five years ago, that was not the case that it, we had conceptions of our own. So this richness that… that these voices have brought in is amazing because what I know today just from listening to these people, to Sid and his friends, is I had no idea. I mean, I was in such a…
Whole a well, or, you know, I was just so ignorant like 10 years ago. I can't even believe I cried when Sid was born. Like for a week I was in like depression because I was like, oh my God. Uh, everything is like, my life is gone. My son is down syndrome, how will I live kind of thing. And it's laughable now.
But that week the grief was real. But that also comes from society's conditioning about what we think that a life with a child with disability is punishment right? Mm-hmm… Mm-hmm… Yeah. And it couldn't be farther from the truth. Absolutely, Yeah… [laugh] Yeah. Yeah. My husband and I often joke about that is that like, if Sid was neurotypical, you know, like you said, we're come from, you know, we have very high opinions of ourselves and our intelligence. [laughs]
So, uh, so we come from a very, uh, smug to use a kind [laugh] word it. And if our child was neurotypical, I can't imagine how we would've been. I think it would've been insufferable. So it's, [laughs], uh, so it's really broadened our minds into what intelligence really mean. It doesn't mean being smart in math and science.
I mean, that could be one definition, but there's so much intelligence is such a… I don't know. It's just everything, right? There's so many fields. It's so pervasive and we only know like one sliver of that and we think we're so smart. I know a lot of people listening to this podcast are perhaps women that are interested in, you know, are already in a business or running a business or interested in starting a business.
And I know that I can be tricky if you have a child with a disability and I just wanted to say that, I struggle with, you know, guilt and managing time all the time. But the one thing that I've started to realize is that what guilt and does is it really ruins the time that you do spend and the time that I spend with Sid.
I make sure that it's of the utmost quality. What I mean is that in that moment, even if I'm not a hundred percent with my business when I'm with Sid, I'm, I'm a hundred percent there. I'm not always there, but that's my goal. Okay? So this, this is like by no means me every day. Like most days it's not like that.
But on the days that go well, I am there for a hundred percent. I am believing in his intelligent hundred percent, and I'm there for him. You know how Brendan Bouchard talks about a servant leader? I, I think of that often like a servant mom. So I feel that as long as I am in that servant-mom state.
That's it, you know, I think that's all it is then, then if that's just half an hour in a day, I think that still works. But when that half an hour is like, oh my God, I have so much to do and how am I going to do this? How am I going to be a homeschooling mom? Plus making sure he's taken care of, plus making sure his diet is good, plus making sure my business, that it doesn't work like that in. In that half an hour when I'm a hundred percent with my intention.
Mm-hmm… and I can't think of any better word than like that, that serving mom state is that those are the days that go well, let me put it back. Yes. [laughs] Yeah. Oh, that is so good I love that you are, you know, leaning into this world with your teacher gifts to be able to give hope to other parents, uh, with children, with challenges, and I really feel like you are leading the way.
You are one of the leaders in this field of how you described where, you know, you can build the foundation with the healthy gut, but then you have to have this strategy also, which is building the house, like and it's not just teaching the alphabet. Mm-hmm… it's more than that. Ok. So much more than that.
And you are bringing that into the world. I love that you're doing that. Can you just share with the listener, uh, what you offer and as far as your courses or whatever programs you have, and then maybe share, uh, if you have any free resources as well, or where people can find you? Yes, absolutely. So I would say a free resource to start with would be my six learning strategies.
I would, I think of these as the six things that people need to do to help their child just to, you know, really jumpstart their kid’s learning. And you can go to @functionalnutritionforkids.com./learning. That's it… functionalnutritionforkids.com/learning. There are a few other freebies you can just check them out on this, but I would recommend starting here.
I offer two courses. One of them, uh, which, uh, is my signature program. They're both, but this one's called “Roadmap to Attention and Regulation.” And it's, um, we abbreviated Roar, R-O-A-R, and that is offered twice a year. And it is a, uh, six-week intensive to, um, move your child's diet and therefore the regulations, that's, that's where the name comes, roadmap to attention and regulation.
So if your child struggles with focus, with attention, with this regulation with you know, emotional ups and downs, hyperactivity, this is the program where you know, you know exactly what to do from a food list medicine. From that perspective and my other program is, it's called “Non-linear Education” and it's for parents who want to tell 'em exactly what to do.
If your child is learning the alphabet and you want them to learn calculus, this is how you go through it. [laughs] Awesome! Okay. That blew my mind… [laughs] from learning the alphabet to learning calculus. Yes. [laughs] Incredible. I even struggled with calculus. Let's just be honest. That's the exact framework that I did with my son.
He's not learning calculus yet, but he's kind of in the pre, uh, he's in late algebra, but we're working our way towards calculus. Incredible. Incredible. And where do you like to connect with people? A lot of, uh, I'm loving Instagram a lot. Um, so that's where a lot of my connections happen.
I'm, uh, so it's instagram.com/dr for Doctor… Dr. Vaish, V-A-I-S-H S-A-R-T-H-Y. Nice! Great! Uh, thank you so much for joining us today and I'm excited about how you are bringing all this goodness into the world, and definitely go give Vaish a follow. [laugh] Thank you, Jen it was so fun talking to you again.
And if you are looking for more support, challenge, and inspiration in running your online business, I would love to have you apply to my mastermind.
Check it out! @jenargue.com
