Learn True Health with Ashley James

We’re now in episode 420 and who better be on the show than Medterra CBD founder, Jay Hartenbach. In this episode, we caught up with Jay on how Medterra is handling the coronavirus situation and how they’re still able to produce and ship products to customers. Jay also talks about what Medterra has been up to, what studies they’ve participated in, and what products are in development.

[0:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 420.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Jay Hartenbach who is the founder of Medterra CBD, my favorite clean CBD company. Jay, we had you all the way back in episode 300. We’re in the 400s now so it’s been a while since we had you on the show. I can’t wait to hear what’s happened since we’ve had you on the show, and also how your company is staying in business to supply us with the needed CBD we need to keep our sanity. Because it’s so great for anxiety. Hemp cannabis is so great for keeping people calm and helping them. It’s very medicinal. You have a very clean form of CBD that doesn’t trigger tests if someone were to go get tested for THC, which we talk about in detail in episode 300. I recommend listeners check that out.

Jay gives us a fantastic discount, gives the listener is 15% off by using coupon code LTH. So we can go to medterracbd.com and use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. Jay, welcome back to the show.

[0:01:38] Jay Hartenbach: Thanks for having me back, Ashley. I’m excited to be here.

[0:01:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. You are in social isolation. Your company has been making some major transitions for ensuring that everyone is safe, that your customers are safe when they receive your products, that your employees are safe. I’d love to go through all this information. Welcome back to the show. First of all, we’ll definitely hear what has been happening in the world of CBD since we had you on the show in episode 300.

Right now, I know that your company has been taking this really seriously—the Covid-19 really seriously. You guys are in Southern California. What is your company doing to create social distancing and to make sure that everything is sanitized so that everyone’s healthy—both your customers and your employees?

[0:02:37] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. I think companies have a huge responsibility here. As the founder and the CEO of Medterra, you can impart a lot of change with something that can be viral—literally viral. Even though we may only employ 70 or 80 employees, there’s a huge responsibility because those 70 or 80 employees if sick could go and infect a lot more people and create this cascading effect. We made the decision two weeks ago to shut down the office entirely.

We’ve sent all the employees home just except for the few fulfillment employees that we have that are now going to be leaving tomorrow. They’re going to just be able to go on permanent leave, basically a paid vacation which is it’s good for them. They’ve worked so hard over the last months. They more than deserve it. We’ve been able to send everyone home.

It’s been a huge transition for us as a company because we have been so close for the last three years and working with each other. You’ve got a lot of friendships that have developed. Now everyone being remote, we were really worried about just the productivity but just also the morale. There’s a lot of concern in the environment of what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen with the economy? It’s been really reassuring to see you’ve got employees that are tagging each other on social media and making them do challenges from their house. We’ve stayed really, really connected.

In some ways, I think we’ve actually become even more productive and the communication has been even better because you’re forced to do so. You can’t not communicate because the only way to do it is to actually send them a message or a video chat. We have made that decision. It’s great to see other companies also making the decision to shut down the office and send everyone home.

[0:04:25] Ashley James: So you have a 40,000 square foot office—I think you said—in Southern California. How are you doing fulfillment then if everyone’s going home? So if someone orders your products are they not going to get it for the next two months or how does that work?

[0:04:45] Jay Hartenbach: That’s a great question. The fulfillment staff that has stayed there really for the last two weeks, like you had said, it is a very big space so social distancing is very possible in the Medterra office when there are only six employees doing fulfillment. What we’ve also been able to do—and this just us growing and maturing as a company—is starting to work with other third-party logistics companies spread out throughout the United States.

Our business, fortunately, has grown a lot larger than even when we last spoke. So the need for these different warehouses across the United States is very important. They are very, I should say, prepared to handle these types of situations. Just like what we were doing in the Medterra office where every order that we were sending out we were just wiping down as an extra precaution.

For our customers, these third party logistics warehouses and companies that we work with throughout the US are doing the same. That just allows everything to stay and run smoothly. We work with three different shipping partners: UPS, FedEx, and USPS, so orders are going out on time and they’re being delivered. In some cases, actually being delivered faster because we’re moving some of that shipping to our East Coast warehouses as opposed to having to ship everything from California.

[0:06:00] Ashley James: Awesome. So everything is sanitized. You are paying your employees to stay home during this quarantine, which I love to hear that people are able to keep their jobs. They will, of course, be loyal to your company for doing that. You help them they’re going to help you. I love seeing that. You’re not just hanging them out to dry. What did you mean by challenges from home? Can you give me some examples of how your employees have been challenging each other from home?

[0:06:39] Jay Hartenbach: I think everyone’s seen the push-up challenge or tag a pup. That’s gone viral on Instagram and social media. Now, I’m starting to see employees saying where they used to have, at two o’clock, they’d go get a shot of expresso together to beat the afternoon slow down. They’re now doing it remotely. It’s just fun to fun to see it. We are fortunate enough that we’ve got a very nice gym in the office. Now that everyone is not able to use that, it’s the same thing. You got people tagging each other and making them do home workouts. It’s just funny. There are also the challenges of working from home. I think it’s not a true conference call when people are working from home unless one dog barks or you have one child in the background. That’s been fun just seeing everyone, what they look like at home.

Like I said before, it is just incredible. I think we are so fortunate to have employees that truly believe in what we’re doing as a company. That’s why it’s so easy to take care of them because they just are—whatever adversity we give them, the CBD industry just in general has had a lot of adversity. Obviously, this has thrown another layer of challenges on, and just seeing how the employees are responding is incredible. I sent a message actually out to the team earlier today and I said, “If we had to start from scratch, I have no concerns because this is the team that I would do it with.” I truly mean that. There’s a lot of great CBD companies, but I really think that the Medterra team, in particular, is a special group. I’m just excited to continue to work through them no matter what the challenges present themselves to be.

[0:08:30] Ashley James: Absolutely. In our first interview, episode 300, we talked about the quality of Medterra about how you really work hard to make sure that the hemp that you derived the CBD from is really high-quality and medicinal, doesn’t have pesticides, that you have a filtration system so that you extract the CBD without the THC. There’s a lot that goes into the production. Listeners can go back to episode 300 to hear about that. We also shared a really interesting story about—I think it was a friend’s father or grandfather who had Parkinson’s. When he took the CBD, his shaking reduced or went away when he took it. Any updates on him?

[0:09:22] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah, continues to use the product. Just so that we’re friendly with our friends at the FDA, certainly not endorsing it as a treatment for that. I can say confidently that he has included that in his daily regimen. Going back to that point of having employees really believe in the company, every one of our employees has some type of personal connection to CBD. Whether it’s a family member or a friend that has seen the benefits for themselves—individually seen the benefits. It’s really easy as a CEO of a company to motivate people when you already have that type of product. It’s exciting.

That’s one of the cases. Because of that case actually and a couple others we’ve created this Medterra Assists program where there’s people that—based on either a disability or just being older and on a limited income or any type of service member: so military, police, fire—we give a significant discount sometimes up to 50% depending on the condition so that they can get access to these products. Because even though we try to keep our products as fairly priced as possible, they still are expensive. Those cases make it worth it for us, so we try to help where we can.

[0:10:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s an expensive process to go through to make a CBD isolate that is clean, safe, and healthy. You’re making a high-quality product, and sometimes you have to pay more for quality. You get what you pay for especially in this industry. I love that you’re providing a big discount for those who really need it but can’t afford it. That’s fantastic. It’s like you could almost create a charity program or something on the side.

What has happened in the last—I think it’s been about a year and a half since you’ve been on the show. What’s happened in Medterra CBD in the last year and a half? How have you guys grown? What kind of science, what kind of studies have come out? I’d love to hear what you guys are doing now.

[0:11:44] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. It’s a year and a half years. I think three or four years or maybe five years. So much has happened. When we talked last, which was like you said a year and a half ago, we were in a 3,000 square foot office. We had 10 employees working with us.

[0:12:03] Ashley James: It’s awesome.

[0:12:03] Jay Hartenbach: Now, like I said, we’re in a 40,000 square foot space. We have just under 80 employees working with us. It’s just been incredible to see that growth. A lot of it is compliments to the team in executing, but it’s also just being a part of such a fast-growing industry. When we talked about we really were focused on isolate, and we were really focused on CBD. That was our mission as a company.

Now, a year and a half later, CBD is still our primary mission, but what we’ve recognized as a company is that there are other ingredients beyond CBD that can be powerful. So our goal is not to deliver the best CBD product but just to deliver the best product in general. So we’re now working on really cool blends that take other natural ingredients to really enhance that efficacy.

We’re just launching this new gummy line right now where gummies can be a great way to deliver CBD because it’s in a friendly format. Customers and consumers like gummies. If that helps them get on a regular regimen, then I’m all in favor of it. Just not selling a CBD gummy that’s got high fructose corn syrup and is loaded with gelatin and isn’t vegan friendly. Ours are pectin-base and all have additional ingredients whether it’s our Keep Calm, or Sleep Tight gummy, or even our Stay Alert gummy. They all have these different ingredients that ultimately give a more efficacious product to the consumer, which is what they’re doing.

One of the realizations we’ve had over the last year and a half too is people aren’t taking CBD for the sake of taking CBD. At least not anymore. I think in 2017 and earlier, it was this cool hip product. People were taking it just to be on that cutting edge. At this point, people are taking CBD because they believe that it works and it can help them. That’s become our mission as a company, just to ultimately deliver the most effective product. Those products all do contain CBD, but how do we get there? It’s different blends as well as some of our new delivery methods like liposomes that we’re working on.

[0:14:09] Ashley James: And have enough CBD in them so it’s not like trace amounts just so you can say. I bought a deodorant and it actually really works. I’m really happy with this deodorant. I always buy 100% natural deodorants, but honest to God it says there’s CBD in my deodorant. I had to laugh so hard because I’m like, “Why do my armpits need CBD really?” It’s probably trace amounts just so they can say like, “This is a CBD deodorant,” and that’s not why I bought it. I mean there’s charcoal and coconut oil and all kinds of other stuff and baking soda and whatever. It works. It’s one of the best deodorant I’ve ever used, but just the fact that it has CBD in it just made me chuckle because it’s one of those things now, it’s gimmicky. You can put a trace amount of CBD in something and then, “Oh, it’s CBD. We could charge $10 more,” but you’re not doing trace amounts in these gummies. You’re trying to get as much CBD as possible into them?

[0:15:06] Jay Hartenbach: That’s correct, yeah. We just take that stuff for granted, but it is worth highlighting because there is just a wide variety of CBD products on the market. Our gummies, as an example, have 25 milligrams of CBD per gummy. Most gummy or CBD gummies on the market usually have 5 to 10 milligrams. So we’re anywhere from 5 to 2 ½ times stronger from a gummy standpoint. That just goes back to our belief in looking at the clinical data where really, at a minimum, if you’re ingesting CBD you’re starting to see effects and that 15 milligrams per serving and kind of going up from there. A 5 or 10 milligram gummy is great. I think that’s a good place to start, but we are very scientifically-driven. So we want to make sure that we’re putting efficacious amounts to the CBD and all of our products.

[0:15:55] Ashley James: Speaking of scientifically-driven, have you guys participated in any studies or any scientific papers? Has there been anything new in the last year and a half in terms of the science?

[0:16:15] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. That’s something that we’re actually very proud of. We just finished a study that’s in peer review right now with the Baylor College of Medicine. It was a combined study with Baylor as well as some local that’s in Houston. What we were studying was the effect of CBD both in naked format or the way that it’s taken now as well as a liposomal format, which we can talk about more. We compared the efficacy versus obviously a control. So as a five-arm, double-blind placebo-controlled study.

We were taking senior dogs that had not found any benefit from traditional arthritis medication. Their owners volunteered to participate in that study. We weren’t locking the dogs up. They went home with the owners every night. I was talking to the marketing team. They said, “You need to make sure that when you talk about this that you clarify that this was not an animal study where they’re locked up.”

[0:17:1] Ashley James: People would be knocking on your door so hard. I love that. When you said vets I thought you meant veterans, but you actually meant the doctors like veterinarians. That’s another thing you definitely want to clarify because I’m like, “Oh, the vets. They would really like this.” Coming back from war and having post-traumatic stress and then being given liposomal CBD and seeing how it affects them.

Okay. So this is pain and dogs, which I find funny that we have to do a double-blind placebo study because it’s not like the dog knows whether we’re giving it olive oil extract or CBD. The dog doesn’t know, but this just going to prove even more that it works. How would they measure pain in dogs? They’re not limping, they’re not yelping, they’re able to walk and run? How did they measure the effects of CBD on these dogs, these senior dogs with arthritis?

[0:18:18] Jay Hartenbach: Well, that’s a great point. So the reason the double-blind was required was because we use something called the Helsinki Pain Index, which is an internationally recognized way of scoring animal behavior specifically to dogs. Like you said, it ties to their gait, how quickly they can go from sitting to standing, and then standing to laying down, and just this qualitative score. That double-blind placebo-control is really important because we don’t want the vets that necessarily know which dog is receiving the CBD or not CBD, but also throw the owners as well. If you’ve got an animal or a pet that’s in suffering, it breaks your heart. You’re really looking for any glimmer of hope. Maybe they get up a little bit faster than they usually do and you’re like, “Oh my God it’s working. This it.”

So it was very important for us just to make sure that it was completely double-blinded so that there wasn’t any way of misconstruing the data because it was a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative scoring system. We were looking at, like I said, how they were getting up and how they’re moving. What was really exciting was in the arm of the study where we were giving—these were larger dogs so 80-pound dogs. We were giving them 50 milligrams a day.

What we were doing was also looking at their liver profile to make sure that there weren’t any elevated liver enzymes, as well as looking at their red and white blood cell counts, as well as kidney analysis just to make sure that there was minimal side effects if not any side effects. In that one arm, 80% of the dog saw 50% improvement or more. This is on a 30-day study, which for us—I think anyone that’s familiar with clinical trials or any type of kind of medical research—30 days is lightning fast. So to see that type of result in 30 days, then we did a follow-on study 30 days after they completed a treatment just to see how quickly they would revert back to their previous symptoms. It was really encouraging to see. That study is in peer review. Go ahead.

[0:20:35] Ashley James: I was just going to say, so to clarify, how many dogs were in the study?

[0:20:39] Jay Hartenbach: There were 25 dogs total. We had five dogs in each arm.

[0:20:44] Ashley James: Okay. When you said each arm there was a placebo, so five dogs were not getting anything?

[0:20:52] Jay Hartenbach: Correct. Five dogs were in the control, five dogs were in the 20 milligrams of regular CBD oil, and then the third group was 50 milligrams, and then we did 20 milligrams of our liposomal delivery, and then 50 milligrams of our liposomal delivery. Each there was five, which is not a very large number. This is granted a preliminary study, but it was powered enough where we could see statistically significant results because of—

[0:21:22] Ashley James: Eighty percent of the dogs that received the CBD saw a 50% improvement. Was there a big difference in dose or did they—across the board no matter what the dose was—see an improvement?

[0:21:35] Jay Hartenbach: They did. The one group that received CBD that saw an improvement but not a significant improvement was the 20 milligrams of CBD oil. So non-encapsulated in a liposome. The one comment that we have to make on that is obviously these were larger dogs, so the average weight was 80 pounds. So think of big labs. One was that enough CBD for them to be effective, and two, these were, like I said, severely arthritic dogs that I don’t think we’re necessarily having the run of a mill arthritis or just age-related conditions.

In that 50 milligram arm of just receiving plain CBD oil, so just our Medterra Pet CBD oil 50 milligrams a day, so 25 in the morning and then 25 at night, that’s where that 80% saw 50% improvement or more. That’s something that I’d be happy to share. Like I said, it’s in peer review right now. We are hoping to publish in the next month or so. So we’re excited about that.

[0:22:42] Ashley James: Very cool. That’s great. So you followed up a month later. How are the dogs doing?

[0:22:49] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah. So a month later is a little bittersweet. For the dogs that were receiving just a regular CBD oil, it was this little heartbreaking because the owners are like, “I need to put them back on CBD as quickly as possible.” The dogs were obviously not very happy from seeing this huge reduction in their symptoms, and now all of a sudden reverting back over the course of really 15 to 20 days to start showing the same symptoms that they were having prior to starting the study.

All of the dogs that completed the study though are now receiving free Medterra CBD for life. It was a tough 30-day period after this study, but now they’re all receiving their CBD and they’re all taking it What was really fascinating for us and this what’s leading us to do some additional studies and actually talking about vets in the sense of veterans, the liposomal delivery, which is a way of encapsulating the CBD so that it becomes hydrophilic and non-hydrophobic, but also dramatically increases the bioavailability as well as the length of time that it is biologically active in the blood.

We were seeing 30 days after still some of the symptoms coming back but significantly reduced. That was very encouraging. I was joking with someone. Someone said, “I don’t know if that’s a great product for you guys to be selling. You’re going to put yourselves out of business.” Look, at the end of the day, we truly believe it. If we’re helping people and animals, then ultimately we’re going to have a strong company. If we ultimately can help them take less CBD down the road, then that’s great because that means they’re seeing less symptoms.

[0:24:33] Ashley James: I think it’s fantastic. You make a quality CBD product that ends up making it so that people need to take less and it lasts longer. Sure, they’ll buy less from you, but you’ll get more customers. Your goal has always been to help as many people as possible, and to make a high-quality product that is holistic, that is healthy, and healing. You’re on par with your mission statement. You’re not looking to try to get as much money out of everyone as possible. You’re trying to really help them. If you can make a very effective CBD product, then you actually would rise above the rest.

I love that you’re putting the effort and the money into all the science around it, which is what you talked about also in episode 300. Really interesting. I love that those dogs are on Medterra CBD for the rest of their life. I thought that was really cool. Why does CBD help to reduce pain especially in an instance where maybe it’s bone-on-bone? Obviously, CBD is not reversing arthritis, but it is significantly helping with pain. Is it that CBD blocks pain receptors, decreases inflammation? Do you know scientifically why CBD helps so much with pain?

[0:26:06] Jay Hartenbach: We’ve got a couple—I shouldn’t say guesses I think it’s a little more educated than a guess. That’s part of the ongoing research, but what we’re seeing is a couple of things. This is done with some of the lab work that we’ve partnered with Baylor to do. One, we’re seeing CBD actually bind directly to the neutrophils. So usually, in cases where you’ve got systemic arthritis, you’ve got overactive neutrophils that are part of our immune system that if operating and working properly these neutrophils are helping combat any foreign particles that are entering or foreign bacteria or viruses entering the body.

If you have an overactive neutrophil that’s basically attacking nearby cells that aren’t bad and they’re native to the body, then that’s a huge issue. What we’re seeing is CBD actually binding to these neutrophils and turning that activity down. That is one, going to just help arthritis in general because that can be a cause of arthritis. The second part of it is to just the actual inflammation around the body.

You’ve seen, we do have studies showing that CBD can turn down inflammation through a variety of methods in the body both applied topically and ingested. One of the things I think we talked about in episode 300 was if we look at just the human conditions that people are afflicted with, a vast majority of them have some tie-in to inflammation or that’s a GI issue, a dermatitis issue. If you can address just the root cause of that inflammation, then you’re going to ultimately see that benefit.

The actual mechanism and the pathway forward is really—I think actually under scrutiny right now—a lot of people have thought—this is new to the industry. Okay, you’ve got this endocannabinoids system. That CBD binds to CB1 and CB2 receptors, and that’s how it operates. We’re seeing, yes, that is part of the pathway for CBD to interact with the body, but like I said, you’re seeing CBD also bind with other parts of the body that aren’t tied directly to the endocannabinoid system. It’s almost creating a more holistic effect than what we thought.

The endocannabinoids system, it was really discovered and started being researched in the early 90s. To think that there weren’t going to be any revisions or new understandings on how it would work, I think was a little misguided or maybe too optimistic. We’re starting to find that out, and that’s exciting for us where you have CBD that’s actually binding to serotonin receptors in the brain. It’s not going through a CB1 receptor and then activating some type of cascade that then affects our serotonin levels. It’s actually just binding to the serotonin receptor in the cell.

That’s exciting for us. It’s just hinting at the potential of both CBD, but just all of these cannabinoids that we’re now looking at and starting to evaluate.

[0:29:12] Ashley James: You mention that CBD, they’re seeing now that it binds to neutrophils, that it’s part of the immune system. Are there studies that show that CBD helps us to combat bacteria or viruses?

[0:29:27] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah. That’s a great question as of late. CBD and just like you talked about your deodorant that has CBD in it. What is the actual justified use? CBD can be very helpful in helping our iMMUNne system from a variety of ways, but not necessarily directly. In the sense that we look at CBD and its ability to help people reduce any type of stress or potentially help with anxiety, those are both causes of immune system degradation. If you’re overly stressed, if you’re not sleeping well, then your immune system is going to start performing poorly. CBD has an immediate opportunity to be beneficial to the immune system through those pathways of just helping you be an overall healthy.

Medterra right now, we actually are developing, and we’re going to be launching this shortly—an Immunity Tincture. It has CBD in it because of those properties that I just described, but it also has Echinacea and elderberry in it to directly act on the immune system to boost the immune system. So kind of goes back to that mission of ours where we want to use CBD where CBD is very important to us, but we’re also not ignorant to the other ingredients that we could potentially include to get this more holistic, more ultimately efficacious product.

There is one cannabinoid though. I’ve heard CBG as an example that may have some antibacterial and antiviral effects. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done on that, but that is really interesting to see that there is one cannabinoid specifically that has shown some antibacterial properties, which is exciting.

[0:31:16] Ashley James: Back when I interviewed you in episode 300 your CBD has been filtered so that there’s no other cannabinoids, there’s no other—what’s the word—particles from the cannabis plant or the hemp plant.

[0:31:36] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah, cannabis.

[0:31:37] Ashley James: There’s the terpenes and all that stuff. It’s not in there, it’s only CBD and that’s great for postal workers, and flight attendants, or policemen, and people that have to take drug tests, or construction workers. They have to take drug tests. I remember my husband was a foreman union carpenter for 20 years. There was drug testing. When CBD came on the market he was worried about taking it. He wanted to try the CBD, which doesn’t get you high. Kids can take it safely. Like you said, pets can take it safely. It’s not a drug. It’s not a street drug. It’s not going to get you high. He really wanted to take it, but at the state at the same time, there wasn’t any CBD product that would say this is not going to trigger a drug test. When he was a union foreman union carpenter, if he were to have an accident let’s say like cut himself, if you have any accident on the job, they immediately require you to get a drug test.

I just remember his conflict because he really believed in all the information coming out and really wanted to try it. He had always had anxiety. He was looking for more natural ways of handling it. Then, of course, the anxiety of, “Well, if I take this CBD what if I have to do a drug test? What if it shows up positive?” That would give him anxiety. He was really just stuck in a hard place. Whereas you’ve solved this problem. That a policeman can take your CBD and know that it’s not going to trigger a drug test because it’s been isolated away from all the other elements of the plants that might trigger the test.

When we did speak in episode 300 we talked about all the medicinal benefits that are in the plant itself, because aside from THC and THCA, it’s the acidic form before it’s been heated. It doesn’t get you high, but it has medicinal properties. There are so many other cannabinoids in the cannabis and in the hemp plant that don’t get you high if processed properly, and that are medicinal and so healthy. There are now companies that want to make whole plant medicines. You were looking into that back then in the last year and a half. Have you made any headway or have you decided against it?

[0:34:27] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. To all those points that, Ashley, you just made one was a recognition. Even when we started Medterra there was this idea that when we looked at the medical research there was so much justification for having a CBD isolate because all of the medical research—specifically to CBD—was done on the isolate as opposed to a full-spectrum product. We felt confident that it was something that we could sell and feel like we were actually providing benefits.

Even since the beginning of Medterra, we never were wanting to dismiss the other properties of these cannabinoids because while CBD could really do a lot of the heavy lifting, I think it would be crazy to think that other parts of the plant couldn’t be beneficial. We just talked about CBG potentially having some antibacterial or antiviral effects.

To your point, one of the things that we had been exploring was this broad-spectrum component. As a company, Medterra really will never sell a product that has THC in it, but to your point, maybe there’s a way of including other parts of the plant like the terpenes, and the flavonoids, and the other cannabinoids besides THC to get more of a holistic encompassing effect.

We have actually recently launched a broad-spectrum product. It’s something that we’re really proud of because we’ve been working on it for a while. There’s a lot of broad-spectrum products out there and some are really good. So I want to make sure I clarify that. We don’t only have the good one, but a lot of broad-spectrum products use a manufacturing method very similar to ours to produce our isolate.

The way that they get rid of the THC is by just simply adding more and more isolate back into the full spectrum blend. If you add enough isolate into your full spectrum blend that might be let’s say 60% CBD and has 3% THC right when it leaves, obviously, the distillation. You just continually bombard it with more and more isolate, then eventually you’re going to get to the THC level will be to a non-detect amount, which is great. You now may not be free of THC, but you’ve got it at such a low level that people shouldn’t be concerned.

The downside is that you’ve basically also diluted everything else out of that full spectrum blend except for the CBD. Now you’re just selling hemp-flavored isolate, which I think is a disservice to people.

[0:36:53] Ashley James: A lot of companies are doing that. You go to the drugstore or you buy online, that’s what you’re getting.

[0:37:01] Jay Hartenbach: Exactly. That’s unfortunate. Just like when we’re talking about when we last spoke, if there’s any time you have any concern, any reputable CBD company should be able. One, they should have it on their website, but two, if you call them into their customer service line or send them an email, should be able to provide any CoA from any batch that you’ve purchased. You can quickly ascertain, “Okay. Are they doing this hemp-flavored isolate where they’re just diluting everything out?” You’ll know because you’ll see CBD concentration really high and then everything else will be non-detect, which like I said, doesn’t necessarily do you any good. You should just buy CBD isolate. It’s going to be cheaper.

With that being said, there have been some advances in the actual processing. Through this process of using chromatography where we’re able to selectively isolate out a compound. Instead of saying, Look, we’re going to isolate for CBD and leave everything else behind.” What we’re going to do is actually take this entire full-spectrum blend and just pull out the THC. You can do that through a process called chromatography. Even when we talked last time, it largely wasn’t scalable for the CBD industry.

You could produce maybe two or four kilos at a time or even the best labs. If you’re trying to put that on a national level, that’s just not going to scale, but some of the more recent advances have really allowed that to scale. You’ve got a lot of labs that are now operating in a much larger level.

Now that we are confident that it is a true broad-spectrum product, we’ve actually brought it to market. Our target for these broad-spectrum products is to really have anywhere from 10:20, 20:1 CBD:my inert cannabinoid ratio. It is meaningful. It’s still very largely a CBD product, but you have meaningful amounts of CBG, and CBC, and CBN all showing up on the COA. Not only in the bulk format but in the actual finished product format so that consumers are actually getting that benefit.

That’s been great for us because it’s really allowed us to branch out. The broad-spectrum products have quickly become a favorite of a lot of our customers where they love the CBD products, but getting those extra cannabinoids in there certainly isn’t hurting them, and for a lot is helping them. So that’s been exciting for us.

[0:39:25] Ashley James: Yeah, no kidding. What was the process, chromatography? How does that work?

[0:39:32] Jay Hartenbach: Knowing that you’ve got different molecular weights for all the cannabinoids—and part of the issue of isolating them out and this why it hasn’t been largely scalable is because the molecular weights are so similar. The compounds themselves are just very similar. It’s very difficult to isolate. Using a chromatography, you basically create these call it chemical filters or chemical gradients that allow basically the different densities of the compounds to sift through this filter.

What it creates is this almost imagine a flowing tap—for illustrative purposes. You put the material through in the beginning, and then what comes out first will be let’s say CBD. Then as you go to a different molecular weight then it’s CBG. Then a different molecular weight it’ll be CBN. Then the next molecular weight that passes through the filter based on the different densities will be THC.

You just note, “Okay. Based on what’s coming through on your testing you’re kind of pulling samples. Okay, this is the THC part of it. We need to just discard that, and then we can continue to last the rest of the flavonoids and terpenes flow through. They each come out individually and then you recombine them at the end and. It basically reconstitute that full-spectrum blend just without the THC.

[0:40:57] Ashley James: Fascinating. Do they take the THC and go sell it as a concentrate?

[0:41:05] Jay Hartenbach: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got that question. We’re just talking with one of our distributors and they said, “Just let me know as a friend where they discard it.” No, they destroy it. It’s just a part of the federal regulations.

[0:41:20] Ashley James: Oh, man. They could have made such a great—I don’t know. I just think I live in Washington and they sell stuff here legally. I will just be like, “Hey, that’s like a byproduct that they could turn around and sell to people that want it,” I don’t partake anymore. I’m from Canada. All Canadians in the 90s grew up on pot. I prefer to be sober. I actually prefer. I don’t drink alcohol. I prefer to just have my wits about me. I’m not against anyone that chooses to partake. It’s just I like being in my body.

I’m a Pisces. I’m so ungrounded and so like in the ether as it is. I just like to be grounded as much as possible and have my wits about me. I see that it’s in Washington State, people partake. I think it’s a healthier alternative than drinking alcohol, to be honest.

People don’t smoke a joint and then start a bar fight and kill people. They usually just chill out, whereas alcohol, alcohol tends to cause more accidents and more violence in general. Your product does not contain anything that would make someone high. Can children take it or is there a warning that children aren’t allowed to take it? How does that work?

[0:42:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s a great question. We do have parents buying it for their children and taking and giving it to their children. We’ve had a couple of parents say that it’s helping their child focus more, be less hyperactive. So children are taking it. It’s just like anything. When you’re talking about children, or pregnant women, or any of that, it’s just making sure that whatever y our primary care physician or anyone that has some medical experience to just make sure that they’re in the loop.

There haven’t been a lot of studies just because CBD is so new. We’ve talked about there is an endocannabinoid system in every mammal. Whether you’re a newborn or you’re 80 years old, CBD has the ability to interact with your body however it may do that. Especially with really young children, as children get into their teens, then you don’t have as much concern. That’s just something that you want to watch very carefully.

You’ve got children that are obviously taking it for the treatment of epilepsy with Epidiolex. They’ve done a lot of safety studies on these children. Looking at their liver and making sure that it wasn’t toxic to their liver in really high doses. That doesn’t seem to be a big safety concern, but at the same time, I think anytime you’re giving something to your children you’ve got to make you’re really educated. If you’ve got any questions, we’re here to help. Certainly, your physician should be able to help guide that conversation.

[0:44:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. That makes so much sense. I know of a few epileptic children who have completely been able to—and these were the ones that weren’t responding to drugs. Using cannabis, using CBD they, were able to reduce. In one instance, one person completely eliminated their seizures. That’s very interesting. I’ve had several doctors on the show talk about this. That our body has the endocannabinoid system. We have receptors for cannabinoids, and our body makes cannabinoids. So essentially our body’s making CBD. Because we’re nutrient deficient, so let’s say Omega 3s, whatever fatty acids our body uses to make these endocannabinoids.

When we are deficient in certain healthy fats our body can’t make enough of it, and then we become deficient in them. Then when we take an external CBD, it is like filling the nutrient deficiency. It’s a nutrient we’re deficient in. Those people that gain great benefits, so they take the CBD and they notice that they’re happier, calmer, significantly less anxiety, they’re able to focus, that they have better sleep, that they’re in less pain.

Those people had nutrient deficiencies and fatty acids to the point where their body wasn’t making. Their own endocannabinoid system was deficient, so now they’re fulfilling it. Some people take CBD and they don’t notice anything. Well, maybe they don’t have anxiety, they don’t have pain, and they don’t have problem sleeping. They were kind of surprised, “I took it. I didn’t notice anything.” Well, maybe they’re not deficient. So they took it, but the CBD didn’t need to fulfill. There was no nutrient deficiency for that person.

It’s not that CBG doesn’t work, it’s that it really works for people who are nutrient deficient, and many people are. Many people don’t have enough of those healthy fatty acids because we’re eating the wrong fats. We’re eating polyunsaturated fatty acids. That’s the majority of our diet, especially in the United States. So we’re getting the wrong fats, which are clogging everything up instead of the right fats that we can use, that our body can use to fulfill the endocannabinoid system.

Your CBD supplement is literally a supplement that’s fulfilling a deficiency, which is what these doctors are saying. I find that to be really fascinating especially when we look and see that some children react really well to it. Of course elderly and everyone in between. This deficiency doesn’t discriminate against age because it’s about whether we’re consuming, digesting, and absorbing enough nutrients.

This is what these doctors are saying about CBD. So we can really see it as a nutrient that is necessary for our body and not something that’s recreational or something just that’s cute and fun and, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It’s an essential nutrient the body actually needs.

[0:48:10] Jay Hartenbach: Totally. I couldn’t agree more. That’s one thing that really has to be communicated, that endocannabinoids system like you said. An endo-cannabinoid, as an example, is anandamide, which is a very similar analog to CBD. So if your body’s not producing that, like you said, because you’re not getting the right fats in your body, they’ve linked omega-3 deficiency with the inability to produce endocannabinoids as an example, then you’re going to need some type of supplement. Going back to the earlier point of if we ultimately sell less CBD because people are healthier, then that’s okay because we’re going to get more customers. I don’t think the world is going to have a shortage of people that are not nutrient deficient or need to be healthier.

If we can help people on their health and wellness journey, get a little bit more healthier then I think that’s awesome. That’s just a huge win for us as a company. We’re going to start understanding that even more as we do more research. Like everything in the body, it’s never black or white. It’s always something connected to another thing. There’s never a one fix-all. You could take a ton of CBD, but if you’re sleeping two hours at night, you’re probably not going to be a very healthy person. You sleep eight hours at night and you eat McDonald’s for lunch every day.

It’s all about balance and making sure that you’re in touch with your body. I love what you said about just being grounded in general. Because when people have more self-awareness of what’s going on in their body, then they can find even more effective treatments because they know exactly what issue they need to address.

[0:49:47] Ashley James: Wonderful. It has been about a year and a half, and you’ve talked about some exciting things. Is there anything in the CBD industry that’s come out that really surprised you? Because you have been so deep in this information. Has anything surprised you recently about CBD? Any new studies that have shocked you?

[0:50:14] Jay Hartenbach: New studies that shocked me, let me think on that. We talked about this. What we understand of the endocannabinoid system is going to be turned on its head, a little bit at least. That’s not for the worst, I think that’s just us understanding it better. The endocannabinoids system is going to continue to be very important, but just know that CBD isn’t limited to just these CB1 and CB2 receptors I think is relatively groundbreaking for scientists because they’ve been so closely looking at CB1 and CB2 receptors.

What’s going to be really groundbreaking, maybe we talk in a year and a half—hopefully, it’s much sooner—it’s these other cannabinoids that are now coming to light. They’re becoming feasible to put into products. Early studies of CBG I thought were pretty groundbreaking and showing that it could be antibacterial. That it’s actually helping. I saw some studies out of the UK that it shows that it’s actually helping with cancer.

That’s really on the forefront. Everyone has this sneaking suspicion that we’re just scratching the surface, and it’s great to see those finally come to light. I think shocking just in the CBD world in general, what we’re seeing is the FDA finally coming on board. We’re kind of shocked by how long it took the FDA. It’s one of those things where I totally respect what the FDA is doing. They need to do it in a systematic way so that they’re not doing it incorrectly or leaving any loopholes, but the longer they take to act the more time unscrupulous companies can exist.

We’re very careful when we’re talking about medical claims and making sure that we have our products manufactured correctly. It’s hard to continue to stay and compete and do well when you have some guy that’s mixing it up in his garage and he’s saying that it’s going to be the end-all-be-all.

Medterra is doing fine, but it’s that has been shocking because ultimately, the FDA can do a lot of good by being very clear on future guidelines of CBD and really forcing the bad actors to either clean up their act or get out of the industry.

[0:52:34] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to be careful about the claims that these companies make. It’s kind of the Wild Wild West, isn’t it? We want good regulations but at the same time, the FDA is a revolving door for pharmaceutical companies. They’re threatened by CBD because it’s cutting into their profits because people are getting off of pain meds or reducing pain meds. That reduces their profits.

I’m always leery. On one hand, we want the FDA to protect us, but on the other hand, we don’t want them to take away our right to access it. That’s why the FDA does not regulate supplements. There are laws. You can’t make health claims.

I can’t say, “Buy my vitamin C. It cures XYZ disease.” You can’t make health claims and make a profit off of something. If I was a doctor, I could say, “Vitamin C cures scurvy,” and that would be legal. But I couldn’t say, “My vitamin C brand cares scurvy. You should buy it.” There are laws around health claims and selling supplements, but as far as if the FDA regulated the supplement industry, they would do so in order to shut down many of the good companies that are out there. This is just getting into we need the Goldilocks. We need the balance. We need to be able to have good regulations, like you said, can get the bad actors to clean up or get out.

I’m always like just cautious because CBD is such a good product at reducing pain. It is cutting into the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. So I don’t want them to start regulating it to the point where it’s going to shut down good companies like you. Your company could lobby. Have you considered hiring some lobbyists to help Medterra and help the whole CBD industry? Is it to the point where we don’t need to lobby?

[0:55:00] Jay Hartenbach: No. There definitely need political action. Medterra, since really our existence, we’ve been a part of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. This year, we actually just joined the Executive Board of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. It’s a great advocacy group that works directly with politicians. It’s so interesting what politics being so polarizing. We are, as a group, working closely with Senator McConnell’s office and also working with Senator Schumer’s office. Depending on which side of the aisle you lean towards, one of those names might send chills up your spine.

[0:55:42] Ashley James: You need both sides to be on your side. You just need everyone to be on the side of CBD. It doesn’t matter. You just need all of them. Get as many of them as possible.

[0:55:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s exactly it. They are. I guess it’s maybe a little biased, but I feel like the politicians in my mind are redeeming themselves. Because there’s this idea in America that some of the politicians can be very self-serving or just really only aligned with the party and not necessarily in with putting American citizens’ interests first. Them both working with each other, it kind of shows that look they are working towards a greater good. The new FDA Commissioner even said—I think it was a couple of weeks ago—said, “I would be a fool to think that I could outlaw CBD.”

We know what the future holds we just don’t know when. The first step that’s going to happen in probably sometime this summer, Congress is looking to pass a bill that will include language mandating that CBD is a dietary supplement. We think that’s going to happen in the summer with obviously an election year as well as obviously this international health crisis that we’re all facing. There’s some TBD on that, but ultimately that will pass. The FDA, like we said, is I think in favor of making CBD a dietary supplement. They just don’t want to create a policy.

One of the issues is this will be the first time that something has existed as a pharmaceutical product that then is now going to be sold as a dietary supplement. The reason this was set was in 2014 GW Pharma, right when it became legal, filed their IND for Epidiolex. So it became a pharmaceutical off the bat before anyone could even sell CBD as a dietary supplement. They’re selling it now.

The FDA does have some concern, not about CBD, but what other pharmaceutical drugs are now going to start being marketed as a dietary supplement, or what pressure are they going to face for other compounds not even related to CBD because of the precedent that they’ve set.

I don’t envy their job. I know people have this love-hate thing with the FDA, but I do believe that they are acting really in the best intention of making CBD as a dietary supplement. I think they’re on board with that. Allowing there to be some clear guidelines to kind of remove those bad actors, and then just freeing up these questions and concerns. You’ve got retailers like we work with, as an example, Albertsons is selling ingestible CBD products. Other retailers like CVS and Walgreens that we work with only carry the topical products because they’re worried about carrying the ingestible products. There’s just this confusion that ultimately is going to get cleared up.

In the meantime what we’re also working on that pharmaceutical front and talking about veterans, we actually are working on developing prescription or pharmaceutical products. We’re not using synthetic compounds. We’re using CBD and we’re encapsulating in our liposomal format, which we have a patent around. So that will be great because then we can actually allow doctors to prescribe and say, if the studies go well, and we’re talking a couple of years now, “You can take this product for X condition.” That also gives it a little bit more legitimacy as well.

[0:59:20] Ashley James: What you’re saying is that you’re liposomal CBD, which is not synthetic, you’re working towards having it be a prescription which would be paid for then by their health insurance. It wouldn’t be a drug, it’s not synthetic. It’s still naturally-derived and yet it would be a prescription, which would be amazing and be very helpful especially for veterans, and servicemen, and women, the elderly who are on a fixed income, or the disabled who are on a fixed income. That it could be paid for by the insurance companies. The insurance companies would be happy because there’s so much evidence that good quality CBD, especially liposomal, helps people reduce their need for pain medications, which would actually save these companies money.

These pain medications come with a host of side effects that then would cause the insurance companies to have to shell out more money. They’d be saving money by going the more natural route by paying for the prescription of liposomal CBD. That’s really exciting. When will we be able to access your liposomal CBD? When will we be able to buy some? Is there a date you have in mind for when it’ll be available to purchase?

[1:00:53] Jay Hartenbach: Yes. We will be launching it. One of the new lines that we’re launching is our Medterra Clinical Line. As a company, we’ve worked very closely with independent pharmacists across the country really since the beginning of Medterra. They’ve been a huge part of our business. We’ve actually developed what we call our Medterra Clinical Line. They are higher concentrations of our existing products as well as some new blends. That will be the first line to receive our liposomal products.

We’re developing a sleep product that has liposomal CBD but also has life is only melatonin, which is also not very bioavailable. We can dramatically reduce the amount of melatonin that we’re putting in it because it is in a liposomal more bioavailable format, which is just better for you. Then we’re also doing a wellness liposomal product that will have turmeric and ginger in liposomal encapsulation, which turmeric as an example, has a very hard time being absorbed by the body.

Those are launching in June—so this summer—in independent pharmacies. Then we’re going to be ultimately releasing those liposomal formats in the third quarter for just the entire company. People can buy that online as well. Really, really excited about it.

[1:02:16] Ashley James: Will you have a list of the independent pharmacies that we can drive to and pick up your liposomal products? Support the local companies or we just want to receive it faster, or do you have a list on your website?

[1:02:34] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. Yeah. We have a store locator. We’re actually updating the store locator now that we’ve got these different lines and products. You’ll be able to search on the store locator probably I’m going to say two weeks. I usually over-promise on website development.

[1:02:51] Ashley James: All your employees are at home so they should be even more productive.

[1:02:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s true. That’s true. I will let them know that. In the next month or so you’ll be able to actually filter the store locator and say, “Hey, look. I’m looking for this specific, I live here and I want to buy this Medterra product.” They can validate if that store carries it. We work with—actually at this point—over 15,000 retailers throughout the US. Not all of them carry all of our products. It’s just helpful for consumers to figure out what they want.

We love working with the retailers because online is great. It’s a great business. It’s important to us as a company, but a lot of people when they want their CBD they want it now. So being able to get it and access it at a retailer relatively quickly is important. We’re thrilled with our retail footprint that we’ve developed.

[1:03:48] Ashley James: Nice. You know what, if listeners want to stay at home and get the package shipped to them they’re going to get 15% off by using coupon code LTH. They can’t walk to the pharmacy and say, “Coupon code LTH please.” So they’re going to get 15% off, and they get to stay at home and chill—Netflix and chill—and wait for their CBD to arrive. Coupon code LTH, 15% off on your website Medterracbd.com or they can go to your website and check out the pharmacy near them so that they can go there. I’m so excited about the liposomal CBD. That sounds amazing. Your turmeric will it have black pepper in it to activate the turmeric?

[1:04:33] Jay Hartenbach: That’s the thing. It won’t because it’s in the liposomal format—the black pepper is really helpful in increasing absorption because it slows down the digestion, but because it’s actually being not absorbed through the stomach and it’s actually hydrophilic, you don’t need the black pepper for the turmeric to be very bioavailable in a liposome.

[1:04:54] Ashley James: That’s really cool. It helps people because there are some people that are really sensitive to black pepper. That’s going to be great for them.

[1:05:03] Jay Hartenbach: We’re really excited. I’ve got some prototypes, and it’s my favorite Medterra product, not to rub it in for anyone that can’t get it yet. I think people are going to be really excited about it.

[1:05:14] Ashley James: I’ve got episodes I published four years ago that people still listen to. For someone who may be listening to this in a few months and they’ll be like, “Okay, I’m just going to go to Medterracbd.com and buy my,” what’s it going to be called the turmeric CBD liposomal thing?

[1:05:32] Jay Hartenbach: We’ve got a working name right now, but we’re calling it our Wellness Capsule.

[1:05:38] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Wellness capsule. That is so great for decreasing inflammation, that’s great for autoimmune, that’s great for, obviously, pain. Turmeric is anti-cancer. It mops up those free radicals. You said that there was turmeric in it and obviously liposomal CBD. What was the other thing that’s in it?

[1:06:05] Jay Hartenbach: Ginger.

[1:06:06] Ashley James: Ginger, that’s right. Wonderful. Oh, man. What a powerful combination. I love how herbs create—when you combine certain herbs it creates a synergy like 1 plus 1 equals 10. It creates a synergistic effect. They individually are good but combined they’re amazing. Ginger turmeric is amazing together. Really interesting to see how CBD and those two play off of each other while giving healing effects to the body. You’re not deficient in CBD so you don’t see this huge difference like some people do when they start taking it, because obviously, you take your products. Why do you love the liposomal wellness capsule, the liposomal ginger turmeric CBD? Why do you love that? What do you notice personally in your body?

[1:07:02] Jay Hartenbach: It’s a great question. One, I think it’s great because if you’re taking CBD as a liposome it makes it more bioavailable. You’re just going to get more bang for your buck with this CBD. That’s a preferred format if available, but the ginger and the turmeric, same thing. I used to take turmeric capsules separate of my Medterra products and ginger. So just having that all-in-one is great. Liposomes are a tough thing to manufacture. So when we first started, we’ve been working on this at this point probably for thirteen or fourteen months now.

Liposomes, when you have things that are not very bioavailable, can be tough. Making a liposomal vitamin C is actually pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of it, but you’ve got something that’s incredibly hydrophilic. You put it right in the center of the liposome and you don’t have to kind of wedge it in between the phospholipid biolayer. You’re good to go. When you start mixing with ginger, which we use gingerall, which is the active form of the ginger or turmeric as an example it can start getting a little trickier.

I noticed—and there’s maybe some placebo effect but I think I’ve got it pretty adjusted—that when I take it as a liposome there’s this mood elevation. If you read a little bit about turmeric as an example, it has been associated with just general feelings of well-being and can elevate your mood. One, I’d love it just because it’s ginger and turmeric. Those are very important they’re very good for your body and making it more bioavailable is just only going to enhance those effects. Taking care of also the daily CBD that I’m taking. In addition also getting this more uplift in mood, which everyone can stand to be a little bit happier. That’s why I like taking it.

[1:09:03] Ashley James: Everyone can stand to be a little happier right now. Come on, Jay. Come on, Jay. Launch it sooner. We need it now. Right now, we’re all freaking out isolated at home getting bored and anxious. If we could choose one of your products, what would be the best one to choose right now to help us calm down?

[1:09:33] Jay Hartenbach: The Broad Spectrum Tincture and the best flavor, in my opinion, is the citrus flavor. So we’ve got a broad spectrum both 1000 and 2000 milligram concentrations. The 2000 milligram, obviously, has more CBD but also has more of those minor cannabinoids. We’ve got a lot of people that have said that it’s been very helpful with their stress relief. That’s just giving credit to these other cannabinoids that also are playing their part on the body.

[1:10:08] Ashley James: Okay. So we get the 2000. We got one bottle of the 2000 milligram Broad Spectrum, citrus flavor. We get it in the mail sanitized—you guys are great. Then how much do we take? Is it a few drops? Is it one dropper full? How much would we take throughout the day? Is it one dose a day? Is it throughout the day? How do we go about taking this? Let’s say it’s a person of average weight. Does weight matter like a 400-pound person versus a 90-pound person?

[1:10:40] Jay Hartenbach: It’s one of those things that we were just saying where it really depends on just the state of your body. We’ve seen people that are 250-pound man only needs 25 milligrams of CBD. You’ve got 140-pound woman that may need twice as much. So my recommendation on it is starting with half a serving, so half an ml, half of the dropper. Take it in the morning, and just see how you feel.

The other cannabinoids, they do seem to have some of a neurological effect as well. The one—I should say not to complain but just what people have said is that it does help them feel very relaxed. Depending on what your day looks like maybe feeling too relaxed is not what you need. Starting with half of it and seeing how your body reacts to it. Then maybe taking the other half at night. Just trying that for the first couple of days and then going from there. Some people take it as needed.

[1:11:44] Ashley James: A lot of us are stuck at home with our kids that we love dearly that are driving us up the wall. We really don’t need to start drinking wine at 9:00 in the morning, which a lot of people are sharing pictures of their alcoholic drinks on Facebook. My friend is stuck. He’s a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He and I were best friends in junior high. He lives in a condo in Toronto. He’s isolated at his condo so he started to make—it’s the best, it’s so hilarious—exercise videos with wine bottles. His pictures or videos of clips of him throughout his condo doing squats and bicep curls with wine bottles. Then other people have joined him. There’s just this group of people that are all doing the wine workouts. They’re just lifting wine. They’re not like working out drinking the wine.

Just making fun of the fact that everyone is freaking out. I saw someone posted a in a homeschooling group. “It’s 10:00 AM. Can I pop the bottle of wine now?” People are just freaking out especially if they’ve never homeschooled before. We’ve been homeschooling our son, who’s almost 5. It can get very stressful, so I can imagine if families have multiple children. They’re looking to just calm their nerves. This sounds great. So the Full Spectrum citrus flavor sounds like a great way to calm the nerves. I would say get the 2000 milligrams tincture because you don’t know if you need the more concentrated, the less concentrated. If you get the stronger one then you can always just take less of it. If you get the weaker one, you might run out sooner if you needed a stronger dose. Does that sound like a good recommendation?

[1:13:39] Jay Hartenbach: Totally. You do get a better bang for your buck. Even if you only need half it’ll last you longer, but it’ll also just be a better value for your spend.

[1:13:55] Ashley James: Nice, nice. Okay. Cool. Use coupon code LTH, get 15% off. So Full Spectrum 2000 milligram citrus flavor. Let’s all go buy that so we can calm down a bit. Take half of a dropper in the morning and see how we fare. Do we hold it in our mouth for a few minutes and then swallow, or can we swallow right away? What’s the way to maximize absorption? Should we do it on an empty stomach or with food?

[1:14:26] Jay Hartenbach: I know there’s been a lot of back and forth on that. Is it sublingual? We haven’t seen too many studies that have actually confirmed in an oil format that it’s able to penetrate in the mouth. I always wash it around my mouth for 10-15 seconds, but ultimately swallow it. We do recommend that people take it with some food because if you do have some food in your stomach it just helps it get to the liver and that will speed up. People have seen a lot of results taking on an empty stomach. It’s pretty resilient once consumed.

[1:15:08] Ashley James: Because it’s an oil format, if someone doesn’t have their gallbladder, for example, they should take it with some food and they should take a bile supplement to make sure they’re actually emulsifying it so that they can to digest and absorb it.

[1:15:24] Jay Hartenbach: Great point.

[1:15:26] Ashley James: There are some people who just—because they don’t have a gallbladder—cannot. They don’t have the ability to emulsify fat so they’re not really going to absorb the medicine. Those people would really benefit from the liposomal CBD, wouldn’t they?

[1:15:41] Jay Hartenbach: They would. Yeah. Absolutely. It doesn’t need to be processed in the liver, and it doesn’t need to be in an oil suspension.

[1:15:50] Ashley James: I’m really looking forward to that product coming out. Can’t wait for it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jay, so much for coming on the show and sharing with us the latest. When I knew that the episode 420 was coming up I said, “Oh, man. Got to have Jay back on the show.” I’m only going to do episode 420 once and it needs to be one about hemp cannabis. It needs to be one of that. Obviously, everyone knows 420 and what that means. I was so happy that you were isolated at home and had nothing better to do than to be on my show. That was great.

[1:16:29] Jay Hartenbach: I just love that you thought of me for 420. I really do appreciate that.

[1:16:33] Ashley James: Yeah. You were the first thing that came to my mind. I’ve had other cannabis and hemp peep experts, but you probably are the funnest. Also just so interesting the fact that you’re so involved in the science, and in the industry, and in the latest coming out of the industry. That you’ve been in the cutting edge of how to create a full spectrum that is also void of THC is amazing. That your company is in the light. That you function in the light. That you show everyone that you are a company for good, and for light, and that you are not one of those shady companies that works in their garage and claims that they cure everything. You’re involved in the political side, the science side, the industry side, the production, side, the farming side.

You have your fingers in everything, but you also are navigating this crazy, crazy world of Covid-19 with your company doing it in the best way possible. Supporting your employees through this time. Everyone’s working from home, and your fulfillment staff is able to take a paid vacation, staycation. You’re able to keep the lights on because you’ve navigated this and figured out how to still fulfill the orders in a sanitized way to protect the customers. Really, I just love your company. I love the work that you do, and I love that you’re functioning in the light and for good. Thank you so much for the mission that you set out. If only a few years ago—when was it 2016—that you formed Medterra CBD?

[1:18:15] Jay Hartenbach: 2017.

[1:18:17] Ashley James: 2017. Oh, yeah. It was 2016 that you first started the conversation. It takes more than a year to get it all up and running. You’ve been functioning, you’ve been doing this for a few years, but you basically now earned your Ph.D. in CBD at this point. So congratulations. You now are a full-fledged Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks, you’ve earned it. It’s been great having you on the show. Thank you so much. I love your products.

My husband and I have really enjoyed your CBD. We’ve tried many others. We really get the quality is there. We really appreciate that. Of course, my listeners have told me that they really enjoy your products as well. I’m happy that you give us a 15% off discount. Thank you. Coupon code LTH. You talked about your conference calls having the dogs in the background. Well, I didn’t realize that my cat was locked in our office. He’s meowing. Your dog barked, my cat meowed. We’re clearly all at home under quarantine.

It’s been so great having you on the show. Thank you so much. Is there anything you’d like to make sure that you say to wrap up today’s interview? Is there anything left unsaid?

[1:19:42] Jay Hartenbach: No. I think we covered it all. Ashley, I really do appreciate the kind words. It means a lot coming from someone like yourself.

[1:19:51] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, Jay, can you just come back on the show every year and a half or so and update us on the latest in the industry? Or if something big comes out, some big science, something major in the industry that you really want to make sure we know about, please come back on the show. I love to keep all of us, all of the listeners—and myself included—up-to-date on all the really cool information about the CBD industry.

Keep coming back. We’d love to have you. Stay safe, stay sane. You were just talking about how you’ve been hiking because there’s a hiking trail right behind your house, but you, of course, stay a safe distance to respect everyone and everyone’s health. You are getting out in nature. If you can, everyone get out in nature as long as you’re safe and everyone else is safe. Get out in the sunlight. Get out in the open air.

Yes, we have a stay-at-home order. That doesn’t mean you can’t go in your backyard and get some sunlight on your face. We should all remember that for our sanity. We need to take deep breaths. We need to do things to calm our nervous system like taking CBD or putting our feet in the grass and our face in the sun and taking some deep breaths. We’re all going to get through this, and we’re all going to do it as a globe, as a whole. The whole earth, we’re all going to get through this together.

The more that we focus on self-care to boost our immune system and support our health overall our mental, emotional, and physical health overall. We will get through this in the healthiest way possible. We need to focus on that. You’ve brought up some great, great, great ways we can do that today. Thank you so much, Jay. Just stay safe and keep in touch.

[1:21:42] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. Will do, Ashley. Thank you so much.

[1:21:45] Outro: Are you in to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Homeopathy Treatment for Coronavirus

https://www.learntruehealth.com/homeopathy-treatment-for-coronavirus

Highlights:

Importance of awareness and exercising awareness
What terrain is
What susceptibility is
Why some people get sick when around germs while some don’t
Homeoprophylaxis
Genus epidemicus
Trust your intuition and get away from fear

Everybody from around the world is experiencing some form of fear and anxiety over the coronavirus. Dr. Cilla Whatcott is back on the show with us. She talks about different ways on how we can prevent or deal with the coronavirus by using homeopathy, homeoprophylaxis, and the importance of “trusting your intuition and getting away from fear.”

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I have interviewed Dr. Cilla Whatcott several times. Please go to learntruehealth.com and type in Dr. Cilla Whatcott. Check out all the other episodes that I have done with her. You can also go in the show notes of this episode for the links to my interviews with Dr. Cilla Whatcott on using homeopathy, and homeoprophylaxis, and past discussions on real immunity and creating a very healthy immune response towards all illnesses.

Today specifically, we are focusing on Covid-19. We’re focusing on the coronavirus. I’m very excited that she has some wonderful up-to-date information to bring you. Dr. Cilla Whatcott is connected with a network of top homeopathic practitioners around the world who are treating people that currently are experiencing Covid-19. They have the coronavirus, they’re experiencing it, and they’re successfully moving through the symptoms back into health using homeopathy. This episode is primarily about that.

If you’d like to learn how to increase the terrain of your body—it’s all about the terrain supporting your body and being the healthiest possible—please, go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s the Learn True Health membership. You learn how to use food as medicine, how to nutrify your body, and we also teach you some amazing other stuff as well. All about helping the terrain of the body to be as absolutely healthy as possible at all times for all ages and using food in a way that supports everyone. The kids love it. The recipes, we had to adapt them so the kids will like it. So please, go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen.

If you’re stuck at home and you’re wondering what to watch, go there, go watch our videos. We have over seven hours now. Every week we’re adding more great content. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and check it out. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Enjoy this episode and the rest of your day.

[0:02:25] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 419. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Cilla Whatcott, Ph.D. in Homeopathy. Her specialty is homeoprophylaxis. Cilla has been on the podcast several times. All of our episodes will be linked in the show notes. You can go back and listen and learn about homeoprophylaxis, and homeopathy, and how it can be used. The closest way I can describe it is like a vaccine in that it trains the immune system to mount a response. You’re the expert. We were talking earlier and I found out that you have some amazing information about Covid-19, about the coronavirus, and how we can support our immune system in this very chaotic time. Welcome back to the show.

[0:03:30] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank You, Ashley. It’s great to be here. I appreciate you having me.

[0:03:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. I heard that you hosted a webinar and it sold out. It was max capacity. Huge webinar where you were teaching people what we can do to train our immune system to mount a healthy response. I said, “Oh my gosh. You have to come on the show and teach us everything.”

[0:03:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank you. Yeah, I had a webinar. There were 900 people registered, and it was free. Now it’s available for $1 only, and that’s available on realimmunity.org. Right on the homepage, you can click on that and access that webinar and see the recording.

[0:04:12] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. I’d love for you to teach us today some things so that we can bring down the fear levels. Right now, fear is our enemy. Fear lowers the immune system. When we’re in a state of panic, and fear, and anxiety—even if you don’t think you are—you might realize that maybe you’re having trouble sleeping, maybe you have racing thoughts, or worrying, which is normal in being in a state of chaos that we’re in at the moment. In that state of fear, our body is in the fight-or-flight response, the nervous system’s response for survival. That shunts blood away from the logic centers of the brain. When that happens, we can’t think clearly, but it also weakens our immune response if we are in the state long-term. The best thing we can do is get out of fight-or-flight so we can get full access to the logic centers of our brain, so we can think clearly and make better decisions for our survival. Also, support our body to be in a state of healing and balance so that we are the healthiest we could possibly be.

I know that some information that Cilla is going to share with us today will help us to calm and ease that panic. Information is power and arming ourselves with what we can do with natural medicine to support our body’s ability to be healthy and stay healthy is what’s going to help us to decrease to that panic, and to regain a foothold, feel a sense of control again. Cilla, what do you have to share with us that is so profound? I’m just very, very excited. I can hardly contain it. What do you have to share with us that is so exciting about homeoprophylaxis and homeopathy in response to the coronavirus?

[0:06:15] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: First, I want to start, Ashley, with just drawing an analogy. If we look at our immune system and we understand that each time we catch a mild virus it exercises and educates our immune system. We build specific immunity—antibodies—to that particular virus. We overcome it. That real health is not never getting sick, but it’s the ability to be adaptable and get well to mount that immune response. What happens is we bump up against a virus, we contract it, our immune system goes into gear by creating those natural antibodies: a fever, a sweat, an eruption, and resolution, and then we’ve built immunity.

Fear, let’s look at it in a similar way. If everything is energy and what happened initially in Wuhan created tremendous fear, anxiety, fear for life, fear for well-being, fear for being isolated, losing income, losing family members, tremendous fear. An energy of frequency of fear was generated. That frequency dissipates around the world. We bump up against it. Throughout our day we hear something, we see something, we read something, and we bump up against that frequency of fear because it’s been generated. It’s no different than bumping up against a virus.

When we bump up against it, if we can then recognize that—okay, acknowledge it, observe it, this is what’s happened: I read a report, I feel my heart rate go up, I feel myself go into that fear mode, and then what do I need to do to calm that? Do I need to get a drink of water? Do I need to go to a yoga class? Do I need to—whatever it is—hug my dog? Whatever you can do in the moment—keeping yourself in the moment—brings you back to your base point. It’s identical to this process of bumping up against the virus, raising an immune response, regulating your system, resolving the immune response, and boom you’ve exercised, and gained an education towards that virus. You’ve enlarged yourself so to speak.

Same thing with the fear. We bump up against it in one of many ways. We acknowledge it, we observe it, we do what we need to do to move back from it, and we’re ascending our own frequency. We’re bringing our own frequency up so that we will not be sucked in and pulled down with the fear. Does that make sense?

[0:09:18] Ashley James: Yes. We can do yoga classes at home. Just because some of us are quarantined. We can turn on the TV and there’s YouTube. There are plenty of yoga classes. I like to just grab an essential oil and take a few deep breaths with it. That really brings me back to now, calms me down, gets me out of that fear response.

[0:09:40] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be an hour class. It can be petting your cat, it can be reading a book. The important part of that process is the awareness. Just be aware and observe yourself, “Oh, I heard the news and then I started getting frightened” That awareness alone is enough to start to educate, and ascend your own frequency, and pull yourself back. Then it’s easy to find some little something. For me, I can empty the dishwasher and it brings me back to reality. Do some tasks around the house or look out the back window. It’s simple. It doesn’t have to be long, and involved, or expensive, or arduous. It’s just shifting your attention.

[0:10:28] Ashley James: Wonderful. Yeah. Taking those few deep breaths and then becoming aware that this is my body, this is what I’m feeling, this is my body’s reaction to the news I just got. Because the mind, when we’re seeing the news—I woke up and I checked a text message from a friend and he sent me an article that was really disturbing about the financial predictions by economists about what’s going to happen. It was all doom and gloom. I could feel my body going into the stress response. I could feel my stomach tighten, almost like nausea. I could feel my body just going into almost like a pre-panic attack, but I felt it every step of the way. I’m like, “Okay,” and like you said, become the observer. I am observing my body responding to this crisis because when we’re reading an article, the mind is imagining, “What does this mean to me and my life? What does this mean to my family?” Our mind, in a split second, is imagining us homeless and having lost everything. In that moment, the body—because the body is always listening to the mind—perceives that as a threat that’s currently happening.

The body goes, “There’s an immediate threat to my survival, I need to go into fight or flight mode. I need to go into the sympathetic nervous system response to survive this immediate threat.” All I’m doing is reading an article, but my body is mounting a response like I’m in a war zone right now. I love that you said that do something when you notice the sensations in your body because stress isn’t an emotion, but we see the results of stress like elevated heart, or nausea, or sweating palms, or feeling dizzy, or almost like hyperventilation. Sometimes you feel a sensation in your neck like high blood pressure. Just notice what sensations you have in your body. Tunnel vision’s another one. If you can’t see your periphery you can only see tunnel vision. That’s another one.

You catch yourself and you go, “Okay, my body is giving in to fear and mounting a stress response because it thinks we’re under attack right now. I need to do a few things to tell my body that we’re actually safe in this moment.” That taking a few breaths, like you said, doing some chores, looking out the back window. For me, it’s breathing some essential oils, and taking a few deep breaths, and visualizing.

Whatever we visualize in our mind our body sees, our body responds to. If you visualize yourself safe and your family is safe, your body goes, “Oh, okay. Everything’s safe,” because the body is always listening to what we’re imagining in our mind. That’s why the body cannot tell the difference between what’s perceived or what’s imagined and what’s real.

That’s why our body will freak out when we’re watching a zombie movie even though we’re totally safe. It’s fun to watch those scary movies. Our body is going through all the stress responses as though it’s real, but it’s not. So it’s fun because, “I’m safe but I’m feeling like I’m under attack by zombies. This is kind of fun.” Some people like that, and that’s the exact proof. The body doesn’t know the difference between what’s imagined and what’s real.

Every time we see something on the news we’re imagining negative things happening or the impact of that to our own lives like loved ones dying or us getting sick. Then our body goes, “Oh my gosh. This is actually a problem that we’re facing right now. I need to mount a response.” That’s when we lose access to the logic centers of our brain because we go into the fight-or-flight response.

I love that you say the number one thing we can do right now, the first thing we can do is always catch ourselves. It might be 20 times a day, but catch yourself when you’re stress response, the sympathetic nervous system response, and do what you can. Whether it’s yoga, deep breathing, cuddling your children, hugging your cat, whatever. Do what you can 20 times a day or putting on a funny Youtube video, laughing for a few minutes to get your body out of that stress response, and imagining your family is safe, you’re safe. Imagining in your mind. That also helps us send that signal to your body that we’re safe, and that your body then gets out of the stress response.

[0:15:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Ashley, the most important part is the exercise. Just like the more you get a virus and mount an immune response, you’re building the strength of your immune system by exercising. Same thing with this, the more times you notice it and pull away from that fear response the more adept you’ll become at doing it. That’s what raises your frequency. It’s the repetitive action of doing it again and again that raises your own frequency.

[0:15:43] Ashley James: Right. I’ve talked to a man who’s very high up in terms of personal growth and development. Dedicated his entire life to teaching it. He’s dedicated his entire life to working on himself. It was hard to not put those people on a pedestal and think they’re somehow better more evolved than us. He said that he gets angry, that he gets triggered, that he gets in stress response. He says, “You don’t get to this point where you’re not going to do it because it’s part of being human. It’s how quickly you get out of it.” He might get really angry like someone cut him off in traffic or whatever, and then he catches himself and he does the exercise. He gets himself out of stress response. It’s the speed at which we do it.

[0:16:38] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: And the way to increase that speed is by doing it again and again and again. That’s how we increase the speed of it. Here it comes again and then try to adjust. I had an experience just the other day, something threw me way off balance. It took me quite a while to come back to my own center, but I observed the whole time, and then took steps. What am I going to do next time? How will I not get thrown off when this happens next time? It’s all about awareness, that’s all. Exercise that awareness muscle.

[0:17:13] Ashley James: You said, you learned from the last experience. “Okay. This threw me off. What things can I put in place?” I have my essential oils right by my desk. I have them throughout the house because, for me, it’s the quickest way to turn off the stress response. Utilizing several of your senses so inhaling, breathing, feeling, and also smelling that helps to bring you back. For me, that’s a good one. I have my husband and our son. Hugs and cuddles also help and talking it out with my husband. He’s very supportive of getting out of fear and back to what’s good about this.

That’s something I learned from Tony Robbins is to ask yourself what’s good about this? Even in negative situations, what’s good about this? I’m like, “Okay. What’s good about being quarantined?” Because right now we’re coming into a time of mandatory quarantine. After I list it off—what’s good about this—I started looking forward to it like, “Man, we’re going to get the shed cleaned out.” We’ve been meaning to do that for a while. We’re going to do our spring cleaning. It’s just this whole list of things that we’ve been meaning to do working on the garden. We’ve got a big vegetable garden going.

We’re going to make the best of it, but we ask ourselves what’s good about this? That also turns off the stress response because now I’m imagining all these positive things. My body goes, “Oh, we’re not under siege? Okay, great. We can go back into healing mode.

[0:18:53] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: That’s your immunity. Right. Right. Exactly.

[0:18:55] Ashley James: Last time we had you on the show you shared this ongoing story of how you battled cancer and you got it under control. How have you been since? You’ve been challenged. We’ve all been challenged with the fear that’s going on in the world. How has your health been since I last had you on the show?

[0:19:22] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I’m not sure when it was we last talked, was it August? Six months ago? I’m not sure. I’m in remission, stronger, better than I’ve been. I have to say, Ashley, it was the biggest gift I could have gotten, honestly, because it was a wake-up call for me. I put some things in place. I became more aware. Truly, it’s helped me to make changes in my life that were necessary. I view it as a blessing. I’m grateful. I’m really grateful. I had to come to terms with death in certain ways. I had to look at my diet, my exercise, my busyness level, my stress level, my relationships. I had to examine all of that, and what better thing to do than put all those things under a microscope and make changes that are necessary.

I’ve adapted a meditation practice that is very effective, a yoga practice, weight training, exercising more. My diet was pretty good. It didn’t need a lot of adjustment, but I’m always tweaking my diet. That too has been impacted and just my ability to create boundaries because I just couldn’t stop helping people. I never ever said no. It could be 11:00 at night, it could be anytime. I couldn’t say no because my empathy for my clients was huge.

I just reached a point—just before my diagnosis—when I felt like I can’t hold up the sorrow and suffering in this world anymore. That’s how responsible I felt. I let go of that. I reframed my perspective to understand that whatever we come into this world with, whether it’s poverty, or pain, or relationship issues, or whatever it is that’s our “cancer.” I have to honor other people. I can be here and offer what I have, but I can’t fix anybody else. Whether I answer the phone at 11:00 at night or wait until 9:00 the next morning, that’s not what’s important because it’s theirs. I have to honor and respect that it’s theirs to deal with. I can make my boundaries and still be helpful in that relationship with them.

I came to a deeper understanding of that so that I’m a lot healthier in how I execute my own practice. It’s good. Boundaries are a thing—it’s just like the exercise program, it’s just like the virus, it’s just like the fear. I got to rein it in. It starts to loosen up, and I feel it. I feel the warning signs, and then I rein it back in, and then it loosens up, and I rein it back in. It gets easier.

All those changes have been made. I’m in remission. I’m happy. My plan is to return to Mexico. I actually canceled my trip this week. I would have been there now for a tune-up. They do a full-body ultrasound, they do tons of blood work, they have hyperbaric chamber, they have vitamin IVs. All different natural immune-boosting things all in one place in a loving environment. I want to be able to go back there at least once a year and get a checkup, and a tune-up, and be doing that. So that’s the plan.

[0:23:16] Ashley James: The center you worked with is hopefourcancer.com, is that it?

[0:23:22] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. It’s the number four, Hope Four Cancer.

[0:23:26] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve heard great things from you, and I’ve heard great things from other people. It’s always good to share those resources. You, for many years, have been an expert in the immune system from a homeopathy standpoint. Then you really doubled down on your education around the immune system when you had to heal your body from cancer. Because cancer is an immune issue, so you’ve really been focusing on the immune system from a very different standpoint than modern medicine. We have to be very careful to say that we’re not saying we’re here to cure anything. The body does its own healing. I’m not here to tell you a cure or Cilla is not going to tell you a cure, but the body is the one that cures. The body is the one that heals itself. We can tell you information to support your body in doing the best job it can.

[0:24:32] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right. It’s all about the terrain. It’s the terrain. It’s not the germ, it’s not the disease, it’s the terrain.

[0:24:40] Ashley James: Can you explain that for people who’ve never heard it before?

[0:24:43] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Germ theory says that we get sick because there’s a germ, and it touches us, and that makes us sick, but that doesn’t account for why some people can be in the room with the germ, and they don’t get sick. Other people are in the same room with the germ, and they do get sick. What we know as homeopaths is there’s such a thing as susceptibility.

Susceptibility is our predisposition to getting that germ to catching, to that germ. Our susceptibility is based on our diet, our sleep, our emotional state, our relationships, our ancestry. Many, many components comprise our susceptibility. The susceptibility is expressed throughout the body at a cellular level. That’s our terrain. It’s the gut biome. It’s the blood. It’s all of our body.

There’s something called dark field microscopy that looks at a drop of blood and can see lots of facts about the terrain. I had this done three times during my process. Literally, there are some people doing it—well, I shouldn’t say some. I’d say anyone doing it can see these holographic images in the blood.

For myself—when I first had it done right after my diagnosis—I had in hand a mammogram and an ultrasound with pictures of the tumor. It was odd-shaped almost like a sword. It was sharp. It was long and odd-shaped. When I did the dark field microscopy, there it was a hologram in my blood. The identical shape, identical. It was bizarre.

Six months later, after doing all the treatments in Mexico, I had it done again. It was gone from my blood. I could still feel it, but it was no longer being represented in my blood.

[0:27:01] Ashley James: When you say you could still feel it you mean the tumor was still present in your breast?

[0:27:05] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. Correct.

[0:27:06] Ashley James: But the holographic image was no longer in your dark field microscopy?

[0:27:11] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Microscopy. The person doing it for me said, “If you want to have it removed this an ideal time because there’s no fear of spreading. You’re not going to open up and spread it.” Because this is what happens sometimes with surgery when you pierce the area. That was her advice. It had been about nine months at that point since my diagnosis. It was fairly aggressive. It had a 40% proliferation rate, and it hadn’t grown. I’d held it at bay, which was a win. I had about five people close to me that died during that time. Some of them from cancer, some of them from other methods. It wears on your mind. Every time, I just wanted to not feel it there anymore. I wanted it gone. I opted, at that point, to have a mastectomy.

[0:28:13] Ashley James: I think that was the smartest move possible because you did all this natural medicine for nine months and proved that you could stop the growth of it. It didn’t, like you said, proliferate, it didn’t metastasize, but you stopped the growth of it, of something that is a rapid-growing tumor with all the natural medicine. Supporting your body’s ability to keep it at bay. Then you had it removed. Since then, you’re free and clear and you still practice everything that you learned from the cancer to support the terrain of your body. Was it Louis Pasteur who talked about the terrain of the body?

[0:28:58] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: On his deathbed, he said it’s not the germ it’s the terrain. He recanted because he had discovered—he had talked about germs. It was on his deathbed that he said that definitely.

[0:29:10] Ashley James: It’s more about the health of the individual because, like you said, we can all be in the same room with a virus and not everyone gets it. Some people are asymptomatic, some people have it in their body but completely asymptomatic, some people die from it, some people have minor symptoms, and some people have major symptoms. Why is that? It’s not because they’re old. There are young people too that are having the symptoms. What is it? There have been older people who have completely survived. There are older people who have not had any symptoms at all. The question is what is it? Why is it that some people get it some and some people don’t?

One thing that’s very interesting—that’s come out of China and South Korea—is that the malaria drug in conjunction with zinc, because the malaria drug forces zinc into the cell. The cell up takes more zinc. The zinc interrupts the cell from making the RNA for the virus. It interrupts some way that the virus is asking the cell or hijacking the cell to make RNA for it.

I talked to some people about this, some health professionals about this. It’s very interesting because zinc is—someone’s healthy and if they have healthy zinc levels, then zinc is present in their cells. This comes back to the terrain of the body. If someone has their nutrient tank is full of the 90 essential nutrients, the nutrient tank is full of all the minerals all the vitamins that their body needs in the right amounts—including zinc—then what they’re seeing is that if there’s enough zinc in the cell, the cell will not make the RNA for the virus.

Maybe that could explain why some people don’t get the virus. They could be carriers. They could just have it in their body, but they’re not reproducing it. They’re not having symptoms of it because the terrain of their body was healthy. You said it was more than just nutrient levels. It can be stress levels, it could be genetics. There are so many factors.

[0:31:44] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Influencing it. Let’s take it one step farther. Let’s say your nutrient tank is full—as you have described. You come in contact with that particular virus or any virus. Your body sees it, but it does not get ill. It doesn’t contract it and get ill. What’s happened now? Your body has become familiarized with it because it’s bumped up against it.

This is similar to the principle behind homeoprophylaxis. Because with homeoprophylaxis, we’re exposing the body to the frequency of a disease, but it’s a safe frequency. It’s not material. If your terrain isn’t 100%, and your nutrient tank isn’t full, you are not at risk because this is a frequency. It’s not the material disease. Then you become familiarized with it. We’re giving it in that energetic form, in the HP, and then if you meet it in nature—because you’re familiar with it—you have a better chance of mounting an actual immune response or repelling it.

I have to say upfront, no method is 100% effective, nothing. Not a vaccine, not a medical intervention, not homeoprophylaxis, nothing’s 100%. We have to accept that to start, but certainly, something that’s safe and has been shown to be effective by the track record for over 200 years is a great option which is why I promote homeoprophylaxis.

[0:33:26] Ashley James: There are no side effects. It’s safe for all ages, right?

[0:33:32] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s safe for all genders, all ages, all species. In third-world countries, they can put it into the water supply for livestock. It can be used with other interventions. If you want to use other interventions at the same time that’s fine. There’s no cold chain required so you can distribute it very quickly. It’s inexpensive. You don’t need medically-licensed people because it’s not injections. They’re pellets so you can train people quickly. Nothing could be more ideal for third-world countries. You can quickly distribute it. In Cuba, 2010 swine flu epidemic, they distributed their HP to 9 million people. They never had a swine flu epidemic there. It didn’t touch Cuba.

[0:34:24] Ashley James: I was just telling one of my guests, he is traveling to Africa to do some research with some tribes there. I said, “You know, you should look into homeoprophylaxis since you’re going to go there. You’re probably going to get a bunch of vaccines, but hey you should check out homeoprophylaxis because it’s been proven to be very effective especially in travel in the third-world countries.” I’m not sure if we’re supposed to call it that anymore, but tropical countries where there are different diseases.

[0:35:07] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Tropical diseases.

[0:35:07] Ashley James: Tropical diseases, thank you.

[0:35:09] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Dengue fever, typhoid, common malaria. Those are some of the big ones.

[0:35:12] Ashley James: Right, right. He had never heard of it. I started telling him about what you said about Cuba. He goes, “Did you know I’m Cuban, and I had no idea.” He goes, “Yeah. I’m very interested in this.” I sent him the studies, and he was amazed.

[0:35:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Did you send him the leptospirosis study? The one that was done in Cuba that’s been written up?

[0:35:36] Ashley James: Yes. For those who haven’t heard it, can you explain that here right now?

[0:35:42] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Sure. The leptospirosis study—and this can be found in my free knowledge vault. If you go to familyhomeopathycare.com, click on courses. Within those paid courses there’s a free knowledge vault. You just sign up for the knowledge vault. You can go in, you can download whatever you want. The lepto study is there.

2007-2008 they had multiple hurricanes come through Cuba. They typically vaccinate the entire population against leptospirosis before hurricane season. Because they had multiple hurricanes they could not roll out and distribute these vaccines. They decided to try homeoprophylaxis. They have an institute there called the Finlay Institute and their research and development for vaccines. They distribute vaccines around the world. They have a natural department that was headed up. Within that department, they created this leptospirosis nosode that was for prevention. They distributed it to 2.3 million people in one region that they knew was going to be hit particularly hard that year based on charting prior years.

The first year it came down, but it came down in some other regions. So they thought, “Well, maybe it’s just down everywhere.” The following year they continued to dose the HP. The following year it flatlined to zero, and it went up everywhere else. That was their proof. It was written up. It’s a PubMed study. That’s inside the knowledge vault for people to see.

They have very little problem there now. That’s the last I heard. Dr. Isaac Golden, who’s the world’s leading authority with homeoprophylaxis, spent about 10 years there going back and forth between Australia and Cuba, collecting data, writing it up, and doing these interventions with the doctors at the Finlay Institute. Swine flu was one of them.

During this particular epidemic, we’re going into now, I consulted with Dr. Golden. He felt that the best HP would be a combination of influenza A, influenza B, bacillinum, which is from tuberculosis, and pneumococcal. That would cover the symptom picture. Because in homeopathy, we use the law of similars. We use things that are similar to the symptoms being expressed by the disease. That’s the homeoprophylaxis that I feel confident using. That being said, there are many very renowned homeopaths around the globe who are recommending other things for prophylaxis.

The Indian government is recommending the homeopathic arsenicum weekly. There’s a doctor by the name of Rajan Sankaran in India who’s well-respected. He’s recommending camphora. There are people out there that are recommending different things. There’s no one right thing. The choice has to be the individual’s choice based on their feelings of security. For myself, I respect Dr. Golden, and that’s the advice that I’m going to follow, and that’s the product that I’m actually offering to people because something very close to that was used for the swine flu. It makes sense the way that he’s developed it.

I’ve also heard of just the actual nosode. Nosode being something from the disease products: sputum, saliva. A remedy is made from that as a prophylactic. That may very well be helpful as well. I don’t know. Isaac didn’t comment on that. He said he doesn’t know where that was procured from. He also questioned just a pure nosode because he had seen effective action when there was a combination of similars. That’s why he recommended what he did. That’s what I’m going with.

[0:40:20] Ashley James: For those who are just learning about homeoprophylaxis for the first time—I definitely recommend going back and listening to our other interviews with Dr. Cilla Whatcott—tell us a little bit about the history of homeoprophylaxis in India, and why the Indian government recommends homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis?

[0:40:46] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Indians are forerunners with homeopathy. They’re homeopaths go through four years of medical school. They operated in the hospitals. They’re well-respected. They really utilize homeopathy because it’s such an inexpensive form of medicine, and they can get it out to all the people in the rural areas. It’s easily distributed for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Their government actually supports the use of homeopathy.

During epidemics, they will put out public signs saying gather such-and-such place to receive your homeoprophylaxis. They have a boat that’s like a pharmacy—a floating homeopathic pharmacy that goes into the backwaters. Places where people can’t get out and get to the cities. They distribute different remedies or homeoprophylaxis.

In my second film called Passage to Real Immunity, I’ve interviewed one of the Indian docs about using homeoprophylaxis in India. It’s done. It’s used. It’s successful. They’ve done a large intervention with Japanese encephalitis that was very successful, dengue fever, chickenpox, chikungunya, lots of tropical diseases. They do use it.

They actually apply resources to experimentation to see what’s the best prophylactic prescription for this particular disease. They came out with their suggestion for arsenicum very early in this process. Early in the epidemic, the anxiety level was huge. This frequency of fear that we talked about. Arsenicum is very, very popular for addressing that. Perhaps—I’m just speculating here—perhaps by addressing that fear it brings it down to a level where the immune system can deal with the virus better. That may be a good intervention in that regard, but all epidemics are dynamic. Viruses are dynamic. They don’t stay exactly the same.

Over time, they’re going to morph, they’re going to shift. What homeopaths have done for generations is something called identifying the genus epidemicus. What that is identifying a number of cases—the more the better—seeing what the common symptoms are amongst those cases, seeing which remedies best address those symptoms, and they may come up with four, six, eight different remedies, and then they consult with other homeopaths around the world.

We’re networked. We all know that these remedies A, B, C, D, E are the ones that are treating the current symptom picture. If we get patients with the epidemic disease, we know we can use one of those remedies. We’re differentiating between one of those remedies. This is what was done with the Spanish flu. So 1918 Spanish flu, the mortality rate for conventional medicine was about 30%. With homeopathy, it was 1% who got it—

[0:44:19] Ashley James: So 30% of people—sorry. I want to just slow that down because this is so important. Back 100 years ago, there were hospitals that were dedicated to homeopathy.

[0:44:35] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct.

[0:44:37] Ashley James: We had—in some ways—access to natural medicine more so over 100 years ago than we do today because there was more freedom. Because the allopathic medical system hadn’t pushed everyone out.

There were hospitals. You could go to a hospital for allopathic medicine and take their pharmaceutical-based drug medicine, or you could go to a homeopathic hospital and get treated by homeopaths. Back in 1918 when the Spanish flu epidemic was happening, people who went to hospitals or saw medical doctors at the time that we’re treating with drug-based medicine, 30% of the people that had the Spanish flu died.

[0:45:29] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. Approximately 30% mortality.

[0:45:30] Ashley James: Huge. That’s a very scary number. That is much larger. Right now, they’re seeing numbers somewhere around between 2% and 4% depending on the country, but we don’t have accurate numbers with the coronavirus because we are not testing everyone.

[0:45:52] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right which raises some bewilderment at best and suspicion at worse in my mind. Because if something is so deadly or so transmissible, why are we not testing for it? What is that about? The not knowing raises more fear than anything else. I could have it. You could have it, any minute we could have it. Anyway, that’s another topic.

[0:46:22] Ashley James: We have to catch ourselves when we’re in that fear of others. I was just at Costco yesterday stocking up. There are signs everywhere that say six-foot social distancing and staff members were enforcing it. As I was walking around, we all tried to avoid each other. It felt like this air of distrust. You can’t trust your neighbor, you can’t trust people. It was very interesting.

I just started observing it and going, “Oh, this is just part of human behavior.” It’s very interesting. Let’s take that and go, “Okay. I observe myself doing this. That’s not productive. It’s putting me in stress response.” Instead, transmute it into love of my neighbor, “I’m going to stay six feet away from you to show you I love you, and respect you, and care about you. It’s not about not trusting you.” It’s interesting because we do that. There’s this reptilian maybe primal part of our brain that starts to want to distrust others and that was sort of being enforced.

Back in the Spanish flu, 30% of people passed away which is huge and totally worse. Totally, totally worse than the coronavirus. Thank goodness that the coronavirus is not as bad as that. Those who went to the homeopathy hospitals, homeopathic hospitals, what was the percentage? What was the mortality rate?

[0:48:04] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: 1.05% mortality.

[0:48:59] Ashley James: It is like how in the world do we not still have homeopathic hospitals? How in the world do homeopaths not work alongside our medical doctors and hospitals if that is the level of effectiveness? How in the world have we allowed, have we pulled the wool over our eyes and allowed pharmaceutical companies to take over our medical system, not for our benefit. Drugs are good, they save lives. I’m not saying no drugs ever. I’m saying that for their profits—if you look at the history of modern medicine—they pushed out all others. There are times we want to use homeopathy because it’s more effective. We should have a bigger tool belt. We should be allowed to.

[0:48:59] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: The why did it get pushed out—the answer to that is in an interview I did with an ER doc who now does mind-body medicine. I interviewed her for a live presentation. It’s on the Facebook page Real Immunity Movie. Anyone can go there and listen to that interview. It’s fabulous. Dr. Kim really outlines what happened in medicine and why it got pushed out. She does a nice concise job of it so people can listen to that there.

Part of the reason that that death rate was so high was because they were suppressing the fever. Aspirin had just come out and it was the wonder drug because you could give the same aspirin to 1000 people without having to take the case. All you had to do was see they had a fever, give them aspirin, boom their fever comes down.

Homeopaths had to take the case because they had a genus epidemicus. They knew it was one of these five remedies, but they had to talk to the patient, ask some questions, observe the symptoms in order to give the proper remedy. Then those patients were surviving, whereas the ones whose fevers were eliminated, it was forcing the pathology deeper into the system because the system wasn’t allowed to move things up and out with this fever, and they were dying very rapidly.

The reason I talk about this is because of genus epidemicus. It’s a method that’s been used successfully for generations by homeopaths. There are some classical homeopaths who do not support homeoprophylaxis. They say the only method to use is genus epidemicus.

I would say both methods can be good. Genus epidemicus is great, and we use it. I’m actually doing a class on it next week because we’re identifying the genus epidemicus for this particular epidemic, and it will morph as things change. But what about the weakest among us? What about those who get sick and die before they can get any homeopathic treatment?

Homeoprophylaxis can be effective and it works. We know it’s about 90% effective with these tropical diseases so why not use it? It can’t harm anyone, and it’s easy to distribute, easy to use. It seems to me there’s room for both in the world: genus epidemicus as well as homeoprophylaxis.

[0:51:34] Ashley James: Homeoprophylaxis is like a homeopathy vaccine in that it trains the immune system—

[0:51:44] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It exercises.

[0:51:45] Ashley James: Exercises, familiarizes. The immune system makes a more educated approach when it then actually comes in contact with the pathogen versus genus Epidemicus, which is once we already have the illness, then we want to take some homeopathy to help us move through the symptoms faster.

[0:52:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct, correct. Exactly.

[0:52:11] Ashley James: Both should be in our tool belt.

[0:52:17] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Genus epidemicus, if you’re really ill, you probably need a professional homeopath to intervene, to differentiate what remedy you need. I wouldn’t recommend people treating themselves but have remedies on hand. If you have to reach out to a homeopath that’s easy enough to do or if you have enough education knowledge in homeopathy you could probably differentiate and choose the right remedy, but it’s not so easy to treat yourself or your family. Even homeopaths, we reach out to colleagues if it’s ourselves or our family.

Having those genus remedies can be really helpful. Right now I know because I have people emailing me daily saying a lot of the homeopathic pharmacies are out of a lot of the remedies. They’re not able to fill orders, many of them right now.

I know for myself with the Influenzinum CV that I’m offering, I can’t keep it in stock. I pick up 100 or 200 vials of it at a time and they sell out within a day. I have doctors’ offices. This is the encouraging thing. I have MD’s offices contacting me for the Influenzinum CV. They’re open-minded, forward-thinking MDS, and their practices lean towards natural methods, but they’re MDs. They’re classically trained in medical school. They recognize the value of it. They’re reaching out for Influenzinum CV.

[0:53:52] Ashley James: Very exciting. When someone gets a vial of this, they can actually make it last years. Because I got the Influenzinum from you—gosh, I want to say two years ago. It’s when I interviewed you about it. It was well over a year ago. It has to be over a year ago because I’ve been through almost two flu seasons now with it. We didn’t get the flu both seasons.

There have been times where we felt like, “Oh, I kind of feel flu-like symptoms,” and then we would take it, and it would pass. We, of course, do lots of other stuff too to keep our immune system up and to support our body in general. When I took the Influenzinum and made a vial, took a few pellets of this whole vial of pellets, and put it in some alcohol. We don’t really drink. A friend left sake in our house so I ended up making it out of sake and a big dropper bottle. Then pounding it 100 times.

We keep it in the fridge. We just take a few drops of it every week or every two weeks. Like you said, it’s retraining with homeoprophylaxis, with the Influenzinum, you can take it every few weeks throughout flu season to educate your immune system to mount an intelligent response.

[0:55:26] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: You made a tincture. That’s great. That’s really commendable. Yeah, you made a tincture. Those pellets, you could have made 100 bottles of tinctures from those pellets.

[0:55:34] Ashley James: Right. It could last our family forever. It’s why I love. It’s such an inexpensive medicine. It’s not molecular medicine, it’s energetic medicine. A lot of us have been raised in the system of if I can’t see it out I don’t believe it. That molecular medicine is the only kind of medicine.

[0:56:00] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Ashley, let me present this to you. Let’s say you were around in 1800, and I said to you, “I’m going to take a picture of you, and I’m going to look at your bones. I’m going to see all your skeletons.” You would have looked at me like I was from Mars. Now, we x-ray people.

Technology is never done. Very clearly, it’s catching up to homeopathy. These energetic methods are becoming more understood and more explainable. It’s happening. The science is catching up. The science is there. Trust me, we are going to see the day where it’s explained and it’s accepted. It is the future of medicine. I honestly believe that.

[0:56:48] Ashley James: I really believe it too. I’ve done a few interviews recently talking about energy, and the morphic field, and how we can affect it and it affects us. There are so many scientific studies happening now to prove that matter and energy go in and out of phase with each other. There even whirled a photograph—a particle being a wave and a particle at the same time recently. You could probably google it, but they just took an image right at the moment where a particle was becoming a wave.

Something physical, something material was becoming energy and phasing in and out. We have to just really wrap our brain around this idea that we are energy, that our body is frequency, that we vibrate, and that there’s actually more space in us if you think about it. I love thinking about is, on a molecular level, the space between atoms that were actually made up of a lot of space when you think about it. That we’re all vibration and frequency. That’s what homeopathy is. No wonder, it is so effective. When you get the right remedy if you’re helping the body move through symptoms.

A homeoprophylaxis is so effective because, like you said, it’s a non-invasive way of training the immune system to mount over an intelligent response. Have you met anyone who’s been using homeopathy and has been in contact with the virus or have you talked to any colleagues?

[0:58:42] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yeah. One colleague who gave a webinar on the genus epidemicus has called between 60 and 70 cases of positively diagnosed coronavirus from around the world—all different countries. That’s what he’s based the genus epidemicus on. He has had actual proof of the disease itself and the remedies.

Personally, because of the dearth of testing in Minnesota where I am there hasn’t been testing. I have been treating many children mostly that have had suspiciously similar symptoms, but they’re not taking any kind of test. I’ve treated them homeopathically. Some of them have been quite miserable, but they get through it. The parents are freaked out over the symptoms. The high fever and child’s moaning and clearly uncomfortable—very, very uncomfortable—but they make it through.

[0:59:55] Ashley James: There is a woman here in Duvall, Washington who was a first responder for a nursing facility in Kirkland where they became confirmed cases—some of the first responders. I think there was something like 50 or 60 in total that were infected. She was one of them, and because she’s a health professional, documented her experience through the entire thing and wrote down.

She said she’s got the fever. It was about 102 point something. Then after the fever, she had a day where her lungs were on fire. She said her lungs were burning, but she documented and shared all of her symptoms. I hadn’t heard that before that symptom that she said her lungs were on fire and burning for a whole day. She survived and shared her experience in hopes that it would help.

The children that have been having the high fever, and the moaning, and the similar symptoms, did the parents also get it? Are you seeing a lot of?

[1:01:04] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: In some cases, yeah. In some cases it went we went through the family, others not. A lot of my patients are from Hawaii to New York. They’re all over the map. They’re not necessarily only here. Some in California, some in Hawaii, New York, East Coast—a bunch on the East Coast, which is what made me suspicious because it would be the coast that would pick it up first with flights coming in. That’s where I’ve been treating most of these sick kids.

[1:01:36] Ashley James: Like you said, we should work with a homeopath because I might have burning lungs, and someone else might have burning lungs, but because of how we present our symptoms, and because of our constitutional, and all these factors a homeopath might give me a different remedy than someone else as they’re going through the disease. It’s best to work with an experienced homeopath. Are there some remedies that you can share that yes, people should stock up on or have available that have been really helpful to help people move through the fever? Especially what’s deadly is the inability to breathe.

[1:02:24] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, right. We see a lot of lung involvement. I’m actually going to be doing an in-depth class on this next week, which will be available through my website. A little sneak peek I would just mention a few remedies. The first one is aconite. In stage one of this, we’re seeing a lot of aconite, which is a very sudden onset of high fever. You’re not feeling well, maybe something’s wrong, and boom 102 fever—very sudden. That’s an aconite feature. You can always start with aconite.

We’re also seeing a lot of phosphorus symptoms or phosphoric acid. The difference between phosphorus and phosphoric acid, there are lung symptoms, there can be choking, coughing, desire for cold drinks. The phosphoric acid has a lot more depletion, exhaustion. We see that also in stage 1 and stage 2 of this virus where there’s tremendous depletion. People are just limp, very heavy, very tired.

Then one of the most common remedies is antimonium tartaricum. This is for the inability to cough something up and out. You see in the elderly they’re not strong enough to cough something up, that they can’t expectorate, or very young children sometimes need antimonium tartaricum because they don’t have the musculature to cough and get something up and they start to choke on it. A lot of antimonium tartaricum, phosphorus, phosphoric acid, aconite is there.

There are a few others, which I’ll go into detail next week in the class with what we call materia medica. It’s a list of symptoms that are associated with that particular remedy.

[1:04:17] Ashley James: This is great for people who don’t have access to a homeopathic practitioner or like you said, it’s the middle of the night and we’re just trying to move through the symptoms. What’s the difference between suppressing a symptom and helping the body move through them?

[1:04:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Suppression takes place when you use a pharmaceutical drug to stop the action of something, so stopping the fever with a pharmaceutical drug. Giving any homeopathic remedy is supportive. Given correctly it’s supportive. I suppose you could suppress with a homeopathic remedy if you hammered a system with the wrong remedy time and time again, but in the right hands, homeopathy is supportive.

The other remedy for high fever is belladonna of course. You can put that in water and give it to a child every 15 minutes to bring a high fever down, and you’re not suppressing the fever. You’re facilitating the body to function with the fever, move through the fever.

The other thing that can be helpful for fever, which is a folk medicine prescription is calcium lactate. This is a supplement. In high fever, the muscles try to leach calcium from the bones. You burn up your calcium very quickly. If you supplement with calcium lactate—it comes in powder, it comes in pellets—you can put it in water, you can put it in juice, and have the child sip it. I’ve known families that never use any fever reducer. They use belladonna, they use calcium lactate.

The calcium lactate can also be helpful if children are prone to febrile seizures. Febrile seizures can occur because the muscles are trying to leach calcium from the bones so they’re spasming to leach that calcium. You see it when the fever goes up rapidly very, very quickly. They don’t necessarily pretend a lifelong of seizures. It’s scarier for the parent than the child, but the calcium lactate can preclude that. Keep getting the calcium in the system and have them sip this calcium lactate in juice or water.

[1:06:39] Ashley James: Does the body do this—leach calcium from the bones—to put into the muscles because a fever is acidic and it’s trying to balance the acidity?

[1:06:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I can’t really answer that, Ashley. All I know is that there’s a higher demand for calcium. I don’t know about the acid-base balance.

[1:07:00] Ashley James: I wonder if people who are deficient in their minerals because if you don’t eat a really good diet it’s very easy to be deficient in minerals. We’ve been lied to about just drink your cow milk. The reason why cow milk has such minerals is they feed the cows supplements. Well, let’s just skip the middleman, take some supplements ourselves, and also why don’t we just go eat what the animals eat, get some greens in us.

[1:07:29] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, and leave out the antibiotics that the animals get.

[1:07:32] Ashley James: Yes, yes. Also, milk is the biggest food that affects the immune system because you’re drinking the immune system of another animal. It’s very confusing for our immune system. Many, many reasons to cut out milk to promote a healthy immune system. That’s not my opinion. That’s from Naturopathic medicine.

We’ve been told that that’s where we should get our calcium from. Yet, animals don’t make minerals, plants don’t make minerals. Minerals are in the soil. How we get them, the best way to get them is from our fruits and our vegetables. If someone doesn’t eat enough, especially toddlers or children maybe they’ve been eating a lot of processed food like pasta and crackers. They’re not eating a ton of fruits and vegetables, maybe they’re mineral deficient or they have a digestive issue that we don’t know about because they’re allergic to milk. We don’t know.

Maybe that’s why some children get these seizures and other children don’t. The terrain of the body. If a child is fully nutrified and they’ve got enough minerals, then when under that stress of a fever they’re not having those seizures, but a child who’s minerally deficient— the muscles don’t have enough calcium—then they’re having those seizures as a result while the parathyroid is trying to get the calcium out of the bones to feed the muscles.

It’s again coming back to that idea of the terrain of the body, which is very interesting. Why we should spend all our time throughout the year filling our nutrient tanks, and decreasing our stress, and practicing self-love, and supporting our body’s ability to be fully stocked up, fully nutrified, and fully healed. That way, when we come across illness, it has its best chance of survival and of thriving. Very interesting about the seizures and the calcium supplement.

[1:09:48] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: You can find that information, again, in the free knowledge vault under natural methods. That’s in the knowledge vault for anyone who wants to download that.

[1:10:00] Ashley James: In the Spanish flu, when they were suppressing the fever, why was that killing people? Why was it killing people to suppress the symptoms?

[1:10:14] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Homeopathically we know that when you suppress that function of the body—the fever serves a tremendous function to reboot everything, to burn up bacteria, to burn off the illness basically. Take that away and it’s going to go rampant. The first place that’s going to go is into the lungs. This is what we see all the time. It goes to the lungs, and then the people would be coughing up blood in the Spanish flu situation, and dying very quickly.

It was understandable because the “modern medicine” was aspirin. You could treat so many people with aspirin. It was the modern way, so that’s what they were doing. In the class I have coming up I have some of the testimonials of some of the doctors that were treating homeopathically or the nurses that were in hospitals and seeing the difference between those taking homeopathy and those taking allopathy or conventional medicine. It’s very interesting to look back in history and see what happened.

[1:11:25] Ashley James: I bet. Absolutely. We need to learn from the past especially now. Especially now.

[1:11:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I know that members of our Homeopathic Association have gone to the State Medical Association and offered to assist and showing the data from these past epidemics and saying, “We’re prepared to assist,” but they’re more or less ignored.

[1:11:49] Ashley James: Of course. This is the system that’s been set up, and also people have been trained for the last 100 years by pharmaceuticals. If you look at Edward Bernays and how we’ve been manipulated. Just study Edward Bernays and how we as a society have been manipulated over the last 100 years to view pharmaceutical-based medicine as the only cure, or the only tool, and everything else is quackery. They discredit everything else multi-generationally. They’ve made it so that we don’t trust great-grandmother’s remedies basically.

What we have to come back to, we just have to keep coming back to the results. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s look at the results. The results are that homeoprophylaxis has—in many countries—gotten great results, and it is cheap, it’s effective, there’s no side effects, everyone can take it. So why not? Why not practice homeoprophylaxis? Even if it just lowers our stress levels a bit, that’ll be helpful too.

[1:13:09] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, right, right. Exactly, exactly. Look back again, Ashley, at frequency. The frequency of conventional medicine is such that it can’t see or hear a different frequency. It can’t understand homeopathy. It can’t let it into its field because it’s at such a lower vibration, a denser vibration. I’ll have to say that for emergency medicine, conventional medicine is great. If you have an arm hanging off or you’ve been hit by a car that’s what you want, but it doesn’t treat chronic disease. It doesn’t really prevent disease in quite the same way as a good terrain can prevent disease. It’s a different frequency. Will it ever be able to see natural medicine or homeopathy? I don’t know. The frequencies are pretty far apart as I know from the whole cancer journey.

Every time I walked into an allopathic office it would take me days to get my center back again because the frequency would be so dense and so doom and gloom. You do this or it’s not going to work. You can feel it, feel a different frequency. I’ll have to look up Edward Bernays. Is it like mayonnaise? Is that how it’s spelled, Bernays?

[1:14:37] Ashley James: Well, if you just type into Google, Google will spell it right for you. Edward Bernays is sort of the father of media manipulation. He wrote some really good books. One of them is called Propaganda. He just shares his formulas. He is one of the people who is celebrated as creating how they manipulate us using media back in—I don’t remember the exact time frame whether it was the 40s of the 50s, but right around then smoking, only men smoked. In the movies, only the villain smoked. The cigarette companies wanted to sell cigarettes to women because that’s half the population. They want to sell twice as much as what they’re selling now.

They use this manipulation in the media all of a sudden they made they used Hollywood so film, and television, and radio, and print ads to make smoking be something that women have freedom do. That it’s a symbol of freedom, it’s a symbol of womanhood. They were able to very quickly turn the narrative 180 to go from only the villain smokes to now sexy women smoke, and your doctor smokes. Look at how their sales went through the roof because they were able to change the perception of cigarettes. It took them many years to change the perception of cigarettes to be like cancer sticks. We’re fighting still against their marketing in some aspects and the remnants of their marketing.

That’s just one example, but they’ve used in modern medicine they’ve used the same tactics to turn people against holistic medicine. They’ve manipulated, that’s very well-documented that the hospitals wanted to make more money. Birth pretty much happened at home. Home births—for how long have we been alive here on the planet? Hundreds of thousands of millions of years, who knows how ever long we’ve been here. It was home births. The hospitals wanted it to be in the hospital so they could make more money.

They started to put out advertising and articles about how if you have a midwife from a different country—so they used this xenophobia—that they will bring their third-world country diseases into your home. As they deliver your baby they’ll infect your baby. They made people afraid of midwives and said, “Your baby will die, and you will die if you have a midwife. Come to our clean pristine hospital we’re modern. You’ll be a modern woman.” Look at how they marketed that breastmilk was inferior to the science of formula.

[1:18:13] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Most recently they said that nursing your baby was contradictory to vaccines. Vaccines couldn’t work as well if you nursed your baby.

[1:18:22] Ashley James: Right, right. The thing is that we have to use our critical thinking. If you want to learn critical thinking there’s a website called Trivium Education. I think it’s triviumeducation.com. It might be .org. Google Trivium Education. It’s a free website that has been around for a very long time. I’ve been following them for over ten years. They teach for free. They teach critical thinking. It’s a system of thinking from Plato’s era. It’s a 3500-year-old system of critical thinking that was taught to people, but it was actually systematically taken out of the education system when they introduced the project and education system about 150 years ago—somewhere around there.

They took it out of the education system. It’s still taught in certain private schools like Jesuit private schools, but it is a system that was taught rigorously. It’s critical thinking. You can watch their videos, and listen to their audios, and you learn this system you learn all the linguistic fallacies. If you learn the system you will become a human BS detector. You’ll actually be able to hear the lies that the media is spewing. It’s all about gathering the facts, and not letting the spin and the Edward Bernays style manipulation take over.

Very Orwellian if you’ve ever—just read the first chapter of 1984. Watch the movie to get how the media spins things and controls to manipulate because all major media outlets are owned by the corporations that want to control the population. It’s not conspiracy this fact. It’s the first paragraph in Edward Bernays book says that he believes that the population needs to be controlled by a few powerful men that own these media outlets. That major corporations owned the media outlets so that they can control the interests. They can control the population.

I guess I’m showing my tinfoil hat at this point, but it’s about coming back to what we can control. Because I can’t control, the media does. I can’t control what the few powerful men out there are doing to the puppet masters. What I can control is my breath, I can control taking homeopathy, I can control eating organic food, I can control supporting my family in love, and joy, and bringing myself to a higher vibration, and I can control educating myself, and informing myself. So that when I take in the information, I look at it through the lens of critical thinking, through the lens of being able to decipher the fallacies. I recommend people study critical thinking, especially if we’re all going to be locked up in our homes for the next few weeks. Study critical thinking. It’s called the Trivium Education, triviumeducation.com or .org.

[1:21:49] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s .com. I just went there.

[1:21:50] Ashley James: It’s .com. Okay, good. I always think it should be .org because it’s a free thing, but it’s triviumeducation.com. Just study the trivium and learn the system of critical thinking so that you can decipher. Don’t just let the media dictate your nervous system. This will also help our nervous system to learn critical thinking because you’ll be able to see through the lies and stream through all the information to pull out the truth, and to weigh it, and to analyze it. If the medical system used the trivium and analyzed homeopathy, they would adopt homeopathy as one of their tools because they would see the results. They’d see that there is a place for homeopathy alongside allopathic medicine because people get fantastic results. It’s all about the results, and that it increases survival rate. That’s wonderful.

We have two tools in homeopathy. Like you said, we have homeoprophylaxis, which is something we can do to exercise the immune system. There’s homeoprophylaxis for all kinds of diseases, which is really exciting, but right now, everyone’s focused on the coronavirus. They can go to your website. Is it realimmunity.org that they would go to your website and go under shop for the homeoprophylaxis?

[1:23:20] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes, or they can look for just general programs for their family, for their children as well. For the homeoprophylaxis for viruses, for Influenzinum CV that’s under shop.

[1:23:33] Ashley James: Okay. I know that you sell out. So you have to go to the website every day because it sells out very quickly. Then you go, and you restock, and then it sells out again. One of my friends locally was able to get one. He says the tracking shows it’s on the way. He’s going to share it with all of us locally here, which is exciting. Just keep going to realimmunity.org, and checking out every day, and seeing. I know Cilla is doing her best to keep it in stock. We can use that for years to come because it exercises the immune system against several viruses, is that correct?

[1:24:18] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct, correct. You can use it year after year.

[1:24:24] Ashley James: Terrific. Your training, which is going to teach us more about when we have symptoms then we could take these homeopathic remedies to help our bodies, for our body to move through it faster—instead of suppress it move through it faster. How do we find that training?

[1:24:46] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’ll go out in a Mailchimp, it’ll be on Facebook, it’ll be on Instagram. The goal is to have it offered next Friday, the 27^th. I’m working towards finishing it up to have it offered by next week.

[1:25:03] Ashley James: Okay, great. If we got on your email list we’ll see it. If we follow you on Facebook we’ll see it. Is it going to be a live webinar?

[1:25:12] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes, live webinar with Q&A.

[1:25:16] Ashley James: Oh, great. I was going to say, “Do you have Q&A?” Okay, perfect. That’ll be great, so we should all sign up for that. That’ll be fun. For those who can’t attend live you’ll have the video for sale or available afterward?

[1:25:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Possibly. I might just be updating it and offering it again live. We’ll see.

[1:25:40] Ashley James: Okay. We’ll stay tuned. Cilla, I love how dedicated you are to education, educating us, and supporting us to support ourselves and being healthy. You’ve been on the show numerous times, and we’ve gotten to know each other over the years. I love how much integrity you have and how heart-centered you are in the work that you do. I only promote things I believe in, and I really, really believe in the work that you do. I feel like I’m the mama bear sometimes. I protect my listeners. I protect in that I don’t want to send them down the wrong path like I don’t want to be sent down the wrong path.

I protect my listeners by not taking on advertisers. I get offers every day for all kinds of things. I comb through them, and I have not taken any advertising dollars. I don’t believe in commercials because I don’t know if I could trust those companies. The only companies that I will promote are ones that I believe in that I know make a difference, and then I’ve gotten fantastic feedback afterward for my listeners saying that it really helped them. Then I’ll continue to promote those companies.

You are someone who I will—time and time again—refer people to because the work that you do is exceptional, your heart-centered, you are full of integrity, and you get great results. You have three documentary movies that listeners can check out. I definitely recommend them. You have homeoprophylaxis, a kit for the entire family that covers everything like polio, and measles, and mumps, and rubella, and all that stuff. That covers a ton of them. People can get the whole homeoprophylaxis kit from you. The whole family can go through that program. You’ve got lots of free information. Again, tell us how to get to your free library, your free vault of information.

[1:27:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: The free knowledge fault is on familyhomeopathycare.com. I have a free giveaway for your listeners as well, Ashley. The first of the three films, I’ve divided it into three half-hour episodes, and I’m giving away the first episode. That’s going to be on Instagram, Facebook. People will be able to find it on the Real Immunity Facebook page or Instagram page. I don’t know if my assistant’s gotten it up there yet, but as soon as she gets it up there it’ll just be a link, password, and people can access that first episode of the film.

[1:28:32] Ashley James: Great. I recommend just buying the digital access to all of your films because the three films together paint this great story. It’s so worth watching. Didn’t you have Dr. Debra Gambrell as one of your?

[1:28:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes.

[1:28:51] Ashley James: I interviewed her and we talked about this in a past episode. She’s an anesthesiologist who started getting into holistic medicine after her son was diagnosed with autism. He was on the spectrum to the point where he couldn’t be in a—if he was going to go to school it was going to be a very specialized school for people on the spectrum. She did natural medicine with him. Now she says in a “normal school.” He’s in classes with children who are not on the spectrum, and he is functioning with them. That’s very exciting. One of the things she shares in our interview is about the importance of fevers. She talks about that in your movie as well.

Parents, we’ve been trained to suppress a fever. We’ve been trained to give baby aspirin or ibuprofen to our children the moment they have a fever. We’ve been trained to be afraid of fevers. We’ve done a huge disservice to our children as a result because fevers are healthy. She talks about this that fevers are healthy. Seattle Children’s Hospital, which I adore. I adore the work they do. They have an article, you can google Seattle Children’s Hospital fever myths.

They say that even a fever of 108 or 109 for a child can be a healthy fever. I’m not saying it’s always a healthy fever, but it can be a healthy fever. When your child is 102, think about this, your child could be at a 108 and a Children’s Hospital in Seattle thinks it could still be a healthy fever. Dr. Debra Gambrell discusses in detail what to look for in children to see whether it’s a healthy fever or an unhealthy fever in my interview. Also, she talks about it with you in your movies.

The point is that if we suppress symptoms we could actually be doing tremendous harm and a disservice to the child. Of course, always talk to your child’s doctor, always talk to your pediatrician. Go read that article that Children’s Hospital put out about fevers. Listen to my interview with Dr. Debra Gambrel about it, and also watch Dr. Cilla Whatcott’s three movies that she made where she interviews amazing doctors of holistic medicine to bring you this information about how to support the immune system. Your movies are real—what was it? I get them mixed up.

[1:31:36] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s the Real Immunity series: Quest for Real Immunity, Passage to Real Immunity, and Choosing Real Immunity. Those are the three. They’re all available on realimmunity.org.

[1:31:47] Ashley James: The third one’s the best one but you have to watch the first two. You have to watch all three. You have to watch all three, so realimmunity.org. Go there, get the movies, get the digital access to them. I have a feeling we’re going to have a lot of free time on our hands for a lot of us who are social distancing or quarantined at home. We’ve got a lot of resources we’re giving you today to go check out.

It’s been so great having you on the show. I could just talk to you for hours about my love of homeopathy. I have some stories about homeopathy I share in past interviews so I won’t share them now, but I have had great success with homeopathy in my personal health but also in my child’s health when he was a baby when he was weeks old with horrible colic. I was trying everything. I was giving him the special little drink you give babies—that colic calm or whatever they call it—where it has fennel in it.

[1:32:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Fennel tea.

[1:32:54] Ashley James: Yeah, fennel tea. I was giving him fennel tea with a little bit of ginger. I was rubbing his belly with very diluted dill essential oil. I was trying everything natural to help with the colic. He had horrible, horrible gas pain. He was just looking up at me with these desperate eyes like, “Please, help. I’m dying.” His guts were being torn up from the inside. Horrible, horrible because, unfortunately, he had to be on formula and we were also getting breast milk donated. The formula was from a cow because everything else he was allergic to. We tried everything. We tried a lactose-free one that he was still allergic to it. While we were trying to access breastmilk he had to be supplemented on this. The colic was just unbearable.

In the middle of the night, I’m exhausted, he’s exhausted, he’s screaming, I’m crying, and I’ve tried a bunch of different things. This isn’t placebo. Then I put a little pellet of the homeopathy in him, and the calmness comes over his face. It melts in his mouth—this little pellet—and he calms and he looks at me. It’s just relief. He didn’t pass gas. It happened every time because, for the first year of his life, he had horrible gas pain and colic until we dialed what food allergies he had, and was able to adjust his diet for him, and of course when he got off breastmilk and formula.

Homeopathy was what helped him move through it. This is what I tell people for people who are skeptical, “How does homeopathy work for a dog? How does it work for an infant?” Because you can explain like if I’m an adult and I take it and I believe in it and then I get a result you could say it’s placebo, but how does the placebo effect work when homeopathy helps animals and it helps infants. Other things I was giving my child wasn’t working. So it couldn’t be placebo because he can’t sit there and think he’s a one-month-old baby. He can’t go, “Oh, my mom put something in my mouth therefore I’m going to have a placebo effect. I believe this will help.”

Homeopathy has been shown—time and time again—to work whether you believe in it or not. That’s the exciting thing. If you want to hear more of my stories that I’ve shared in my personal life. Cilla has shared many wonderful stories and also lots of great information. Go to learntruehealth.com, search Dr. Cilla Whatcott in the search bar at learntruehealth.com. You’ll find all the episodes where Cilla has been on the show. You can also look in the show notes of this podcast to find all the episodes. Listen to all of them so you’ll hear more great information about homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis.

Thank you so much for coming today and talking specifically about the coronavirus, and how we can use homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis for the Covid-19. Is there anything that you want to make sure that you say today to the listener? Anything left unsaid before we finish today’s interview?

[1:36:24] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: First, I want to thank you, Ashley, because it’s always a pleasure to come on your show. I just so appreciate everything you’ve said. Your recognition that I try to work with integrity from my heart means the world to me because that’s the most important thing to me. Thank you sincerely for having me. I think that the most important thing is to trust your intuition and get away from fear. That’s the keynote of my films, really. Coming at it from every direction to try to get parents to trust their intuition. You have this, and you can get through this. Just quiet yourself, go inside, learn, read, understand, know what you need to do for yourself, and trust that. That’s my best advice. Nobody can tell you what’s right for you. It has to be your choice.

[1:37:22] Ashley James: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Dr. Cilla Whatcott for coming back on the show. You are always welcome. Keep coming back, and keep teaching us. We’d love to have you. Before we wrap it up, is there a resource for those who would love to hire a homeopath? Either a digital one online or one in person? Some people, they’re learning about homeopathy for the first time. How do they navigate this world and find a good homeopathy?

[1:37:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Let me tell you a website, I’m just pulling it up. Center for Homeopathic Certification. They have a list—here it is, hang on. Council for Homeopathic Certification. The actual URL is homeopathicdirectory.com. These people are certified. I would highly recommend people who have the CCH after their names. It’s rigorous training, rigorous testing, and they are certified. Homeopathicdirectory.com. You can click on your state, and you can find who’s certified in your state.

[1:38:26] Ashley James: What does CCH mean?

[1:38:28] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Certified Classical Homeopathy.

[1:38:34] Ashley James: Is there any alphabet behind their name if they’re into homeoprophylaxis?

[1:38:41] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Some do, some don’t, C.HP. Certified in HP, but not everyone because I’ve certified quite a few medical doctors, chiropractors, Naturopaths. They don’t necessarily have that designation. You just have to ask and see if someone has training.

[1:39:07] Ashley James: Do you offer training for people who want to study homeopathy?

[1:39:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I do. I don’t advertise it publicly. People who reach out to me I save their emails, and then when I do a training I limit it to about six people so there’s a lot of personal interaction. It’s a six-hour training and the seventh hour is one-on-one with me to adapt it to your own practice. I provide tons of information, handouts, written information. There’s just lots of stuff. I’m hoping to teach that again sometime this summer. People can contact me. I just give them a free 15-minute consult so we can see if it’s a good fit for them.

[1:39:51] Ashley James: Got it.

[1:39:52] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: But they need to have a practice. They need to have some sort of practice. It’s not available to parents or laypeople. Professionals who are in some sort of practice.

[1:40:03] Ashley James: About 20% of my listeners are holistic health practitioners. Those who have a practice and want to learn homeoprophylaxis—fantastic tool to have in your practice—can contact Dr. Cilla Whatcott and see if it’s right for them in their practice. That’s very cool. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. So realimmunity.org. Lots of great information. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I want to leave everyone with the homework to practice self-care, self-love—especially now—more diligently. Soak in magnesium, drink lemon water, go for walks—even if just walks around your backyard. Get out in sunlight, ground yourself, take your shoes off and put your feet in the grass in the backyard, get out in nature. Even though we’re self-isolating do your best to get outside in nature and take care of yourself. Lots of love, and cuddles, and hugs to get the oxytocin up.

Oxytocin and cortisol are opposite. So cortisol is the stress hormone, oxytocin is the love hormone. If we can do lots of cuddles—30-second hugs with our spouse and our children—and love on our pets like you said. Our dogs, or cats, or whatever. We can increase oxytocin and that helps to decrease cortisol. You’re either in a cortisol state or you’re an oxytocin state right now. You want to keep yourself in oxytocin state as much as possible and keep yourself out of cortisol as much as possible.

My homework for everyone is to practice as much self-love as possible. Even if you have to write down a list. I have a list on my fridge. Just write down a list of ways that you decrease your stress and ways that you increase your joy. Whether it’s put on music and dance. Just ways you increase your joy and decrease your stress. Put it up around the house—post-it notes—to remind yourself, “Oh, I can do that right no. I can decrease my stress.”

Then after that, take all the resources we told you about Dr. Cilla Whatcott’s website and her free resources vault, and her videos, or movies. Also, if you want to study what I talked about today with triviumeducation.com. Take all these resources and bring that information into you as long as you’re staying out of cortisol, as long as you’re staying out of the stress response. If you catch yourself in stress responsible while studying, get up, walk away from your computer or your phone, and do something that brings you joy and increases your oxytocin. Stay in a state of oxytocin for better health long term.

Cilla, such a pleasure as always. Come back on the show again sometime soon. Keep sharing with us. I love, love learning from you.

[1:43:07] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank you, thank you, Ashley, very much.

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Mar 21, 2020

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Dr. Terry Wahls and Healing MS

https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-terry-wahls-and-healing-ms

Highlights:

What the Wahls Protocol is
Mitochondria driver of disability for MS and other degenerative diseases
Factors that raises cognitive decline
What carotenoids are
Diet and lifestyle choices made diseases develop.
Everything you eat will become you.
What do you want your health for?

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and needing to use a reclining wheelchair, nobody expected that Dr. Terry Wahls would be able to walk without assistance or even ride a bike for 18.5 miles. But she did. Be inspired by Dr. Terry’s story on how she put her multiple sclerosis in remission and how she helped other people put their degenerative diseases in remission by changing their diet and lifestyle.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Terry Wahls who is quite the celebrity in the holistic health space. She reversed her MS using food and has gone on to help thousands of people reverse autoimmune conditions and heal their brain, heal their nervous system. She has a very interesting approach to healing the body by using food. The majority of the diet is vegetables.

I want to let you know that if you’re the type of person that does not know how to cook and eat delicious vegetables, please join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Back in October, I started working with my friend Naomi, who’s an amazing stay at home chef. She has created some amazingly delicious and healing recipes. Of course, that’s what my passion is as well, using the kitchen to heal my body and keep my family healthy. We started filming, for four months, we filmed videos and we put them all up in a membership. Every week, we also add new videos. These videos teach you how to cook lots of vegetables, lots of plants to heal your body.

Dr. Wahls also talks about using things like organ meats to heal the body. She goes through that in the interview. Of course, you definitely are going to want to get her new book. She has so much science behind it and also many results clinically, which is really, really exciting. Thousands of people have been able to put their MS in remission and other autoimmune diseases in remission using her way, her diet. She explains that there are different ways to do it. You can take her formula and you can do it in a vegan or vegetarian way. If you have allergies or religious beliefs or you don’t want to eat meat, there’s a way to do it that way. A way to go more whole food plant-based with her protocol. She does mention in the interview it’s difficult but it’s doable. She works with Dr. Joel Kahn, who’s a plant-based vegan cardiologist. They together help people reverse heart disease, MS, and autoimmune conditions together.

In the interview, she says it’s difficult because they don’t have a complete protein. What she meant by that was not that the whole food plant-based diet is void of protein, it’s not, there’s protein in everything. In all plants there’s protein. What she was referring to is that her protocol is very limiting because it’s an autoimmune protocol. There are no potatoes, there are no beans, there are no grains. If someone is going to take her protocol and also be a vegan, they’re going to have to really monitor their diet closely so that they’re making sure they’re getting all the nutrition they require to heal the body.

We can use food as medicine. There’s not one diet that fixes everyone because everyone is on different paths. One person is healing their diabetes, the other one is healing their heart disease, the other one is healing an autoimmune condition, the other one is trying to gain weight, the other one is trying to lose weight, someone’s trying to gain muscle. You can accomplish many of these things by eating whole foods. What does that mean? It means it’s not eating processed foods, eating whole foods. Dr. Terry Wahls today is going to share some amazing stories and amazing success around showing people how to dial in their diet to heal their bodies.

If you want to learn how to cook whole foods and learn from myself and Naomi, we have some amazing recipes that are so delicious that our kids love eating these meals. Kids that normally don’t like vegetables are now eating them and loving them. If you want to figure out how to use your kitchen to heal your body, please join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You’ll also be supporting the Learn True Health podcast by doing that. We made it affordable for everyone. You could join monthly or annually. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. You are just going to love it.

I’ve got one recipe in the baked section that is a 10-pound lasagna and lasagna is 100% made of plants. You’re getting all your vegetables and the kids love it. They love it. They don’t realize that they’re eating so many vegetables. It is so delicious. There are no grains in it. It’s grain-free and is just very delicious. I call it 10-pound lasagna because it’s 10 pounds of vegetables. It’s just amazing. It’s so delicious. I am excited for you to join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and join our membership. You’ll be supporting yourself and your family. If you’re stuck at home during the quarantine, there are over seven hours of videos and content right now in the membership. You’ll be able to pour through them and learn all these wonderful recipes and ways of healing your body. We even have recipes that incorporate antiviral foods to support the immune system. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Excellent.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about especially those you know in your life who have MS or have any form of autoimmune condition. This diet, this protocol, is proving to be incredibly successful. I’m so excited and grateful to be able to bring this information to you today. Let’s share it with as many people as possible and turn this ripple into a tidal wave to help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[0:06:15] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 418. I am so excited for today’s guest. I feel like you are a celebrity in my world so I am starstruck. Dr. Terry Wahls here. You, to me, is the bringer, the mother of using food as medicine. The founder of bringing forth the knowledge of what we’ve known for centuries but forgotten in the last hundred years. That when we eat our medicine, when I treat our plate as if it’s our prescription, we can heal disease. You have been showing us with your own example and you’ve helped thousands and thousands of people so I am so inspired by you. Many of my listeners, when I told them I was interviewing you, got so excited because we can, with whole foods, we can heal our body and you’re showing us that. Welcome to the show.

[0:07:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.

[0:07:28] Ashley James: Absolutely. For those who don’t know who you are or haven’t seen your TEDx talk, which I’m going to make sure the link to it is in the show notes of the podcast. Everyone should google Dr. Terry Wahls and watch the first video that comes up is the TED talk because it is so inspiring. Even since then, because that was back in 2011, so much has happened. I can’t wait to hear what has happened since. For those who have never heard of you before, can you fill us in? What happened in your life that led you to using food as medicine?

[0:08:01] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m an internal medicine physician at the University of Iowa: very, very conventional, believed in the latest drugs, best technology, and was very skeptical of special diets and supplements and all of that stuff. God works in mysterious ways to teach us. I developed weakness in my left leg in 2000 and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I knew it’s a progressive disease. I want to treat my disease aggressively so I sought out the best people I could find, took the newest drugs, but went relentlessly downhill. Within two years, my Cleveland Clinic physicians had told me about the work of Loren Cordain. I read his books and his papers and decided, after 20 years of being a low-fat vegetarian, to go back to eating meat. I gave up all grains, all legumes, all dairy and was eating meat.

It was a big change. I continued to go downhill, but I stayed with that diet because I didn’t know how long to change my course. The next year I needed a reclining wheelchair. I started taking more potent drugs including Tysabri, that new biologic. Continued to go relentlessly downhill. They tried a variety of other disease-modifying drugs. They never had any impact, but I stayed with them because I was trying to do everything that I possibly could.

I also decided to begin reading the basic science and to do all that I possibly could. On that basis, I decided that mitochondria were likely the drivers of disability in MS and many other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s, ALS. I started making a supplement cocktail to support my mitochondria. That helped my fatigue a little bit, but I was still declining. I also have trigeminal neuralgia. I actually had that since medical school since 1980. My face pain was getting steadily more severe, more difficult.

I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine in the summer of 2007. I took their course in neuroprotection. I had a longer list of supplements, which I added. Not a lot changed, but then I had a really big aha moment. What if I redesigned my paleo diet in a very specific way based on what I’d learned from my review of the basic science and what I was taking in supplement form? It was several more months of research and I started this new way of eating in the December 26, 2008. Mind you, at that point, I’m beginning to have problems with brain fog. Of course, I have severe, severe fatigue. I am so weak I cannot sit up in a regular chair. I’m in a zero-gravity chair with my knees higher than my nose, and it’s a struggle to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks.

I start this new way of eating, within three months my trigeminal neuralgia is gone, my brain fog is gone, my fatigue is gone, and I’m able to sit up and eat at the kitchen table again. Then in six months, I’m walking around at the hospital with a walking stick. In nine months, I’m able to get on my bike for the first time in six years. I am able to pedal around the block. My son and my daughter are crying. My wife is crying. I am crying. In a year, I’m able to do an 18.5-mile bike ride with my family. Once again, my kids are crying, my wife’s crying, and I’m crying. This radically changes how I will practice medicine. It will ultimately change the type of research that I do.

[0:12:09] Ashley James: I bet. How did you come across the idea that mitochondria and feeding the mitochondria was the key?

[0:12:17] Dr. Terry Wahls: As I was continuing to go relentlessly downhill despite taking the best drugs from the best people, I was like, “Okay, I can go back to reading the literature.” I started reading the animal models for MS. Then I thought, “Well, I might as well read about the other neurodegenerative diseases with shrinking brains.” I’m reading the animal models of Parkinson’s, about Alzheimer’s. I see that mitochondrial dysfunction is present in all those disease states. Although no one’s yet talking about it in MS, but I decide since I never really had relapses. I had really only one relapse, maybe two in my entire course. Otherwise, it was this slow relentless decline, that mitochondria were probably the big driver for my illness. Then my research was like, “Okay. What nutrients could I take, supplements, vitamins?”

Again, I’m reading the basic science, animal model studies. Slowly, I’m coming up with a supplement cocktail that’s helpful. It’s not stopping anything but I’m slowing my decline. I can tell the days I skipped my supplements I don’t do as well. I’m very excited by that. I’m excited because I’m learning stuff that my medical team is not telling me. I’m feeling very impassioned and I’m willing to spend more time reading the literature. By now, I’ve been assigned to join the Institutional Review Board to review clinical research. I tell my partners that I want to review all of the brain related studies. I’m getting more and more comfortable reading the basic science, reading clinical trials, and I’m getting more comfortable experimenting on myself.

[0:14:15] Ashley James: Very interesting observation that the days that you skip your B vitamins and your supplements that you notice a difference right away.

[0:14:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. Well, it takes about 36 hours. Here’s what happened. After six months of my first round of supplements, the conventional doc reared her head and said, “Oh, you’re just wasting your money.” So I quit them all. Then I could go to work the next day, but then after 36 hours, I just felt profoundly even more exhausted. On the third day, my wife came in, “Honey, I think you oughta take these again.” I took them and the next morning I could go to work. I thought, “Wow. That is really, really interesting.” Two weeks later, I did the same thing, I stopped all my supplements. Again, at 36 hours, my fatigue was even much more severe. I waited three days. I started them up again and said, “Okay,” that is when I was so excited like, “Okay. I’m figuring stuff out.”

[0:15:18] Ashley James: Right. That there’s one way that someone could have MS—my understanding and maybe you could shed some light on this—is that it’s an autoimmune condition or at least that’s been… People think it’s autoimmune, but an autoimmune condition wouldn’t get better and worse and better and worse because you took your supplements one day and then didn’t the next. Right? Is that my understanding?

[0:15:45] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. Correct. We’ve known for a long time that MS has both an inflammation component and a degeneration component. Early on, the researchers focused on finding drugs and strategies that would turn off the excess inflammation. Now that we understand the MRI, we’ve been measuring brain volume and spinal cord volume, we realize that as the brain volume shrinks the disability is fixed. If you have inflammation you’ll have weakness that may disappear when that acute relapse goes away and you get back to close to normal. As the volume decreases, the disability is fixed, and the thinking is it’s the mitochondria that aren’t making enough energy that are leading to the brain volume loss and that are leading to the permanent disability. A lot of the drugs that are focused on stopping inflammation are really good at stopping the inflammation, but they don’t have any drugs for mitochondria. It turns out that that’s really a diet and lifestyle thing.

[0:17:07] Ashley James: Right. You can’t feed a body a bunch of drugs and expect it to make enzymes because the body needs nutrients.

[0:17:17] Dr. Terry Wahls: Needs all the parts.

[0:17:18] Ashley James: Right. The building blocks of life.

[0:17:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: My daughter went back to school. She’s taking a chemistry class. I was thinking about going back to grad school with some more science. It’s so fun to watch her get so excited about chemistry. We’re having these lovely conversations about biochemistry, nutrition, and health. It’s just so obvious that if you don’t have the building blocks, you can’t run the chemistry. How can you be healthy if you don’t have the building blocks to run the chemistry of life?

[0:17:57] Ashley James: Right. We’re not going to get it through a fast-food drive-through. The standard American diet does not set us up for success. You noticed a difference on days that you took your supplements versus you didn’t within 36 hours. What happened to have you have that aha moment and go, “Wait a second. Maybe I could get even more if I switched over to food.”

[0:18:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: Isn’t it interesting? I started taking with my supplement cocktail about 2004, maybe early 2005. I’m reading the basic science, slowly adding a few more vitamins and supplements. In the summer of 2007, I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine. They had a really lovely course on neuroprotection. That again was a lot of mitochondria, a lot of biochemistry—I liked it a lot. They had a longer list of supplements, which I added. I should step back. Remember, I switched from vegetarian to paleo eater and that I’m adding supplements. It does not improve me, it’s just slowing my decline. I have to admit, I don’t quite recall what was the aha moment. What if I used my list of supplements to say, “I need to figure out where these are in the food supply and stress those foods.” Because of course food is really complex. It’s much more than the—at that time it was 19 different nutrients that I was working on supplement wise. Now there are 36 nutrients that we monitor to determine the quality of the diet in terms of brain health. When I went to my registered dietician colleagues I said, “What foods would these be? What I need to eat to have a rich supply of these nutrients?” and the response was, “That’s complicated. I need a dietetic intern to look that up. I don’t really know.” Then I went to the university librarian so we tried. They really weren’t that helpful, but fortunately, I went back and I found the Linus Pauling Institute of Micronutrients. I used that as a [inaudible 0:20:19] resource. Originally, I had these long lists of foodstuffs that I was stressing. You can’t teach that to the public very well. Then I had to think much more deeply about how could I create an easily understood teaching message that would help people have diets that stress these key nutrients that I’m so keen on?

That’s how I ended up creating the message that I now teach which was the core part of the Wahls protocol.

[0:20:51] Ashley James: Before that though, before you decided you were going to teach people how to eat this way, you were figuring out for yourself. You were experimenting with food. Then you started to see results. Can you bring us back to that moment?

[0:21:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: What happened there was I’d identified these B vitamins, some sulfur amino acids, carotenoids, a variety of fats. I had that as I needed to have foods that would be rich in these things. Eventually, I get this list of these key foodstuffs that I wanted to be eating, and that was eating liver. I grew up eating liver. I quit eating liver. I was back to, ”I got to eat liver once a week,” and to get oysters and mussels a couple times a week. The other thing that’s fascinating, I identified that carotenoid, all these carotenoids were really vital. So I ate salads but now I was eating a tremendously much larger volume of kale, and parsley, and romaine lettuce, chard, and way more garlic, and then flax oil, and hemp oil and all this. What I discovered was as I ramped all of this up, I discovered that I couldn’t get enough greens. I had just this amazing craving for greens, for cooked kale, for steamed kale, for big kale salads, parsleys.

We since had more research that has come through on the critical role of vitamin K2 in the brain for stimulating the growth of brain stem cells, and the oligodendrocytes that repair the myelin in the brain. I’m recovering enough that I’m submitting papers and abstracts to present at scientific meetings, and so I’m going to these meetings. You can’t eat 9-12 cups of vegetables on the road very easily. I had yet figure out how to do that. I discovered that 36 hours away from home, my energy was beginning to tank.

[0:23:40] Ashley James: Right. Had you switched over? Had you stopped taking supplements and you’d been getting all your nutrition from food?

[0:23:47] Dr. Terry Wahls: No. I was still taking my supplements. I could still take the supplements, but I couldn’t take all the food. When I was away from it, within 36 hours, my energy level was dropping quite remarkably and my mental clarity was dropping quite remarkably. I would eventually learn, so I would pack food with me. I’d pack a kale with me and I’d be eating my kale. I pack cabbage with me, I’d eat cabbage. if I would pack these foods—and cabbage flies really well because it’s very forgiving. It can go several days without being refrigerated, it’s not a big deal. I really enjoy raw cabbage so I could go with a green cabbage, I could go with a purple cabbage, I could go with green or purple kale. Those are very portable foods.

[0:24:43] Ashley James: And delicious.

[0:24:46] Dr. Terry Wahls: And delicious. When I traveled with my vegetables in tow, I didn’t have my vegetable intake drop, and then I was fine.

[0:24:58] Ashley James: Fascinating. You figured out that you needed certain compounds like sulfur, iodine. Can you break that down a bit, the really important? You mentioned carotenoids, what is that?

[0:25:15] Dr. Terry Wahls: Carotenoids, those are the antioxidants that are in plants. The part of the pigment in plants. A lot of them are in the green plants but also in red, orange, blue, purple, black also have a variety of carotenoids in them. You can think of these as the polyphenols, the antioxidants. These are compounds that help protect. Every chemical plant always has some trash in it as you do the chemical processes. Whether it’s a man-made chemical plant or a biologic chemical plant. There is some biochemical trash in our mitochondria and biochemical trash in our cells and the color—the carotenoids in our plants—mop up that trash very nicely.

[0:26:12] Ashley James: They go in and they clean up the mitochondria? They give it a little spring cleaning.

[0:26:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yes, exactly. That is exactly correct. They provide support to a lot of enzymes of the mitochondria to improve their efficiency. They also provide support to some of the enzymes in the brain for making neurotransmitters. They provide support to the enzymes involved in the processing and eliminating of toxins.

[0:26:43] Ashley James: So these are things that are really hard to get from supplements. You can get a B complex but if you’re just taking supplements and then eating potatoes and corn and just the standard American diet, you’re not getting the carotenoids.

[0:26:59] Dr. Terry Wahls: And you’re not getting the diversity. You see, we have had about a billion and a half maybe two billion years worth of random mutations that have occurred in DNA that have allowed us to create enzymes that facilitate the chemistry of life. We have this rich array of compounds that support the chemistry of life. Food is vastly more complicated than the 34 different nutrients that the US Department of Agriculture has listed with recommended daily allowance or average intake recommendations for us. We need food, with all of its complexity and diversity, in order for us to run the full chemistry of life.

In fact, when I was in medical school, we were so excited about the genome project because we’re going to analyze the human DNA and sequence it. We thought we’d have about 100,000 genes because of the number of proteins that humans have. It turns out we have only about 25,000 genes. The big question is, “Man, where did those other 75,000 genes go?” Because corn, grass, plants, wheat have more like 100,000 genes. Our professors are sort of offended that plants appeared to be more complicated than humans. That this was like, “How could that be?” Of course, nobody knew anything about the microbiome. We just thought poop was poop.

Now we know that microbiome is teeming with life. As those bacteria and those microbes help eat the food that we consume and help digest the food and make vitamins and other small molecules that would get into our bloodstream, it’s the bacteria that have those other 75,000 genes that have the DNA to make the enzymes to make those compounds that we need for the other processes that we could no longer do, but our bacteria could. When the mutation occurred thousands of generations ago in our ancestral mother, she had reproductive success because the microbes in her gut could still do that chemical step. It was at that moment that the genetic instruction for that chemical step was exported from the human DNA to bacterial DNA.

[0:30:03] Ashley James: Fascinating. Your microbiome changed because you changed your diet. It became more diverse because you ate a more diverse diet of plants because that’s what feeds meat. Meat doesn’t necessarily feed a microbiome well but plants do, right?

[0:30:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: Let me modify that. The meat feeds your microbiome. The supplements you eat feed your microbiome. Junk food you eat feeds your microbiome. Plants feed your microbiome. The things that are new to our microbiome are processed foods, processed food additives, emulsifiers, sugar, white flour, pasta, cereals. All those things are clearly feeding disease-promoting bacteria. Plants, they are probably feeding the same kind of bacteria that were in our ancestral mothers for thousands of generations. Meat, again, thousands of generations. Whole grains and legumes, that’d be about 8,000 years, so a few generations. Not as many as the meats and plants have been eating. The sugar about 300 years. The emulsifier, food additives, that’s probably about 100 years.

[0:31:24] Ashley James: I heard one microbiome expert said that we’ve created the Homer Simpson of microbiome in the modern diet. It’s just kind of dumbed down and very limited in its functionality.

[0:31:44] Dr. Terry Wahls: Very limited. On my study team, I have a bunch of dietitians on my study team and we love talking about diet, food quality, the research. The research—I think it’s really very interesting—there are many diets. Humans can eat a wide variety of things and be healthy. My mitochondria can burn protein. During the winter, my ancestral mothers and fathers either had to live off their own fat or if the hunt was good they got to have meat. Otherwise, you had to wait until the next hunt was good because it’d be summer before there was plant material again. You’d have several months where you can have meat or nothing. Then during the summer, you could have plants. If the hunt was bad you just had plants or nothing. If that was okay, you’d have a combination of plants and meat.

We can survive on just plants for a while, but we all have to have protein. Otherwise, we can’t live without protein. We can survive for a long time on just fat, our own fat. That’s how we survived, war, winter, famine. We can survive for a while on meat alone. I don’t know that we have any societies that have—over their lifetime—been a meat only eater.

We do know the standard American diet is wrecking our health. We could have the Mediterranean diet and have better health. We can have the Paleo diet and have better health. You can have a ketogenic diet and have better health. You’d have the standard American diet as a population our health declines. We have this exploding rates of obesity, autoimmunity, and mental health issues, and cancers. If I take you off that diet and I could put you on a Mediterranean diet, a paleo diet, a ketogenic diet your health will improve. With a little bit of structure, I can put you on a vegetarian or vegan diet and your health will improve. I have a bias that I think our diet, of all the diets out there, have been most thoughtfully structured. We’re the only one who really have done any prospective studies in detailed nutritional analyses to say, “We know that this diet provides everything that your brain needs.”

[0:34:21] Ashley James: While you were traveling and you were experimenting with food, eating tons, tons of plants. Of course, you were eating you said liver. I believe you said once a week, you’re eating grass-fed meat.

[0:34:32] Dr. Terry Wahls: Once a week, yes.

[0:34:34] Ashley James: So you’re eating organ meat once a week. You’re eating grass-fed meat, free-range—

[0:34:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, I want to correct you there. Liver once a week. Heart probably once a week. Oysters and mussels once or twice a week. I was eating a lot of organs. I was paying deep, deep attention to the diversity of my meats and diversity of my plants.

[0:35:01] Ashley James: Now, you ate, I believe you said, nine cups of vegetables a day.

[0:35:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: I told the public to eat nine. I was probably eating more like 12.

[0:35:13] Ashley James: See, yeah. Nine seems small because when you’ve been describing how much a variety of vegetables, but you ate a huge amount of beautiful variety of plants. It’s not like you’re eating a carnivore diet. You’re listing off all these meats and stuff. It’s really a small amount of animal products in comparison to the rest of your diet, which was a variety of beautiful vegetables and berries. You did that experiment accidentally where you cut back on your 12 cups of vegetables while you were traveling and you notice within 36 hours you had fatigue and brain fog. Did you ever experiment with cutting out the animal products for a few days and noticing if you also experience the same effect?

[0:36:11] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. I could do no meat for two days. Beyond that, it does not work.

[0:36:21] Ashley James: So you had the same experience of lowered—so there are some key nutrients that you figured out in the organ meats.

[0:36:31] Dr. Terry Wahls: The organ meats are really superfoods. I had some debates with the carnivore folks. Then with them, I like liver, I think it’s really good for you, but I only want people to have about 6 to 8 ounces of liver a week. I want them to otherwise have other organs: heart, kidney, oysters, mussels, whole sardines. If you have more than eight ounces of liver, then you’re going to be at risk for chronic vitamin A toxicity. If you don’t have enough retinol, then you’re at risk for retinol insufficiency, which also increases the risk for infection, autoimmunity, and cancer. There’s a balance, liver once a week. My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother also eat liver once a week. By God they were correct.

[0:37:30] Ashley James: Right. If we look at even the health of our great-grandparents versus the health that we have today. We really do need to go back. If we just go back a few hundred years we would eat such a better diet than what we’re eating now. I really do love what you’ve dialed in. The question is, where’s the science. You’ve experimented on yourself, but since then, where is the science? I’d love to know, have you been able to do clinical studies?

[0:38:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yes. Absolutely.

[0:38:08] Ashley James: Have you been able to prove that this formula is effective for other people as well?

[0:38:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah. My area of research was a diagnostic error looking at what we called secondary data analysis. When I had my recovery, the chair of medicine saw my recoveries. They’re at the U again, call me in, I told them what I had done, and he’s a rheumatology doctor. He says, “Terry, this is so important. I want you to get a case report written up.” I said, “On myself said?” He said, “Yes. Work with your treating team. That’s your assignment for the year.” I salute and I said, “Okay.” I get that done, and he calls me back and says, “Now, I want you to do a safety and feasibility study.” I said, “Well, I don’t really have training in that.” “I will get you mentors. That’s your assignment.” Again, I salute and we get the protocol written up. That takes me a while to get it written up and through the IRB, now I have to raise about $100,000. When you have less than 2% of protocols get funding, but if we have any Canadian listeners, we have to thank the Canadians because it was a Canadian small nonprofit that gave us that funding. A little electrotherapy device MP that gave us that funding, and we were able to do that small early pilot study. We were able to show that yes other people could implement my diet and lifestyle program, that it was safe, that the biggest risk was if you’re overweight you lost weight and got back to a healthy body weight.

[0:39:59] Ashley James: If people were at normal weight or underweight would they lose weight as well?

[0:40:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: They would get back to the weight that they were at as a young adult. It’s about 19-22 years old without being hungry. Nobody became underweight. We were able to work with people to keep them within that target BMI. They lost their weight actually quite rapidly. I had to file safety reports every three months because of that. Fortunately for me, people got to their young adult weight and stayed there and did very very well.

Then we were able to show that quality of life went up quite remarkably. You got a short form 36, a 5-point change is clinically meaningful. We had a 16-point change so that would be clinically very very meaningful. The p-value was less than 0.0005, so that’s hugely impactful. The fatigue severity dropped quite largely. That scale was close from seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life to one no fatigue in any aspect of your life. We had a reduction of the volume, I think it was 2.38. Again, clinically huge and statistically very, very meaningful. Again, less than 0.0005.

[0:41:30] Ashley James: What’s a low p-value mean?

[0:41:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: It means that it’s a statistical way of saying it’s significant. If it’s less than 0.05 then that means there’s a 95% probability that that is statistically meaningful, it wasn’t a random possibility. The fact that I’m less than 0.0005 would mean there’d be less than 0.005 percent chance of random finding of that. In the science world, that is hugely, hugely significantly.

[0:42:10] Ashley James: I bet. You’re using diet and nutrition, you were using it to heal your specific condition, but do you think your diet could heal all conditions? Do you think that this is the perfect diet for everyone or just for specific diseases?

[0:42:29] Dr. Terry Wahls: This changed how I practice medicine in my primary care clinic, in the traumatic brain injury clinic. They’re taking care of people with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic brain injury. My Veteran Affairs hospital was so impressed that they pulled me out of those clinics and put me in my own clinic. We call it the Therapy Lifestyle Clinic. There, I went and asked people who had the pain clinic and the primary care clinics and said, “Give me your people who are most refractory to treatment who you can’t really help, but they need to know I’m only using diet and lifestyle. You’re going to do the drugs. I’m not doing any drugs for these patients.”

We got a few folks had tremendous success. Started getting more and more referrals. We just had such, such success that the VA national office came out to see me. We wrote a grant, expanded the clinic. Then, three years ago, I decided to leave the VA because by then, I’m now traveling in the world lecturing, teaching other physicians, other researchers how to do what it is that I do.

[0:43:58] Ashley James: Brilliant. You mentioned that if the population just stopped eating the standard American diet any of your listed [Hough 0:44:07] even vegan, vegetarian, paleo, keto, Mediterranean all of those would be better choices than the standard American diet. Can someone heal? Could someone choose a whole food plant-based diet eating 12 cups of a variety of vegetables a day and heal their mitochondria, or did you find that you absolutely need to eat organ meat in order to heal the mitochondria?

[0:44:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: In my book, the Wahls protocol, I do have levels. For the vegetarian, vegans I provide a structure for them and supplement recommendations so that they could address their mitochondria. Most folks who are vegetarian are vegans—unless they’re taking supplements—are going to end up with chronic disease and a neurologic problem.

[0:45:00] Ashley James: Why is that? What supplements?

[0:45:02] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, that’s because they don’t get a complete protein. If they aren’t taking B vitamins they’ll ultimately become short on B12, they may become short on iodine, they may become short on minerals. You can be a vegetarian vegan but you have to be very thoughtful, you have to structure your diet carefully, and you need some B vitamins, and you need some supplements.

[0:45:29] Ashley James: Most people need supplements if they’ve been eating the standard American diet because they’re highly deficient.

[0:45:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: Their recovery will be faster. In my VA, we had very limited supplements that we could use. This was really a diet and lifestyle program. My folks were living on food stamps. They’re often disabled, unable to work. They’re shopping in rural small-town Iowa. It’s certainly not Whole Foods, and we had remarkable success. I teach them how to cook. I wasn’t doing any fancy functional medicine testing, I was doing just basic primary care labs.

We had worked out how to grow their internal motivation. We’ve created what I now call the Wahls behavior change model, and that’s part of what I teach clinicians. Because the reasons our patients get better—whether you’re a conventional doc or you’re a functional medicine doc—the reason they get better or not is most often really contingent on can they follow your recommendations to improve their diet quality and their health behaviors? We’re asking people to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s benefits.

[0:46:45] Ashley James: It could be something as quick as days, days of eating vegetables. How soon did you notice a shift in your symptoms? Because you were very sick.

[0:46:56] Dr. Terry Wahls: In a month.

[0:46:57] Ashley James: In one month. So it took 30 days and then you started noticing it or was it gradual over that month?

[0:47:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: Gradual over that month, in my clinics with the VA, we’d see people monthly for that first six months. It was very typical when they’d come back. Then that first month, they could tell that things were beginning to improve often for the first time in years, many times decades. That their pain was lessening, their brain fog was lessening, their energy was improving, that the world was less irritating to them, and it was easier to get along with family, with co-workers, with colleagues, with their spouse, with their kids. It was because the inflammation in their brain and their spinal cord is going down. Their weight is coming down quite remarkably. They’re not striving. They’re not hungry. They’re eating to satiety.

Of course, many of these folks had either never been taught how to cook or had forgotten how to cook. We have to have cooking classes and food demonstrations to show them how to do this affordably. How to do it affordable in terms of money and in terms of time. It has to be manageable for both.

[0:48:28] Ashley James: Were all the participants in this study all have MS, or do they have a variety of neurological symptoms?

[0:48:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: In my clinical trials we’ve only studied multiple sclerosis. In my clinics, so I told you about my primary care clinic and my traumatic brain injury clinic, in my lifestyle clinic, we’d see folks with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar. Then we’d see rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, fibromyalgia, myasthenia gravis, MS, Parkinson’s, cognitive decline, chronic pain following back surgery, chronic pain following a war injury or a traumatic amputation, chronic headaches following a severe traumatic brain injury. Then of course, the usual diabetes, obesity, heart disease, heart failure. We had some Neuropathies following chemotherapy, so a wide variety of conditions. The most common symptoms were pain, decreasing energy, or fatigue problems, irritability, brain fog. People will often report that those symptoms were reducing within four to six weeks. Then It’d continue to improve over the next six months.

[0:49:58] Ashley James: Did their MS go away?

[0:50:00] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m very clear. In my case, I still have lesions in my spinal cord, a couple of lesions in my head, but these were lesions that had been there for years. My neurologist when I went back to see him he was so excited to get another MRI. He was disappointed that the MRI hadn’t changed. He said, “But you know, Terry, I expect it was foolish to think that they would because those were old lesions. Of course, they’re going to stay. If you have new lesions that are less than two years old, there’s plenty of reason to be very hopeful that those lesions will go away. If they’re old lesions, older than two years, they may well stay.”

I’m very clear with all of my patients whether you have an autoimmune problem, or a degenerative problem, or diabetes, obesity. If we change your diet and lifestyle to health-promoting diet and lifestyle choices, and your blood pressure improves, your blood sugar improves, your mood improves, you are doing great, you’re off meds, and so you think now you’re cured. You can go back to your old ways. All of your diseases will come screaming back, and you’ll need all your drugs again. It’s the diet and lifestyle choices that made those diseases develop.

[0:51:24] Ashley James: Well, it’s kind of like drinking a poison. If I were to give arsenic to someone and they get sick. Then they take an antidote and they’re like, “Oh, I’m better again.” They keep taking the arsenic.

[0:51:37] Dr. Terry Wahls: I can go back to eating an arsenic.

[0:51:38] Ashley James: Right. The diet is the arsenic, the diet causes these diseases. It’s not that we’re broken. I feel that’s the mentality, and I love that you have a behavioral change model because part of that is the mentality that I’m broken and I need drugs, for example. I’m not against drugs. They’re not the only thing out there. It’s certainly not the cure if the diet is the poison.

[0:52:04] Dr. Terry Wahls: What we teach is we’re creating health by helping you learn health behaviors, health-promoting behaviors. What I can’t predict for anyone is how much health recovery is possible. Typically, I am quite delighted that vastly more health recovery is possible than the person had dared to hope for because they were so ill that they had been afraid. They just couldn’t know what might be possible.

As we embrace those health behaviors, and I get them to understand how to shop and make menus and eat and cook and prepare all that. We teach them how to find joy and meaning in their life as it is. How to manage their stress levels and self-care. To go outside and move and be at the sunlight again. What they discover is the blood pressure begins to improve. The blood sugars begin to improve. Their mood improves. They were having joyful relationships with their family.

The guys come in smiling and say, “You know what doc, you didn’t tell me that my love life would come back.” So they’re smiling and the ladies are in because they’re so pleased that they’re getting their old bodies back. They’re losing weight getting back to a younger, healthier self.

[0:53:34] Ashley James: Beautiful. I interviewed Dr. Joel Khan and he said to me he was very excited for the research that you’re doing now. I think it was specifically around a whole food plant-based diet. Can you shed some light on that?

[0:53:51] Dr. Terry Wahls: What Joel is he is more of a low-fat person, and he is very much into plants. He comes out from a cardiology perspective. Where Joel and I agree is that it’s certainly possible to have a vegetarian diet. He and I recognize that you got to follow your B12 very closely, you want to follow your mineral status, you want to follow your protein status. If you do a low-fat diet, you still have to maintain your Omega-3 fatty acid, Omega-6 fatty acid ratios. It’s the ratio that’s also very important in addition to having sufficient fats in your brains are fat.

The research that I do uses the Wahls Paleo diet or the Wahls elimination diet. In my clinical practice, we do take care of people who are vegetarian and vegans. We have a diet that Joel Khan would be thrilled that we are using. That’s my clinical practice for people who are vegetarian or vegan for their religious beliefs or who may have a particular reason to follow a lower cholesterol diet because of their underlying heart disease. In my MS clinical research, we do either the Wahls paleo or the Wahls elimination diet.

[0:55:18] Ashley James: Explain how we can get healthy fats from our diet to support our brain? People are worried about Alzheimer’s and dementia. That’s on the rise. Of course, not only MS, but that there’s other neurological problems that look like they’re on the rise.

[0:55:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Absolutely. It’s very scary the rates of cognitive decline, early dementias—early dementias in the 40s that are being found. Of course, there are many factors with that. Part of that is a diet that drives your insulin up very high. If you have a diet that’s high in carbs, that can drive your insulin high. When the insulin is high, your brain can’t clear out some of the toxic trash, the beta-amyloid as well. So you’re at higher risk for cognitive decline. If you have more toxins, heavy metals mercury, arsenic, you’re at higher rates for cognitive decline. If you have unrecognized gluten sensitivity, you’re at a much higher rate of cognitive decline. If you aren’t physically active, you have a higher rate of cognitive decline. If you smoked or exposed to air pollution, you have higher rates of cognitive decline. If you are lonely, you have higher rates of cognitive decline. So there are many, many, many factors here.

When we see people, we talk about the many things that are under our control that can markedly reduce your risk of cognitive decline. When I first started doing my research in 2010, I was the only person doing a food-based dietary intervention. I was the only person doing a multi-modal diet stress reduction exercise intervention. The feeling was that if you didn’t do one like you at a time if you had a good effect we wouldn’t know the mechanism. Fortunately, my chair of medicine said, “The question is, can people do what you did? If they do, what happens?” We saw that yes they could do it, we didn’t hurt them, and we had dramatically favorable results. We’re doing more of these complicated diet stress reduction exercise studies. The NIH is now doing more of these diet and lifestyle studies to look at other autoimmune conditions and other issues of cognitive decline.

[0:58:10] Ashley James: I know you said you’re just doing basic labs, but did you see that in the labs, that they’re autoimmune—whatever markers you use for autoimmune—that they were going down as well as healing mitochondria?

[0:58:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: As you address the diet and lifestyle factors, you can do autoimmunity panels. There are much more sophisticated autoantibodies that look at brain structures, look at thyroid, look at bone that you could see someone comes in with many autoantibodies. If we teach them how to address diet and lifestyle and adapt these health behaviors, we can see these autoantibody profiles come down. In the VA, thyroid disease is very, very common. Having people implement the Wahls protocol, and we followed their thyroid antibodies, we could see the antibodies coming down nicely. That’s a lovely marker that people can use to monitor that they’re having a great biologic success at changing the trajectory of their illness. If they can go back to being autoantibody negative, they have reversed the damage. Whereas if you continue to have autoantibodies, we know that you’re damaging yourself and you are developing a more progressive organ damage.

[0:59:53] Ashley James: Right. Whether it’s the thyroid or the mitochondria or wherever the autoimmune is presenting. That’s such a clear picture that helps motivate the patient to keep going because it’s going in the right direction.

[1:00:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: Even more important than blood work, I talk about your biosensor. Again, this is something I’ve learned both from my own personal experience and from working with veterans is to help educate them to identify their subtle symptoms. For me, because of my trigeminal neuralgia, if I have changes in sensation on my face that will come up. I know that if I don’t address that my face pain, electrical face pain due to trigeminal neuralgia would turn on, and I will have horrific levels of pain in very short order. That’s my biosensor. So I talk to my patients, “Okay. We want you to figure out what are your subtle symptoms that are sort of your warning that there’s more incipient trouble ahead for you? If you can identify these subtle symptoms that are your biosensor, you can use that to help monitor your environment. If your biosensor is turning on, then you can sit back and think, “Okay, is there something in my diet that I have a food sensitivity to? Was I exposed to more toxins? Is there a bigger situational stressor that’s going on? Am I not outside enough? Has my vitamin D level fallen? Am I having a viral infection?””

I help people tune in to their subtle symptoms for their biosensor. Then help them develop that internal checklist of what are all the environmental exposures I could run through in my mind to see, could this be what’s making my biosensor turn on today?

[1:01:58] Ashley James: Oh, I love it.

[1:01:58] Dr. Terry Wahls: And then, what could I do about it?

[1:02:00] Ashley James: Right. I love that because they’re tuning into their own body. I interviewed Palmer Kippola who had MS for many years. I believe it was over 10 years that as she was adjusting her diet and figuring out what worked for her, she made a checklist and she realized that she could predict if she would have within a month if she would have a relapse based on sleep, stress, nutrition, if she sort of partied too hard, or whatever it was, or had too much stress. She saw that if she didn’t get her supplements or her nutrition or these really important factors, if she just stopped practicing self-care as much, she could predict. She could go, “Okay. This month I’m going to have one. I’m going to have a relapse.” Sure enough, it was predictable, but if she stayed on top of all of the things that you teach then she wouldn’t.

[1:02:59] Dr. Terry Wahls: All the self-care.

[1:03:00] Ashley James: Yeah, all the self-care. Everything that you teach and the diet she would have zero relapses. It was just evident to her that something is as simple as managing stress, moving your body in a way that brings you joy, hydrating nutrition, nutrition, nutrition, diet being the number one thing, and sleep. Even a lack of sleep and stress, those two combined would be enough for her to have a relapse. She just saw that taking care of yourself on all these levels is so important.

[1:03:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: Think about what’s happening in the world right now. This pandemic of the coronavirus that has people afraid, have governments trying to figure out how to contain the spread of the infection. There’s a lot of fear. People don’t know what to do. If you have this fear, this isolation, and terrible diets that make people at much greater risk to have the viral infection and a greater risk to have a more serious infection. Think of the people over the age of 60, an autoimmune disease or on chronic medication. If we could help them understand that the concepts that I teach, the self-cares, the quality of your diet, the meditation, being outside with some sunlight and fresh air. These things are addressing those factors that put you at greater risk.

[1:04:42] Ashley James: Yes. It’s protective on all fronts. I love it. You mentioned in the evolution of man that there were times where, in the winter, those who lived in the North didn’t have access to plants. We either had to fast, or we could eat a game if we caught it.

[1:05:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: Right. If the hunt was good.

[1:05:06] Ashley James: Yeah. Whatever we could gain access to, but throughout our history, there have been times where we had to fast. Where there was famine we had to fast and our body figured out how to burn fat for fuel so that we could fast. I believe it was back in 2012 that the discovery of autophagy that occurs during fasting. Autophagy being the body’s own ability to digest pathological tissue and scar tissue. Then there’s a huge spike in human growth hormone and in stem cells. Have you looked into or experimented on yourself with using fasting to heal your lesions?

[1:05:44] Dr. Terry Wahls: Probably about 18 months now. My typical eating pattern is one meal a day. So I’ll have a two-hour window where I’m eating food. Then, one week a month, I will have a calorie-restricted diet so that I’ll have about 500 calories a day during that week. By the end of the week, I am pretty hungry. After that then I have a higher protein diet. That’s when my stem cells have all woken up. They’re like making the new younger Terry. I really appreciate that. My family and my kids are like, “Your hair is grayer—yes, mom—but you keep looking younger and younger and younger.” That fasting and that intermittent calorie restriction does increase the number of stem cells that your bone marrow makes and releases into the bloodstream in the periphery. It does improve your ability to repair your blood vessels, your heart, your brain, your pancreas. It makes for actually younger fat because your fat turns out to be a hormone organ.

Intermittent fasting, calorie restriction great for you. If you do intermittent water fasting you for sure need to have your personal medical team supervise that.

[1:07:19] Ashley James: Absolutely. I love that you address that you’re eating very good nutrition after fasting or after a time period of calorie restriction because those stem cells need nutrition to make healthy new cells.

[1:07:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: To make the new you.

[1:07:37] Ashley James: Right. I’ve seen some people come off of a fast and then eat ice cream. I’m like, “You’re just building cells made of ice cream. That’s not conducive to building a healthy body.” We have to remember, everything we put in our mouth is building our cells.

[1:07:53] Dr. Terry Wahls: Becomes you. Everything you eat will become you.

[1:07:57] Ashley James: Do you want to be a doughnut?

[1:08:01] Dr. Terry Wahls: We want to be eating foods that our great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather would recognize as food.

[1:08:09] Ashley James: Yes, I love it. As part of your protocol, is there a percentage of food that’s raw so that we get the enzymes? A percentage of food that’s cooked?

[1:08:20] Dr. Terry Wahls: Again, I personalize this based on the circumstances. The simplest way to think about this is who are feeding our microbiome and us. I have you monitor your bowel movements. Are you passing rocks, logs, snakes, pudding, or tea? If you’re passing rocks and dry logs, then your microbiome needs more fiber and more fermented food. So more raw vegetables, more salads, more resistance starch such as inulin. If you’re pooping snakes, that’s fine. If the snakes are getting into your pants that is not socially fine so you’re going to have to back off on the fermented food and the raw things. If you’re pooping pudding and tea, again, that’s not good. You have to back off.

So some people can only have soups and stews because they have inflammatory bowel disease and they’re having pudding and tea. Some people can’t manage the snakes because they have a neurologic disease. They have difficulty controlling their sphincter and they have too many accidents. I don’t want anybody to have rocks and dry logs. I would much rather that they have enough fiber so that they can easily pass their bowel movements.

There’s this stool chart that’s like one to seven. It’s way too confusing to keep track the numbers, but all my patients know when I’m talking rocks, dry logs, logs, snakes, pudding, and tea. They know exactly what I’m talking about.

[1:10:07] Ashley James: So ideally, it’s logs but not dry logs?

[1:10:10] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. It’s really soft easily passed bowel movements that you have a couple times a day, you’re not having fecal accidents.

[1:10:20] Ashley James: Can you tell us more about the Wahls behavioral change model? Maybe teach us a little bit because I know the listeners been piqued. Their interest is piqued and they want to make changes in their life. Maybe you could teach us a little bit.

[1:10:34] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah. Our brains, through evolution and all of the random mutations that occurred in our DNA, if something was pleasurable and we did more of it and it was good for the species, that mutation was passed on. So in general, we’re wired to crave pleasure and comfort. We’re also wired to be much more interested in what’s happening right now than what might happen in the future. So if I tell you to make this change to give up today’s pleasure, that ice cream, to prevent trouble from being demented in 20 years that’s very difficult. That goes against all of the biologic priming of your ancestors over thousands of generations. That’s incredibly difficult.

Then if I put the ice cream on the counter in a bowl, I put some chocolate sauce on it, it’s extremely difficult for you. You can just taste it, it’s right there in your mouth, it’d be so yummy. But there are some circumstances where you and I would be willing to go into a burning building to save something or someone that we cared so deeply about. That we won’t care about that bowl of ice cream. My question is, is there anything in your life that you care so much about that if you knew that prison or that thing was asleep in that house we see some smoke coming out of the window, without thinking you’d be in there getting that item or that person out. If there is nothing then I’m going to have to help them. I have more join in their life right now because they’re too depressed. If there is something that they care that much about, then there’s a possibility that we can help them give up on the ice cream. Because if I can link the decision that I’m going to give up on the ice cream because I care so much about my grandson that I would take out of that burning house because I want to be there to see my grandson go to school. I want to see my grandson get married. I want to dance with my daughter at her wedding.

If I can help them understand the possibility of why eating vegetables, meditating, and walking will help you achieve that, and let’s figure out what’s the next small actionable step. We’ve got 15 steps along the way to help people go from their current diet and lifestyle to the more therapeutic diet and lifestyle. That’s part of that whole process that we use. When people understand, when I explain to them that of course, it’s very hard to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s benefit. That’s biologic. We’ve had millions of generations where that biology has been reinforced. That is an incredible ask for you to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s theoretic benefit, but we will all do it for things that deeply matter to us such as our children, our grandchildren, or your fellow soldiers in an army unit under fire, or a purpose that you so deeply care about, or perhaps your grand your grandfather’s pocket knife that he gave you, and he’s dead, and by God, you’re not going to lose that.

People are items of tremendous emotional value. You’re willing to risk pain and suffering and potential harm to go safe. We, in fact, are going to give up today’s pleasure, but we have to put it in context for someone to be willing to do that. Then help them make the small actionable next step to be successful.

[1:15:06] Ashley James: I love that you have 15 small steps because it seems almost impossible to go from eating no vegetables at all or people eat potatoes, because they think that’s a vegetable in the form of fries, to go from that nine cups.

[1:15:21] Dr. Terry Wahls: There’s a lot of steps that we go through to help people be successful. You have to grow the insights to understand how it’s possible. You have to connect the motivation. You have to help people find joy in their life as it is right now.

[1:15:42] Ashley James: The listener was following you as you were describing that. In their mind, mentally threw out the ice cream to save their favorite person or object from a burning building. What next steps could they take today?

[1:16:00] Dr. Terry Wahls: Again, it will depend on the person and their circumstances. What are their diagnoses? What am I helping them address? The first step that I really want people to think deeply about is what do you want your health for? Spend some time journaling about that: what I want my health for? That is the beginning of the process because whenever you’re changing your behavior, you can sort of think about the last time you changed a health behavior, broke a bad habit, made a new habit. The reason you were successful was that you decided it was worth it to you to put in that effort. We never make those kinds of changes just because I came over and said, “You got to start walking an hour every day.” When we make a new habit or extinguish an old bad habit it’s because I made the internal decision that my desire for change is great enough that I’m willing to put in the effort.

The very first step for any change is this really deep reflection on what do I want my health for? Because I have to grow your desire to put in the work.

[1:17:43] Ashley James: Yes. Well, look at you. You were in a wheelchair, in a zero-gravity chair and months later, you were walking without assistance.

[1:17:54] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m walking without assistance, and within a year, 18.5 miles on a bike ride.

[1:17:59] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Those who are sick and suffering right now and immobile, know that within a year you could be mobile, you could be out of pain, you can end the suffering.

[1:18:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: I spend a fair amount of time helping people understand that their life has meaning and they could have joy now in their circumstances as they are right now even if they’re in a wheelchair, even if they’re having pain, even if they have tremendous sorrow because they’ve lost someone who is deeply, deeply important to them.

[1:18:47] Ashley James: It’s needing to shift the mindset first. That’s where it really allows them to-

[1:18:57] Dr. Terry Wahls: All change begins. All change begins. First, with understanding why I want to make that change.

[1:19:07] Ashley James: You had to overcome a lot of—maybe you’re just a black sheep because you had to have a mindset to be so different than your training as an MD. You’re not trained as an MD to look at food and nutrition. Like you said, you started out by going to the Cleveland Clinic and doing the chemotherapy and doing all the drugs and doing everything. You were a really good patient.

[1:19:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: I absolutely believe in all those drugs. I still take gabapentin, a small dose. The gabapentin, if I don’t take any, my face pain will come back. I take small doses. I’m pain-free. There’s absolutely a role for medication for some conditions. Some people may need disease-modifying drugs. I also want to tell your listeners that I did all of this to slow my decline. I had no hope of recovery. I had accepted that there’d be—with progressive MS—no return of functions once lost. I couldn’t sit up, my pain was getting more and more severe, my brain fog was more troublesome. I knew I would probably soon be forced to stop working, but I felt like I have to do everything that I possibly can. I have young kids. My kids are in high school and junior high. I was still doing my tiny simple work out. I’m still doing everything that I can: reading the basic science, experimenting on myself because I wanted them to see that life’s not fair, but so what? You don’t give up, you just keep doing the best that you can.

[1:21:06] Ashley James: So that was your mindset, that you were a fighter but you were also doing it for those you love, your children.

[1:21:12] Dr. Terry Wahls: I was modeling for my kids that life’s not fair but you do the best that you can anyway. I was modeling for them how I wanted them to face their greatest challenge in life. That was my why.

[1:21:30] Ashley James: I’m moved to tears. I’m just thinking about here you were just wanting to slow down the progression so that you could be there longer for your children, but also that you could demonstrate being a fighter. Out of all of this, you have helped so many people, so many people.

[1:21:51] Dr. Terry Wahls: When I was walking around—as you have a progressive illness, progressive neurologic illness, you finally get to a point where you take each day as it unfolds because I knew I had an incurable progressive illness. My pain is gone, my fatigue is gone. I’m walking the neighborhood with walking sticks and without walking sticks. I’m still taking each day one day at a time because I don’t know what any of this really means. It was the day that I got on my bike, that I was able to bike around the block, that I understood that who knew what might be possible. That the current understanding of MS was incomplete. As I said, my wife’s crying, my kids are crying, I’m crying. Actually, I’m crying now too because that was such a momentous moment. That’s when I began to have hope again. It’s like, “Oh my God. How much recovery is possible?”

[1:22:59] Ashley James: Yes. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself and you unlocked that. Then you started to see it, but it’s the mentality, it’s the mindset. We need to adopt the mindset that it is possible to heal. That a diagnosis is not a life sentence no matter what the doctors say because so many doctors tell their patients what they have been told, which is, “This is progressive. You’re never going to get better.” The fact is no one knows for sure, only God. No one knows for sure what is a life sentence and what isn’t, but the body has an ability to heal itself. We need to hold on to hope and believe that we can heal and then take the actions and fight for ourselves and fight for those we love. You did that and look, you’re creating a ripple that is going around the world and is saving millions of lives. They now get to ride bikes with their children because of you.

[1:24:04] Dr. Terry Wahls: They have meaning to their life. That they have joy and purpose. Some people get on their bikes again, some do not, but some find that they still have a very meaningful and joyful life. That their purpose is modeling for their kids that you keep doing the best you can.

[1:24:27] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your story. We didn’t break down your diet specifically but those resources are available. I’d love for you to point us in that direction. Of course, listeners can buy your book. If a listener wants to adapt their diet to heal themselves using food as nutrition, what’s the best place that they can start?

[1:24:53] Dr. Terry Wahls: Go to my website terrywahls.com/diet. We have a one-page handout that’s a great resource. We have many, many resources on the website to get you going. I certainly want you to pick up the book. Even if you’ve gotten the first book, the new book has so much more research on epigenetics, the microbiome on neuro rehab. We have more details on oxalates, histamines, FODMAPs. I’ve added the Wahls elimination diet. We have a lot more information on ketosis, how we monitor it, and the many different ways of using fasting strategies to get into ketosis. It’s 30% new material. We have lots of bonuses that I talk about in the book that we’ll have for you. If you go to terrywahls.com/bonus, you’ll learn more about how to get those bonuses that you’d be able to get by ordering the book.

[1:26:01] Ashley James: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It has been such a pleasure. You are welcome back. Anytime you want a platform to teach we would love to have you back. To wrap up today’s interview, is there anything left unsaid or anything you want to say to the listener, make sure that you leave the listener with?

[1:26:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’d like you to swap out the sugar for berries and to try having some more greens.

[1:26:30] Ashley James: Nine cups. I love it. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to have you here today.

[1:26:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Thank you.

[1:26:41] Outro: If you love this interview and you love the Learn True Health Podcast, please join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You’re supporting the podcast and you’re also supporting yourself and your family and you’re continuing your education to learn how to achieve true health. This isn’t a diet. The membership isn’t a specific diet. It’s just teaching you how to eat more nutritious food, how to incorporate whole foods that are unprocessed into your diet in a way that your children will love, in a way that your whole family will love, in a way that is quick, and will save you money. We teach you how to save you time in the kitchen, money in the kitchen, and how to grow your health by using your kitchen.

So please, join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. We make the videos fun and we share wonderful, wonderful recipes. I’m so excited for you to join. The members, the listeners who have joined already have shared some amazing testimonials. One listener, within five days of beginning to incorporate what she learned from the membership her chronic headaches went away and her fatigue went away. How cool is that? So join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I can’t wait to see you there.

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417 Corona Virus, What Naturopathic Doctors Are Saying About The COVID-19 Outbreak, Vitamins, Herbs, Self-Quarantine, Social Distancing, Immune System Support 0

Mar 16, 2020

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Coronavirus and Natural Medicine

https://www.learntruehealth.com/coronavirus-natural-medicine

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 417. Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. In the light of the coronavirus, I’ve been in contact with several Naturopathic doctors and medical doctors who have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on right now around the world and have been watching the studies that have been coming out of China and other places. Interesting studies. Korea and China have found some things that are working better than just waiting it out. They’ve been publishing these. The doctors that I’ve been talking to have been putting their finger on the pulse and really making sure that they are prepared, and they’re letting all their patients know what they think they should do. I wanted to pass that information along to you.

Some people feel we’re overreacting with the quarantine, the self-quarantine. I live in the state of Washington and we are self-quarantined. Some people feel were under-reacting. Whatever your position is, we are all affected. Borders are shutting down, restaurants and bars are shutting down. We’re being asked to stay in our homes for the next few weeks. All the schools in Washington and several other states have shut down. Whatever your belief system is around the virus, whether you think it’s a conspiracy, whether you believe the mainstream narrative. Let’s err on the side of caution. Let’s not give in to panic because that lowers the immune system. Don’t allow fear to run your life because that lowers the immune system. Any virus can be potentially fatal depending on your health status.

We all have a family member or friend who is at risk, who’s vulnerable. Whether it’s a grandparent or a friend’s grandparent or a child with asthma, immunocompromised child. Maybe you’re in total health but others around you, others that you could have contact with may not be. The best thing to do is to err on the side of caution. If you can, if your family is capable of doing it, if this doesn’t affect the income of your family to self-quarantine, if you need to leave the house, obviously you’re taking measures like washing your hands and face. Also, take your shoes off and leave them outside of your home. Take your clothing off the moment you get home and throw it in the wash and take a shower right away. There’s certain things we can do to lower our exposure, but the fact is that this virus does live on surfaces up to I’ve heard nine days, I’ve heard 12 days. It can incubate in someone for up to 2 weeks. So you may have it right now and not know it for two weeks.

Again, giving in to fear will decrease our immune health. So what can we do? We can all take precautions. There are antiviral herbs. I’m going to give you a list of some herbs that you can add in your cooking, you can add in tea, you can take encapsulated form, you can take in tincture form or an essential oil form. You’re going to want to do your own research as to how much of these herbs to take. It’s best not to overdo anything. I’m also going to give you a list of some vitamins, some supplements that the Naturopathic doctors are telling their patients to take. There have been some studies that show that they help to give a positive outcome with the coronavirus.

Vitamin A

The first is vitamin A. If anyone is experiencing upper respiratory problems you can take high-dose vitamin A. This is according to a Naturopathic doctor that’s very experienced that I was talking to recently. He says for 3 days you can take 100,000 international units of vitamin A and that’s not beta-carotene. You want to get high-dose vitamin A that is not beta-carotene. Then after that, you can take 25,000 international units a day. This is just for preventive measures during the flu season or during an outbreak.

Vitamin C

Vitamin C. In China, they’re doing high-dose vitamin C intravenously. They’re showing that that has been creating positive outcomes with the coronavirus. For just a regular dose every day, take between 2,000 and 6,000 milligrams a day. You want to spread it out throughout the day so that you don’t get diarrhea because high dose vitamin C does cause diarrhea. It’s best to get powder. That way you can dose it slowly throughout the day. If you can get between 2,000 and 6,000 milligrams of vitamin C in you every day during flu season that would be fantastic.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D. If you have your levels tested every year and you know you’re low like let’s say your reading is below 40 for example, 40 or 30. Then you can easily take between 5,000 and 10,000 international units of vitamin D a day. These are all adult doses. You’d have to speak to your pediatrician about doses for children. My son, our pediatrician has him on 1,000 international units of vitamin D a day during the flu season.

Zinc

Zinc. They have seen, there’s been a study on the Covid-19 coronavirus where they found that zinc and a malaria drug combined, they did this in China and they did it in Korea, but they used a different drug. That you’re using the drug in order to increase zinc’s intake. It increases the uptake of zinc into the cell. They’re finding that zinc stops the cell from producing RNA for the virus. That’s very promising. I’ve talked to several health professionals about this. We want to take zinc every day. This would be just a great general practice during the flu season anyway. The Mayo Clinic says that between 8 milligrams and 11 milligrams is a good recommended daily dose, but that seems kind of low. The National Institutes of Health consider that 40 milligrams a day for adults is the upper limit dose. They recommend not going above 40 milligrams a day and that they say four milligrams a day for infants under the age of six months. That’s the National Institute of Health.

Again, any supplementation for your children, I’d talk to a Naturopathic pediatrician, but there you have it with zinc, basically 40 milligrams or less a day. Taking any supplements in high doses can cause diarrhea or other symptoms. You want to start gradually, slowly, and increase to your bowel tolerance basically it says. It’s how they put it for vitamin C but also for zinc. High levels of zinc too can cause diarrhea as well as headaches and nausea.

Again, we don’t want to overdo anything. We don’t want to harm our body by freaking out and taking high doses of something that ends up causing other symptoms. The point is we just want to support the immune system. What’s been proven to be supportive is vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc. There are herbs that have several studies, many studies that support the body in fighting off viruses in general. There aren’t a lot of studies around Covid-19 specifically and herbs, but what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of herbs out there that support the body. For example, basil.

Basil

There was a four-week study in 24 healthy adults were supplementing with 300 milligrams of holy basil extract significantly increased levels of helper T-cells and natural killer cells. They’re both immune cells that help protect and defend your body from viral infections. Things like holy basil, that’s something that you could eat every day in your food. You could put it in salads and soups or you could get an extract or an encapsulated form.

Lemon Balm

Lemon balm is a fantastic antiviral. It’s great to make a tea out of it. A lot of these herbs, not all of them but a lot of them, you can mix together, buy in bulk. For example, mix together and just drink all day long as an herbal tea. So lemon balm, oregano, sage, fennel, garlic. Garlic is something I wouldn’t necessarily make a tea out of, but you can eat it raw and you can eat it cooked. Peppermint, rosemary. Rosemary has an extract that has been proven to be quite antiviral. Oleanolic acid in rosemary has been displayed to be quite antiviral in several studies against several different kinds of viruses.

Echinacea

Echinacea both is antiviral and boosts the immune system. That’s something again you can get in tea form. Herbal tea, if you take all these antiviral herbs and you mix it together and make a nice tea out of it, that’s very gentle for the body to take it all day long, drink it all day long. If you take capsules or if you take an extract that’s more concentrated and then you have to be careful with the dose. Whereas, it’s easier to dilute. Just take a tablespoon of each dry herb and make a big thing of tea like 60 ounces of tea and then you just sip it all day long. That’s more gentle and it’s less likely that you would accidentally overdose. Tea is the most gentle form of taking herbs. Then the next would be encapsulated. Then the more concentrated extracts or essential oils the more careful you have to be with overdosing.

Elderberry

Elderberry, I’m sure you’ve heard of elderberry extract. There have been several studies on elderberry that’s very exciting. It’s known to suppress viral replication and it stimulates the immune system. Even in a recent study, it showed that elderberry helped to inhibit viruses from entering our cells. That’s something that you can actually get your own elderberries and make your own elderberry syrup. Or you could just buy a bunch of elderberry syrup or you can buy a bunch of elderberries. Kids often love it because it is delicious. That’s definitely something to have stocked up on.

Licorice

Licorice has been known, it’s been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. You have to be careful with licorice if you have high blood pressure. Licorice also is fantastic for depression and anxiety and for people who have lethargy. It has shown to be antiviral against several viruses including severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronaviruses.

Astragalus

Astragalus is another herb in traditional Chinese medicine that has shown to significantly enhance the immune system against viruses.

Ginger

Ginger, and you know, I heard that there were stores that had completely sold out of ginger. I’m not surprised because you can make teas, you can cook with it, and you can make cough syrup with it. It has fantastic compounds that are antiviral, but that also help us throughout the flu season to mitigate several symptoms of the cold or flu.

Dandelion

Dandelion is wonderful to add to your herbal tea blends. It has many medicinal properties including a potent antiviral effect. Several studies showed that dandelion extract reduced or inhibited the replication of some viruses, but it also is wonderful for the liver and for our blood.

There are many different kinds of herbs that we can use. You can go on Google, find the herbs that you like and make a tea. You could buy them on Amazon or there are many co-ops online that will ship herbal blends to you. I say buy it in bulk. Pick a few that sound really delicious together like lemon balm, basil, sage, rosemary, echinacea. Get these loose-leaf basically and then mix them together and every day make a big tea. You don’t even have to heat it. You can put it in a big thing of water overnight and then just drink it the next day. It makes a beautiful tea. You can drink cold or you can drink hot. That way, you’re getting very gentle antiviral herbs into you and into your family and you’re hydrating.

Learn True Health Podcast Episodes

Some episodes for you to listen to. Episode 315 of the Learn True Health podcast I share everything I’ve learned from Naturopaths for what to do when you have a cold or flu to boost the immune system and also to mitigate symptoms. You really want to listen to that episode. I talk about colloidal silver. I talk about specific essential oil blends for respiratory support. Use of the neti pot, use of hydrotherapy to boost the immune system and boost lymphatic flow. You’ll want to listen to episode 315.

Episode 15

So to get to episode 15, you can’t listen to it on iTunes because only the most recent 300 episodes are available. Because this is episode 417, there are 117 episodes that have been pushed off of iTunes. You have to go to learntruehealth.com, my website, or other podcast directories like Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Google Podcasts. There are lots of other podcast directories that you can find episode 15 on or you just go to learntruehealth.com and find episode 15.

Dr. Jenna Jorgensen. She’s a Naturopathic physician and she shares exactly what she has in her medicinal holistic first aid kit and what you should have in your medicine cabinet. All the natural remedies from homeopathy, essential oils, and some really interesting things that you should have in your home for helping you with cold and flu and other just general stuff that happens. If you want to have a Naturopathic kit, basically, a first aid kit, then listen to episode 15 with Dr. Jenna Jorgensen.

Colloidal Silver

Colloidal silver is something that has been proven to be antiviral. You have to make sure that it’s a high-quality colloidal silver. I was just talking to my Naturopath about this last week. She and I both like the brand that Sovereign Silver. You can take it orally, you can gargle with it, and you can use it topically. Some Naturopaths talk about nebulizing it, so inhaling the fine particles. Consult your Naturopathic physician or consult your doctor about that, about nebulizing. The lungs really aren’t meant to have stuff in them. If you’re going to nebulize colloidal silver be very careful because there’s been evidence to suggest that it will accumulate, the colloidal silver would accumulate in the lungs. However, if you are fighting a viral infection, many Naturopaths talk about nebulizing colloidal silver and also nebulizing glutathione to support the lungs.

There are things that you can do to support the lungs using natural medicine, but again, talk to a Naturopathic physician about these specifically. I really want to err on the side of caution here. Don’t just nebulize things randomly as a preventative because you could end up doing damage. We really want to be very careful.

There was several people that died recently in the Middle East because they read something on social media that some kind of rubbing alcohol if they drank it would be a cure for coronavirus. Of course, that killed them. I know you guys, my listeners, are so smart. You guys are smart. You guys wouldn’t buy into a fake meme. I want us to also not overreact. I want us to not under-react, but I definitely don’t want to overreact and an overdose on a natural substance. It’s best to do this all in balance. Before you take anything, just do a little bit of digging and talk to a Naturopathic physician to create your perfect formula of natural immune supportive supplements that you could be taking.

Supplements are generally very, very safe. It is when we go into high doses for long periods of time that we can do damage. So stay within those parameters and just err on the side of caution. Start slow and work your way up like vitamin C. Start with 1000 milligrams and then slowly ramp it up to bowel tolerance. Those are things that are totally proven to be safe.

The best thing we can do is to decrease our stress levels is to err on the side of caution to stay at home as much as possible. You know what’s really interesting? I bet we see a huge decrease in all infections. If you think about it, if we all stay at home as much as possible, we’re probably going to see a huge decrease in all affections across the board. A huge decrease in the spread of all infections. If you can’t stay at home, practice more self-care to decrease stress levels. I’m seeing so many people are so afraid right now. The best thing you can do for your immune system is to stay informed, stay calm. Maybe when you’re drinking your antiviral tea every day, you can imagine that it is supportive of your body every time you sip it, you could imagine that you’re supporting yourself, and your body is strong and healthy and then everyone you love is going to be healthy and safe.

We can just support each other by letting everyone know that we can take vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, and elderberry and other herbs to support our body in the best way we can. Everything that I’ve shared today, I want to make it really clear, I’m not sharing a cure. I’m not saying that any of this will even prevent coronavirus, but what the studies are showing and what the doctors have told me is that these herbs and these supplements support the body. So they might help to mitigate symptoms. In China, several studies are showing that with the use of vitamin C and zinc and other nutrients that they’re finding that those people have better outcomes with their infection. That they have a higher success rate of thriving and living when they used vitamin C when they used other nutrients and herbs versus nothing at all.

Of course, we want to do the best we can to support our body’s ability to heal itself and stay healthy. Please, support yourself by not giving in to the overwhelm. By doing what you can daily to lower your stress levels. Get out in nature. Get out in sunlight. There are studies that show that sunlight is antiviral and getting out in fresh air, grounding yourself. Go stand out in your backyard with your feet in the ground or go lie down in the grass if you can. Go for nature walks. Read some books. Unplug from social media and do things that will decrease your stress. Now is a great time to pull out those board games and play with your family. Please, make an antiviral tea. Take these supplements to support your body’s ability to stay as healthy as it can.

Join our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have many health professionals in that Facebook group, and we’re all sharing great information, staying up to date with what we can do to support our immune system and support each other. Please, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Although I just said stay off of social media, but it’s a really positive place to be, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’re trying to keep it a very happy and positive place, but also supporting all of our health questions with great information. If you’re looking for a good resource, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’m going to have some great doctors on the show coming up soon to support us around this as well. Please, just keep focusing on decreasing your stress and self-care. I love you all. We’re all going to get through this together. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

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416 Super Human, The Mind's Physiological Effect On The Body And How We Can Harness It To Heal and Create Our Reality, Telekinesis, Extrasensory Perception, Pre-Cognition Experiences, Consciousness & Energy Medicine, Caroline Cory 0

Mar 10, 2020

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Superhuman

https://www.learntruehealth.com/superhuman

Highlights:

Why the Superhuman film was created
How to encourage DNA repair
What vibrational methodology is
The merging process
Release blocks before setting specific intent
Importance of getting to the root cause

In this episode, Caroline Cory shares how people not trained with telekinesis can change pH in water; and how blindfold perception were able to do those. She also talks about the importance of releasing blocks before setting specific intent.

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. If you love the Learn True Health podcast, as I know you do, come join our membership go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s a learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. We have some wonderful lessons on boosting the immune system and foods that you can use that are in your kitchen right now to fight off viruses. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen and learn how to use food as medicine to heal your body and keep you healthy. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen.

[0:00:42] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 416. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Caroline Cory, who’s an award-winning filmmaker. Oh man, I love your most recent movie Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible. You produced some wonderful documentaries. I really am excited for my listeners to check out your documentaries because they’re so relevant to helping people heal their bodies. We get to a point where we’re trying everything, we’re trying all kinds of physical medicine or maybe we have emotional work to go through or maybe we’re really stuck in our life. The one thing we’re not tapping into, which is our most powerful tool, is our mind and our consciousness and our mind’s ability to shape and change our reality. I know that sounds like a bunch of new-age stuff, but your movie goes through the science of it. You have so many wonderful science experiments with PhDs who do this for a living. By the end of the movie, you walk away a believer that the mind has the ability to change our reality and our mind shapes our reality. It can be a very beautiful thing to cultivate that. Caroline, welcome to the show.

[0:02:19] Caroline Cory: Hey, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It’s great to connect with you. You said it, it’s exactly what you said. We don’t talk about this that much. Actually, I take that back. Everybody’s been telling us and we’ve been hearing over and over that the mind affects our body, our health, our stress level. Even in the mainstream medical field, we know now that meditation is helpful for reducing stress and imbalances and things like that. What I wanted to do with this film is to take it to the next level. It’s not just theory anymore, it’s like show me how. How it’s possible that the mind is actually having a physiological effect on my body? That’s exactly why I made this film because it’s no longer new age stuff, just theory. This is the proof, this is the demonstration, these are the devices, this is the science and this is very real, very measurable.

[0:03:30] Ashley James: I like that you said the mind is having a physiological effect on the body.

[0:03:36] Caroline Cory: Yeah, measurable.

[0:03:39] Ashley James: It’s measurable. You can see it. My experience of this, back in 2005, I became a master practitioner trainer of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. I often attended the American Board of Hypnotherapy conventions that they would have. Actually, the last one must have just happened, but it was every President’s Day. They did it for like 20 years. They would have, as the opening evening, it was like Friday evening, they would have all of us in a big ballroom. There’d be two or three or a hundred or thousand or however many people there are. It was a big ballroom, lots of people. The first event would be this man who is a Ph.D. professor. He taught at one of those big universities in California. He would come on stage. He was very factual and he talked about telekinesis. Of course, we’re all like, “Okay, this is a little out there. We’re at hypnotherapy convention.” His day job is teaching physics. He believes in reality and in measuring reality, he’s a physicist. He would take this giant iron bar that was maybe two inches thick, a very big iron bar used in making the railroads. He would have us all come up and touch it and pound on it and feel that it was absolutely solid. It was solid. It was not a magic act at all. It was solid.

He would hold it in both hands. He would pause and he would meditate with it. Then he turned it to a pretzel. We’d gasp like, “What just happened?” Then he’d say, “Okay. Now, feel it. Touch it.” Again, we’d come up and it would be completely solid. Then he’d spend the next few minutes explaining what happened. That our mind has the ability to speed up the matter, to speed up all the electrons and all the matter inside that iron bar to the point where he could mold it. Then he’d teach us how to do it. We’d all be holding lots of cutlery. He’d hand out silver cutlery so we’re all holding—I remember holding a knife and my friend, who’s also from Canada, was holding a fork. She and I had known each other for several years. I’ve known her not to have some superhuman powers. She was just regular like me. She’s holding the fork and she’s practicing what he said to do, which is with your mind imagine that the spoon is bending or that the fork is bending. Imagine that you’re speeding up the electrons.

I was having a hard time because I really wanted it, my knife, I really wanted my knife to move. I really, really, really wanted it. I just desperately wanted it too much and I wasn’t actually just doing it. Kind of like if you have your arm resting and you just say, “I really want to move my arm.” But you don’t actually just do it. Wanting it doesn’t happen. Wanting doesn’t make it happen but doing it does. I was not as successful as I was doing it. I looked over at my friend who was holding the fork. She’s holding the base of the fork. She’s holding it up in front of her looking at the four tongs of the fork. I’d believe you if someone told me that they like dropped acid in my water before the event because I watched, as she was just gently staring at it, and I watched as every single tongue moved away from each other and then curled up. They all curled together. I looked around the room and some people were successful, some people weren’t. I watched as people, with their minds, bent spoons, twisted knives around.

Some people would hold the knife and they’d sort of warm-up the molecules with their mind and the knife would be malleable. They could turn it to a pretzel and then it would harden again. Whereas some people could just look at the object and move it. He would come every year to the American Board of Hypnotherapy Convention. It was the highlight of the weekend, obviously. Seeing that with my own eyes left me, obviously, questioning my reality, but also left me in awe of the untapped potential of the human mind.

[0:08:27] Caroline Cory: Exactly. Absolutely. That’s it. People don’t realize that this is real. They can do this. That’s what I was trying to do with the film to make it very kind of an everyday thing. That’s why we didn’t just show people who are super trained. I had, in fact, guests who had never done anything like this. They would come. We would teach them in a couple of hours the basis of telekinesis and they would be able to move stuff like it’s no big deal. That is exactly what I want people to take away from this. It’s just an untapped potential, an untapped power. We just have to do it like you said. Stop talking about it. Let’s just do it. What was the name of this physicist?

[0:09:26] Ashley James: I knew you’re going to ask me that. I forget his name off top of my head, but if I remember I’ll tell you. I think he has since retired. It’s been a few years since I’ve been back to the conventions.

[0:09:41] Caroline Cory: There’s a lot of people as you saw in the film as well. There are quite a few scientists that we were able to bring together in the film. Of course, doing four different subjects. That’s exactly what I want people to take away from this. It’s not just a theory when they see other people on camera. Don’t forget, it’s even harder when we’re filming because you have this stress. You want to succeed. Even though it’s edited eventually, but then it’s one take. We don’t cut when we are doing the experiment, during the experiment. You can literally see the object move. It’s even more stressful like I said because you have cameras all around us. You have staff looking. The crew looking at it. “Is this going to work? Is this going to work?” It’s that much more tension and stress on you. Even under those conditions, when it works, it’s pretty amazing. That’s what I’m hoping people will realize to just try it. In fact, we’re doing a seminar. We’re doing workshops teaching everything that’s in the film. The telekinesis, the change in the pH in the water, the blindfold perception everything that’s in there we’re teaching in workshops. Because of the reaction of the people who are watching, like the crew, for example, some of them were kind of familiar with the topic. Most of them weren’t. When they would see this, their reaction would be like, “Wow. Wait a minute. I want to do this. Can I try this How come this person could do it the first time?

In fact, I keep getting just from the trailer that’s been out there now a few months so people are sending us texts and emails like, “Hey, are you teaching this? Where can I learn this? My kid wants to learn this.” It’s really more pop culture than we think. If it’s packaged and presented in the right way as opposed to this kind of strange new age thing that only a few people can do. You know what I mean? It’s just like, “Hey. It’s just a real thing. Have fun with it. You are your own superhero.” That’s what it’s about.

[0:12:27] Ashley James: I love it. Talking about the real applications of you go through in your movie and you show how we can use our mind to change pH really quickly. Within minutes, you can actually. There’s a great scientific experiment in a lab where you change the pH of water with your mind. Be able to move things with your mind. What I love is that your friend, who had an eye condition that left her almost blind, it was very hard for her to see. Within two weeks of using these techniques, she was able to read again. Not because she healed her eye but because she was able to perceive letters with her mind. That they’re using these techniques to teach blind people how to even see and read. You have these video, the part of the movie is following these children who become blindfolded and are able to read books blindfolded and able to run outside and play soccer blindfolded. It’s something that even adults can be trained to do to be able to perceive reality.

What you proposed was that you and the PhDs that you’re working with propose that, our order is wrong. We think our eyes perceive things, the messages get sent to our brain, and then we perceive reality. What it’s being proposed is that we are actually perceiving reality before our eyes perceive it. That our eyes kind of are the secondary system to go, “Okay, yes. I thought that was there and it actually is there.” Our brain has the ability to both intake and perceive information from the outside world, but also to influence it.

[0:14:35] Caroline Cory: Yeah. It’s consciousness if you will because your consciousness is non-local so it’s tapping into a unified field. It’s tapping into an information field whether you know it or not, whether you feel it or not, you understand or not. You are bigger than your body so your consciousness is constantly retrieving that information first. Then the brain, the physical brain, translates that information into a visual data. Then you see or you hear what your consciousness had already tapped into. It is the other way around. Whereas we are not just taught, but we’re literally programmed to think that what you see is what is real, what you see or what you hear is what is. Everything else doesn’t exist. That’s a big problem because, first of all, the order is wrong, like you just said. Also, if you keep convincing yourself that it’s only what you see and what you hear that exists and nothing else counts, it’s almost like you’re discounting what your consciousness is doing spontaneously, which is tapping spontaneously in this unified information field all the time and retrieving this information all the time.

This is a paradigm shift. This is a completely different perspective on reality. We show this in the film. It’s not just a few kids somewhere in the UK because they’re doing the specific training. They’re all over. We went to Utah, we went to Germany, Russia, Romania. There’s a lot of groups that we didn’t even include in the film. Mexico, India. We just want to—it’s obvious if the film gets very, very long so we just went to enough places, shown enough people of all ages, different backgrounds. By the way, the methodology is actually different.

Some folks use a vibrational methodology, meaning they’re tapping into the information field through vibration, reading the information as a vibration, and then translating it into a visual data. This is one group. The other groups do something completely different. They use visualization and, of course, intent. Especially with the kids, it’s so easy to teach the kids basically. Really allowing your consciousness to be in the universe, accept that you are everywhere in the universe, that there’s light everywhere, and then to bring that through the physical brain, the physical body, and translate that into the visual data. Then you start to see. It sounds crazy but it works. It’s in the film. There are people from all over doing it.

[0:17:56] Ashley James: I want to back up and get to know you a little bit, get to know why did you create this film? What happened in your life? Because this is a huge project. This is a huge project that took years and a lot of energy, a lot of time and money to create this beautiful documentary. What happened in your life that motivated you to put forth the effort to build this and create this documentary?

[0:18:30] Caroline Cory: Actually, since I was very, very young, even at the age of five, I could perceive subtle energy, not just aura, but I could see basically the energy field around people. People’s consciousness. I could just look at them and know everything about them. Of course, I was five years old so I thought it was like, “Oh, everybody can do this.” I didn’t think I was anything special or it wasn’t anything special. I just kind of went along with that. I don’t know if you want to call it ability because I think everybody can do this. What happened is that because it was so spontaneous, I also had an experience where I could kind of hear telepathically, kind of communicate telepathically. What started to happen was not so much like, “Oh, wow. This is happening to me.” It was more like how is this happening? What is the mechanism that allowed me to do this when nobody else, for example, could see the subtle energy or could understand certain things before they happened and things like that?

I kept kind of wanting to know the mechanics of this. As I grew up, of course, I went into the field of psychology. In college, I studied psychology. By the time I got to graduate school, it was like, “This is not even close. We’re missing a whole field of understanding.” I continue to explore and research and really bring my own knowledge from my own experiences. For example, I would look at someone and I knew the root cause of their whatever illness or struggle. They had been trying different kinds of healing methods and doing psychotherapy for 20 years. They were still exactly at the same place. Then when I would tell them, “Oh, yeah. Well, you have this because in the past life you had this and that or because before you were born you’re supposed to come in with a twin brother but this happened. Things like that. It was like I was able to pinpoint the root cause and exactly at that time their problem would go away.

This was validation for me. It was like, “Okay, I’m not crazy. This is real. I am tapping into an information field that is accurate. I just have to train myself to make sure that I’m not projecting, that I’m not mixing with my own interpretation and things like that.” This was my personal training that allowed me to develop a whole methodology. How do you stay out of the objective observation? How do you then shift the energy field?

It took me 20 years to develop a methodology in energy medicine for healing and also for consciousness expansion. I started teaching other people to read the energy field in this way and to go directly to the root cause and the method. It’s not just one way, it’s many different ways. It’s color, its sound, its geometry, it’s zero point. There are all kinds of techniques altogether.

I did that for a long time. Even though, for example, I was working with people who had a cyst. We would do one session and the cyst is suddenly gone. You could see it on an ultrasound. One minute it’s here the other minute it’s gone. People with cancer. Even though I had so much validation and even my students, people who were studying it, had so much validation this stuff works, it’s very strange. It’s almost like I still had to go to the next level. It’s like I had to not just go from the experience of, “Hey, you had this condition and now you don’t” or “you were stuck in your life and now you’re not.” Going from the experiential to the actual scientific demonstration. It’s almost like people still need this additional validation to prove to themselves that they have this healing power. It wasn’t a fluke.

That’s the reason why the subject itself was very easy to me because everything I said, it took me my whole lifetime to explore the mechanics of consciousness on matter, in the physical world, in other dimensional fields, what-have-you. It was more like I need to at this point go beyond the experiential and bring the data. The scientific validation, demonstrations. That is the reason why I had to make this film. I wanted to also invite people who had never done anything like this before to take part in the experiments, in the demonstrations to show that anybody can do this. I wanted to bring some credible scientists, not just a few people who are just in, again, in the new age field.

[0:24:35] Ashley James: Woowoo?

[0:24:36] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Yeah. I think I managed to do that. That’s the reason why I ended up making this film investing so much of my time, energy, and money. I think it was worth it. I think it’s worth it.

[0:24:51] Ashley James: I think it was worth it too. This isn’t your first movie. You’ve made other movies.

[0:24:58] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Again, because I had so many experiences with otherworldly beings. When I was five, that one experience that I had, I realized that I wasn’t just looking at people’s energy field, but I could see beings, I could see angels, I could see spirits. It was obviously nothing scary. It’s not like in the movies where you see dead people, it’s so scary. It was nothing like that. It was beautiful, angelic, light beings. I could feel them, I could talk to them. I would see the type of energy they had and what they were doing here on earth and things like that.

That also stayed with me my whole life. I kept kind of, not just thinking or feeling that somebody was there, I would literally see them. Because of that, I also felt that I needed to demonstrate, that we’re surrounded by so many types of beings and what those worlds were about. That was my last film called Among Us, but I think it’s more specialized tactile. It attracts more people who are really into the subject whereas this current film is more helpful. It’s more like you can apply what you learn in the film to your daily life. Especially the experiment we did with pH.

There was a physicist—William Tiller actually did a famous experiment with pH. He was able to demonstrate that a group of, I think it was his students at the time, they would focus on a water sample and they were just intended to increase the pH or change the pH and it would happen. They did that scientifically. They did that study. I think he published that study. I believe it was in the 80s. Anyway, so this showed at the time that your consciousness, your mind can literally change the chemistry of water. I wanted to replicate this.

I worked a lot with water and DNA with another scientist, Glenn Rein. The reason why I had to include this in the film and why this is so important is because if you are able to change the chemistry of water that’s sitting in front of you, it means that you can change the chemistry of your body. That’s the point. That’s the point of this whole film. It’s not about moving the piece of metal. It’s not about the piece of metal. It’s not about the water. It’s about you having those abilities. Especially water because we hear so much about higher pH and water and people are selling these 9 plus pH water bottles and things like that. Obviously, an alkaline environment is not conducive to illness. I mean the virus cannot survive. We know that an alkaline environment is better for your health, not too much alkaline, but, again, a balance.

I wanted to demonstrate that on the film. It took a few minutes, but the other one with the DNA, I did that many times the DNA test where I was able to change the electricity in the DNA. That literally happens in seconds. I can zap that thing.

[0:29:16] Ashley James: For those who haven’t seen it, explain the experiment so we get the full picture.

[0:29:23] Caroline Cory: What happens, first of all, when we set up these experiments, of course, we’re editing a film, and so we can’t show the hours and hours and hours of preparation that goes into each experiment. Basically, what we do, let’s say we want to test the conductivity and change the electricity in a DNA sample. We have to measure this electrical conductivity in that same sample over a long period of time, get specific measurements. This is kind of like we get a baseline meaning over several days, over several hours this is the measurement of the electrical conductivity in this sample. Then at a specific point, I come in, or whoever comes in, and with the intent starts to interfere, intervene with that sample and trying to change. In our case, we wanted to increase the electrical conductivity in the water. Then let’s say at 3:00 PM the experiment starts from 3:00 PM-3:15 PM and then we do it again from 4:00 PM-4:15 PM, 5:00 PM-5:15 PM.

We have this measurement over a long period of time. We notice that exactly between 3:00 PM-3:15 PM, 4:00 PM-4:15 PM is exactly when the electrical conductivity changed dramatically. All the other times it would go back to the original baseline. This means this time correlation tells us that at those specific times, the intent of the observer or the person that’s doing the experiment has an effect, has a measurable effect. Scientifically, that’s how it works. Of course, we have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. In the film, we talk about the baseline, measuring the baseline. Then we show on camera how it changes.

I’ve done this experiment with DNA before. What I notice is that DNA responds very, very quickly like literally in seconds. Whereas the pH it takes a few minutes, which is still pretty good. What happens is that when you change the electrical conductivity—in this film, I think it showed about 100% jump. Other films I did it again and other places I did and it would jump to 400%. This is very significant because the electrical conductivity in the DNA was shown to increase its ability to self-repair. They had done a study, this is California Tech Institute I believe, they had done a study to measure or to see a correlation at least between the electrical conductivity in a DNA sample with its relationship to self-correct. If you have any sort of imbalance, any sort of something not working and you increase the electricity in the DNA sample, you basically restore its original kind of pattern if you will. That is huge. Imagine that you can do that in 10seconds. I did it in 10 seconds in the film.

This means that your mind, your consciousness can self-repair help your DNA to self-repair. If that is not significant I’m not sure what is.

[0:33:26] Ashley James: That is wonderfully significant. How would one go about encouraging the DNA to repair? Would we send love to our DNA? How would one do that?

[0:33:45] Caroline Cory: That’s what I was saying. We are now teaching workshops. I’m also writing a book. It’s more of a manual exactly for that. First of all, to understand like anything else it’s you, it’s your consciousness so you have to prepare just like in anything. You have to know what type of state your consciousness has to be in, what type of meditation needs to happen that is more useful because everybody meditates differently. People say, “Oh, I just meditate. I do mindfulness. I do this or I do that.” Well, yeah. To me, every type of meditation does something different.

You have to do the meditation that works for what you are trying to do in this experiment. In this experiment you want your mind to be very very fast, very very accurate, very very precise. You want it to be very quiet. That’s the reason why it’s a specific meditation. Actually, I have one that’s online. It’s free of charge if people want to take a look at that. It may look or sound like a simple meditation but actually, it has, if you want, the pattern to get you to that point of specificity and aligning your mind channels very specifically. That’s the preparation.

Then you also have to understand, which was very very interesting actually, working with all of these devices. It is not the same when you are trying to affect water. It’s not the same as trying to affect a piece of an electronic device or an electrical device. It’s completely different or to move a piece of paper or to try to influence a metal like you were saying earlier. It’s a different feeling. It’s almost like you notice that the biological substance, like DNA or water, responds to your, I don’t want to say command but you know what I mean, to you intent let’s say in a very different way than does the spoon that you’re trying to bend. You have to kind of know all of these things so that you know how to approach whatever it is you’re trying to influence.

If you’re working on your body, of course sending love and all of that is great. You want to be more specific. You also want to be aware of what’s coming up for you and release that. For example, that’s part of the preparation. As soon as you sit down and you try to do something like that I can see the people’s mind chatter kicks in like, “Wait. Can I do this? Is this going to work? I don’t know. Maybe other people can do it. Am I gifted?” All this mind chatter are blocks. You can’t start the experiment if you have all these blocks. Part of the preparation is to release these blocks, to know when you are really energetically ready. Then begin the influencing of whatever it is that you want. If it’s the DNA then you focus on the DNA. Then you basically set your intent for something specific. For example, it was very specific. I want the electrical conductivity to increase. You can say, “I want to get my cancer.” That’s still too general.

I find that it’s more efficient if you have more specific intents. If you have more details as to—for example, what is contributing to your current imbalance? It’s that much better than you target that imbalance. It’s the thyroid or it’s the chemistry and this part of my body and so on and so forth. Does that make sense?

[0:38:22] Ashley James: Absolutely, I remember in one of my trainings back in 2005, there was an MD, a doctor, who was studying along with us. We came to this exercise using a pendulum. The pendulum was just a biofeedback. We would swing it and it would go from—one it would start swinging let’s say northeast, northeast and then it would go up like a sunrise and start then going towards north-south, north-south. It’s just kind of like arced. We would say to it, as it was arcing upwards, we would say as this goes, as this moves up progressively. It’s swinging going from one direction to arcing to swinging going to a different direction, my metabolism is increasing. This doctor just totally didn’t believe it at all. It’s not a placebo because he thought this was just ridiculous. He actually said it, “The mind cannot affect the body. I’ve spent eight years in medical school. The mind cannot affect the body. It’s not possible.” I don’t know why he was taking these trainings, but he said the mind can’t affect the body. Probably just to be a better doctor, have more tools in his tool belt. He said, “The mind can’t affect the body. This is ridiculous.”

He actually was the demo. Our teacher brought him up in front of the class to teach this. The fact that he totally didn’t believe in it and thought it was a sham was great. Because what happened was as he’s doing it, so he just says to his mind, unconscious mind, “Raise my metabolism and show me that you’re raising my metabolism by the movement of the pendulum.” We’re using as a biofeedback so the micro muscle movement, we’re not moving it with our mind. This is not telekinesis. It’s simply, the unconscious mind can control micro muscle movements in the fingers. He’s just holding it there but his unconscious mind is moving it. We’re watching. As it’s moving up, he wasn’t surprised that the pendulum was moving, he had moved a pendulum before. His unconscious mind has moved a pendulum before. It wasn’t a big deal.

We noticed that his neck started to get really red. The redness move up his face. By the time the redness had crept up to his eyes, beads of sweat began to form on his brow. He yelled out, “This is impossible. What is going on? I’m so hot.” He throws the pendulum. He’s ripping off his coat, his blazer and unloosening his tie. He’s sort of angry. He says, “This is impossible. The mind cannot affect the body.” He’s fighting with it because he saw with his own eyes and experienced in his own body that his intention, his mind’s intention to increase his metabolism and the command he gave it, he gave it a conscious intention to his unconscious mind. His unconscious mind communicated back that he was doing it, that it was doing it. Just with the intention of his mind within seconds, it wasn’t even a minute, it was like maybe 30 seconds, he raises metabolism to the point where he was sweating and had a huge flush of blood flow and heats. He was very hot, his whole body was hot.

That kind of blew us away too because he didn’t believe in it so it’s not a placebo effect. He had to really re-examine his eight years in medical school because the mind absolutely affects the body. What does that mean? We’re walking around listening to other people’s suggestions, the media suggestions about our health. How much does that play a role in how we create our reality and how we create ill health?

[0:43:06] Caroline Cory: Absolutely. Look at the commercials. Every two seconds there’s a commercial on a drug because we’re all going to get sick by the time we’re 50. Women are going to develop that and men are going to be that. It’s like we’re definitely programmed to become ill. This is fascinating this story you just told about this. I have to say, the fact that he was even in that class, a part of him, I think his unconscious mind, totally believed in it. It’s his conscious mind, it’s his logical mind that doesn’t even want to go there because of his medical training. It’s like he’s not going to reexamine what he spent eight years or ten years or whatever that is. He’s not going to question that, but unconsciously, that’s what brought him to the class. Of course, that’s what demonstrated the effect.

Also, you bring up the point that we don’t even have to believe. I mean, it’s better if we believe because it’s more efficient and faster, but even if we don’t believe there’s still something happening. Even if we don’t believe consciously, I want to say. It still works.

[0:44:29] Ashley James: Belief is not required for your consciousness to affect your body because it always is affecting your body. You prove that in your movie with all the different scientific experiments you did. That our consciousness is constantly talking to our DNA, talking to every molecule in our body. Even across the country, across the world. You did an experiment where you were able to move an object in a vacuum across the United States, which goes to show that we have this. We’re connected to this morphic field, this energy field that is this earth. There are so many experiments. You want to highlight another one that so people can understand that they have the ability, they have tools to unlock inside them that can help them to achieve their health goals?

[0:45:31] Caroline Cory: Yeah. The pH and the DNA is extremely useful for an everyday life thing because every day you are dealing with chemistry: food, even your mood, the hormones that get released in your brain, your emotions. Your chemistry is changing all day long. I feel like this one experiment should empower people to remember that during the day like, “Wait, I feel off. So I just ate something and it just doesn’t feel right.” Instead of ignoring it or saying, “Oh, it’ll go away,” or “it’s just indigestion.” or whatever that is. To start to gravitate to have a reaction, a spontaneous reaction to say, “Wait, I can change the chemistry in my digestive system right now.” I feel that one is very useful on a day-to-day basis.

The other experiments, for example, the one that we did with the long distance, the remote viewing and of course the telekinesis and the blindfold. For example, the remote viewing, that one I feel also is very empowering for people to just remember that all these crazy synchronicities that happen in their life is not even on a day-to-day basis is not synchronicity. It’s like your brain and your consciousness is tapped into a universal consciousness, a collective consciousness. Everybody’s tapped into the same field so why is it so crazy to think that, “Oh, I just thought of Ashley and then the phone rings and it’s her. Wow.” This is not like weird stuff.

Actually, there’s science. Scientists have also demonstrated and proven entanglement meaning that two particles at a distance can actually exchange properties. They don’t even have to connect with each other. The property of one particle can be transferred to another and affect the other and vice versa. Not just in a small way but even on a cosmic way like a star in the sky can do that with another star. This was demonstrated scientifically.

If you just allow yourself to imagine that or just believe that this is real, this is the mechanics of who we are. Stop calling it like, “Hey, it’s a fluke. It’s synchronicity. It’s luck,” but use this mechanism for your benefit. For example, I’m about to take a trip somewhere or for example, my son is on a trip and I haven’t heard from him in ten days. I’m worried, what’s going on? For example, I can use this understanding, the mechanics of our consciousness to know that we are entangled. If I train myself, there’s a method that I call the merging process, you can pick up that information accurately every single time.

That’s why I showed the remote-viewing experiment in the film. It was used by governments around the world to spy on other governments. If this was a woowoo thing, they’re not going to spend 20 years and millions of dollars investigating. It was accurate to a point especially the Russians and the Chinese too. They were able to read documents and see what’s inside the drawer remotely or know exactly where the rockets were. That is very precise. If at that level of government level, if that doesn’t bring validation and also with this scientific explanation and demonstration of how entanglement works, we can start to use it in our daily life and manifest so many things, feel so much better of how we are interacting with the rest of the universe and use that to our benefit and manifest our daily reality differently.

[0:50:35] Ashley James: In the Bible, in the Old Testament, Genesis 1:27 it says that God made us in His image. I’ve always been curious about that ever since I was a child. It really dawns on me that what if this is what he meant, made in His image. Not that God has ten fingers and ten toes and walks around with a big beard. He’s about 6’2” with blue eyes. Not in his image physically like we’re taking it literally, but in His image in that he gave us the ability to be connected. We’re connected in this morphic field. You talk about in your movie, trees they can measure it and prove it, but trees have an energy field that talks to each other, communicates to each other when a storm is coming when there’s a threat nearby. Even there’s a mycelial network that all living things that are connected there, all plants connect through the mycelial network and communicate that way. More so that they’re able to communicate long distances through this morphic field. This resonance that were a part of that animals can sense it and communicate and we also too are part of it. That we can both perceive it and also affect it with our consciousness. What if that’s what God meant by in His image? That he gave us this tool to shape our reality.

[0:52:25] Caroline Cory: Exactly. I totally agree. When we talk about that, to me it has to do with being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipresence. Of course, we’re not talking on a Creator level, but it’s kind of like a smaller version of that potential. Omniscience is the ability to tap into all of the knowledge in the universe. Does it even make sense that animals communicate that way, trees communicate that way but not humans? It doesn’t even make sense that certain things have been proven, have been demonstrated on an animal level and then it goes kind of strange when we talk about it in terms of human beings. It’s the same mechanics. If anything, it’s even more sophisticated.

I feel like tapping into the knowledge of the universe spontaneously without going through a third party. Directly being tapped into the source of all of the information, all of healing, clarity, guidance; it’s all there. I feel that’s exactly it that we are connected. I think that is the definition of as above so below and being in His image. It doesn’t even make sense for it to be otherwise. Sometimes if you look around and there’s millions and millions of breeds of animals of flowers and trees and insects. Look up in the sky. The stars, billions of stars and galaxies and universe and multiverses.

Whoever created this or however that whole thing was created, does it even make sense that there would be one species called the human being that would not be able, that would be completely isolated on this one planet and not be able to communicate with anything? Not communicate even with themselves. You know what I mean? It doesn’t even make sense that whatever divine intelligence, whatever mechanics is behind all of this, it doesn’t make sense to not think that it is all connected. You’re a part of this larger mold. If you’re a part of it, then you are it. It’s like your hand. Your hand is part of your whole body. Whatever your hand feels, you feel. Whatever your hand is doing you know what it’s doing and vice versa. You know if you’re going through something, your hand is going to feel it. It’s like that. We’re an extension. We’re part of this larger consciousness, universal consciousness of all that is.

[0:55:50] Ashley James: A very famous experiment was done in DC several years ago where they try to affect the crime rates in DC. At the beginning, the Chief of Police was not on board, he was not supportive. By the end of the summer, they had had such a drastic decrease in the crime rates in DC that the Chief of Police became an absolute supporter. How they dropped the rates of crime so significantly in DC was they meditated on peace. They got thousands of people together and they meditated. They focused their consciousness on peace. People focusing their consciousness on peace with the intention of peace we’re able to drop the crime rates.

How is it that some hardened thug with a gun who’s down on their luck and wants to rob a convenience store who doesn’t give to any things about some monks down the street meditating. The people that do the violence right, all the violent crimes, those guys don’t care that there’s someone meditating for them to be peaceful. They really don’t. Yet somehow, the consciousness of a few thousand people were able to calm, to ground, to make these criminals choose a different path, a peaceful path.

[0:57:27] Caroline Cory: Yeah, exactly. This was done several times actually with the Dean Radin’s the random generator, the random number generator that measures collective consciousness. It works in the same way as you would have a hurricane category 5 that would completely destroy an entire neighborhood and there’s this one house that’s not the most stable house or solid house and yet it’s standing. It goes to show that you can still create your reality within the larger reality. The problem becomes when we think that we are here to change the world and so we want everybody to change in order for things to work. We want people to believe what we believe and have better systems and be fair and be honest and things like that. That doesn’t work. If we understand the principle of consciousness, I feel like consciousness is the behind-the-scenes power that we have.

You don’t really change the pattern or the behavior of a person, you affect their consciousness, which then, in turn, affects their behavior.

[0:59:10] Ashley James: Oh, sure.

[0:59:11] Caroline Cory: That’s the reason why a lot of clashes happen when we want somebody else to be convinced of our truth because we’re going head to head a neurological human mind trying to convince them that our truth is the better truth as opposed to simply tapping into the larger consciousness and pouring into the larger consciousness what we believe in. It doesn’t mean that you are being sneaky about it, it’s just that you are pouring your truth. If many people are pouring the same truth then eventually, it affects whoever is open to that truth because they’re still free will.

On some higher level, this thug in DC that was just about to rob the 7-Eleven that his conscious mind would say, “Hey, I’m going to rob this 7-Eleven and that’s that,” but on a higher honor, he’s tapped into the same consciousness field that everybody else is. On a higher level, his higher consciousness, kind of changed. Something happened in that field and told him, “Maybe not today. Let’s take a break.” He was on some level open to it. He didn’t understand it himself on a conscious mind, but on this higher consciousness level, everyone is tapped into this. Everyone can receive that inspiration, that shift if they’re open to it.

[1:00:58] Ashley James: A practical application would be instead of yelling at the kids again because they didn’t clean their room, to focus and intent with love for them to feel motivated to clean their room or something. Try that every day. Instead of just coming at them, just come at them from love and just focus an intent that you’re going to affect their consciousness. Do this experiment every day and see what happens. See that your intention, your focus, your consciousness could affect their consciousness. Now, in terms of healing our body you said the more specific the better.

[1:01:39] Caroline Cory: You don’t want to put in their consciousness, “I want you to clean your room and go do your homework.” You want, first of all, when you are working at that level because this is part of the method that we work with. You are, again, it’s a method that I call the merging, so you’re merging with their higher consciousness. Before you pour the love into it, you can already feel why they are not wanting to clean their room. You know what I mean? Do they not want to clean the room just to show you? Is it like a defiance thing or do they not want to clean their room because actually, they’re not feeling well physically? Do they not want to clean their room because they just had a fight at school and they were bullied? You know what I mean?

There are different reasons why. Every kid is different. Every kid has a different situation. Again, before you put in the positive you want to take out whatever is the root cause of the problem. If you do this enough, you tap into this root cause and then let’s say if it’s something physical, before telling them to go clean their room, maybe you can be guided to give them the chemical whatever food or drink or whatever they need. If it’s a tea, if it’s a hot milk, or whatever. Something that will soothe or bring that chemical balance back into their body so they feel good. Then you say, “Okay.” Then they will naturally feel okay and then they will clean their room. You know what I mean?

If it’s something that—let’s say you feel that something happened in school. They were bullied, they feel ashamed or something like that. Then you want to sit down and say, “Tell me what happened in school?” You know what I mean? Then it’s almost like first, you have to feel the block. Once that is resolved, it’s very easy to pour the love. Then you just watch them change. It’s very magical, but it works.

The problem with kids is we don’t really hear them. Even though sometimes we hear this, some parents are really good. Some parents are, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong. What’s bothering you or whatever.” But what happens is that even though the kid says, “Well, this kid in school said this or did that,” or whatever. Usually what I noticed with what parents would say, “But it’s okay. Just don’t think about it. Just next time don’t talk to him. Go play with your other friends,” or whatever. It’s almost like the parent is bringing the solution to make the kid feel better or they’re completely ignoring it. That’s another case, of course. Even when they are trying to help, you’re bringing a solution to the problem, but that is not really helping the kid resolve the emotional block that just happened from that experience if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean?

It’s more like, why is this kid attracting the bullying in the first place? Why is my kid allowing these circumstances the other kids don’t get that, for example? I want to go behind the scenes again and feel the root cause that created this problem in the first place and help that, resolve the situation, and help him resolve it at that level. It’s a completely different approach because the kid then feels heard. Because if you propose a very loving solution, they’ll feel the support, they’ll feel like, “Hey, my mother has my back.” Yeah, that’s great, but it still does not resolve the conflict. Does that make sense?

[1:05:54] Ashley James: Absolutely. I like that you’re starting by getting in their shoes, connecting with them, and then going deeper. Sometimes, we kind of just override their feelings. Not just kids but anyone we’re interacting or wanting to influence. That they should be doing it this way, they should be cleaning the dishes this way, or they should be doing it this way. They should do it my way. Why aren’t they looking for a job? Why aren’t they doing this, why aren’t they doing that? They should be doing it this way. They should be doing it my way. We’re cutting ourselves off from this flow of energy by imposing our own will on people.

[1:06:37] Caroline Cory: Yeah, exactly. Or why doesn’t he call me when he’s gone for so long? All the behavior of others.

[1:06:45] Ashley James: Instead, if we close our eyes, take a deep breath, connect with their energy, and just get in their shoes. What are they feeling? What are they going through? Have that level of empathy to connect with them. See if you could understand their world and what they’re going through on an unconscious level and a level of just connecting to their consciousness. From there, help them to get to the root cause. Help them to see it in a way that’ll help them get out of that rut or to shift their life. So that we’re not just imposing our will on them, but that we’re actually helping them to make those. I think it’s really beautiful. How can we do that for ourselves when we get stuck?

[1:07:36] Caroline Cory: I see that also a lot in relationships. For example, usually with women, they get very frustrated because he’s somewhere and he’s not calling or he goes to the store and he buys everything except the one thing that you really want. You know what I mean? Those little annoying things. You want him to pay attention to what you just said. I see this very, very often. It’s very frustrating because to you it’s very logical like, “What’s the big deal, just call me when you get there,” or something like that. “Hey, it’s on your list. What’s the big deal?”

I noticed that when you tap into their higher consciousness exactly at that moment you notice in general, it’s really not that he’s trying to blow you off or you’re not important, sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s not even that. Sometimes they’re just very ADD. They cannot focus. Sometimes it’s just that. Sometimes they feel that what you asked for is not so important, that you’re going to be okay. They’re assuming that certain things are not important even though you tell them it’s important.

These little things end up piling up and at the end, you end up with fights and confusion and frustration in relationships. The way you can use this is, again, when this is happening, or even before, you can focus and merge with the higher consciousness, not the human aspect of the person. The higher consciousness of your partner or whatever, in that location and just ask the question, “Can you please remember to buy me what’s on the list?” You will feel his authentic reaction like, “Oh, wait. I forgot,” or “Oh, it’s not important.” You can change it. You can change it at that level. It takes a little practice, but it works like miracles.

If you do this with your partner, with your kids now you are becoming, I feel like I want to say evolved, you’re working on multi-dimensional levels of reality. Your human mind is being conscious, is doing all the conscious stuff: cooking, cleaning, driving, going to work, whatever. Your higher consciousness is tapped into all of this potential and it’s guiding you, it’s bringing. You’re not just on one level, you’re on both levels let’s say or multi-level. You are operating in this reality, in this very expanded evolved way.

[1:11:02] Ashley James: How can we take that same principle and apply it to our own healing?

[1:11:07] Caroline Cory: Again, it’s the same thing, it’s the same principle. To me, the biggest problem is the root cause. Why? For example, it’s not myself but let’s say it’s just an example. You start to have certain symptoms or certain imbalances in your body. In the same way, of course, we know at this point it’s not just the symptoms. You want to go back to the root cause of the root cause. We know maybe because your mother had this or it’s genetic or because you ate too much whatever the wrong foods or you smoked or this or that. This is one level of root cause. To me, the bigger root cause or the deeper root cause is why am I creating this in the first place exactly at this time? When you tap into that, all kinds of stories start to happen.

You can train yourself to go deeper and deeper and deeper. Actually, that’s what I teach other healers to do. Once you released one of these root cause, to try to even go deeper and deeper to that place where you first decided that it was okay to create this condition. That is the point where it needs to be reversed. It’s just training. It’s just practice. It’s just training. You just have to keep going deeper and deeper. It’s a whole training of course that we teach.

[1:12:51] Ashley James: That was my next question. I want to know about your training because you know what, my four-year-old wants to learn all this.

[1:13:00] Caroline Cory: Which part?

[1:13:02] Ashley James: Be able to be blindfolded and see the world. It’s just amazing that these kids are reading books blindfolded. You could hold up any color they can tell you what color it is. They can even navigate the world blindfolded. I like that you even did in one clip, you had a little sensor inside the blindfold to prove that there was no light coming in. It’s not a trick.

[1:13:35] Caroline Cory: Oh, it’s not a trick. Also, when you start watching that part of the film, in the beginning, you’re like, “Yeah. Okay. Whatever,” but then you see more and more and more people doing it and just doing all kinds of amazing stuff, not just reading. By the way, these kids, because somebody said, “Well, what if they just memorized the book?” Okay. Well, when I was there, for example, I would write something on a piece of paper that they had never seen before. They have no idea what I’m going to write and then they’d be able to read it. How does that work?

This is very much real and kids are easier to teach. Because they don’t think so much. Imagine that there’s light inside. I want you to put light inside your mask, inside your body. I want you to go out in the universe and bring as much light as you can and put it inside the mask and imagine that you were—I want you to pierce through the mask and read. They’d be like, “Yeah.” If I told an adult that they’d be like, “What? Wait, what? Universe? What does that mean? How can I bring the light? How does this work?” It’s definitely better for kids to do that.

We started putting some classes together. People can go to the Superhuman Film website for those types of classes. Because we’re getting more and more requests for kids so we’re going to do one specifically for kids. Also, we’re going to start doing them online. It’s not the same thing online because just for technical reasons as well because you want the kid to touch things and feel. It seems to be working. I’m doing that with a couple of kids. We’re going to be posting more and more specifically for kids. That is the best age. I think between four and eight is perfect. Of course, everybody can do this. Stay tuned for those details. The other ones that are currently available are on the website superhumanfilm.com.

[1:16:00] Ashley James: Got it. The classes haven’t started yet or have you already started teaching them?

[1:16:05] Caroline Cory: The ones that are based on it, because we’re releasing the film literally now. The film is being released now. It’s kind of like you watch the film you say, “Hey, I want to learn this.” You go on the website and then you take all the classes. We have about five or six workshops already planned this year. We’re going to keep adding more and more.

These classes are specific for mind over matter meaning the blindfold perception, telekinesis, changing the water pH. These are the specific mind over matter workshops, but the other classes that I was talking about how to merge and feel the consciousness of the person, these are on my energy medicine consciousness website. I think I have like 600 classes and sessions on how to use these techniques for healers. People who are interested, there’s a whole healers program with all of these methods all on the website already. That is carolinecory.com.

[1:17:20] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. I think that these are fantastic things, fantastic tools for us to learn. It would be really great if this was taught in school. To come back to like how real this is that the US government, for many years, invested a lot of money in psychic soldiers and in remote viewing. So did Russia, so did China. They haven’t stopped because it works. I’ve met a few psychic soldiers.

I went to the Awake and Aware Conference back in 2008 and talked to a few, met a few. The ones that are speaking up and sharing their experiences, it’s very interesting that you can remote view a location and know where a bomb is or read a manual or read classified files. The military would not be investing time and energy into it if it didn’t exist. The fact that if they can train a soldier to do it then you can get trained to do it too. It’s part of us. It’s part of who we are. For whatever reason, we’ve been suppressed. We’ve been told not to cultivate these gifts. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that throughout the history of the last thousand years, they’ve wanted us to suppress and not be connected to our gifts?

[1:19:13] Caroline Cory: Well, there are a couple of answers to this question. On one level, it has a lot to do with our programming that you have to believe what a scientist tells you because they’re educated and they are. That’s not to say they’re not, but here’s the problem. What people don’t realize is this is what I call subjective science, which is a contradiction in terms actually because science is supposed to be objective. This is still science. The problem is it is subjective in the sense that, for example, today I’m going to be able to move this piece of paper, make it rotate 360 degrees very easily. Tomorrow, if I sit exactly in the same condition, at the same time, at the same hour everything exactly the same, there’s nothing interfering with it, I’m going to be able to maybe move it 10 degrees. Then the next day, I’m going to be able to move it 20 degrees and then 40 degrees, and then on the fourth day, I’m going to make it move 360 degrees.

A scientist from the outside would say, “Wait, this doesn’t work.” Because the way we define science is you’re supposed to have repeatable results. You’re supposed to every single day you move an object it’s supposed to behave in the same way because they’re a physical law you. Newton’s physical laws that apply to the physical world. If you did it once in one way and then the next thing you did something different, that doesn’t count, therefore telekinesis doesn’t exist. It’s crazy. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I moved the object 360 degrees. Of course, we’re talking baseline, everything else in a vacuum, the conditions are scientific. The fact that every day the result was slightly different or very different, this should not make any difference because, under the actual physical laws, I shouldn’t be able to move anything. This should be impossible.

Some scientists will look at the result and say, “Wait, this just moved ten degrees. That’s nothing.” You know what I mean? That’s the problem. They dismiss it right off the bat because it doesn’t comply with the way scientific experiments are conducted. The reason being, that’s why I call it subjective science because this manifestation, what’s happening is that it has to do with my subjective consciousness, which is affected by so many things. One day, I have less energy, another day, my mother just called and I spend an hour on the phone and I’m exhausted, or my kid is sick. You know what I mean? I am a living consciousness that it’s continuously changing. I am in constant movement and form of energy that is constantly moving. It’s that energy that is trying to affect a physical object. That is the reason why the results are now going to be exactly the same. Again, but the fact that I have done it even once, it means I broke the physical laws of the universe. You see what I mean?

I think that’s one of the problems. They dismiss it because it needs to fit. They are trying to explain non-physical phenomena with physical laws in other words. That doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s like you have the wrong ingredients, you have the wrong parameters for measuring this thing. That’s the main problem. I have another. I don’t even know if you want to go there. I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years ago. I feel that there has been a lot of manipulation with the human species. Even on a genetic level, I feel that there’s been a lot of interference and a lot of genetic manipulation that kind of made the human gradually, generation after generation, thousands of years later, become very limited. I mean more limited than it should be. Something on a genetic level, it was programmed so that you keep going in circles so that you don’t expand out. You stay inside your little bubble. That programming is very, very, very ancient.

I don’t know if you want to go talk about those kinds of things because we’re talking about other types of species and doing stuff like that. I don’t know if this is part of this.

[1:24:39] Ashley James: I know I’m into it. I’m interested in everything. Leave no stone unturned. If you think about it, I think we’ve been programmed to have fear. If someone had awakened their gifts 500 years ago they’d be burned at the stake or the Spanish Inquisition. If you look at the last 1000 years or 2000 years even, there’s a concerted effort by the ruling people using religion and government to control us. To not want us to be awake and be empowered. There’s a fear. Don’t be a tall poppy. Don’t stand out. There’s a fear of standing out because we’ll be culled from the herd. We’ll be somehow put back in our place. We have to acknowledge that there’s a fear inside of us that if we were to tap into our own gifts that we’re afraid we’ll be rejected by those we love and care about. That it’s part of our survival to fit in. We have to get that it’s safe, it’s safe to tap into our gifts, and that we all have them. That there’s no Spanish Inquisition coming after us if we become fully empowered in our gifts.

I really would love every single listener to be able to tap into their and use their consciousness to support their body’s ability to heal itself, to unblock what is blocked, to adjust the pH, increase the connectivity of their DNA, to increase the absorption rate of nutrients, increase the uptake of nutrients into the cells, to open up their capillaries, and increase the oxygenation to the cell. Just all these little things that we could focus on, what if that if every day we chose one thing? We chose to spend five minutes just meditating on and focusing on the intention of increasing oxygenation to the cell or increasing the permeability for nutrients to come in and for waste to come out or supporting more blood flow to the liver to get toxins out or whatever. Pick one thing and just focus on it for a week and see what happens.

[1:27:18] Caroline Cory: Right. I love that.

[1:27:20] Ashley James: We can focus on supporting our body and healing tissue and increasing, like you said, increasing thyroid, but you got to get to the root. Because what if the thyroid is not the problem?

[1:27:30] Caroline Cory: I was just going to say. I was just going to say. I can’t stress that enough. Part of this work though is to first tune into why that is happening in the first place. Because if you’re focusing on increasing, let’s say increasing your metabolism or something. It’s almost like you are adding more information to the cells. You’re telling your cells, “Okay, now I want you to behave this way. My intent is that I want you to increase your electrical conductivity or I want you to increase your vibrational whatever.” You’re kind of adding more information when you have not taken out the information that made it behave this way in the first place.

That’s why when we talk about affirmation it’s kind of the same thing. You can’t be saying, “Oh, I’m healthy. I’m beautiful. I’m successful.” I’m not saying it doesn’t help. It helps, but it’s not efficient enough if you are saying that. You’re still saying, “I’m successful. I’m healthy.” and your unconscious mind and your cells still have the old information of, “I’m not good enough. I’m a failure. I’m abandoned by my father.” and so on and so forth. That is part of the revolving door. You have to do both at the same time.

[1:28:58] Ashley James: That’s been my problem with affirmations because you can say, “Oh, I’m successful. I’m rich. I’m beautiful.” over and over again and yet, let’s say, you’ve got no money in the bank account. You really have an unconscious belief that you’re not beautiful and you’re unemployed or you’re not successful. You’re consciously repeating something but your unconscious mind is going, “That’s not true. That’s not true. That’s not true.” It’s not actually changing anything. When done wrong, affirmations are kind of a waste of time and also will actually harm. It’s almost like they’ll harm us though because they have our unconscious mind reinforce our belief system. “No, I am broke. What are you talking about?” Just reinforces that, whereas when we get to the root cause we go, “Okay. What do I need to shift? What do I need to change? What is my belief system?” Then focusing the consciousness on like you said, it can’t be so general, it needs to be specific.

Let’s say, okay specifically, “I just did a job interview and I’m going to put my consciousness towards that person hiring me or that person thinking I’m going to be really good for the job.” So we get really specific and we focus our intent, our intention on shifting our reality to go a certain way. I’d love to do experiments with lab tests like lowering cholesterol. Get a bunch of people together. Maybe if you’re interested in doing any experiments or doing a sequel to your movie. Get a bunch of people together and get a bunch of diabetics together and teach this to them. Type 2 diabetics and teach this to them. “Okay, using your consciousness we’re going to monitor your blood sugar, your blood glucose. Let’s see if you could actually manipulate your blood glucose with your consciousness.”

I just remembered. There is a—I don’t remember what book it’s in but there was a reference to a publication where this woman had multiple personalities. I forget what they call it now. There’s a new term for it. She would go in and out of different personalities, completely split personalities that didn’t know the other personalities. One of her personalities was diabetic and the other ones weren’t. When she went into the personality with diabetes, her blood sugar would change. They would monitor her. The other personalities didn’t have it. She would not have blood sugar problems when she was in those other personalities. The doctors were baffled to be able to see that personality, that the mind could actually affect that.

I’m not saying people should just stop taking their insulin or eat doughnuts and then just imagine that they’re not having high blood sugar. It’s not what I’m saying. I think diet and lifestyle, physical things are very important. What if part of keeping us sick is continually holding on to the belief that we’re sick?

[1:32:18] Caroline Cory: Absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly. That’s exactly it. In fact, we are opening a lab and we’re definitely going to be doing more along those lines. Again, like you just explained with that example, there was a root cause for this person. The root cause was that she had multiple personalities. It’s not just genetic, it’s not just a diet. But then, you go deeper into this and go, “Wait. Why did I attract or create this multiple personality condition in the first place?” So you keep going, again like I said, the root cause of the root cause. Then when you get there, this is when the diabetic condition is going to shift. Until then, it’s still there because it’s being built on all of these patterns that have been there for years and years and years. That’s the methodology that I teach.

[1:33:25] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Caroline, this has been wonderful. I love exploring this topic. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:33:38] Caroline Cory: I think if people watch the film they would feel that it’s okay and it’s time to be empowered. To just go out and do it and be themselves. I feel that is the purpose of this film. It’s not just a select group of gifted people. Everyone can do this and they will see it in the film. There’s a lot of scientific validation and we need to just move on from expecting everyone to agree or do this or do that. It is what it is. That’s what I’m hoping that people will get out of this. In terms of the healing methodologies and stuff, I have actually a lot of free stuff on my website, on my Youtube channel. For those who are more interested in really learning the methodology, they can look at the courses that are on the website carolinecory.com as well.

[1:34:50] Ashley James: Excellent. Very cool. So your website’s carolinecory.com and also, to see the movie superhumanfilm.com. Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible, which is coming out really soon. What’s the date for the launch?

[1:35:07] Caroline Cory: Actually, now. We’re just finalizing the details of the actual official release. It should be any time now in March. The best thing is people go to the website Superhuman Film and they can just sign up, just put their email. They’ll go get an update. As soon as it’s out, they’ll get an update.

[1:35:30] Ashley James: Excellent. For those who are really interested in the paranormal, they could check out your other videos. You did something with William Shatner. Is that correct?

[1:35:44] Caroline Cory: Yeah. I am a guest on a couple of shows on History Channel. There’s one show is Ancient Aliens. I’m kind of becoming almost a regular in this season, anyway. I’ve done maybe four-five seasons of that show. The Unexplained is a new show with William Shatner. I think it’s season one still. We just filmed one of the episodes, actually, just last week.

[1:36:19] Ashley James: Well, I can’t wait to see it. Have you met William in person?

[1:36:23] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Actually, I met him in another event. These shows, he does the hosting. We’re not necessarily filming on the day, on same space, because we were at a conference. The A&E Network, they had an event for all their shows. We were both in that, invited. I just met him there.

[1:36:51] Ashley James: I’m a big Trekkie so I just have to know, what’s he like in person?

[1:36:55] Caroline Cory: He’s adorable. So nice, so nice, so so sweet, and so nice. Yeah. He’s adorable.

[1:37:04] Ashley James: That’s awesome.

[1:37:05] Caroline Cory: I think he’s 68 or 70, I’m not sure, but I mean he’s very sharp and just very, very sweet.

[1:37:11] Ashley James: Very cool. You should get him to watch your movie.

[1:37:16] Caroline Cory: I mean there’s enough on his plate but yeah.

[1:37:20] Ashley James: Well, we should all watch your movie. I’m excited for its release. Thank you so much, Caroline, for coming on the show today. It’s been a real pleasure. I’d love to have you back especially when you do more studies and when, in your lab as you say, when you have collected more studies, I’d love for you to come back and share the results. Then for those who are interested in taking your courses on developing their own telekinesis, their own ability to sense the world, perceive the world, like read blindfolded, and also to be able to affect the world with their consciousness, would going to superhumanfilm.com be better or go to carolinecory.com be better?

[1:38:04] Caroline Cory: Just go to superhumanfilm.com and look at the workshops. You just click on workshops, you’ll see what we have now. We’ll keep updating, we’ll keep adding classes and online classes. Like I said, the best thing also for people, just use the sign-up link. Every time we add a class or we’re doing like a private screening somewhere or a public screening, whatever, then they’ll get an update. We don’t really bombard people with information. It’s only when we have an update.

[1:38:38] Ashley James: Excellent. Thank you so much, Caroline. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

[1:38:41] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome.

[1:38:47] Outro: For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected with Caroline Cory!

SuperHuman Movie

Website

CranioSacral Therapy

https://www.learntruehealth.com/craniosacral-therapy

Highlights:

What CranioSacral Therapy is
What dance therapy is
What the enteric nervous system is
Gut and brain relationship
Listening with your hands

In this episode, Nikki Kenward tells us how CranioSacral Therapy helps people with their gut problems as well as help with emotional issues. She shares what dance therapy is. Lastly, she shares how do we listen with our hands.

Intro:

For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com, and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com, takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

[0:00:34] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley team. This is episode 415. I am so excited for today’s guest. We’re going to have a fantastic show today. Nikki Kenward has such an amazing story and such wonderful heartfelt lessons to teach us today. Nikki, welcome to the show.

[0:01:02] Nikki Kenward: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a real delight to be here and talk to you.

[0:01:07] Ashley James: Absolutely. I really love the work that you do. Nikki has been an Upledger Craniosacral Therapist for over 25 years, and her focus is on mental health and the gut. We’ve covered those topics several times separately. The mental health is over here; the gut is over here. We don’t ever really talk about that there is a direct link between mental health and gut health. Also, so many people feel ashamed to talk about their mental health and also ashamed to talk about their gut health. There’s some kind of stigma in today’s society about having gastrointestinal distress and symptoms and as well having mental and emotional health symptoms.

The fact that you help people to heal their gut and heal their emotional mental state and come back into a place of balance is so beautiful. I’m excited for us to learn from you today, Nikki.

[0:02:09] Nikki Kenward: Great. Yes.

[0:02:12] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now Nikki’s website is nikkikenward.com. Of course, the links to everything that Nikki does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. I want to start by diving into your story because I feel that there’s a really interesting story that led you to become the expert that you are today and the healer that you are today.

[0:02:32] Nikki Kenward: Where would you like me to start?

[0:02:36] Ashley James: Well, what happened in your youth that made you go in this direction?

[0:02:42] Nikki Kenward: I went in the direction of CranioSacral Therapy, actually quite late in life. I was around 39-40 at the time because I’d been a dancer, dance therapist and needed to get another string to my bow and was really fascinated by it and fell in love with that. I soon realized as I got deeper into CranioSacral Therapy and especially the smarter emotional release work that we do with the Upledger work, that the body process work was so important looking at our emotional history that was held in our body. Supporting that experience, the experience people have on the couch when you’ve got your hands on to help them move forward and integrate these experiences.

For myself, I had some incredible support during my craniosacral training especially the advanced classes where I got to deal with all kinds of trauma from my childhood in a way that really transformed my life. It’s all about the emotional history being written in the body.

[0:04:05] Ashley James: When you said you’re a dance therapist, what is that? Is that like a physical therapist or is that an emotional therapist?

[0:04:12] Nikki Kenward: Well, a dance therapist will dance with people so it’s really about the emotions, expression of the emotions but through the body so not really that big a step away from the work I do as a CranioSacral Therapist.

[0:04:28] Ashley James: I’m fascinated. I’ve never heard of dance therapy. If I were to go to a dance therapist it would be like we’d be doing the waltz or the tango while talking about my emotions? How does that work?

[0:04:41] Nikki Kenward: Well, it would be more. They were to help you explore through movements that felt authentic to you how you were feeling in your body. So it’s about helping you connect to that emotional history in your body and express it in whatever way is helpful to you and they would support that.

[0:04:59] Ashley James: I can see how I could be really helpful especially because we have so much body shame.

[0:05:04] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. Yeah, we do.

[0:05:07] Ashley James: Very interesting. You started to use CranioSacral Therapy in conjunction with dance therapy. What happened? Did you have some aha moments? What happened when you’re first integrating CranioSacral Therapy with your clients?

[0:05:25] Nikki Kenward: I think there were some—can you have a gradual aha moment?

[0:05:30] Ashley James: Sure.

[0:05:32] Nikki Kenward: I think I had a gradual aha moment quite early on that it wasn’t so much about what you were doing with your hands or your body, it was more about the space between you and the person on the couch and creating a safe space so that person is able to do and express and experience what they need to on the couch that day. That’s helpful to their process.

[0:05:59] Ashley James: For those who’ve never heard of CranioSacral Therapy, could you explain what it is? Now, I know you are very well-versed in it. You have like a higher understanding of what it does and I think it affects the body on many levels, but for those who’ve never heard of it, just walk us through. What is CranioSacral Therapy? Who is it good for? Why should we go and experience CranioSacral Therapy as a client?

[0:06:24] Nikki Kenward: Sure. CranioSacral Therapy works from the cranium, the head down to the sacrum, the bottom end of the spine between your hips. These bones, of course, contain our central nervous system: the brain, spinal cord, all the fluids in that system. That’s the core system in the body that impacts on every single part of the body, all the fascia all the organs coming from the central nervous system. What CranioSacral Therapy does is listen really carefully to that system with a gentle pair of skillful hands to look for and release any restrictions around the system. It’s hands-on but it’s gentle, it’s listening, it’s without agenda. It can work on a very physical basis so somebody might come with a stiff neck or concussion or migraines after a spinal surgery perhaps. You can really help get things more functional, you can free things up for the migraine headache sufferer, you can work with the jaw.

It doesn’t have to be on anything other than a physical level but it very often seems to go deeper than that. It takes people in into a very deep state of rest in their system, which really allows them to start healing and processing whatever might be helpful to them. Then while you’re working, there is memory of an event or an emotion might come up into their awareness. We don’t analyze it, we’re not psychotherapists, but we support their experience of it through the dialoguing guided imagery. As a result of them going into that piece of their emotional history in that part of the body where we have our hands, we are able to get release of emotion from the tissue. The tissue would then release much more fully than if it hadn’t gone to a deeper level, if that makes sense.

[0:08:35] Ashley James: Absolutely. I studied CranioSacral Therapy in the 90s.

[0:08:42] Nikki Kenward: Did you?

[0:08:43] Ashley James: I did. I went to the Canadian College of Massage and Hydrotherapy. I chose to take courses in it to augment what I was learning and what I was doing. I was really blown away. I love the first book. I can’t remember the name of it, the very first book they have you read and the stories, Dr. Upledger’s stories when he was first doing it. Maybe you could share some of those stories like the man who had had bombs. He was a soldier and he had bombs go off. He had post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and extreme anger and he was in constant pain. Wasn’t there like a child who couldn’t walk?

[0:09:36] Nikki Kenward: Yes. There are many wonderful stories. I think the great joy and beauty of this work is that it’s a very respectful, listening, passive pair of hands in a safe space which really activates the body’s self-healing mechanisms.

[0:09:59] Ashley James: Would you be able to just fill in those stories that I mentioned and tell the stories for listeners who’ve never heard of them so they have an understanding of the depths of CranioSacral Therapy?

[0:10:12] Nikki Kenward: Yes. I was really lucky and I did some studying with Dr. John. I’ve also worked at intensive therapy programs in the Institute in West Palm Beach with military veterans. Of course, they had often horrific post-traumatic stress disorder from the bombs, maybe some injuries that they had sustained. They were given lots of medication and maybe some talking therapy, but often, it was very hard for them to move forward from a place of fear, anxiety, hopelessness, depression and there were many suicides. Dr. John was really an innovator in that he created these intensive programs where there would be a small group of military veterans, and I’ve worked on these, that would be at the Institute for a week all-day every day for a week. They would be in the same room. There would be a lead therapist and two, three, or four assistant therapists for every person on the table.

They would then be able, in that really safe consistent space, to really explore their experiences, release some of that fear, begin to rebalance some of the autonomic nervous system, find hope, lift the depression, recover better from injuries. The results were phenomenal.

[0:11:45] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Right. I just remember crying reading that book because of the amount of healing. The one soldiery he talks about who was able to recover from the anger and the pain. That Dr. Upledger as he was very gently, only putting about four ounces of pressure but very gently felt the joints of the skull release from that pressure. Then the flow of the cerebral spinal fluid could finally flow, which of course affects the brain. Yes, there’s an emotional healing. There’s also a very real physical healing and that he was able to heal on an emotional and physical level. I remember just being so happy reading that book because hearing about that, I think it was a child that couldn’t walk and then the child grew up and then came back to John. It was like, “Hey, remember me?”

[0:12:51] Nikki Kenward: Yes. Absolutely. Of course, the emotional and physical healing are one thing. So the emotions that the emotional process is held in the tissues that are tight. It’s a mind-body experience always. The two things are done simultaneously are one healing process.

[0:13:15] Ashley James: It’s such a light touch that it’s sometimes we discredit it, its validity in our mind. “You’re touching me so lightly, how could that have made any difference?” How do you address that?

[0:13:29] Nikki Kenward: Well, people often say that to me. They say, “Oh, I feel very relaxed but you didn’t do anything,” especially their first session. I say, “No, that’s fine.” They look a bit guilty saying that. I do explain it. I say, “Well, what we’re working with are the nerves, the cerebral spinal fluid flow, and the fascia, the membranes that surround the brain and the spinal cord. All of these tissues only respond and relax with a very gentle touch. So that’s part of their anatomy. So if you were to push really hard on them, they would just either do nothing or they would get more tight and resist.”

Then I suggest to people they might like to mix up some cornflour and water in a bowl when they get home.

[0:14:24] Ashley James: Some what?

[0:14:25] Nikki Kenward: If you mix up corn flour, like a very fine flour and water in a bowl and if you stir it around, if you prod it hard with your finger it feels like wood or concrete.

[0:14:38] Ashley James: Right. I remember that we did this as kids. You take two cups of cornflour and maybe a cup and a half of water and then you mix it together. That’s right. It acts solid if you pound on it, but if you just gently put your finger on it it’s like quicksand.

[0:14:54] Nikki Kenward: It flows. Well, the collagen in the makes fascia behave like that. So that’s why we need a gentle touch. Nerve fibers are 50%-70% fascia. If you’re working with the nervous system with the dura membrane in the skull and in the spine and the fluid flow, you need to be gentle or nothing’s going to happen. I say, “Well, if you go and see a chiropractor they’ll do what they do to line up the bones of your spine and that’s great. You go into your massage therapist, very often they’ll be aiming to lengthen and massage knots out of your muscles so they need often more pressure. But if you come and see me, I’m not working on either of those systems, I’m working with your craniosacral system and that requires that I have a gentle touch in order for it to release.”

[0:15:56] Ashley James: Your intention as you worked with your clients for dance therapy and CranioSacral Therapy was to help them on an emotional level and then also help the more physical level in the nervous system and the spinal fluid. Understanding that there’s obviously a connection between our brain health and our emotional mental health. As you began to work with clients and helping them to release and helping them to heal on both physical and emotional levels, when did you start to see a connection to gut health?

[0:16:34] Nikki Kenward: Well, that was probably about four or five years ago I began to see it because there suddenly was a whole raft of books about gut health beginning to come out at that time. There were lots of people talking about the microbiome, the gut bacteria. There were people talking about the gut-brain access between the gut, the brain and the gut, the brain and the head. I got very interested in all of this and began reading a lot. I was particularly interested because lots of my clients coming to me had what I would call post-traumatic gut. They’d had difficult experiences. They had a lot of emotional history buried in their gut.

I didn’t really know how to properly help them. I was in the same situation as them. I had post-traumatic stress disorder arrived in my life about 15 years ago, but the worst part of it was the gut. That was what I’ve struggled with since then. I always felt for all the therapy I’d had: CST, talking therapy, you name it I’ve probably done it. There was a missing piece, there was something I couldn’t quite get to in my gut. I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. I felt disconnected and disassociated from it.

That was also a big motivation besides my curiosity in the research coming out. As a result of all that, I thought, “Right. I need to make some new kind of training for myself and my colleagues so we can work with the enteric nervous system in the gut,” which of course talks do and is part of our central nervous system, our autonomic nervous system because it’s just as important.

That was the time at which I approached the International Association of Healthcare Educators, for whom I’d been a certified educator for many years already. I rather sheepishly said to them, “How do you fancy writing a class on the gut and the enteric nervous system?” They were interested. So the next stage I had to do a presentation about it at the Beyond the Dura Conference in Palm Beach a few years ago. People responded well so I was invited to write an outline of the class, which I did. That was sent around to the international faculty for comment. I then wrote the whole four-day class and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ve been teaching that internationally for about two years now. It was during that process that I was approached, in fact in the same week, by two publishers to write the book.

[0:19:42] Ashley James: Very cool. What is the enteric nervous system?

[0:19:46] Nikki Kenward: The enteric nervous system is the nervous system that is embedded in the whole of the gut. So, if we think of the gut as a long tube going from the mouth down your esophagus through the stomach wriggling around the small intestine colon and out through the rectum and anal canal, anus. That long tube is our gut, it’s nine meters long. There is a network of our enteric nervous system stretching up to the esophagus and all the way down to the anal canal. It’s complex, it’s like a modern data processing center. It talks to the brain in our head all the time. It also makes its own decisions a lot of the time without referring to the brain in the head. So that’s our enteric nervous system. It’s massive. It has as many neurons in it as our spinal cord.

[0:20:47] Ashley James: Amazing. How do we feel our enteric nervous system? Could you maybe give some examples of when we’re experiencing it?

[0:21:02] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, sure. Well, a couple of things really easily come to mind. If we’re feeling very anxious sometimes it’s difficult to swallow. That would be one thing. When we’re eating it can make it really difficult very anxious. If we’re scared maybe we’re going on stage or we’re meeting a new person or going into a situation where we feel really out of our comfort zone, we’ll get butterflies in our stomach. That’s our enteric nervous system. If we eat something that’s poisonous or doesn’t shoot our particular digestive system our gut will get all those horrible cramps and nausea. All of those things. Sometimes much more subtle than those very obvious things. We talk don’t we about having a gut feeling about something. We meet somebody or somebody says something. We just get that kind of feeling in our gut but not sure about this. Often, it’s very definite it’s a yes or a no and we feel it in the gut. We really need to pay attention to that.

[0:22:18] Ashley James: I just saw an article this morning that said, “Children won’t tell you they have anxiety. They’ll tell you they have a tummy ache.”

[0:22:25] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. Because they feel that anxiety in their gut as I would do and a lot of adults do but they don’t know what it is. All they know is that they’ve got cramps or nausea or tummy ache, some sort.

[0:22:46] Ashley James: Right. Now that we understand what the enteric nervous system is, how could we use this relationship to focus on healing our gut and being more connected with our body so that we can work on healing our emotions? Because I think a lot of times we—let’s say we have anxiety or depression or we have these different things come up. Maybe we have trauma from our past and a lot of times we self-medicate with food, alcohol, with street drugs or even we get a prescription in order to cope.

I think a lot of people walk around coping with symptoms and not healing from them. Then feeling so ashamed that they have this problem because they feel broken. They’ve had a decision somewhere along the way that they’re not whole complete and perfect and they’re broken. They have emotional things that they’re sort of shutting down, pushing to the side, or numbing and it’s manifesting in the physical body like you said around the gut through the enteric nervous system. So there’s the real definite emotional mental connection to our physical health. I love that you’re addressing that we have to heal our emotional state and our gut at the same time because even long-term trauma can cause gut imbalance. Could we talk a little bit about that?

[0:24:27] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. You may well have heard of the adverse childhood experience study. That was done in the States over 17,000 people. It was begun in about 1995, done over a long term. There had been a couple of brilliant books that have come out of it, one is Childhood Disrupted and one is the Deepest Well. Now, what that found, one of its big findings was that early traumatic experience were adverse experience in the early years has a negative impact on the gut bacteria.

[0:25:05] Ashley James: It’s just fascinating.

[0:25:08] Nikki Kenward: So, even at that stage and there are other studies which show us the impact on the developing brain. So if we have early adverse childhood experience that has an impact almost our entire life. It predisposes us to post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, for a man going to war of we have any other kind of trauma which we know there are many different kinds.

[0:25:36] Ashley James: Talk about how when we have trauma that it can negatively affect good health.

[0:25:41] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. Yes. So right from the beginning of our life, our gut health is impacted by our experiences especially how safe we feel, how nurtured we feel. A lot of those emotional experiences become embedded or held in the tissues of the gut. It’s often a place where if we have a trauma we pile those emotions into our gut and we disconnect from it. A lot of people whose mental health is such that they dissociate find it very difficult to be present to make relationships in their life. Everything is stuffed down into the gut tissues and then they’ve like switched off from it. I did that as well. So then it’s really hard to reach that emotional history in the physical tissues. I think it’s interesting also that the actual diagnosis of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was created by psychologists who didn’t really think about the gut as part of PTSD. Yet, all the many people I have worked with, including myself, with PTSD always have a gut problem.

[0:27:07] Ashley James: It makes so much sense. I’m thinking about everyone I know with PTSD and yet it’s right. It’s true. They all do have a gut work that they’ve been working on healing. Is it that that adverse childhood events or trauma from our past disrupts the gut so much that it causes gut problems or is it that gut problems—I mean it is that gut problems cause emotional problems, is that it starts on the emotional level and then manifests in the physical. Is that correct?

[0:27:44] Nikki Kenward: I think that’s right, Ashley. I think it starts with the difficult events. It manifests in the gut, but of course, then it’s going to create a kind of vicious loop. For example, if you’ve got a problem with the gut barrier, if you’ve got a not a very healthy gut bacteria, maybe not diverse enough, maybe not the right ones, if you’ve got a slightly dysfunctional enteric nervous system from all these things that have happened in your life, then you’re going to have low serotonin. That will also increase your anxiety. You’re going to have the possibility of undigested food proteins and bacterium virus getting into your systemic and circulation and going up to your brain, further enhancing your anxiety and depression again and maybe causing information in your central nervous system. There’s a huge correlation now between stuff from the gut going to the brain, creating inflammation and that inflammation being correlated with depression. I think it starts with the experience, but it then loops all the way back. Then things get kind of entrenched in a horrible circle.

[0:29:01] Ashley James: Another thing the gut does, a healthy gut and a healthy gut biome, converts 25% of our T3, our T3 thyroid hormone. So someone with a perfectly healthy thyroid could show up in blood work with low T3 and be put on medication when it actually wasn’t the thyroid itself, it was their gut dysbiosis. We have, like you said, the serotonin. The feel-good happy neurochemicals of the brain are made in the gut. We also have that—there’s a nerve, the vagal nerve?

[0:29:41] Nikki Kenward: Yes, vagus nerve.

[0:29:42] Ashley James: The vagus nerve that travels as a cranial nerve that travels all the way from the brain down into the gut.

[0:29:51] Nikki Kenward: That’s right.

[0:29:52] Ashley James: Is that part of the enteric nervous system or is that affected? How does that a play a role in all this?

[0:30:00] Nikki Kenward: So, the vagus nerve is often called the superhighway between the gut and the brain and back again. It’s also the biggest part of our parasympathetic nervous system, which allows us to rest and digest. It’s connected to the gut. There are more messages that go from our gut to the nervous system up to the brain then go from the brain downwards to the gut. We have to remember that as well as that vagal superhighway, which is really important, people talk a lot about vagal tone. When we got good vagal tone and a good functioning vagus nerve, we can heal ourselves really well. When we haven’t, we can’t. Of course with PTSD, we don’t usually have that.

However, it’s more complex because we have the fact that the enteric nervous system can make its own decisions without talking to the brain in the head via the vagus nerve. You have this massive communication superhighway really important. You also have the autonomous aspect of the enteric nervous system. You also have the gut microbiome that’s talking via the vagus nerve and to the autonomous aspect. You’ve got so much complexity. It makes my brain hurt to be able to touch base. I figured the only way we can possibly work is to have a truly holistic approach to people because it’s too complicated to be able to work out what’s happening with any particular individual. You have to go on a journey with them and explore and see.

[0:31:53] Ashley James: We want to take, like you said, the holistic approach. Because if we went in the allopathic medical system, which is the traditional, I don’t say they were traditional, it is the modern go to a hospital, go to an MD. Most of these, most hospitals practice allopathic medicine, which is reductionistic. Reductionistic meaning it’s going to look at symptoms and systems of the body. I think because it’s compartmentalize, this is probably the reason why it’s taken us so long to acknowledge in medicine that there’s a direct link, an integrated link between mental health and the gut health because allopathic medicine treats people reductionisticaliy and also is segmented.

So you go to one doctor for your gut, you go to a separate doctor in a separate building for mental health. The two don’t normally meet each other or talk to each other or really respect each other. The gastroenterologist is going to want to use drugs and surgery and they might suggest diet if they’ve taken courses outside of extracurriculars they’ve taken some courses. Maybe they’ve understood that there actually is a relationship between food and gut health, but it’s not mandatory to be in a gastroenterologist. Not mandatory to actually study nutrition. That’s their wheelhouse. Then separately is mental health. It’s it’s considered totally separate. That’s one of the problems with modern medicine is that it’s reductionistic. That, “We’re going to only look at your pancreas or we’re going to only look at your stomach. Then we’re going to give you some drugs for your stomach because you have GERD. You have diarrhea? Okay, we’re going do colonoscopy. We’re just going to look at the colon. Then we’re just going to look at this and then we’re going to give you some drugs for this.”

They’re never going to see the big picture. They’re never going to see the root cause that way. They’re simply going to keep treating symptoms. That’s probably why a lot of listeners are listening now because they’ve been given the runaround, they’ve been on drug after drug or therapy after therapy or even holistic therapy after a realistic therapy. They feel like they’re chasing their tail or as I have often felt like playing darts blindfolded. I guess I’m going to try this therapy. Maybe I’ll get it, maybe I won’t. But what’s the root cause? We really have to get that 30,000 view approach. We have to really back out kind of like Google Earth where you back out and you see the whole planet. Look at the whole body and look at your whole life. I like that you’re going all the way back to adverse childhood events because that’s where it starts. It could start all the way at birth being a cesarean section baby. Being born cesarean affects the microbiome. Having been put on antibiotics as a child. So it can compound if we have poor gut health for a long time and maybe some adverse childhood events or some trauma.

Then, like you said, it probably starts with emotional health. Then it just snowballs from there. If we had a weakened gut because many people have been on antibiotics or eat a diet that isn’t supportive of their body unknowingly or been born cesarean. However, we’ve had we have a weakened gut to begin with and then couple that with some with some trauma from our past and we’re just trying to survive day-to-day. We’re just getting up, getting our coffee, and going to work, and just try to keep a roof over our head. We’re kind of treading water. We don’t really feel like we even have the luxury to stop and process a lifetime’s worth of trauma and stuff from our past because we’re afraid it might consume us. So for those who really do want to heal and they really feel like they’re chasing their tail but they’re kind of overwhelmed by it all, by all the therapies and everything, and of course, the overwhelm harms the enteric nervous system. It harms the gut more, right? We need to get ourselves back into a state of calm so we can. What are some steps we can take? So we’ve been chasing our tail, we’re stressed out, we got bills to pay.

[0:36:44] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Just to preface that, which I’ll come to, it’s so interesting because when I started to talk about it, the thing that really was frustrating and drove me into my day-to-day struggle on my own was people would say things like, “If only you take the probiotic I take you’d be fine,” or “if only you’d put lavender oil on your pillow you’d sleep,” or “go and see my hypnotherapist. She’ll sort you out in one session.” There was such a lack of understanding out there and compassion that I was in that very isolated state. I think that what I’ve come to realize, the biggest steps we can take it’s how we live our life, it’s really all about that. How we live our life. So, as far as the gut goes, I used to see my gut really as the enemy. It’s like, “Oh, no. Not again. How am I going to cope with this?” I’ve got diarrhea. I’ve got to go to work. I’m going to have to take some Imodium, whatever it is or I’d be up in the night feeling horrible with anxiety and my palpitations and nausea and all of that.

So I would get very frustrated and cross with my gut, which wasn’t particularly helpful but quite human. I’m sure lots of other people listening are in that state. So my first thing was to take the big step of finding compassion for myself and my gut and begin to befriend it, connect and listen. Even if it’s just sitting with your hands on for a while with the intention of understanding of listening not judging befriending connecting and breeding is also helpful. Then how we live our lives, that’s one thing. So finding time to do things that help you to relax and get into that calm state, whether it’s going for a walk at lunchtime from your job somewhere. Maybe you’ve got a park or somewhere you can go for a walk or just sitting down somewhere peacefully and breathing meditating for a few minutes. Maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s yoga, maybe it’s tai chi, maybe it’s a social dance. Whatever it is, playing tennis. All these things add up together. There’s not one big thing. I think there’s a lot of little things looking at how you live your life with your gut in a compassionate way for yourself.

Part of that breathing and physical activity in those things matters. So your gut bacteria love being taken for a walk. I know I can tell. I have this image of mine all on the little leech and I’m taking a walk like lots of very tiny dogs. They love it. It helps get strong and healthy and grow the good ones.

[0:40:01] Ashley James: I love that analogy. I have a friend, she has two Mastiff dogs if you know them. She doesn’t have children, she has dogs. So Mastiffs are the size of adults, they’re huge. She will spend more on her dogs. They get dental work, they go to the vet, they go to the dog park twice a day, they get home handmade treats, and she’ll spend more time, energy, and money on her dogs than she would on her own health. It’s pretty funny and it’s very common for dog owners to put their animals first. I mean you know as parents we put our kids first. I love this analogy because often we won’t take care of ourselves but we would take our dog for a walk or we’d take our child in the pram for a walk. We won’t take ourselves for a walk. It’s like you know what, you have this gut health it’s a bit between three and six pounds of bacteria. So it’s like a little cat or a Shih Tzu. We imagine we have like an internal pet some animal.

[0:41:25] Nikki Kenward: I like that.

[0:41:41] Ashley James: How we treat it is how it treats us. So if we ignore it and feed it McDonald’s and whatever then it’s a very angry Chihuahua that we don’t like.

[0:41:41] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. If we shout to it and hit it.

[0:41:44] Ashley James: It wakes us up in the middle of the night, it gives us horrible indigestion, it gives us all kinds of nasty feelings start the day; but if we take it for a walk and we feed it good food and water and we spend some time rubbing it, putting our hands on our belly. We’re nurturing that little inner pet, whatever we want it, whatever we identify, whatever animal: little kangaroo. I don’t know. Whatever we wanted to be, little panda. I love it.

[0:42:14] Nikki Kenward: I love that. I’ve come to a whole new expansive idea now, Ashley, thanks to you. I think I like the idea of having an inner panda.

[0:42:25] Ashley James: Because bacteria, it’s kind of hard to emotionally connect with. What’s really interesting about our gut biome, and I’m sure you know this, it’s really interesting and there are studies. I actually have a few of them printed out on my desk somewhere. There are studies now that show that the gut biome creates chemical signals to the brain to feed us more of what it needs. So if we have a disrupted gut biome, we’ve got a really bad gut biome, we’ve got the Chihuahua of gut biomes; then it actually causes us to crave bad foods for us that feed it. So if we’re craving sugar like refined sugar and we’re craving caffeine and refined sugar and all kinds of junk food and fast food, it’s actually not us. It’s our brains being hijacked by the parasites.

[0:43:22] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. Because if we eat lots of sugar we’ll grow many more bacteria that eat that, that’s their diet. So when they’re hungry they send the messages up saying, “Give me sugar now.”

[0:43:35] Ashley James: It just hijacks our brain and then we feel, “Oh, I guess my body needs this,” but it’s not us. We’re being hijacked by the six pounds of angry Chihuahua inside us. What’s really interesting though is I never particularly liked kale until I started to eat a lot of raw kale. Because of course raw organic fresh vegetables and fruit is how you can populate the gut with those bacteria. I learned that when I studied to become a health coach at IIN. I was blown away by this lecture on the microbiome of gardening and how a bacteria that live, they’re alive on your strawberries. Even if you wash the strawberry the bacteria is still there and you eat the strawberry raw, of course, then the bacteria on strawberries that digest strawberries—if you just leave the strawberry and it’s sort of like molds and decomposes anyways, but you eat it before that happens, that same bacteria that digests strawberries populates in your gut and helps you to not only digest the strawberry but helps you to assimilate the vitamins and the nutrients from that strawberry. So the more strawberries you eat the better you get at digesting strawberries. So the more kale I ate the more I began to crave it. Then I really knew that my little panda gut biome was taking control of my brain because I began to have a Pavlovian response to kale. I’d start to salivate, get really excited for, and even crave kale.

So we can retrain our gut to make us want to eat healthy.

[0:45:19] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. We can retrain our little pets. The other interesting thing about the pet is that it’s constantly talking to all the parts of our enteric nervous system. So it’s talking to the enteric neurons all the time and the immune system and the hormones in the gut. So nothing happens on its own. The gut bacteria do not act on their own nor does the enteric nervous system nor does the immune system nor does the endocrine system in the gut. They’re all talking to each other the whole time. Decisions are being made on the basis of those conversations. So everything needs to work.

[0:46:12] Ashley James: How does the enteric nervous system affect our emotional health?

[0:46:16] Nikki Kenward: So the enteric nervous system affects our emotional health because if it’s not functioning well we will have low serotonin, low dopamine. Also, if we have emotional difficulties, trauma, whatever it might be that will impact and create tension strain patterns through the nerve fibers, the different layers of the intestine and colon, which wound and make it very difficult for the enteric nervous system to work properly.

[0:46:50] Ashley James: So as you begin to explore these, last four or five years, you began to really dive into gut health. You’ve been really into for a very long time like you’ve been doing therapy with people for a really long time. So you’ve been into the healing emotional health. You’ve been into CranioSacral for 25 years so helping people in that way. But in the last, like you said, four or five years, your focus has been on gut health. As you began to make these connections, what changes did you see in your own health?

[0:47:24] Nikki Kenward: So I began to understand—well, the first thing that changed was I found some compassion for my gut health. I began to understand better all the many messages it was giving me and where they were coming from in terms of my emotional history. So that awareness and understanding is itself very empowering. I began to realize I needed to look at that stuff and to take some pressure off myself in my life and the way I lived it in order to give it time to heal properly. I’ve also worked with a nutritional therapist to give it the other stuff that it needed to heal. I’m not a nutritionist but I think, as we’ve said in this conversation, that’s a really important part of gut health and of gut healing.

So those nutritional aspects I’ve addressed, looking at how I live my life now, I’m looking at the emotional history and my gut. So the changes are coming fast and furious now for me. Interestingly in my clients, I’ll have a client who’s done everything, tried everything, eaten everything, not eaten everything, has had constipation for decades, had a couple of cranial gut sessions so to speak, and now goes every day. It was an emotional event that she been holding on to was disconnected from in her gut for such a long time.

[0:49:07] Ashley James: So she was chronically constipated and after having an emotional healing event she now goes regularly?

[0:49:14] Nikki Kenward: Yes.

[0:49:14] Ashley James: Wow. What about the opposite? What about people who are inflamed and have diarrhea?

[0:49:22] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely similar. So I’m getting some really encouraging results from people who come with chronic long-term gut problems that they can’t seem to resolve. I work with my hands just as I would with my other cranial work very light and gently on the gut going where the gut needs me through all the different layers of the intestine, the colon palpating with intention into the places where I can feel strain patterns and tension. Just staying there giving it an opportunity to release if it’s appropriate and often the emotional stuff will come up.

[0:50:05] Ashley James: As the emotional stuff comes up, do they talk to you? Do they cry? Do they just breathe? How do they process it?

[0:50:12] Nikki Kenward: So sometimes all of those three or maybe one of those three. It may just be some tears. There may be, “Oh, so this is it. I remember and I was….” And there’d be a story. Sometimes they’ll just breathe deeply there may be a few tears they don’t need to talk that’s absolutely fine. So it can express itself in many different ways, but there’s usually a bit of an aha about where that came from. It softens something that they had wouldn’t have been able to get to in a kind of rational, “I’m trying to work it out way.” It comes from a deeper place because it’s coming from the tissues of the body.

[0:50:55] Ashley James: So you’ve taken Dr. Upledger’s CranioSacral Therapy and applied it, taking it away from the traditional working on basically around the spine and you’re working on the gut but on a very, very light, gentle, slow because you’re not trying to work on muscles like you said like a massage therapist. You’re working on the fascia and the nerves.

[0:51:22] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m doing. So I’m applying the cranial techniques and the cranial approach, which is obviously meeting someone where they are without an agenda with a light listening touch, creating a safe space between you and the person on the table, non-judgment. I’m doing all of those things. I’m doing it with the tissues of the gut.

[0:51:48] Ashley James: Now, since you created this type of therapy, I mean you expanded upon Dr. Upledger’s work, but you really did pioneer this specific technique. Have you had therapists do your technique on you?

[0:52:06] Nikki Kenward: Definitely, yes. A bit more now because at first there was only me, but yes I have. It’s been wonderful. I’m very fortunate now. I travel and teach it to lots of other therapists. So I get messages from all over the place now saying how helpful it is in clinical practice.

[0:52:33] Ashley James: If someone wanted to get a session, how would they find a CranioSacral therapist who has your certification?

[0:52:41] Nikki Kenward: Well, they would look at the list of therapists on the—let me see—it be the website of the International Association of Healthcare Educators. They would look for somebody who’s done my class amongst the other classes they’ve done, which will be by their name. So my training is called CST and Listening to the Second Brain. So the acronym for my class is CLSB. That would appear. They might have done the basic training. They might have done a brain class and the immune course. You’ll also see CLSB and you know they’ll have done my training.

[0:53:33] Ashley James: Excellent. Can you share any stories of what’s come about as you’ve been traveling and teaching this? Any really brilliant stories as practitioners have learned in the class or have had like aha moments while they’re learning from you?

[0:53:52] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. So many really. There’s one class I was teaching in—where was I think I must have been in—it was either Boston or Denver. There were a lot of equine therapists there. They had light bulbs going off all the time because apparently, horses have—I’m not a horse person so I didn’t know this, I’m more of a panda person. They’ll have baby horses in their guts. Anyway, so the equine therapists we’re going, “Oh my god, this is going to be amazing for our horses.” So they went away and applied these techniques to their horses. I’ve had messages saying how it’s really helped horses with their irritable bowel or the equine equivalent of that.

[0:54:49] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s really neat. I got to tell you. I’ll tell you a story. I’ve had Eric Thornton on the show several times. He is a spiritual healer, a very practical down-to-earth. I live in a part of a Washington state near Woodinville where there’s a lot of horses. It’s a horse area. English style riding, not cowboys. So it’s actually kind of the uniform of people and Woodinville to walk around in English riding gear minus the helmet basically and the crop. Even if you don’t own a horse you just walk around in boots and the riding pants. It’s quite funny. That’s our area for you, lots of horses.

So he works with humans and with animals. He’s been doing it for a long time. He shared a story in one of our interviews that really blew my mind. A horse had been having miscarriages. This horse also acted as though it was depressed. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. They had the vet come and do everything they could do. The rider was about 12 or 13-year-old girl. So Eric comes up to the horse. They explained what the problem was and he basically talked to the horse. The horse shared with him what was going on. He turned to the girl and said, “Your horse is so depressed, so sad, has so much grief. She has so much grief because she has lost her babies.” No one could ride her. She was just really very unmotivated as a horse. Eric said to her, “Just go into the stall with her and sit with her and feel the grief with her and be present to her. Just imagine what it would feel like having lost your baby.” This young girl is about 13 but she so she hasn’t had that experience, but she could be empathetic show.

So the girl just sat with her horse in her stall and felt the grief with her. The next day the horse was fine. Then she went on to conceive. So it was just very interesting that we can help process emotions with our animals. That animals can hold onto trauma just like we can. I thought that was really interesting. So the fact that you can use CranioSacral Therapy with animals is really cool, but then that you can also help them on an emotional level is really neat as well.

When our son was born we used craniosacral there be with him and it made a really big difference in making it a very gentle experience. I love CranioSacral Therapy. I love that you’re incorporating it for gut health. I think that’s really cool. Do you have any more stories that come to mind that you’d love to share with us?

[0:57:57] Nikki Kenward: Some of the stories involve people’s emotional stories, which I’m not sure I could talk about. Obviously, they’re very personal. For example, people with eating disorders. There was a lady who’d had an eating disorder for many, many, many years. As I’m sure you appreciate it, something that’s really, really difficult to overcome. As I was working on the layers of her small intestine she connected back, just came into her awareness hidden in this really massive tension I was feeling in this particular layer. It was the basement membrane, which is one of the many layers in the small intestine, of experience she’d had when she was tiny and being weaned by her parents, by her mother, which was a really difficult and traumatic experience for her. That had completely colored her attitude to food and from then her ability to eat in a healthy happy way and digest her food. It started right back then. She hadn’t really thought about that and only barely remembered it in the past, but because we were right there in the part of her intestine where the tension was held it came up into her awareness. She realized. We talked about it. Just open questions on my part allowing her to tell her story. As she did that the tissue released and released and released. She felt very relaxed. Then the next time I saw her she said it was like you just flipped a switch. She said, “My body is now able to process my food so much more easily.”

So obviously, she didn’t go immediately into, “Oh, yeah. I can eat anything and I’m fine,” but it made a huge change. It was just that place, that membrane, and that part of her intestine that was holding that trauma from when she was less than a year old.

[1:00:29] Ashley James: So sometimes we don’t even know consciously what we need to work on.

[1:00:35] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. I think very often we don’t in my experience. We try and work it out rationally and usually that doesn’t get us very far. We have to go deeper than that.

[1:00:52] Ashley James: Well, I can see your tool, your technique being a great tool for therapists, for many different kinds of therapists. For holistic health providers, if they can help the person to release and also the person to become conscious of what’s going on, then it could save them years of work to try to find that root cause. So how can someone take your class? You’ve piqued their interests, now they really want to learn this technique for themselves and for others, how can they take your class?

[1:01:33] Nikki Kenward: So at the moment, my class is for Upledger CranioSacral Therapists. So they will know about the class they can take it. So I’ve been asked quite a few times recently to develop training for other therapists, which I haven’t done it yet. The other way in which other therapists could use it as a tool is to read the book because a lot of this is in the book. It’s actually written for therapists or laypeople to give people strategies, to give them the understanding of the anatomy of the layers. So even a layperson could put the hands on their own gut and start to connect in and discover these places. Lots of people have bought my book, have been my clients, but also other therapists doing other kinds of bodywork. So that would be at the moment the best way for people to access some of these ideas and techniques.

[1:02:35] Ashley James: Is there any lesson from the book that you’d like to teach us today?

[1:02:40] Nikki Kenward: Yes. Okay, there’s so many. Let’s choose one that’s a nice simple one to start with. We talked about it being a long tube from the mouth down to the anus. If we think about the long tube as being the outside world really coming inside us, so everything in the long tube is in the outside world until we absorb any of it into our body. Does that make sense? That idea was first mooted by Michael Gershon in the Second Brain many years ago. One thing you can always do is put your hands one on your belly maybe one on your chest thinking about the esophagus or one on your belly one on your stomach. Wherever feels right at that moment. Just allow yourself to connect into your long tube with your intention and maybe visualizing it, your breath. Just ask yourself the question how does my long tube feel? How am I responding to the outside world coming in? Am I very relaxed and embracing the things that come in? Am I more guarded or maybe I have some tension or more fearful? How does it feel? How am I responding to that outside world?

Really, it’s one of the main places we respond to our lives. We can just sit quietly, hands-on say belly, stomach, esophagus, breathe connecting to our long tube and just ask ourselves that question, how does it feel? How is it responding? How am I responding to the outside world? See what happens.

[1:04:39] Ashley James: Just slow deep breaths and close your eyes and just become aware.

[1:04:46] Nikki Kenward: Yeah. Just go inside, become aware, listen with your hands. If the answer to that question is, it feels like there’s tension like it’s guarded then maybe just acknowledge that, send the breath there, listen to that. Sometimes the body loves being listened to. That can be enough for things to start to release. You might feel the tension and become aware of an event or an emotion. It’s really a journey of exploration.

[1:05:29] Ashley James: What does listen with your hands mean?

[1:05:32] Nikki Kenward: So you’re listening to the body to feel if there’s tension there. Does it feel relaxed or tense? Does it feel warm or cold? What can I feel in there? What’s my felt sense of my inner world? We’re just really palpating touching with an intention to notice, to feel what’s going on under the surface.

[1:06:03] Ashley James: Beautiful. How long should we do this for?

[1:06:08] Nikki Kenward: Well, you could just do it for 5 minutes or 10 minutes or as long as you have. Even just doing that, say for five minutes or so, 10 minutes a day, we can gradually become more connected. We can find some compassion. We can befriend that part of us a little bit. What I would say is I’d really encourage you just to sit with it, to not worry if you think, “I don’t if I can feel anything,” because it can take a little bit of time. Just have that intention each time you sit and gradually things would change and you’ll notice things.

[1:06:53] Ashley James: I think this would be good to do right before we eat.

[1:06:55] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, definitely.

[1:06:57] Ashley James: Take the time. Prayer before a meal is a common practice, but we could also take the time to close our eyes and breathe and go within, which would help to put us out of stress response and into rest and digest response.

[1:07:16] Nikki Kenward: That’s a brilliant idea.

[1:07:18] Ashley James: Listen to the gut. I think a lot of times we’ll eat in front of the TV or standing by the sink or we’ll eat in front of the computer. We’re not true truly aware of what’s going on, what the signals of our body. I remember as a child, my mom would talk about that we have an internal thermostat. It’s not the thermostats broken but it’s like the wires are cut. We eat far more than we need but we’re not even digesting it correctly because we’re out of rest and digest mode or the sympathetic nervous system response of fight or flight. Our resources are shunted away from the gut or we have lower stomach acid. Really, we’re not fully digesting. Then we have a lot of gas and bloating because we’re not digesting we’re fermenting. Then we’re not really absorbing. What we are absorbing is kind of fermented and partially digested, it’s leaky gut.

I was just talking to a colon hydrotherapist over the weekend and she said when you have really smelly farts. You just smell horrible, especially those that might be allergic to dairy and not realize it. So you just smell something and it smells putrid like something’s rotting in your gut. She said, “Your colon absorbs most of your water. If the water in your gut smells that way, smells basically this putrid. It’s like a swamp. Your body is actually absorbing putrid swamp water. What do you think you that’s going to all your organs?” The pristine water you drink has been contaminated by the dysbiosis. Maybe you know maybe you’re in stress mode so you’re not really digesting so you’re fermenting. Basically, by the time your water gets the colon, it’s now putrid swamp water. We wonder why we have brain fog and we can’t sleep and our energies zapped. We wonder why we feel so gross. It’s a vicious cycle, but we have to break it somewhere.

[1:09:35] Nikki Kenward: We have to break it.

[1:09:37] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to break the vicious cycle. Before we eat for five minutes at every meal right before we eat, if we could just do some slow deep breathing into our belly, put our hands on our belly in our heart, get connected, check-in. I love the imagery of checking in with the tube from our mouth to our anus just checking it with that tube and relaxing the belly and letting the belly just fall out of the pelvic floor. Just let it all fall out because I think sometimes yeah suck it all in and it’s all hard. Let the belly soften then just connect. Connect with the inner panda.

[1:10:20] Nikki Kenward: It’s a great idea. Connect with our inner panda. That’s such a good idea before we eat. It’s so interesting what you were saying there because our Western idea of the belly as it should be taut, flat, and hard. It shouldn’t look like what it is because we don’t want to think about poo going through a tube. If we look at Eastern tradition, the gut, the lower Dan Tien, the lower navel is the center of emotional and spiritual growth. How did we get to where we are? What you were saying about the prayer and the meditation before eating and allowing it to soften is beautiful. That’s exactly what we can do.

[1:11:12] Ashley James: For the last 100 years or so—I mean if you look at history, there’s been a concerted effort throughout all of history to try to suppress us and control the masses. If you look at the way in which they’ve used all religions throughout the world and the way in which they’ve enforced or created wars. “My religion is better than your religion. We’re going to kill you.” or “You have to convert.” If you look at the history of government, for example, why are all the Christian holidays on top of pagan holidays? It’s very interesting how the history of the last 5000 years. Look at human history and look at how governments and religions have worked at controlling people. None of them have wanted us to be in our own power. We’re very dangerous when we are empowered, when we are in the seat of our own power connected to source, connected to our creator, connected to our heart, connected to our soul, and have health.

When we are at full health and in full power we are a danger to those who want to control us. We need to be read to examine our belief system and examine who instilled these beliefs about our bodies like what the ideal body looks like? Where does that come from? Because really, there’s so many layers to what we have been taught and hat we have unconsciously accepted as truth. What you think is beautiful or what your belief system around beauty about being, like you said, that the heart and flat tummy, that might be part of the mechanism of keeping us distracted so we don’t connect with. Look at it as being unnatural. If we’re so focused on getting a boob job and getting a nose job, if we’re so focused on what we wear, if we’re so focused on this external look of something we are not and we want to be something we’re not. We have this like, “If only I had more money. If only I had more time. If only had more energy.”

They keep us wanting and wanting and wanting then we cannot focus on being in our own power. I think to get back into our own empowerment, we have to take it into our own hands. No one’s going to give it to us. I love that your technique doing it right before each meal three times a day: sit, breathe for five minutes, pray, meditate, connect with yourself again with the intention to come back into your power, to heal yourself. Because the powers that be don’t want us to be empowered and fully healed. We just have to reexamine our belief system around what is beautiful and why do I want that? What is health? Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why am I desiring what I’m desiring? Is it my authentic self or is it been something that’s been imposed upon me? Because society is designed that way to keep us all sheeple. I love that. I love right.

[1:14:53] Nikki Kenward: It’s so true. It’s so true.

[1:14:55] Ashley James: Your technique is helping us come into our own power and listen to ourselves and connect with ourselves again because the mainstream media and the mainstream collectiveness does not want us to know that we can get in touch their intuition. That we can get in touch with our body and our body could speak to us. That we can actually heal. These are radical, radical ideas that you’re throwing out here. I love it. We have to kind of be radical. We have to swim upstream. We have to go be like salmon, totally going against the norm. We don’t want to live like a statistic. The number one killer is heart disease. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis. One in three people have pre-diabetes or obese. The statistics are horrible. If we want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If we don’t want to be a statistic, we have to be the salmon and be willing to challenge the norm and go upstream. I love what you’re doing because you are helping people get empowered.

[1:15:57] Nikki Kenward: That’s what Dr. John Upledger taught me. He said that our job is to empower people to give them choices. That’s always been my focus because I completely agree with everything you’re saying. The only thing is if we’re a salmon can we have an inner panda? I’m not sure about that. By the way, laughing is very good for our vagal health.

[1:16:30] Ashley James: One of my one of the homework I give my clients is on their lunch breaks—I’ve get a lot of busy clients, “I don’t have time to do this. I don’t have time to get to that.” I get them to, on their lunch break, go on YouTube and look up Comedy Central or whatever and watch 5, 10, or 15-minute comedy act and just laugh. Go for walks. Get out of the office, go for a walk, listen to comedy, laugh, walk, and breathe. We have to actually schedule time throughout the day to help our enteric nervous system and help our autonomic nervous system to go back into healing mode and come out of stress mode.

[1:17:18] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. It’s really important.

[1:17:21] Ashley James: Brilliant. Nicky, is there anything else you’d like to make sure that you teach us today before we wrap up today’s interview?

[1:17:29] Nikki Kenward: I think just the only other thing is to say that anybody there who is listening to this who has felt isolated with these issues, ashamed, secret, unable to talk, I’m talking about my issues. I talk about mental health and bowel movements with my clients all the time. I just encourage you to talk about it. We all need to talk about it. It doesn’t make you any less. It doesn’t make you less functional, less competent. It makes you a human being.

[1:18:03] Ashley James: Talk about it with the right people.

[1:18:06] Nikki Kenward: With the right people, yes.

[1:18:08] Ashley James: The people who are receptive who will hold a loving space for you.

[1:18:13] Nikki Kenward: Yes, absolutely. Because the Japanese if they crack a pot, say it breaks a piece of pottery, they will put it together with some gold-colored glue because they say that pot is more precious than the one that hasn’t been broken.

[1:18:32] Ashley James: Exactly. I’ve looked at every part of my life when I felt broken and I look back and I just see that that forged me into an even more beautiful person. When we’re at our depths when we’re at our lowest know that in five-ten years you’ll look back and be grateful for the tragedy and the sorrow you have now. To keep going and use it as a tool to slingshot you into your healing. Nikki Kenward, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Listeners can go to nikkikenward.com to access your information. Is that the best place to go to buy your book as well?

[1:19:13] Nikki Kenward: I have another link for my book which is nikkikenward.store.

[1:19:20] Ashley James: Okay. Excellent.

[1:19:21] Nikki Kenward: If they’re in America though, they might do better to go on to the International Association of Healthcare Educators website where their products are because it will be cheaper to get it from there in America.

[1:19:38] Ashley James: Okay. We’ll make sure those links are all in the show notes of today’s podcast. Excellent. Nikki, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[1:19:45] Nikki Kenward: You’re welcome. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Ashley.

[1:19:51] Outro: For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

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It’s All in Your Gut

The Power of Eight

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-eight

Highlights:

What is the power of eight
How did power of eight start
Positive intention vs negative intention
What power of eight session looks like
What time travel intention is

In this episode, Lynne McTaggart shares with us how the power of eight started. She shares how powerful sending and receiving intention is. She also shares how people can get over big or small traumas through time travel intention.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. I would love for you to join my new membership that I’ve spent the last four months creating. I’ve filmed a bunch of wonderful videos and every week I upload new videos teaching you how to cook in a way that heals your body and also cook and prepare food in a way that your kids will love, your spouse will love. It’s delicious food but it is whole foods and that there’s no processed foods, minimally processed and it taste delicious. So if you want to learn some amazing recipes, even if you could just improve your health by adding more nutrition in the form of food to your life, please come join come check out the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. I would love to see you there. The community so far is loving it.

One of our members said that within five days of applying some of the things that she learned in the membership, her chronic headaches went away and that she noticed she had more energy. She was actually feeling like she could sleep at night. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen and learn how to use food as your medicine to eat delicious food that also heals your body. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. You can join as a monthly member. It’s $9.97 for a whole month. You can come check it out. You can join as an annual member and use the coupon code LTH for a big discount. Come learn how to make delicious food that is also healing for your body. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I hope to see you there.

[0:01:56] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 414. I am so excited for today’s guest. This has been a long time in the making. Lynne McTaggart, I have wanted to interview you for a really long time and our schedules finally aligned. Today is the day. I’m so excited. A really good friend of mine, who’s a mental health counselor about a year ago, wrote me a text saying, “You have to interview this woman. I just finished her book. It’s life-changing. Oh my gosh. This is amazing.” I really take her opinion seriously because she’s a mental health counselor and she is really grounded in what works, what doesn’t work. She has to be. She actually, after reading your book The Power of Eight, she owns a clinic and she runs the clinic. About 80% of her clientele are there to end alcohol and substance abuse. So she does individual therapy and she has therapists underneath her as well and she also has group therapy. So most of her clientele is there to end addiction. She immediately started using the tools that she learned from your book, The Power of Eight, in her group sessions.

So, when they all came together two or three times a week to do their group therapy for ending their substance abuse, addiction or healing it; all the things she learned from your book she started doing with them and started seeing some fantastic results. Then she started doing it to shift things in her personal life. I’d get a text, “Okay, at 9:00 in the morning we’re all going to put this intention out there together.” So we started this intention circle, which was so great. So finally you’re here on the show. I think that your tools are so relevant for everyone listening. So I’m very, very excited for us to learn from you today. Welcome to the show.

[0:04:06] Lynne McTaggart: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you, Ashley.

[0:04:10] Ashley James: Awesome. Absolutely. Now, here’s another example of serendipity. I just texted my godmother and I just felt this urge. I don’t normally tell her who I’m interviewing. I just felt the urge to tell her and I said, “I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I’m finally interviewing Lynne McTaggart today.” My auntie, I call her my auntie. She wrote back, “You’re not going to believe this. I’m holding her book in my hand.” I’ve never talked to my aunt about you at all. She said, “I can’t believe it. I’m holding her book The Power of Eight right now in my hand.” I said, “Yeah, exactly. I just knew it. Something in me knew to tell her.” So she’s really excited. So she’s going to text me a question for you while we’re doing our interview. But this is how exciting it is. Finally, I have you on the show.

All my listeners want to achieve better health emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, energetically. All my listeners want a better life for themselves and their family. This is something that you teach people. You’re considered an intention guru. It’s almost like learning how to master the ability to manifest. I am so excited to dive into this, but before we do, I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory so that we really understand what happened in your life that led you to become this best-selling author of teaching people how to control their thoughts in a way that manifests what they want in life.

[0:05:51] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I mean, I never set out to do this. My background is investigative reporting. So, when I started out my career, Ashley, I broke baby-selling rings. I was trying to put bad guys in jail kind of thing. I came over to the UK to write a book. At that point, it was a biography of one of the Kennedy sisters. I fell in love with the place, never left. At that, which was my early 30s, I got ill and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I went from very conventional doctors to very outer rim of alternative doctors and nobody could tell me what was wrong with me. Now, it turned out I had a faulty microbiome. No big deal these days, but back in the early 80s, it was.

So, I finally realized if I was going to get better I was going to have to research this myself. So I researched what I thought I had. Then I researched the right doctor to work with me, to heal me. He was a pioneering nutritional doctor, a medical doctor who was not using drugs anymore, he was using supplements. He was using food and supplements as medicine. We got me better and I was so impressed by this that I probably got pretty boring on the subject. My husband sort of turned to me one day and he said, “Don’t tell me, tell the world.”

So, we started a little newsletter then called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. This was 30 years ago. We carried on and we still carried on. It’s now an international magazine. We run the one in America and the one in the UK. We also have its sister publication called Get Well and a Get Well show, an exhibition, a health expo that we just had in London. So, in the course of doing this work and when we started the newsletter, we decided we want to show people what’s really proven to work in alternative medicine. So, I kept coming across, when I was doing research, very good studies, studies of spiritual healing. I kept thinking to myself, “Wait a minute, if you can have a thought and send it to someone else and make them better, that completely undermines everything we know about how the world works.”

So, I set off on a quest essentially to find out what this was. Do we have human energy fields? What was going on? So, I persuaded my publisher to let me go on a journey and to write a book without a compass. I had no idea what I was going to find, but they agreed to do a book that I wasn’t even sure the content of. I started talking to scientists in quantum physics, pioneers in consciousness research. What each of them were telling me was a tiny piece of what together compounded into a completely new science, a new view of the world. So I wrote that up in a book called The Field, which was a best-seller, an international bestseller. One night afterward, I realized there was some unfinished business because there was a lot of evidence in there that actually thoughts are an actual something with the capacity to change matter.

So, the journalist in me was very curious. I kept thinking, “Well, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a tiny shift of a quantum particle? Are we talking about curing cancer with your thoughts? I wrote a book called The Intention Experiment, which was the science of intention, all the science about the power of your thoughts, but it was also an invitation to take part in experiment. I wanted to do this and test this in the biggest possible way. I started thinking about it. I knew a lot of scientists in consciousness research, scientists working at prestigious universities like Princeton, Penn State, University of Arizona, University of California. I also have lots of readers because the field was in 30 languages. So I kept thinking, “Well, if I put them together I’m going to have the biggest global laboratory in the world.”

So we did. We would set up these well-controlled experiments with scientists. Every so often I would invite my readers to all send the same thought to that target. To be honest, Ashley, I did not think it was going to work. I thought maybe we’d have some very subtle effect but we did. It did work. It really worked. I mean, we’ve run 33 experiments. Everything from trying to make seeds grow faster to trying to purify water to lowering violence of war-torn areas and to even try to heal somebody of post-traumatic stress disorder. Of those 33, 29 have shown positive, measurable mostly significant effects. There’s no pharmaceutical drug out there that has that kind of track record, but it was really the small group thing came about because I was trying to figure out how to start running workshops in this. This is back in 2008. I wasn’t really sure how to scale down what I was learning in the intention experiments.

So I was kicking it around with my husband one day and I said, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just put people in groups of eight or so and have them send healing intention to a member of the group with a health challenge.” He, being a good headline writer, said, “I love it. The Power of 8.” That is how it had started, just completely by accident. We did this in Chicago, our first workshop. Put people in groups of 8 or so. Had them send healing intention to a member of the group with a health challenge. Again, I didn’t think it was really going to work. I thought it was going to be a little feel-good effect like relaxing, having your back massage or something like that. That’s not what happened. Next day when people came in to talk about how it had been for them the day before in the workshop, they said things like this, “I have cataracts and they’re 80% better.” “I have a very bad knee from arthritis and I’m walking normally today.” “I have IBS and it feels like it’s cleared.” “I have depression and I feel lighter and better today. I feel like it’s gone.” On and on and on it went. I didn’t believe it. I really didn’t believe it. I thought, “Well, this is a placebo effect.” But I have now seen this happen in thousands of people’s where there have been healings in an instant or healings over time with a power of a group.

[0:13:19] Ashley James: That is amazing. I love that your husband came up with the name. That was some divine intervention to come up with that. So you didn’t do experiments where we did a group of six and a group of 10 and we found out that eight was the best?

[0:13:35] Lynne McTaggart: No. It doesn’t have to be eight. As I say, that was just me plucking a number out of the air. I mean, we have had groups of six, we’ve had groups of 12. It doesn’t need eight. Eight is kind of a Goldilocks figure, Ashley. It’s not too big and it’s not too small, but it works with six or five, it works with twelve. I think more than twelve it gets a little unwieldy. The point is a group, a small group of any size.

[0:14:06] Ashley James: You said that thoughts can change matter and you saw it in large groups of people. Did you do any experiments where you saw significant changes in something with one person’s thoughts?

[0:14:20] Lynne McTaggart: I mean, there are plenty of studies of that and they’re all in my book, The Intention Experiment of individuals sending intention to everything from bacteria to plants to single-celled organisms to full-fledged human beings and they’ve been able to change things. There’s no question. There’s huge, huge evidence of that. It’s without a doubt now. I was interested in the power of groups. I figured, “Well if one person has that power, does it get magnified in a group?” That was the other thing that really intrigued me. So that’s really why I wanted to do the intention experiment. I wanted to see what if there are thousands? What happens? With the intention experiments, we’ve had everything from 3,000 people to 25,000 people participating.

[0:15:19] Ashley James: This reminds me of what happened in DC several years ago where they meditated for peace and that the crime rates dropped significantly during that summer. This is the kind of experiments you were doing where you were taking many people with a single focus. Then you would see that it actually got results. Why is that? Is it that we’re all part of a morphic field? Is it that our thoughts really do create reality and matter is an illusion? Why is it that a group can get together and change reality?

[0:15:57] Lynne McTaggart: First of all, the studies you’re talking about, which were done by the Transcendental Meditation people, were very good studies, well-controlled. What they were looking at was just the effect of passive meditation. So the people who are part of that, what they looked at was, and they did it with 48 cities around America and Washington DC was one of them. They wanted to see what would happen if there were a critical mass of meditators meditating. They found when they reached a certain critical mass, the crime rate would go down. Now, these were not people intending for lowering violence, these were people just meditating. Essentially their theory, and that’s really all we get to call it, is that it creates a change in the field. When there are lots of people meditating, it really changes and calms things in the field.

I don’t know about that. There certainly are studies. Their studies are very good, but the why for them, I can’t really speak about. What I can talk about is what we did, which was a very highly focused thought. So our people weren’t meditating. They were in a state of hyper-awareness, hyperfocus, which is the state I try to get people in with intention. It’s not a quiescent state, it’s a state of a high degree of focus. I have them hold a particular thought. Our intention is that we will lower violence in St. Louis Missouri, in the Fairground section of St. Louis Missouri by at least 10%, something very, very specific. We’ve done this seven times now with violence lowering. We’ve done intention in war-torn areas like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. We’ve also done it in very highly violent places like Washington DC, a section of Washington DC and also a section of St. Louis Missouri, which is officially the most violent place in America.

With that study, we worked with the team of scientists. One of them was a noted statistician in consciousness research called Dr. Jessica Utss from the University of California. She examined three years’ worth of data around St. Louis as a whole and also the area we were focusing on, which was the most violent part of St. Louis, the Fairground area. So we looked at both property crime and actual crime, violent crime. She found that the crime rate had been going up and up and up in all areas of St. Louis, particularly Fairground. From six months onward, after our intention, property crime continued to go up in St. Louis as a whole. Violent crime St. Louis at the whole continue to go up. Property crime in Fairground continue to go up, but violent crime, the focus of our intention, went down by about 43%.

[0:19:18] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:19:19] Lynne McTaggart: We’ve done seven and all seven have shown measurable, documented lowering of violence.

[0:19:30] Ashley James: Was it advertised and people in that area know that this was happening or was it completely oblivious to the people in those areas that this was going on?

[0:19:44] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. We didn’t advertise it to the St. Louis people. We let our community and other communities in the consciousness that we were doing it and invited them to be part of it. We didn’t let St. Louis know about it.

So what is this? Well, I think that there’s a lot of things going on. I think, certainly, there is a power of thoughts. There’s almost like a psychic internet that gets created. I give you an example of that. With my intention experiment, one of the early ones we were doing trying, to make seeds grow faster. We were working with the University of Arizona. They would get four sets of thirty seeds: A, B, C and D as they were called. They would photograph each set, send me the photographs. When I was speaking in a particular area, we would do a new study.

So my first place that I was speaking was in Sydney, Australia. They were in Tucson, Arizona with the seeds. So they sent me the photos with the audience we chose randomly, one of the four sets. Didn’t tell the scientists which ones, sent intention to that set of seeds. Didn’t tell the scientists which ones. Let them then told them we were done. They planted the seeds and five days later after they’ve measured all four sets of seeds to see how high they grew, did we unblind the study and tell them, “Well, actually, we send intention to seeds A,” or whichever one it was. We ran that study six times. Every single time, the seed sent intention grew significantly higher than the controls. One time twice as high.

Now, unpack this for a second. That first study, we’re in Sydney, Australia. The seeds are in Tucson, Arizona, 8,000 miles away. The audience isn’t sending intention to the seeds itself, they’re sending intention to a photograph of the seeds. Nevertheless, we had an effect. So, that’s what I’m talking about with some sort of weird psychic internet. The even more interesting thing, that’s interesting, pretty amazing but not the really interesting part of the story. The more interesting part is what happened to the participants? Because once we started doing peace experiments in 2008, we started sending questionnaires, surveys to the people who would participate. We got thousands of responses back where people said things like these, “I’ve made up with my estranged relative.” “I’m getting up along so much better with my wife.” “That boss of mine, that horrible boss of mine, is suddenly being so nice to me.” “Now, I am in love with everyone I come in contact with.” That was about half of the people said that. That was the most. They were basically talking about hugging strangers in the street. There was this incredible change in them that was a kind of their lives became more peaceful. More peaceful, more loving, more connected. So that’s the thing, that rebound effect, that mirror effect was what started to really interest me.

[0:23:07] Ashley James: It’s as if they plugged into a different internet like you said. They’re plugging into this internet where the intention and the energy is about love and peace. The morphic field they were living in, the life, the goldfish bowl that they were living in has changed. They took themselves out of the petty, the angry whatever they were in and they put themselves in a different vibrational state. So then, they started seeing their entire world in a different way. It changed their perception.

[0:23:48] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[0:24:27] Ashley James: That is brilliant. Now in your book, The Power of Eight, you teach people and teach groups how to do this. What about individuals? So I want to talk about groups, I want to talk about individuals because individuals are listening to this. Maybe some people, like introverts, would be shy to go find a group of people to start doing this with at first and they want to build up their confidence by doing something alone. Can people practice what you teach alone and then go find a group? Should they just go find a group because that’s so much more powerful?

[0:24:28] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I would recommend that they find a group. It doesn’t have to be a group that’s physical. You can meet virtually. On my website, lynnemctaggart.com/forum, you can sign up to either join an existing group, and there are thousands of them going, or you can create one and advertise one in your time zone. Just say, “Hey, I’m looking for people to do a power of eight group with.” Yes, you can practice the rudimentary of intention, but it’s the power of the group. I’ll tell you what the real secret sauce is and why you do need a group. That is because for so many people if they’re stuck in their lives, the way that they get off of that is by getting off of themselves and sending intention to someone else. That’s why a group, small groups, are so powerful because I’ve seen this over and over and over again.

When I first started noticing that this was going on, I started looking at it from different ways trying to understand this because I didn’t believe it. At one point I decided to put people in groups, have them follow a course of mine for a whole year. I would put them in groups after they’d gone through some teaching with me over six weeks. I’d study them. I would monitor their progress over an entire year. Now, we had some amazing things and we continue to do so.

With that first group, there were 250 in the first group. About 150 continue to meet regularly week after week after week. Of those 150, pretty much 100% of them had major life transformations. We had an Allison who had vitiligo and started repigmenting. Trudy who regained most of her hearing, she had hearing loss. We had Mitchell Dean who was a psychologist who suffered from his own suicidal thoughts. He had suicidal depression and nothing had worked. He was an integrative psychologist, but when he put it out to his group to help him find the path to healing. After they did an intention for him, he was compelled to go to a Chinese herbalist who wanted to test his liver filtration systems. He found out that one of them was blocked. As soon as that was unblocked, his depression lifted.

So we had amazing stories like this. People who were in financial straits suddenly get this incredible ongoing windfall of money. Extraordinary people stuck in their jobs, like Melissa, who in her 50s ends up getting this new dream job, but some people, in the beginning, were stuck like Andy. Now Andy was a very talented marketing person and coach. She had sold her gift store and she was going through a divorce. She had two small children so she really needed a job. She couldn’t find a job no matter what they were doing, her group’s intention, all of the stuff she was stuck, stuck, stuck. So I went through all kinds of things with her and I finally just said, “You know Andy, get off of yourself.”

I had a particular person in mind for her to focus her intention on. There was a young boy called Luke who was 15. He had just broken up with his first serious girlfriend. When he was in a fit of adolescent angst, he threw himself off a 40-foot structure onto a hard ground. Luke broke every bone in his body, had nerve damage, brain damage. His stepfather and his mother didn’t think he was going to live according to what the doctors were telling them. So, they wrote to me and said can you put him on an intention circle. So I asked this masterclass that had been formed with these groups. All do a healing vigil for Luke on three successive Sundays while his parents kept a running commentary of what was going on with him.

Luke ended up healing in record time. Within a few weeks, he was whizzing around on a wheelchair. With a few more weeks he went home against every prognosis of the doctors. Now, he’s a healthy 18-year-old boy. So amazing. Was that down to us or good doctoring or maybe a combo of both, who knows? But what was really fascinating is what happened to Andy. Because Andy, the moment she got off of herself and started focusing on Luke, she gets a call out of nowhere from someone she doesn’t even know offering her the perfect job. That happened over and over and over again to the point where I started realizing that the real secret of this, the real reason why people are getting better is this thing of altruism.

Altruism is like a bulletproof vest. The science shows you that people who do things for other people, no matter how slight, live longer, happier, healthier lives. If you have an illness and you help somebody with the same illness, you’re more likely to get better. Even if you’re a volunteer you’re more likely to have a healthy life. You’re more likely to have longer life. It’s really extraordinary the science behind it.

[0:30:24] Ashley James: Now, what’s the difference between the power of eight or this group intention, the system, you’ve developed a system, that has proven time and time again to work for the intended target but also for everyone doing it, which is great. What the difference between that and prayer? You go to church on Sunday and the whole church prays for someone. What’s the difference?

[0:30:51] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I think it’s different. It’s a secular system, first of all. Secondly, you’re not praying to a supreme being where you basically say to God, “You decide. Thy will be done,” is what we say in church. You decide essentially. With intention, this is a very specific request to the universe. This is what I’d like, please. Also, there is the energy, the something, the alchemy that goes on in this group. Now, everybody, we just had a health show in London Olympia and I did a Get Well show. I put people into groups of eight and let them experience that. People talked about this extraordinary buzzing energy they were feeling. I’ll give you an example.

A few months ago, I did this at a conference. A woman, I swear to you, Maya, young woman who had had some sort of idiopathic paralysis from the neck down that occurred that was tragic because she was a dancer. She was in and out of paralysis and when she came to the show, she was in a wheelchair paralyzed from the neck down. The group did for her. She described this extraordinary buzzing, this energy that filled he with such gratitude, with such force that she felt, “I can’t keep this for myself.” So she started intending to send some of that out to one of her relatives who was ill. Anyway, the upshot is, when we were calling on people afterward who were raising their hand to say what had happen to them, she put her hand up and she thought to herself, “I got to stand.” She stood up and turned around and talked to everybody. It was just astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.

It’s that group thing, there is a group feeling of oneness that people talk about all the time that is something much, much bigger than them. Like they’re almost inviting in a power even outside the group. People talk about that all the time. Light behind chairs, the chair of the circle, light being’s there. Someone who had a bad knee and afterward was able to do a deep squat after this ten-minute intention. Talked about feeling warm mitts around her he even though nobody in the group was holding on to her knee. It’s that kind of thing. There’s something bigger that gets produced.

[0:33:36] Ashley James: You’re inviting in healing angels.

[0:33:40] Lynne McTaggart: I guess you are. Who knows? Look, I’ve started recognizing that intention plays a big part of it. Group intention plays a big part of it. The group effect itself. Groups are, as one psychologist called it, a collective effervescence. They have their own amazing effect and power. Altruism plays a huge part in it. Just getting off of yourself. What happens with altruism is when you do something for someone else, it activates a thing in your body called the vagus nerve. It’s the longest nerve in your body and it starts in the neck, winds its way through all of the major organs of your body. It’s kind of a love nerve because it gets activated when we do something good for someone else like a child in need. When it does, it also makes us feel connected to everyone, even people we are nothing like, we feel more connection with the other. So, there’s an extraordinary spiritual side to this that gets activated in a group and a group that is involved in an altruistic intention.

[0:34:57] Ashley James: There are studies that show that people who are depressed and suicidal when they join a group and volunteer, so dog-walking; feeding the homeless; community gardens that time and time again, they see that depression lifts and suicidal thoughts melt away. Joy starts to fill their life and that people who volunteer live longer. They are happier people and they live longer. So you’re explaining one of the physiological reasons why because it’s stimulating the vagus nerve. It connects our two brains because they’re saying now that there’s like a second brain which is our gut. That there’s so many nerves happening in the gut. The vagus nerve is sending more signals to the brain than the brain is sending back down. So the brain is receiving all this information. We have an intuition I believe. We call it like a gut feeling. I think the gut perceives also. So when we have a really clean and a healthy vagus nerve, we have better digestion; 25% of our serotonin, I believe, is produced in the gut of a healthy microbiome.

So, there’s joy and happiness, there’s better digestion, better absorption of nutrition. When the gut, when the vagus nerve’s inflamed, they see that people have chronic depression and also have developed digestive disorders like IBS. We can do something like be altruistic, volunteer, join a power of eight group and actually have a physiological effect on calming the vagus nerve, which supports our physical health. I love that. I love that we can start to see the actual physical benefits of something mental and emotional because the mental-emotional body is connected. We’re all connected. That’s really cool.

[0:37:14] Lynne McTaggart: Yes. The amazing thing of it is, as I say, in a group, it’s not just the receivers that get healed, it’s the senders too. Now, with one group, I just organized a group in Denver with the Mile Hi Church. So we had this group of eight and one of the members of the group was a guy called Wes. Now, Wes wanted to put himself forward because he suffered from depression and he had this miserable life. He was 65 when I met him and he was there with the group and he had big hopes and dreams to become a biochemist or a doctor even. He was at university when, I think his third year, he got called up to be drafted at the very end of the Vietnam War when there were no more draft deferments for college students. So he ended up going to Vietnam getting totally traumatized by the situation, coming home deeply depressed, didn’t finish university and his life went down in a downward spiral after that. Even when he met the love of his life, had married his second wife, she didn’t last long. She died of a fast-growing cancer.

So, he got to the point by 65 where it was kind of what’s the use? He barely could get himself up in the morning. So he was there and he did this whole thing. He wanted to put himself forward but there was a woman in the group with stage four cancer and he thought she was more deserving. So he did that. That first night, he went to bed and woke up and it was almost like Scrooge on Christmas morning where suddenly he’s like this totally different person. He’s smiling. He used to avoid people. He’s suddenly smiling and saying hi to them. The grass was greener than he’d ever seen it. He had a cup of herbal tea and he said it knocked his socks off. All of his senses were really heightened.

So then, the next night goes to bed. He has this amazing lucid dream he said almost like a vision where he’s meeting his 19-year-old self. They’re back in campus and the 19-year-old self is somehow communicating to him, “Don’t worry, there’s still time.” From then, Wes was a totally different person because he suddenly started doing power walks, he started writing, he started joining classes, he started coming to his church, Mile Hi Church, and is very active in a power of eight group. He’s a completely different person after that one 10-minute session.

[0:40:05] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, I’m crying right now. I think my favorite thing in the world is hearing about people who felt hopeless and then they had a breakthrough because it’s never too late. You’re not a lost cause, you’re not broken, it’s never too late. You can have a better life even if you’ve been suffering. I remember feeling so sick. In my 20s, I was so sick I just didn’t want to live anymore at times because I felt like a prisoner trapped in my own body. I was suffering so horribly. I was able to use natural medicine to overcome it and that’s one of the reasons why I do this show is to help people who are suffering like me. There is a way to heal yourself. The road sometimes is long, but sometimes it’s short. Sometimes you do something like join a power of eight group and you have these amazing results, but there’s always hope. There’s always something there for you to learn. I believe that there’s no lost causes. This is my favorite kind of story is hearing of people who triumph. Every single person deserves that. Every single person deserves to create the life that they love.

[0:41:29] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, that’s the thing that’s really amazing about it. When you do see studies of what happens when people do for other people and how that changes them. One of my favorite studies is a study of prayer and it looked at took a group of 400 people with depression. They put them into two groups. One group where the people who are going to get prayer for them, and the other group of 200 we’re going to be people who are going to give the prayer. So they carried out the study and afterward measured the effects. Now, the people who got the prayer did really well. They improved, but nowhere near as much as the people who had given the prayer. They were off of the charts. So that was I think one of those interesting things. Also, another study of people looking at people who have what we’d consider the good life, all the money in the world, everything that they want, go on a lot of holidays, have a lot of material things. When they looked at their immune system markers, a group of researchers, they found they had terrible immune systems. These are people who are going to die of any one of the number of degenerative diseases: heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, etc. They were going to drop like flies, they look like, at another group who weren’t as affluent but who were living a life of service, of doing for other people. Those people had robust immune systems. They were going to live forever. So, there’s another example of the power of getting off of yourself and doing for other people. It’s really extraordinary.

[0:43:26] Ashley James: That’s so beautiful. I love it. My aunt texted her question. She says, “So, I’m in a group. Based on her book The Power of Eight, there are eight people meeting once a week on Zoom. We are into our third week and plan to do eight weeks for all eight people. Each week we let each person in the group say their intention for themselves for this week and then we pick one person after that who we’ll all focus on, figure out what intention will suit that person’s issue the best and we all repeat silently to ourselves for 10 minutes. The same intention for this one person. We meditate on it. My question is, at the beginning of the call, is it a good idea for each one of us to tell our own personal intention first or is it better to only focus on the one person’s intention throughout the whole our together?”

[0:44:20] Lynne McTaggart: Well, you can talk about your intentions, your personal intentions, but if you’re doing it for an hour, I wouldn’t try to do everybody in the group in that one hour. Sometimes it’s good to just send and sometimes it’s good to receive. So, if you’ve got an hour, you might want a little time to talk about things after each intention and to break and have time. So having about three people to four people being the targets of intention would be a good idea at most in an hour. You’d want them to talk about themselves, what’s going on with them, and then everybody shares some feedback afterward because some of the stuff that I talk about is also having visualizations of success, very strong visualizations not just holding the statement and bringing it down to your heart but also holding visualizations of success.

[0:45:18] Ashley James: Maybe you could walk us through what a session looks like so that the listener went and got seven other people together, walk us through what it looks like. Of course, they’ll get your book because they’ll want to dive in deeper but for those listening today that are really jazzed and just want to go try it, can you walk us through step by step what we should do with a group of seven other people.

[0:45:41] Lynne McTaggart: Sure. I mean, it doesn’t have to be aid, as I say, you can be on Skype or Zoom or a conference call or you can be meeting in person. You design a very specific intention statement together. It helps to have one person be the leader stroke timekeeper. So, one person gets nominated as the recipient, everybody else is the sender’s. You decide together on the intention statement, make it very specific. If you want to heal the big toe of somebody’s right foot say, “Our intention is that Jane Doe will be healed of all pain in her big toe of her right foot.” That kind of thing. You hold, you then start breathing together, you then formulate the intention bring it down to your heart, send it out to the person. I’m just giving you the big broad strokes. There’s a lot of details. In fact, there are 13 keys to intention mastery. I talk about a number of them in my book, The Power of Eight, and also in The Intention Experiment. I teach these very in-depth and lots of other things about in tension in masterclasses, but these are the broad strokes.

So, we take you down to our hearts, we send it out. The person receiving just opens up their hearts to receive. I say hold it for just 10 minutes because sometimes people aren’t as proficient in focusing and it requires a high degree of focus, focusing on the outcome that person being healthy and well in every way. Imagining them running around or being blooming with good health. Hold and you don’t need to do more than 10 minutes. Lots of people do things for hours, you don’t need it. We’ve seen so many healings in an instant basically. Then you slowly come out. The timekeeper says, “Time is up.” You slowly come back in onto the call and then it’s good to have some feedback. What did the receiver feel? What did the senders feel? What did they visualize?

[0:47:56] Ashley James: So in one call, like you said, you could do three or four people if you wanted to.

[0:48:02] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. I wouldn’t try to do all eight because you wouldn’t have enough time.

[0:48:05] Ashley James: Right. Right. Because it sounds like it would be about twenty minutes per person if you’re really intentional with the time.

[0:48:13] Lynne McTaggart: Sure. Do understand that people get healed toward the senders just as much as the receivers, in some cases more so. Remember Wes? He wasn’t a receiver, he was a sender and his life got changed in those 10 minutes.

[0:48:29] Ashley James: This makes me think about hurricanes where we’ve seen them veer off all of a sudden. There was no explanation as to why and everyone in Florida and everyone around Florida is just intending for it to move. Then there are other times where people are expecting worst-case scenarios and I wonder, have you seen negative things happen where if a group of people believe something really bad is going to happen, could we also create something negative?

[0:49:08] Lynne McTaggart: Oh, yeah. There’s a huge batch of research about negative intention and I’d like to tell you, Ashley, that positive intention is more powerful than negative intention, but I can’t. It works just as well. If you think about it, I mean Qi Gong masters use a thing called destroying mind to overcome the opponent if they’re doing a kind of a fight with them. That works very powerfully. There are other situations where they’ve done very well-controlled studies of people sending negative intention to anything from bacteria, to plants, to all kinds of things like that and they have a very powerful effect. They’ve even done studies where they do a trade. They start to do a positive thing for a while then a negative thing for a while, positive thing and it creates a kind of zigzag effect. So yeah, we can have negative intention too. So people expecting the worst, it’s like that old, I think it’s an old Buddhist story of somebody coming to a new town and eating a Buddha and saying, “So what’s it like in this new town that they were about to move in?” And the Buddha says to them, “Well, what was it like in the last town?” And they said, “Oh, it’s terrible. People were so unfriendly.” And he said, “Well, yeah. They’re going to be unfriendly in the next place.” Then somebody else comes along and they say, “So, we’re moving into this town. What are people like here?” And he says, “Well, what were like in the last town?” “They were so lovely. They were so friendly. They were wonderful.” And he said, “Well, the people here in this next town are going to be lovely too.” So, a lot of it is depending on your point of view and what you do.

I’ve actually worked with a group of intenders in Florida trying to move one of the hurricanes and it certainly missed that area. It was aiming for it and it missed it. Did we do this? Short answer, who knows, but it’s interesting and it seems to happen quite a lot.

[0:51:14] Ashley James: Oh, that’s so brilliant. Now you have an intention masterclass. I believe it started in January. Can people still join?

[0:51:23] Lynne McTaggart: Well, I’m due to do the fifth one on Saturday. These are all recorded so if people were really desperate to join, we could probably fit a few people in. They would get the first four sessions if they join this week and they could join the fifth session, which is all about how to protect yourself from negative intention. They could join it and be part of it. Now, what happens is, they get six live webinars from me, and these are also recorded if you miss them if you’ve started late too. We are putting people in groups of eight or so. We put them into more so that there will always be eight that on their calls. Then we encourage them to meet weekly with their group. Once my six are finished, and then I send them weekly challenges, advice, guidance. I also have a system to monitor their progress, every person’s progress on the masterclass. They get four catch-up calls with me where I teach them some more through the year and they get to ask some questions. We have a private Facebook page where they can ask more questions and there’s a lot of feedback that goes on.

So the real work happens with the groups, but they learn a lot from me about using intention for relationships, using intention to become a better receiver of other people’s intention, the thirteen P’s and so forth and how to be really successful in a power of eight group.

[0:53:05] Ashley James: I know that you also teach people if they feel like their choices are not in their own control, that you teach people how to use their thoughts to change that behavior. Because some people feel like, “Oh, I wish I could stick to this way of eating, but I can’t control going through the drive-through,” as an example or, “I keep wanting to go to the gym but I just can’t make it there.” It’s like they want to do something but then feel like their behavior is not in their control. That’s something that you teach as well as how people can overcome that.

[0:53:51] Lynne McTaggart: Yeah. What we also teach is, and I’ve run a retreat with my husband on this and we’re going to be in amazing place in Italy in the Piedmont area where I’m staying in a castle and we’re also going to be visiting Damanhur, that amazing spiritual community that’s been considered one of the eight wonders of the world because it has these extraordinary subterranean cathedrals in there, very, very sacred place. I’ve been working a lot with intention and sacred spaces, and some of the science does show that intention seems to work faster and better when there’ve been a lot of sacred work in certain areas. So we do that, which is really interesting, but we also work on healing the past through the power of eight because my husband has a lot of work about how the past becomes you and lives through you and creates the you you present to the world. We combine that with a lot of time travel intention and we work with people and help them get over some of the big and small traumas that have limited them in their lives from manifesting to life of their dreams. So this year we’re going to be going for, we only do one retreat a year, we’re going in early October. So there’s going to be more up about that on my website too.

[0:55:21] Ashley James: That sounds beautiful. What do you mean by, I mean I think I know what you mean but I’d love for you to explain it, time travel intention?

[0:55:30] Lynne McTaggart: Well we actually use intention through various techniques to go back to moments of trauma and essentially erase that tape. We don’t erase what happened, but we erased the tape. So we erase the footprint that is limiting you. It’s quite a complex technique, but essentially it really means what we are doing is getting rid of that emotional trauma, the emotional footprint of it.

[0:56:02] Ashley James: Beautiful. Well, I love the work that you do. I would love to have you back on the show to dive deeper into these topics. This is sort of the manual we should have been born with to learn how to use this tool in between our ears and our heart. Science now is finally starting to prove that this exists, that we can affect with our thoughts, can affect reality. I just finished an interview with a woman that had just published a documentary called Superhuman. The entire documentary is following experiments proving that thought affects the world. It’s wonderful to now interview you and get that many people, including yourself, many scientists, are all working together around the world to prove that there’s something. Thought is like an invisible arm that we have. It’s not only a sense because we can perceive. People get intuition or psychic abilities, but that our consciousness also effects. So it receives but it also puts out. In this documentary, they were at I think Stanford, she was able to within 10 seconds, by just using her consciousness, just in tension, she changed the conductivity of DNA. Then they did another experiment within 30 seconds she changed the pH, which is in increasing the hydrogen in water while it was all hooked up to electrodes. All kinds of experiments like that just to show that anyone, she was coming in blind, never done it before, that everyone has this ability. Most people are walking around handicapped because they don’t know that they have this ability.

So your books are showing them and teaching them how to use this God-given ability to create a world. We’re kind of walking around like children creating a world chaotically with our thoughts not really taking responsibility for them because we don’t realize how great of an impact they have on our reality. So we need to harness this power and focus it towards what we want.

[0:58:49] Lynne McTaggart: Absolutely.

[0:58:50] Ashley James: Yeah. So bring it together, focus it. It’s kind of like the difference between a sailboat where all the ropes are loose and everything’s flapping about and it’s just kind of going with the current versus focusing the sailboat to harness the wind to go where we want it to go. So we can use your tools to learn how to do that.

[0:59:13] Lynne McTaggart: I like that. I like the idea of harnessing ourselves. Sounds great.

[0:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah. Lynne, your website is lynnemctaggart.com. Of course, the links to everything that Lynne does, including her intention masterclass and all her books, are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure you taught today or anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[0:59:42] Lynne McTaggart: Well, just that I think the power of thoughts really should give you hope and the power of the group should give you hope because we in the spiritual community, we think we have to spend years practicing or hours priming ourselves to get into a mystical state. We did brain wave studies with neuroscientist at Life University, one of the largest chiropractic universities in the world, and they found that during power of eight groups, the brainwaves of the participants, who are just novice students, would change and not look anything like meditation. They resembled Sufi masters during chanting and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer as measured by the University of Pennsylvania. So, my message is just this: you don’t need a sweat lodge, you don’t need years of walking around on your knees, all you need is a power of eight group and a common intention and it’s your passport to the miraculous.

[1:00:53] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’d love to have you back.

[1:00:56] Lynne McTaggart: I would love to be back, Ashley. Thanks so much.

[1:01:00] Outro: Are you in to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com, takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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413 How Ketamine Is Now Transforming Mental and Emotional Health, Healing and Ending Addiction, Depression, Chronic Pain, PTSD, Trauma, Suicidal Ideation, and Anxiety with Professor and Clinical Forensic Psychologist Dr. John Huber 0

Feb 24, 2020

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www.mainstreammentalhealth.org

Ketamine and Mental Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/ketamine-mental-health

Highlights:

What Mainstream Mental Health does
DNA testing for psychotropic medicine
What electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is
What ketamine treatment is
Dangers of using ketamine
Different kinds of therapies
Signs that someone is a psychopath

In this episode, Dr. John Huber shares with us how he is increasing mental health awareness by doing interviews and going on different shows. He shares various stories on how he has helped people deal with different mental health issues using different therapy techniques depending on what he thinks would be beneficial to the patient. He also shares that it is beneficial to go see a therapist once in a while so that the therapist has a record of how a patient is when he’s doing well and how he is when he’s not doing well.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. I thought it was a very interesting interview and I think this information needs to get out there. Thank you for sharing this episode with your friends and people you care about. We need to spread this information so that people can learn that there are more tools available to them to achieve mental health, emotional health and overall a happier life. We all deserve that.

I would love for you to join my new membership that I’ve spent the last four months creating. I’ve filmed a bunch of wonderful videos and every week I upload new videos teaching you how to cook in a way that heals your body and also cook and prepare food in a way that your kids will love, your spouse will love. It’s delicious food but it is whole foods and that there’s no processed foods, minimally processed and it tastes delicious. So if you want to learn some amazing recipes even if you could just improve your health by adding more nutrition in the form of food to your life please come join, come check out the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. I would love to see you there. The community so far is loving it. One of our members said that within five days of applying some of the things that she learned in the membership, her chronic headaches went away. That she noticed she had more energy and she was actually feeling like she could sleep at night. That’s just one of the members. We’ve had amazing results.

Naomi’s mom, after eating this way for six weeks, completely lost her arthritis. She no longer has arthritis. There’s so many things that you can do with food to heal your body. So if you would love to increase your health and even mental-emotional health is affected by food. There’s many reasons for that. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen and learn how to use food as your medicine to eat delicious food that also heals your body. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. You can join as a monthly member. It’s $9.97 for a whole month. You can come check it out. You can join as an annual member and use the coupon code LTH for a big discount. I wanted to make this affordable so everyone could gain access to this information that I’ve cultivated, I brought together to help you to achieve true health. Come learn how to make delicious food that is also healing for your body, learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I hope to see you there. Enjoy today’s interview.

[0:03:04] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 413. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show with us Dr. John Huber. Oh my gosh. This is going to be such a fantastic interview. Dr. Huber’s website is mainstreammentalhealth.org. His mission is to increase awareness about mental health. I think that’s really important because, as you just said before we hit record, you can take all the vitamins and you could do the perfect diet and you could do the perfect exercise and do absolutely everything perfect for physical health but if you don’t have your mental-emotional health you don’t actually have health. So Dr. John’s mission is to get us healthy in a mental and emotional way. You have so many years of experience so I’m really looking forward to tapping into that brain of yours so we can all learn how to be healthier mentally and emotionally. Welcome to the show.

[0:04:12] Dr. John Huber: Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Anytime I can talk about mental health it just brings so much joy to my heart because we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to take this silent illness and make people realize that it’s not because you’re broken, it’s because you’re human. We need to be out there standing up for that.

[0:04:35] Ashley James: Yeah. I love that you said that. People feel often like there’s something wrong with them, that they’re incomplete, that they’re not whole and that they feel this guilt and shame when it’s totally human. It’s absolutely human. I was really amazed to hear in the history of Hawaii, which the ancient Polynesians took little canoes across the ocean to get to Hawaii. They’re pretty awesome people. But there was zero recorded history of mental illness until the Christian, Catholic people came in their ships and told them they should feel ashamed for being naked. But there was zero mental health issues. It was just amazing. After they changed their diet and took on religion and started to feel guilt and shame about their bodies and their culture, changed basically everything about what they were doing. All of a sudden then there was recorded events of schizophrenia. That it had never happened before in their culture and other mental illness.

So, it’s just really interesting that when we’re in perfect harmony with ourselves that were we’re really like going with the flow and everything’s good. But when we’re out of harmony with ourselves, I think mental illness is a symptom like our brain is saying, “Hey something’s wrong here. Something isn’t right.” So I just thought that was really interesting about the history of the Hawaiians. Now, you have many years of experience and you taught clinical forensic psychology. What was that like?

[0:06:18] Dr. John Huber: Well, I taught a lot of classes, but I’m a forensic psychologist, clinical forensic psychologist. I was lucky enough to be in a university that actually had brought in as I was becoming part of the faculty a forensic minor in psychology. Now, an undergraduate level that just kind of gives you some introductory stuff. You don’t have a license or you’re not skilled to go out and be able to do work for a police department or anything like that, but it starts getting people’s you know fingers and feet wet in what’s going on. Because when I got into this there was three schools in the United States at the doctorate level that didn’t require you to get a law degree and a Ph.D. to be a clinical forensic psychologist. I didn’t want to be an attorney. I wanted to be a practitioner that I could help people. One of the things I know about myself and I’ve known it since I was a young child, I get bored really easy. So I have to kind of create my own environment you know that I function in. One of those things is I need to be able to, okay if I start to feel myself getting tired or bored with something I need to move on and do something else for a day or two and then I can come back to that other thing if I have to continue working on a project or something like that.

So, for example, right now I’ve got my nonprofit. I do 1,100-1,200 radio interviews every year. I do approximately three to four hundred television interviews every year. I have my own podcast. Several hundred podcasts out there, I haven’t actually stopped to count them. I’m working on a book that I want to get out there. So, that’s just my nonprofit part right there. Then I have privileges at two medical hospitals where people get surgeries and they don’t understand why we have to cut a foot off or they’ve come to you and say, “I’d rather have my life go and be dead than have no leg.” I’m sitting there go, “Look at your grandkid right here, he’s three months old. Do you want him to remember you?

I get really bizarre answers from that because people have these preconceived notions about how everybody else sees them. It’s kind of like stage fright you know. People don’t like to get up in front of the audience and talk, but when people realize whether you’re singing, playing music, talking; that if somebody else wanted to come up there and talk they could talk to. You’re not keeping them from talking if you’re up there talking. Everybody has their own choices to make. A lot of people would rather sit back and listen and in some cases criticize after the fact. That’s okay because their opinions don’t change my opinion. If they bring me facts and research and data, then I look at the data and I do that. But an opinion, that’s just an opinion. They have a right to it, I have a right to mine.

I’m no better than they are there, they’re no better than me. If they’re willing to come listen to me, well I’m definitely going to give them an earful. I mean, that’s what I do. I’ve had people challenge me. I’ve had students challenge me. You get 500 students in there and a student asks you a question and you don’t know the answer to it. The student, “Well, you’re the professor. Don’t you know everything about psychology?” I’m like, “You know, there’s so much in psychology I wish I really did because I wouldn’t need to be here teaching you guys. I’d be teaching the teachers to teach you guys.” That kind of thing. This guy one day would just not leave it alone. He kept asking me about déjà vu, déjà vu, déjà vu and it was about the time the Matrix had come out. Finally, I just turned it, “You really want to know about déjà vu?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” I go, “It’s the Matrix resetting.” And the whole class, the whole class just like, “Did the professor just say that. He quoted the Matrix?” This kid is like, he’s dumbfounded. He doesn’t know what to say because he doesn’t have a rhetoric to that. I gave him an answer.

[0:10:28] Ashley James: That’s funny.

[0:10:29] Dr. John Huber: The rest of the class got it. He just kind of sat down and didn’t say anything else. About three weeks later he raised his hand and he goes, “Dude,” and the whole class turns around and looks at him like, “Did you just call the professor dude?” Then they turn around to look at me. I had corrected him. I said, “Excuse me, that’s Dr. Dude.” It’s not my ego. I’m there to teach them. I want them to learn. We know a lot of things about learning. If you put an emotion with learning, you remember it much better. I know professors who believe that, “Well, I’ll just make all the class angry at me because it’s easy.” I’m like, “No. I’d rather have them be laughing and enjoying the conversation because they remember that good feeling and they keep that with them when they study psychology from then on and out.” To this day, I’ve got students that are doing you know they’re residencies in thoracic surgery in New York State and all over the United States. I get emails and calls. I’m going to be in New York next week and I’ve got a couple of them going to introduce me to some of their surgery supervisors and want to go out to dinner and all this kind of stuff. You know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel like I did my job and I’m proud of those kids.

If you knew some of the stories and I see the successes. I mean these kids that were failing out of school and I pulled them into my office and, “Hey, I need you to do something for me,” and I give them a responsibility in the class. All of a sudden, their grade comes up to an A in my class. Then they’re like, “Man, I’m struggling in this class.” “Well, have you tried this? Go talk to the professor.” Then they end up graduating with 3.8-3.9 four years later. They’re telling me I’m the reason why they finish school.

[0:12:13] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:12:14] Dr. John Huber: Because I just give them a little bit of support. I give them some skills, some coping skills which is what I try to do in therapy. I want to create a patient who comes in and needs help a set of coping skills, a set of management, life management tools that they don’t ever have to come back to me. That’s my goal. They still do. They come back. I might not see one for three or four years and they call me. “Oh, hey. Can I get in next week?” “Sure, let’s come on in.” They just wanted to touch base. That’s awesome. I love that. Yeah.

[0:12:49] Ashley James: That’s so cool. It sounds brilliant that you have had that impact for so many years with thousands, thousands of young professionals that have gone on to help so many people. I love that ripple effect. That’s really beautiful. You mentioned this one thing about being on stage. This worry we have sometimes about what will other people think of us. I think sometimes it’s so ingrained that it’s like second nature this fear of what other people think of us or that person that would rather die than have them be an amputee. He couldn’t get over the hump, like in his mind like he needs a little bit of help getting over the hump of like you’ve got a whole life like you’ve got people that love you and you could have a really fulfilling life. Who cares you don’t have a leg.

[0:13:50] Dr. John Huber: Well they care.

[0:13:51] Ashley James: Yeah, of course.

[0:13:52] Dr. John Huber: But they care.

[0:13:53] Ashley James: But look at how much life you could have. They can’t even see past the no leg to all the love and joy and fulfillment that they could have.

[0:14:05] Dr. John Huber: Oh, but I have my ways. I have not lost the patient because they wouldn’t have an amputation.

[0:14:11] Ashley James: Well, that’s really cool.

[0:14:12] Dr. John Huber: In almost 10 years. It depends. I can remember specifically I had this one lady, 40 years old her daughter was 20 expecting her first baby. So grandma, she going to be a first grandma at 40 years old. She had uncontrolled diabetes and she ended up with gangrene on both her feet. We were going to have to amputate her feet. She’s like, “Let me die. I don’t want to bring a new baby up to look up to a gimp in a wheelchair the rest of their lives.” “A gimp?” “Yeah.” I go, “Okay, so you’re ready to die. I’ve got some friends that are really interested in the end of life thought processes and death and dying. Can I bring them in here? They’re actually here.” “Oh, yeah. Sure.” I ran down to the outpatient rehab department because there were three gentlemen in there who are double amputees who have amazing abilities on their prosthetics. They run around no canes nothing. They can run and jog and walk. You never know they have amputations. I’d met them because I’ve been at the hospital for a while and they’ve been in and out and now they were in outpatient.

I go, “Hey guys, I can’t tell you the patient’s name but she wants to die and I want you guys to act like you’re interested in dying and death and that kind of stuff.” “What? What?” “Well. She doesn’t think anybody can have a normal life with prosthetics,” and they just started laughing. “Sure. We can do that.” These are guys, 60-70 years old. They’re happy to be alive. They got their families. Literally, we’re walking down the hallway and we got one more room to go and one of the guys stop for a second, bent down on one knee and untied a shoe and walked in there. So they start asking her about death and dying. “So, you’re going to have an amputation here?” “No. I’d rather die. I don’t want to be a gimp.” The guy who untied his shoes was a little bit further away. “Oh man,” and he made a big deal about his shoe being untied. He propped that foot up there on there and his pant leg came up and you saw the steel rod of the prosthetic. “Well, okay. Well, maybe you know but they want both of my feet. You’ve only lost one.” He reached over and pulled up the pant leg on the other leg. She’s like, “What?” All three of the guys go, “Yeah, we’re all amputees, double amputees.” Let’s just say she was there for her grand baby’s birth.

[0:16:41] Ashley James: That’s awesome.

[0:16:44] Dr. John Huber: Changed her perspective, give her a different point of view. We get so stuck and this is the way things are and it’s not that way. Everybody has two eyes, hopefully, they’re functional to some extent, but we all see different things.

[0:16:59] Ashley James: Yeah. We all perceive the world in a different way. You and I could go to the same movie and walk away with a different experience.

[0:17:06] Dr. John Huber: Exactly. Me and my wife did that with, what was that, the Twilight series. She’s like, “Oh, man. It’s fantasy and it’s Beauty and the Beast and the vampire,” and I go, “No. It’s an emo girl who’s trying to decide if she’s going to experience bestiality or necrophilia.” Yeah. My wife didn’t think I was that funny.

[0:17:31] Ashley James: That’s exactly it. You mentioned that we’re worried about what other people think. I had a recent experience a few months ago where someone I’m really close to, I found out that she had a very negative viewpoint of me and of things I’ve done. Actually, it was completely untrue. It was just a completely untrue viewpoint. At first, I was very, very hurt because I had poured a lot of time energy and money into supporting her and helping her and doing everything I could to help her get over a certain difficulty in her life and she turned around and she made it mean. So many nasty horrible things. So at first, I was just kind of taken aback. Then I felt like my brain broke, like something in my brain snapped. I started laughing because I could have never in a million years predicted the things that she would have come up with.

I’ve spent my whole life worrying about what other people think of me, but no one has really ever actually come up to me and fulfilled my worry. I’m worried about what people think about my shape or my hair color or whatever. Like, “Oh, I’ve got some gray hairs,” or “I didn’t pluck the hairs on my chin,” or whatever. Whatever I’m worried about. No one has ever actually come up to me and fulfilled my worry, but people come up with the things like I could never even imagine, right? Something in my brain snapped because I got that no matter how much I worry, I could spend the rest of my life worrying about what other people think but those people will never actually think the things I’m worried about because they’re going to come up with their own stuff that is so weird that I could not possibly predict worrying about those things.

[0:19:33] Dr. John Huber: Oh, you know that reminds me. I was doing a presentation once with about 600 people there. My daughter was about two and a half, my son was about six but he was sick so I had to bring her with me. She’d been to the auditorium before and she picked the seat she wanted to sit at right down the middle, middle aisle. So people have their assigned tickets and all that kind of stuff. They come in there and here comes the person for that seat. She informed them that that was her seat. She walked them down to actually where we had a seat for her on the front row, this person got a front-row ticket. So they weren’t mad. They sat there. But I I’m one of those speakers, I can’t stand behind a podium. So I’ve got my wireless mic and I’m running circles, laps around this place while I’m doing my presentation. Finally, my daughter gets up while I’m talking and she kind of meets me at a crossroads. She grabs me by the hand and I got this wireless mic on and she goes, “Look, dad, you’ve got to calm down or these people aren’t going to be able to follow you.” She walks me up to the front and sits me down on the chair that’s right up next to the podium.

The place went crazy. It was hilarious. Yeah. Then she actually asked somebody for paper so she could keep taking notes while she was listening to my presentation.

[0:20:55] Ashley James: That’s funny. Well, of course, that was her perception.

[0:20:58] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[0:21:00] Ashley James: Right. Because if no one was following you everyone would have been stir-crazy.

[0:21:05] Dr. John Huber: Right, but I love the fact that with that mic, I can walk up and I can put my hand on anybody’s shoulder and go, “So what do you think about…” and I don’t lose anybody that way because I do that. I’m one of those guys.

[0:21:17] Ashley James: I can tell. So, you have Mainstream Mental Health Radio, that’s your show. Is that the name of your podcast?

[0:21:29] Dr. John Huber: Mainstream Mental Health Radio, yes that is the name of my podcast. The website is mainstreammentalhealth.org, but we also have an extra way to get there by going to drpsycho.org. That’s DRPSYCHO.ORG and people remember that one. The minute I started using that man.

[0:21:49] Ashley James: Dr. Psycho.

[0:21:50] Dr. John Huber: Yes. We get slammed on our bandwidth there, but that’s fine. That’s what it’s for. We talk about anything mental health. I mean, I’ve had porn stars on. I’ve had the president of the APA. I’ve had professional wrestlers, actors, politicians, accountants, massage therapist, therapists. I’m trying to think. Man, I mean, just about anything. American Indians. Man, probably my most unexpected most exciting show I did was with Gerry Cooney, the boxer.

My dad passed away in 1994. So he never got to see me doing any of this stuff, but I remember my dad and I were big sports fans together, football. My dad really loved boxing so I would watch it. I didn’t necessarily care too much about it at that point in my life. I didn’t really see the skill I just saw the brutality. I know football’s brutal, but I could see the skill. I could see the athleticism in that. Now, I’m a third-degree black belt and I do see the skill because I have had to develop some stuff, some skills. But they offered, they say, “Hey. This guy Gerry Cooney wanted to come on and do your show.” I’m like, “Gerry Cooney, oh my God. I remember watching him fight when it was like 1980 or something.” He won. The first time I saw a fight finishing in less than a minute. I mean, I think it was 54, 56 seconds. I may be wrong but I think it was Leon Spinks. He walked in. It was in Vegas and bam, the whole thing was over. We planned on being there like three hours for 15 rounds. It was like, “Oh, okay. So now we get a listen to sportscasters hem and haw for the next two hours.” Yeah.

Now, 20 years later, 30 years later I get to interview this guy. I’m like my dad would be so excited. So I was excited and we start talking. Not three minutes into that interview, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and it stayed that way the whole time. This guy was amazing. He was so brutally honest. After that fight, he got offered a chance because he became the US heavyweight champion. He got offered a chance to fight for the world heavyweight champion. I want to say it was Muhammad Ali at that time but don’t get me on the actual statistics, but he had such a problem with alcohol. He had 180 days to sign the contract and he was too drunk those 180 days to sign the contract.

[0:24:29] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:24:31] Dr. John Huber: He then explained to me the way he was able to fight was he would go out in the ring and they would bump gloves and he would go back to his corner. When that bell would ring, he would turn around and it was his dad’s face on that boxer.

[0:24:44] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:24:45] Dr. John Huber: He would go pummel his dad’s face.

[0:24:49] Ashley James: Geez.

[0:24:50] Dr. John Huber: Then we started talking about it exploring his alcoholism and all this kind of stuff. He’s a recovering alcoholic. He’s got an amazing show on Friday and Monday nights on XM radio doing all the fight game and all this kind of stuff. He’s an amazing guy. I had dinner with him this past summer when I was up in New York. He came back on my show again. He always teased me, “Okay, you’re a black belt. Let’s spar.” I’m like, “Okay if you’re willing to make it a fundraiser for my nonprofit, I’ll let you knock the crap out of me.” Then I actually got to meet him and his hands made my hands look like I was a three-year-old. I’m like, “Okay. Well, maybe I could do a spit.” No. His arms were longer than my legs. I’m just dead. He’s like, “Oh, come on. I’m 14-15 years older than you.” I go, “Yeah. It don’t matter. I know better. I got a lot of education.”

[0:25:48] Ashley James: No kidding. What does your charity do? What does your nonprofit do?

[0:25:54] Dr. John Huber: Well, we’re kind of in phase one, which is we want to get people talking about mental health. I think we’re doing a really good job. I mean, I’ve been on Jenny McCarthy show. I’ve been on your show. I’ve talked with Dr. Drew several times on his show. It’s funny. All summer long, I had politicians calling me from Washington DC, from other states calling me up, “What’s your opinion on this? I got to go talk to these people. It’s like wait, people are actually talking about it now and they’re hearing me. I feel like I’m finally getting to that point. Our next goal is we want to do something for our first responders and our veterans. What I mean by doing something for them, we have a lot of great practitioners in the VA, for example, but we don’t have enough. We’re underfunded. They throw money in there but then they got to build infrastructure before they can put more therapists in there, more psychologists. It’s just, man, we’re fighting an uphill battle.

What I’d like to do is create some sort of system. We’ve got a model ready to go. When we get to this point, we would like to create a website where basically the veteran would log in and they would create an account. Within that account verify that they’re a veteran for sure. Then they get a code number. They take that code number to any licensed therapist in their community and that code number is what they log in with. It pairs them up. They send me the HIPAA consent from the patient and a summary of the notes. I don’t want details, just a summary of the notes so our auditors can make sure they’re actually doing psychotherapy. We pay them for their therapy services. For Central Texas, we think that if we had about 13 million a year, we could take away enough of the therapy from the VA that there would not be any delays at the VA in Central Texas. Nationwide, we’re looking at somewhere between $160-$180 million dollars and that’s nothing. I mean, it really is.

When you think about Planned Parenthood, it gets 800 million from Congress. Then they get 800 million from donations, another 600 million or 307 million from corporate America and they’re giving birth control pills out. I want to go out and stop what we have right now is 20 to 22 veterans killing themselves every day. We had one here in Austin two months ago. He walked in, he needed therapy. Now, to get a veteran to say, “I need therapy.” Think about the environment that they lived in as a military personnel where you are dysfunctional, you are a threat to the unit if you have mental health issues. So they hide everything, but that veteran finally gets to a place where his life is so distraught, so much in upheaval that they’re willing to go to the organization that’s supposed to be helping them and say, “I need a therapist.” They usually go when it’s at that dire point and they get told, “Oh, we’ll get you in 120 days. We got you an appointment set up with Dr. Smith.” That patient here in Austin, Texas walked over sat in the waiting room for a couple hours. The waiting room was full. He pulled out a gun and blew his head out. That is not unusual.

I’ve had veterans call me and say, at different parts of the United States, at different times I’ve been doing this now for four or five years. At one point there was an area the United States where there was a 13-month wait when you walked in and said, “I need a therapist,” before they could actually see one. That is, I mean, is so disgusting in so many different levels.

[0:29:40] Ashley James: Yeah.

[0:29:41] Dr. John Huber: These veterans put their lives on the line so we can have our independence, have our safety, have our freedoms and we can’t even get them a therapist. That’s phase two. That’s what I want to do. Right now, we’re making some headway, we’re getting some airplay. I think we’re starting to stir things up. Like I said, this past summer I was amazed at how many phone calls I was getting from politicians and things like that. I’ll tell you something. Also amazing, Bob Salter who is a sports broadcaster for WFAN in New York City, the largest all-sports radio station in the nation. The first NBC’s benchmark studio. He had me in this summer. He introduced me for five minutes and he opened up the mics and we talked mental health for two hours straight. Not one question about sports and the fans were asking the questions. I got home and for the next four months, I was getting handwritten letters from people thanking me. Thanking me for going. I didn’t get one derogatory statement. I didn’t get one person saying, “Hey, why didn’t we talk about the Giants?” I’m back on the air in two weeks on Sunday morning and they’re giving me two hours again.

[0:31:04] Ashley James: Oh, I love it.

[0:31:05] Dr. John Huber: So, it’s exciting and people are listening. People are taking a hit. That’s the first step. We got to get this. If you think about it, go back to the 80s, early 80’s. Childhood cancer, it was shameful what we were doing. We had a 15% survival rate. That means 85% were dying. There were some specific cancers that we cured better than others, but in general, 15% overall, 85% death rate. Today we have a 15% death rate and an 85% survival rate. What did we do? We started getting the histories of these kids. What was going on in their lives? What type of activities were they doing when they were six months old, when they were two months old, when they were two years old? Then they got their cancer at 6, 7, 8, 9 years of age, they had this really great history. We’ve been able to sit there and see, “Hey, these are some signs that we need to start watching these kids.” So, when they go in their pediatric checkups the pediatricians are going, “Hey, how is he doing? Is he turning over? Is he doing? Wait, let me go check this out.” And they start looking for things. You catch it before it ever becomes a terminal situation.

I know because I’ve worked with kids. I started my career as a school psychologist working with preemies, 16-18 months old, three years old before they ever get to school. Seeing these people dealing with developmental delays and how we are so underprepared for how to treat and interact with those kids. Then, historically we’ve just kind of thrown them in the classroom.

[0:32:43] Ashley James: Yeah.

[0:32:45] Dr. John Huber: And we’re playing catch-up. In the late 90s, they turn around, “Oh, we have to do research-based.” Well, there wasn’t a lot of research-based interventions actually. Everybody’s like, “Oh, it’s out there.” Well, where is it? Show me the math. Show me. What do we know? Drill and practice worked really well, but people hate drill and practice. So schools don’t like to do that, but if you go into a special education classroom you’re going to get drill in practice. That will breakthrough because you do the same problems over and over and over and it becomes automaticity. They don’t have to think about it. They know that one plus one equals two or you divide this fraction by this and this is what you get because they’ve done it enough. That all of a sudden makes the rest of the math easy. So, we start doing that and we break it down into really simple steps. All of a sudden these kids start having good lives at school. They actually like being in class. They’re not afraid if the teacher calls on them because they got some kind of answer, whereas before they would hide and they didn’t want to be known because the teacher was going to call on somebody to read in front of everybody. Well, I don’t have any sound-symbol relationships so I’m going to sound like a baby. What happens is people would rather be and a mean person who is a bully than somebody who’s considered dumb. That’s a shame.

[0:34:07] Ashley James: To clarify what you said before was it a $153 million a year to be able to cover the psychotherapy for all veterans?

[0:34:17] Dr. John Huber: Well, it’s not for all but it’s a big enough chunk that the VA would be able to take care of the rest. Actually, nationwide what we’re looking at is between $160 and $180 million. Somewhere in there. Because there’s a lot of management of audits and making sure people are following up and actually doing what they purport to do because I don’t want people to not help our veterans. So we have to have a mechanism in place. It’s kind of self-serving. Once the veterans register, they can basically go to anybody. They just have to present to us a copy of their license and their liability insurance so we know that they’re covered. Then we want them to submit a summary of their treatment and the billing information and we’d like to be able to pay them.

You think about that, that sounds like a lot of money and it is to an individual, but to this nation, it’s not. When we spend how many billions every year $1.2-$1.3 billion in Planned Parenthood. The tax dollars we give to Planned Parenthood’s about 800 million, between $600-$800 million every year. I don’t know what it is this year. I didn’t look at the budget. But just thinking about that, think about what they give for dry cleaning uniforms in the Navy. I mean, hey, wear them one more time before you dry clean them and save a little bit that way and use that money for your budget. Yeah. When you talk about trillions and trillions of spending in this country, less than $200 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. It’s a shameful experience to sit back and know that we have veterans that are asking for help and not able to get it because we don’t have enough therapists. When we try to hire new therapists, we don’t have the physical space for them. Then they go to a culture, the military culture, where mental health issues are considered so taboo that you’re broken, you’re a liability then to your platoon. Nobody wants to be around you so nobody admits to having any of those issues.

The strangest thing, in real life, in civilian life, men and women, they say men have about half, for example, depression that women do. I think what happens is I think about half the men aren’t willing to admit to it. They end up with anger issues, which is one of the ways that men tend to express depression. They have anger issues. Then they have adult-onset attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They can’t focus, they can’t attend and guess, what? Those are symptoms that kids exhibit when they have depression. So, does it make sense that maybe adults might have depression? You notice, the pediatricians in my community they start going, “I’m not going to give him Ritalin. Let’s give them some Zoloft and see how they work first.” So why give them pharmaceutical grade crystal meth when their behavior will improve, it’s a Band-Aid. It’s not going to actually kind of fix what’s the underlying problem.

So, I think men actually have just as much depression and mental health issues as women. We’ve just been taught that there’s one emotion that is okay for us men to have and that’s anger. So, we turn everything into anger and nobody questions whether we are mentally healthy or not. He’s just mad. It’s a hard life being a man. It is. It’s a hard life being human period male or female across the board. I think we end up with a lot of people who should be getting help that aren’t. Women go and get help except the female veterans. They’re actually as resistant as male veterans are at getting psychotherapy. The female veterans are 10-20 times more resistant to getting psychotherapy.

[0:38:21] Ashley James: Sure. That makes sense because they have something to prove.

[0:38:23] Dr. John Huber: They have something to prove and not one of them that I’ve talked to, they’ve all said this one way or another, they don’t want to be the poster child for why women should not be able to go to combat because they wanted to go fight for their country.

[0:38:36] Ashley James: A really good friend of mine was held hostage at knifepoint by her friend, female veteran, who had seen horrific, horrific things. Dead children, just really, really horrific things in the Middle East. She just snapped one day and she held my friend hostage at knifepoint until the cops were able to calmly talk her down and get her admitted for help. There was a lot of signs that she was ramping in that direction. She wasn’t willing to get help. Luckily they were all able to talk her down and get her calm. It’s making it normal to seek help is the first step. I love that that’s what you want to do, you want to normalize that it’s human and normal to go get mental health, to seek it, to seek mental health. That it’s okay if you’re having suicidal thoughts if you’re depressed. If something is off, you’re not broken, you’re not wrong and bad, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

The most healthy thing you can do for yourself is go get help. Like you said, the female veterans don’t want other women to be deterred from going into combat. You know what, by holding on to your mental illness you’re actually going to deter other women, but by seeking help, you are showing that you are strong and that you knew what you needed when you needed it. Because you’re going to come out of therapy, maybe months or years later, you’re going to come out the other end strong, sure of yourself, healthy. You’re going to come out the person you know you are in deep inside and you will be a prime example of what a healthy veteran does for other veterans.

In the moment, when we’re in mental illness, we’re so afraid of what other people think. We have to remember like the lesson that I got a few months ago. We have to remember, people will never actually be thinking about what you’re worried they’re going to think about. Because they’re coming up with their own stuff.

[0:41:03] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely.

[0:41:04] Ashley James: They’re going to be like making fun of you because your eyebrows are too close together. The stuff that you’re worried about they’ll never actually think about.

[0:41:13] Dr. John Huber: Not at all.

[0:41:14] Ashley James: But they’re going to come up with stuff that even you can’t even predict and you can’t even prevent because everyone’s got their own filters but all you can do is make sure that you are the healthiest person that you can be for yourself and for your loved ones. You mentioned that there’s a deficit of therapists. Is this just in the VA or is it across the board? Are we seeing that the United States and possibly other countries just don’t have enough mental health counselors?

[0:41:41] Dr. John Huber: Well, it’s hard to be a mental health counselor education-wise. Then you turn around and in the health care industry, it’s one of the lowest-paid areas. I mean, you’re sitting there talking with somebody. So the insurance companies that are driven by the funding of the drug companies don’t see any value in that.

[0:42:03] Ashley James: Because you’re trying to keep people off drugs.

[0:42:05] Dr. John Huber: Well, yeah. I used to be a hard no, no way, but man I’ve seen so many miracles happen from the right medication. That’s a whole another topic. I think we’ve got a new industry in the DNA testing. I’ve seen it over the last four or five years. I’ve had patients that struggled for decades, couldn’t find the right medication. Hey, let’s go get one of these DNA tests for psychotropic meds. Literally, me and his psychiatrists were like, this is like the drug it’s recommending is one we wouldn’t give to our cat because we’ve never had a patient be efficacious on it and have it benefit. But we did it and amazing. There was no six to eight-week turnaround for this person. In 48 hours they were like, “Wow. This is what normal is supposed to feel like?” They’re calling us and leaving messages going, “This is awesome.”

So, I think having that access to our DNA and that human genome and knowing that hey you don’t have enough receptor sites for this or you don’t have enough glands that are making the right neurotransmitter for you so we need to use the reuptake inhibitors so that there’s more of it floating around in your central nervous system and your body can use it. Man, that is amazing. Right now, I don’t know of any insurance company that actually pays for the test. The test is right around $300, but the patients who do it are usually at their wit’s end or their family is. They pay out of pocket for it. Four out of five patients that have used it it was a life-changing event for them.

[0:43:43] Ashley James: How does someone know when they would benefit from a drug or when it’s simply something they need to process and work through? I’m getting that drugs are a tool in our tool belt but they’re also a last resort, not a first resort.

[0:44:01] Dr. John Huber: Well, I think there’s other drugs that are further down the road. I think ECT is a last resort. We use it. I’ve seen it work, but what I like to see actually because I’m kind of weathered I’ve done this for a while and I’ve worked with a lot of different patients. I’ll come in and I’ll start working with a patient without drugs if they don’t want that, but there comes a point when I see, okay, the pathway they’re on is a pathway to failure. What I need them to do is even if it’s just for six or eight or ten months so I can get them on the right path to let me get them on the right medication with their physician so that they can kind of get a break and they can quit struggling with that depression all on their own and that is all-encompassing of them. Then we can start changing on the effects of changing how you think, your cognitive, reframing restructuring and develop skills that hey, if I go this way if I talk about this and I don’t separate myself and compartmentalize myself from this I’m going to get encapsulated in it and I’m going to fall into a deep depression. So I either should not be talking about it or I need to prepare myself and find a way to train myself through that conversation so I realize it’s not personal to me.

[0:45:20] Ashley James: So you’re helping them with the skills and you see that there’s certain people that are just trapped and that the medication is going to help them. You don’t want to put someone on meds for their so life necessarily, but you really want to use it as a tool to help them get over that. What’s ECT?

[0:45:35] Dr. John Huber: Electroconvulsive therapy. If you ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s still done. I know my experience here in the state of Texas when I was at the State Hospital, we went through and all of the doctors had to sign off on it before. If anybody was dissenting it wasn’t going to happen basically. Then we sent it up to the Department of Health and let them sign off on it, the medical doctor at the top there. We didn’t do it a lot, but we had people who would walk in and have file charts that if you stood him up on it would be six-eight feet high. They’ve been getting every type of therapy known, every type of drug and nothing seemed to work. They were just miserably depressed. It was a last resort.

Now, along those lines in more recent history, I’ve been working with a gentleman, Dr. Carl Bonnett. He is the clinical director at Klarisana, which is a ketamine clinic. Starts with a K, klarisana.com. We have, over the years, been doing different treatments. We started primarily with our veterans. Dr. Bonnett was an emergency room director and physician for the VA for several decades and had access to a lot of data. We would sit there and look and watch these gentlemen come through there with PTSD. When they were given ketamine for something else they were better. So we started and worked and now we’re probably doing 400-500 veterans a year between all the clinics. Clinic in Denver, San Antonio, Austin, there was one in New Mexico and Wyoming I believe at this point now. We have a program where we give them an infusion. I know there are other clinics out there and some of them use intramuscular like just a shot in the shoulder or whatever. We have a lot of success with the IV pump where it’s just kind of free-floating. We monitor exactly how much ketamine is going into them for a certain amount of time. We don’t want them ketamine as used as anesthesia medication. We’re not putting it in a bolus type setting where they’re going to be knocked unconscious. That is not our goal. In fact, our facilities are not set up for any kind of sedation type stuff. We are there treating and using that medication psychotropically, like a psychotropic, like an antidepressant or antipsychotic.

The whole idea when we bring in the therapist side of it is we’re able to drop those individuals’ self-defense mechanisms and we can get right to the heart of the matter. But with the PTSD, the post-traumatic stress disorder, the advantages we have with that is one of the advantages it has as an anesthesia is that it has an amnestic quality to it. In other words, it helps people forget things they don’t want to remember.

[0:48:45] Ashley James: Permanently or temporarily?

[0:48:47] Dr. John Huber: Well, if you just get one or two infusions it’s going to do temporarily at that moment and I’ll talk a little bit more about this in a minute, but we do a series of them. We have a program designed. We talk about it being a 30-day but it’s actually more of a 12-month program and that we like to have the patients and do most of the work in the first 30 days. Then we have them come back once the next month. Based on that interaction we predict do they need to come back in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks the next time. We see them sporadically over the rest of the year. What we see is a permanent change for most of these individuals. It’s in my opinion, it’s kind of miraculous in fact. Why do I say that?

Well, think about your memory. When you use your memory you go in and you think of a childhood memory, in elementary school or whatever. You pull that out of that memory storage center. Only one part of your brain can use that memory at a time. No other part of your brain is doing it but your recall and you’re trying to focus on that, but as you recall that you remember the emotions and you start feeling those emotions and you remember the smells and you start having those smells. Then you start maybe somebody is standing there that you like maybe one of your kids and so you start telling them your story. Your kids kind of look at you and they ask you a question you never thought of and you go back to that memory and you change that memory just a little bit because of that input.

Now, what that’s like is going into an old analog Dewey Decimal System library and you’re looking for this book and you find the book and you pull it off and you stand there in the middle of the stacks and you flip the pages and you read this little chapter right there and, “Oh, wow. But that reminds me.” Then you write a little note in the margin. Then you put that book right back up in the library space when you’re through reading it. The next person comes and checks that book out, but this time they read your note as well because you’ve changed that memory. That book will never be the same because you added that in there and maybe they’ll add some to that memory. Then they put it up in the bookshelf again until you go back and pull that memory off again.

We can go through that process with the patients about their trauma event and get them to change that trauma event, their perspective on it to essentially, in some cases, have them you know drive part of the negative stuff out of their memory. Now, we can recover that memory. It’s not like they’ll never have that again ever again, but now they can function. Because when they think about being at a marketplace in Kabul, they don’t think about that IED blowing their friend’s leg off.

[0:51:58] Ashley James: What do they think about?

[0:51:59] Dr. John Huber: Well, everybody’s different. Everybody’s different. That’s part of the beauty of that. They remember that there was a firefight there maybe and they just don’t remember the specifics. Then when they see their friend then they remember it at that moment but then they go back to living their life. When they talk about it, they talk about the firefight, not their friend getting his leg blown off. So we alter their memories, but it’s not under my control really it’s under the patient’s control. They’re like, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this.” Well, the drug doesn’t care. That’s what I like about ketamine. Ketamine doesn’t care whether you think you can or not. It’s going to help you do it. One of the things we use it for, and this is what convinced me, is pain management, chronic pain management. Now, I broke my shoulder playing football in high school and trying to play in college. At 18 years of age, I have still pins in my shoulder, my left shoulder. I’ve had chronic pain since I was 18.

Well, when Dr. Bonnett and I got together, we were talking about all these different things. He started mentioning pain. I go, “Oh, man. My shoulder over 20-something years I’ve had this chronic pain.” Well, he’s a smart guy and he’s like, “Well, why don’t you come down the clinic and watch some of my patients go through the infusion and just monitor things. Maybe it’s something you want to do, maybe it’s not.” So I watched the day and there were some people in there for pain management. I came in the next day and one of them was a 20-something girl who had a degenerative bone disease that started affecting her about 14. By the time she was 16, she couldn’t sleep without heavy opiates every night because pain was so great. She walks in the front door, we’re sitting there you know having our little cup of coffee out of the Keurig. She walks in and she’s crying. I’m thinking, “Wow. This isn’t good.” Bonnett is just like, “Hey, how you doing? Pretty powerful experience yeah?” Like this is normal. So she starts saying, “Oh my God. It’s the first time since I was 16 years old I slept through the night without one narcotic.”

[0:54:10] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:54:11] Dr. John Huber: She came in and she got it. We do follow up with little microdosing and things like that. You don’t always have to keep coming back for these heavy infusions. But after I watched all that, Bonnett’s like, “Well, you want to try it for your shoulder?” I took one infusion and my chronic pain stopped.

[0:54:33] Ashley James: Forever?

[0:54:34] Dr. John Huber: Well, I take microdoses every once in a while. I’m a third-degree black belt. I do stupid things that somebody my age probably shouldn’t be doing, jumping off things and smashing things with my fists and my feet and knees and things like that, playing with swords and six-foot fighting staffs and like that. Then turning around and some sixth or eighth-degree black belt who’s you know pushing seven he knocks me on my backside. I’m like, “Oh, what? You’re a skinny old man. Why did you do that? How did you do that?” So I get some bumps and bruises and most of them go away or I set my hot tub for 20 minutes and it goes away, but when it gets back to my shoulder and I heard something there it starts bugging me. So I take one of the microdoses and I go to bed. I wake up in the morning and it’s like, “Wow. My pain doesn’t hurt. It’s gone.”

What we found out, and we’ve gotten the research on this from I think it was Johns Hopkins did this, they found out what happens. When you do those infusions in the right timing, your brain takes those nerve signals from your peripheral nervous system and feeds them through the lower brain stem. There’s a filter process in there that says, “Okay. This is pain, this is pain. Nope, this is normal. This is pain. This is pain.” And it sends them to the right places. Well, the ketamine resets that and says, “Oh, this is a chronic pain.” Every time you had this infusion you’ve had this pain and there’s no new damage there.

So it gets that homeostatic mechanism to actually no longer receive that as pain. It just says, “This is normal pain.” But if you rehurt yourself, that new pain is there and you know it’s there. Whereas an opiate would just kind of block the pain and you could go and get hurt by continuing to play with a bad torn muscle or something like that. It actually makes the pain go away too. My experience with opiates whether it was OxyContin or Norco or any of those things is what happened was, I just didn’t care about the pain it didn’t ever really go away but with the ketamine, it actually went away.

[0:56:47] Ashley James: What’s the mechanism of this drug, of ketamine? I mean, what is it? Can you explain a bit more about how it affects the brain? How it’s working on us?

[0:57:02] Dr. John Huber: I’m not a neurobiologist and a neuroscientist. I’ve sat through. We’ve had two medical ketamine conferences. The first one ever on ketamine for physicians in the United States was in Austin Texas two years ago in September. The last one was 2019 in Denver. Present for both of those and amazing research that’s been out there. Amazing thing. Most of the research has been done since the late 60s, early 70s is actually from Russia, but most of that technology and the ability to convert technical Russian language into technical English there aren’t people who can do that. So people haven’t had access to it. So Dr. Bonnett and myself were sitting there going, “What are we going to do?” and Bonnett is like, “Well, let’s try and call them.” So we got to hold of them and they speak fluent English and they were able to tell us what it was. It was like, “Wow.”

So, actually, we have a couple of them sitting on our board of directors, some of these researchers. They’ve told us some of the issues with their government because they’re trying to become more capitalists. Nobody owns a patent for the general ketamine. So, they’re not fostering research in that area because none of the drug companies are going to be able to capitalize on it so to speak.

So, they basically kind of had their research ended, but they have so much experience on it. We’ve been able to detox alcoholics, other drugs. We’ve detoxed heroin addicts with their help. We’ve been able to do heroin addicts without any significant withdrawal effects at all using the ketamine because the receptor sites that are used by heroin are also used by the ketamine. So they drop in there and then we basically replace that with the ketamine. Then we can easily wean them off the ketamine because it doesn’t have the withdrawal effects.

[0:59:07] Ashley James: That was my next question was about I’ve heard that ketamine has been used successfully for addiction. Besides withdrawal, how does it help people on the mental and emotional level with addiction, with overcoming addiction?

[0:59:22] Dr. John Huber: Well, you got to think about a lot of addiction. One of my patients was telling me that he had some bad things happen to him. He’s really depressed. He casually drank pretty much his whole life. Then one night, he was really depressed. He poured himself a drink and he took that drink and when he finished that drink he felt normal. For the first time in weeks, he felt normal. So he spent the rest of the night trying to duplicate that feeling and finished off a bottle and woke up three days later. He got up and what he wanted to do is feel normal again. So he went after that. Went down and got him another bottle. That first drink felt good but then he chased that first drink the rest of the night, that feeling. Okay. Then it got to a point where he became physiologically addicted to the alcohol. Then it became a 20-year issue and end up losing jobs, divorce, all this kind of stuff. So it took over his life.

Now, not everybody is specifically that way. There are people who just have that addictive personality. We know a lot of things about alcohol and drug use and drinking. For example, something like 94% of college students, at some point, in their college career go into binge drinking. We know that about 3% of those people continue binge drinking 10-15 years after they’re out of college and they’ve got an alcohol problem. So binge drinking might have happened one semester for you, “Wow. I’m not going to be able to finish college if I keep drinking like that,” and you get your drinking under control and you go on. But for some people, that’s how they feel normal. It could be because of some trauma whether it’s abuse, watching some horrific thing happen, living in a house where the parents are very violent with each other, violent towards the kids, maybe there’s sexual abuse that neither of the parents know about or maybe they both do. There’s so many reasons. The reality of it is I can’t say there’s one thing, but I could say trauma because all of these things that we’re talking about are some form of trauma. Whether you’ve seen somebody get hurt or somebody’s violated you or abused you or you’ve watched somebody else’s being abused. It’s all a form of trauma.

So there’s some trauma somewhere in there. The alcohol was allowing this individual, when they had the right amount, to not feel that and actually feel normal, but then they chase that normal feeling with the next 15 drinks.

[1:02:05] Ashley James: Right. The same could be said for food.

[1:02:10] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely.

[1:02:11] Ashley James: Look at chasing the dopamine. Eating food is the only time I feel happy, normal, safe, secure. It’s socially acceptable. It is socially acceptable to drink alcohol, but it’s socially acceptable obviously to eat. Less socially acceptable to do meth but that still doesn’t stop people from seeking it, and I have a client who is in and out of rehab because she says it is the only time she feels normal is when she’s on meth. Any other time, she feels incredibly depressed to the point of just not wanting to be here. She’s fighting it. She’s fighting it. She’s sober, but it just it really for me I’ve never done meth so I don’t know. I don’t know this. She said the first time it was amazing, but then it made it so that any other time she was sober, it was her life had lost all of its luster.

[1:03:09] Dr. John Huber: That’s what of my patients said about heroin. He’d been detoxed 13 or 14 times. We went through the detox with him and used the ketamine. He said, “This is the first time. Somebody jacked with my mind.” We’re like, “What do you mean jacked with your mind?” He used other profanity words and stuff but I’m like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “This is the first time when I got off the heroin that I didn’t even think about I need more heroin. All the other times I wanted more heroin.”

[1:03:43] Ashley James: That’s really fascinating. I prefer to do things holistically not with drugs but I see that this is really a powerful tool that can help people get to the other side. I would rather see someone on a drug and alive than not on a drug and dead, obviously. So, it’s like get the best tools for the job.

[1:04:09] Dr. John Huber: Get the best tools because you could do methadone but now you have a harder physiological addiction. What I see with the ketamine is that it changes their thought process. It changes how their brain takes those stimuli on. For example, last year we had about 14 alcoholics come through our program. All but one of them 100% sober. The 14th one just for lack of a number, he fell off the wagon. Now he’s, as of yesterday’s, five months sober. We got him back. We gave him a few booster bumps with the ketamine and he’s five months sober. I can tell you that because we have truck drivers, their companies can put those breathalyzers on their trucks and stuff like that. Well, we got him a portable one and said, “If you want to stay on our program you have to blow on this anytime it blows off.” It goes off randomly, anytime. Sometimes it’ll go off three times in an hour other times it’ll go off five times in 24 hours. It wakes him up at 2:00 in the morning to blow. He doesn’t know when it’s going to happen but he agreed to that because we’re trying to support our stuff with research. So we’ve got this stuff going on and it’s working for him. It takes a nice little picture of him. So we know it’s him blowing into the machine and he didn’t train his dog to blow into it or anything like that, which I kind of like to see. He’s now five months. He actually sat down with me yesterday. He said, “You know the last time I was five months sober or longer?” I’m like, “No when?” He goes, “I was in middle school.” This guy is 60 years old.

[1:06:00] Ashley James: Geez. Talk about achieving some mental clarity.

[1:06:06] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely. It’s so funny because like the last three months, his thought process has started to become, for lack of a better word, more adult-like and less ten-year-old like.

[1:06:17] Ashley James: Yeah. I bet.

[1:06:18] Dr. John Huber: It’s just amazing what’s going on with him. I had to wait until he left. I mean, I had tears on my eyes. I was like, “Oh my god. This guy’s finding his life back. He’s getting it back.” He actually said he’d gotten a new job. He went out and got some new clothes. His first day at the job, he got up to go get dressed and everything else his wife have gotten out before him and pressed everything. He goes, “In whole marriage, she never once did anything like that for him.” She was so proud of him being sober. He decided he didn’t like that other job because it was reminding him of drinking stuff so he made a change. He goes, “I got home and there were notes all over the house how proud she was of me.” He even goes, “That was amazing.” He goes, “You just don’t know when you’ve never gotten that before from anybody.

[1:07:21] Ashley James: So, for people who’ve struggled with depression, post-traumatic stress, chronic pain or some form of addiction and other forms of therapy they’ve tried it’s not worked, they’re struggling. You’re seeing really great results with ketamine. Also coupling ketamine with mental health counseling. You’re not just giving ketamine to people and then they just leave and that’s it. You’re actually you’re addressing the underlying issues as well, right?

[1:08:00] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely. That’s so much a part of it. Now, we’ve treated I think last year I treated, not me specifically but the clinic. We treated about 400 veterans with PTSD. They all didn’t get psychotherapy counseling. I mean, that’s a hard thing to push when we’re talking about that culture. If we couch it right, if they do it right, they don’t necessarily have to have the therapist right there, okay. Now some of them go in there and they’re all, “I’m not going to need a therapist.” They go find and they do halfway through it and then we get a call and one of us needs to go in and work with them. Because either they’re not getting the results they want or they’re getting results and they know that they need to, they’re putting this money in this and they need to take advantage of it and so let’s go ahead and get the therapist in there. It facilitates things much, much more quickly.

[1:08:57] Ashley James: Interesting. Are there any side effects of ketamine that people should be aware of? Obviously, they should do it under the care of a physician.

[1:09:08] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely.

[1:09:09] Ashley James: The clinic that you work with where it’s a lots of experience but are there things we should know in terms of the dangers of using it because it is a drug?

[1:09:21] Dr. John Huber: It is a drug. It’s actually an extremely safe drug, but just like water, there are problems. You can drown with water. So, we lose 1,200-1,300 people every year to bathtub drownings. So water can be dangerous even though we have to have it for life. So, taking that into consideration, ketamine was a drug that was designed originally the government, the federal government, went in and sent their laboratories to work to make a synthetic opiate and ended up creating this drug called PCP. It had some really great advantages but had some really bad things going on with it too. So bad on the street that’s called angel dust. So, they went back to the laboratories and they started cleaving off parts of these molecules and testing them and seeing what they could find out. One of them happened to be ketamine.

It has a very short half-life, 15 to 30-minute half-life. So, when we stop the IV or if you take the microdosing, let’s say. You put it on your tongue, it dissolves, you swallow it. Anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes later, you start feeling the effects of the ketamine. When you start feeling those effects, it’s going to be done in about 40 minutes. So whatever goes on, and one of the things that goes on actually are you start misperceiving the environment. You start hallucinating, okay, but it’s not out of your control. What we find is that if you start feeling like you’re losing control and it scares you, if you open your eyes the visual ground around you the visual images are strong enough that it’s a mild, relatively mild hallucinogen. You can actually even stop the hallucinations all together just by focusing on say a picture frame in a room. We also think what we call the shamanic experience, kind of letting that hallucination go through, allows you to roleplay some of those traumas.

So we want to encourage them to do that. We know though that less than an hour it’s going to be over. Once the patient gets that and they realize, “Okay, I’m going to let go of that. I’m not going to fight that. I’m going to let my brain weed this stuff out and get rid of the chaff. I’m going to sit there keep my eyes closed. If it gets too scary for me I can always open my eyes.” Then all of a sudden the experience is over. Now, Timothy Leary pushed LSD that, “Oh, we can do this with LSD.” The problem with LSD, it has a minimum, a four-hour half-life. That means you’re going to be going for eight hours. You’re going to be physically, emotionally exhausted. From the moment they take their microdoses until it’s no longer creating that shamanic experience for them they’re not reliving that trauma. We have this expectation of them that they’re going to let this thing roll. Because we’ve done it in the clinic with them and when we do it with an IV push, we keep that push going for at least an hour. So when we stop at that point it’s going to continue for that 15 to 30 minutes until the rest of it’s gone off, okay. But what happens along the way is you have some severe psychomotor retardation, your balance is completely off.

[1:12:57] Ashley James: You’re talking about LSD?

[1:12:59] Dr. John Huber: No. I’m talking about the ketamine.

[1:13:00] Ashley James: Okay, you’re talking about the ketamine now. Got it.

[1:13:02] Dr. John Huber: So, until that has been able to flush out of your system, we’ve got to wheelchair you there, we’ll take you to the bathroom and all this kind of stuff. We have some rules. After you get the ketamine, whether it’s a microdose, you’re not allowed to make any kind of decision. No financial decisions, no relationship decisions whatsoever. When we’re doing the IV push in that in that initial treatment dates, we make you sign a commitment that you will not watch news: cell phone news, internet news, television news, radio news. No news. Because by taking this ketamine, you’re letting your defense mechanisms down and we don’t want you to incorporate the negativity of news, because that’s how they sell it, in you. So, we prefer to have them in one of our facilities where we have massage therapists there and we have cordon bleu wannabe chefs who are going to the school doing their internships and cooking for and things like that. Got a nice hot tub and a pool and they can relax and we do yoga and we don’t have TVs there. They’re like, “Why you got everything else but there’s no TV?” Because you don’t need them.

[1:14:16] Ashley James: You take their cellphones away from them?

[1:14:18] Dr. John Huber: They get one hour a day and it’s supervised because we don’t want them going to the news, but that’s part of the thing. We pick them up at the airport. We want to have a car for them. They can Uber. They could if they wanted to, but again, we have their phone for an hour day so we would know about it. We want them to just chill. We want to teach them how to be human and that’s not being attached to a computer whether it’s a flat-screen TV or your computer. The interesting thing is most drug rehab programs, they want 45 to 90 days. Well, the average person can’t take three months off for vacation, unless they have a drug addiction then you get permission for their business then everybody knows their business.

So, we get CEOs who can take a 30-day vacation and they’ll take it with us and we’ll get them off their alcohol. Then they can come out for their follow-up one-day visit on a weekend or whatever and they’re set and they’re good to go. We’re having really good success rate about, 80% success rate for alcoholism, which if you talk to Dr. Drew Pinsky, I’ve talked to him several times. Been on his show several times, he’ll tell you that the best, at average success rate, for a regular 12-step intervention for alcohol rehab is 8%.

[1:15:43] Ashley James: Geez.

[1:15:45] Dr. John Huber: That’s what the research shows. Some of it shows as low as 2% or 3%. I’ve seen a few studies that went as high as 16%, but Dr. Drew told me on the air it is 8% as far as he’s concerned. So that means there’s 92% failure in that system. They know whether it’s this rehab or your rehab, that 92% of the patients are going to be back within three years.

[1:16:09] Ashley James: Well, that’s a lucrative business.

[1:16:10] Dr. John Huber: It is a lucrative business. So, people don’t really want us doing our business because we had 14 patients last year one of them fell off the wagon and now he’s at almost six months. A little over five months right now. We just did a little jumpstart with him and he’s there. So, our data shows about an 80% success rate. When our patients come in, for example, for PTSD one of the things they do is self-medicate. Whether it’s heroin, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. We get that report. We’re not there to file charges on them and it’s not our job, but it’s funny when we go back and look at our raw data, those patients who weren’t even there for alcohol or cocaine or marijuana, 80% of them stopped.

[1:16:59] Ashley James: Wow. That’s huge. So your program is a 30-day program always or just for alcohol? How does that work?

[1:17:09] Dr. John Huber: No. It’s very specific. There’s reasons why ketamine is not appropriate for you. So one of the things we want to do is we want to do a psych eval on you. We can do a quick one and know within 24 hours whether this is an appropriate treatment for you. It costs us money so we charge you for that eval. You get your deposit for the rest of the 30 days back if you’re not appropriate, but the cost of that actually incurs some cost for us. We’ve learned what’s not appropriate. One of the things that obviously is not appropriate for ketamine treatment is if you have a history of psychosis, active psychosis especially if you have drug-induced psychosis it depends one of the drugs and how you were using and things like that. Just regular schizophrenia active psychosis or maybe bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes during your mania phase and things like that are not good indications that you’re appropriate for that. We have some cut-offs levels on you know the MMPI and the MCMI and like that that we use that have turned pretty good for us. We get pretty good shot at it. We don’t want to put anybody into a bad situation, but we also know that a lot of people are coming to us because nothing else has worked. So we want to try and get as many people as we can too.

We know, like okay, everybody who’s had these scores when we gave them they were not any better. Now they were out the $35,000-$40,000. They’re hurting because of that so it’s not appropriate for us to follow through with that. So, here’s your money minus the psychological evaluation. We’ll write you a nice report. You can take that with you if you’d like. Then we follow up with an evaluation at the end. We see pre and post-treatment intervention effects and it’s just amazing. We talked about that before the show, before we started taping. I really can’t get into too much of that, but it’s totally floored me. It’s made me go back and look at my 21 years of teaching graduate students and undergraduate students. Wow. If I’d only know then what I know now.

[1:19:37] Ashley James: Yeah. There’s some stories you can’t tell right now for legal reasons, but there will come a day when you can and I wanted to have you back on the show for sure because those stories need to be told. The listeners need to hear them. They’re pretty amazing, but for legal reasons right now, we can’t. We can’t talk about it unfortunately on the air, but one day you will be able to share these beautiful, beautiful stories. For listeners who are interested in going to the clinic, you work with that uses ketamine, what website would be best for them to look into that further?

[1:20:14] Dr. John Huber: KLARISANA.com. We have one in San Antonio. We have one in Austin. I’m doing more work with the Austin one. San Antonio is a really long drive for me. I have gone down there and done it. I know everybody in that clinic who works there. I know all the clinic here. My staff works up at this one mostly. We do occasionally again go down there. There is a Klarisana in Denver. That’s kind of become Dr. Bonnett’s home clinic. We all kind of bounce around between the three places as needed. We have Dr. Bonnett’s license in all the states that we’ve got. The therapy team here only does actual therapy in the states where we’re licensed, but we can supervise and teach therapists in other areas where we’re not licensed in different states how to do the appropriate intervention and stuff with that. We do supervise that.

[1:21:21] Ashley James: There are so many different, just coming back to your wanting to normalize mental health.

[1:21:27] Dr. John Huber: Yes.

[1:21:28] Ashley James: One of the first steps is also people understanding that the services that are available to them. On my show, I’ve had many Naturopathic physicians on the show. I’ve actually had listeners write to me and say to me, “I never knew that there was anything other than an MD that I could go to. I didn’t know that there was an osteopath and a chiropractor. I didn’t know that they could do the things they do.” Also, Naturopathic physician. So, I’ve actually had several listeners write to me and say that they were in pre-med and they switched to becoming a Naturopath because they didn’t even know a Naturopathy existed. Sometimes it’s a matter of letting people know that their services are out there. That there’s more than just the thing they’ve always been going to.

So, I know that there’s many different kinds of therapy, but maybe the listener doesn’t actually know that because we learn a lot from the mainstream media. Everyone’s heard of Freud so we think that the Hollywood version of therapy is we’re just lying on a couch complaining and sort of worrying about being judged by this person with a notepad. We haven’t really been given a very fair viewpoint of what therapy actually is by Hollywood or by the media. People who haven’t been to therapy don’t know what it’s like and what kinds of therapy there is out there besides the very stereotypical Freudian therapy. Could you go through and talk about what kind of therapies are out there? Especially talk about the ones that have better success rates.

[1:23:16] Dr. John Huber: Well, there’s a lot of different types of therapies out there. One of the interesting things, I’m currently working on a book right now on what it’s like to go to therapy for the first time. Because a lot of people are afraid to go to therapy, “They’re going to brainwash me. They’re going to have some kind of mind control over me.” The book will get into that, but the problem with that is it’s got to be a short read because if you’re depressed, you need to go see a therapist. You don’t want to sit there and read a novel. So, it’s been really a challenge. It’s coming along though. I’ve got a game plan. We’re working on making some adjustments. Maybe I can send you a copy of that and you can see if you want to have me on. We can talk about that as well too, but what we know is that there’s cognitive therapies.

The cognitive therapies are there to change framework, change positions, change language. For example, using absolutes. There’s no real absolute in this world is there except for what? You’re going to die. You can try and avoid taxes, but if you get caught, but you know you’re going to die. I mean that’s an absolute. We use things like everybody hates me. One of my favorite things, you know the seven billion people on this planet? That’s pretty amazing. How do you know all seven billion people? You know they hate you and then all the languages you’d have to master. So, we know that’s a fallacy, but we have to get the person to stop using absolute language. Because absolute language is very destructive to our psyche especially if you’ve got some bad things that have happened to you. If the dominoes have fallen just right in the recent past or maybe in distant past, but they continue. Little ones keep falling and it keeps reinforcing that belief set that you’ve created. So we want to change that cognitive restructuring.

Then we also have different types of psychoanalytic. Of course, we know Freud. Why is Freud so important? Why is he something that we always bring up? Well, Freud basically, he believes that everything resorts back to these unconscious conflicts between sex and aggression. So that becomes very seductive in storytelling when you can use aggression or sex. I mean it’s just we think about the good in the dark. The dark side is very seductive and the light side is it’s nice and warm and loving and it’s got its own seduction for that piece that we want to have there too. So, it’s seductive also but we all openly discuss wanting peace. We don’t all openly discuss that, “I wonder what it feels like to do something evil to somebody.” Everybody goes, “Oh, you’re sick.” “I didn’t do it. I just talked about it. Does that make me sick? You were telling me the other day how that person cut you off on the road and if you’d had a gun you were going to shoot him, but you didn’t have a gun so you didn’t shoot him. Does that make yours sick?”

Thoughts are not inherently sick. Your actions when you actually take action on them can be. So we have to kind of watch what that is, but we also then, they’re in between those two that cognitive you have other things like behavioral where we don’t really care what you’re thinking. We just want to reinforce certain behaviors so we can get those things to change.

Then we have blends, cognitive-behavioral. Now cognitive-behavioral and behavioral work really good. Insurance companies love them as a therapist because you can count and measure really well and you can make progress and we know. “Hey, they’re making progress. They’ve made three out of seven goals. We’re going to make two more in the next week and we’ll be done here in four weeks.” They love that. They don’t complain and argue with that, but at the same time, with the right patient and the right situation, I’ve had insurance companies say, “No. You do as much therapy as you want with those patients.” It was all the right things.

I had a young lady who was mauled by a pit bull and had peeled her face back and chewed her nose. They got there, got the dog off her, got her an ambulance and the plastic surgeon rebuilt her face. From that day forward, every day she looked in the mirror there was somebody else in the morning looking back at her. The insurance company’s, “Nope. Do all the therapy you need.” When I first saw her we were going three days a week. We ended up getting it down to once a month over a period of years. Then we stretched it out and then she did a couple of six-month checkups. Then the last time I heard from her she sent me an invitation to her wedding.

[1:28:09] Ashley James: Nice.

[1:28:11] Dr. John Huber: Exactly. Man, we had to use a very eclectic kind of thing because she was having all these intrusive thoughts because this is a stranger looking back at me at the mirror, but she was also having all these Freudian things about aggression. “I’m not mad. I love dogs.” It took me about 18 months for her to on her own decide she needed to get rid of the big dogs that she got after she got mauled trying to prove to herself she wasn’t afraid of dogs.

[1:28:41] Ashley James: Wow.

[1:28:44] Dr. John Huber: That changed her whole life perspective. Just one thing after another, I have to give it to that insurance company. They never once balked at any extension at all. Not one time. They didn’t give me a hard time. They didn’t say, “Oh, we need a copy every one of your notes.” It’s like, “Give us a summary what you’ve done so far.” That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but if you come into to my office because all your kids have gone off to college. Now you have no meaning in life. You were taking care of the hamster, but the hamster died. Now you just want to go commit suicide because a hamster died. It’s like, “Okay, first of all, you can get a new hamster. They have about three-year life expectancy anyway.” It doesn’t symbolize those children that left. They feel like that they’re not there anymore. So there’s some connections there.

Freud does all that symbology and how it replaces one thing for another and then you go to Carl Jung and all the images and the patriarchal matriarchal models and things like that and the collective unconscious. All these things that seem very mystical, but it’s really funny. I did my last doctorate degree, I did it at a school that had one of the researchers who had worked with Hermann Rorschach putting together a Rorschach test. He was not a young man, but he made me push my boundaries and made me learn the Rorschach test probably better than I wanted to be at it. When I have patients who come in and the cognitive stuff doesn’t work, the behavioral stuff, the cognitive-behavioral doesn’t work. When I start using thought stopping and Albert Ellis and all these and nothing’s working, I pull out some Freud and all of a sudden this person’s life changes in a matter of weeks.

[1:30:48] Ashley James: Wow.

[1:30:49] Dr. John Huber: It’s like whoa. This was right. This was right for this person. I had a guy who was very suicidal. He dropped out of school right before his senior year. His family knew the school board. I was working in Miami Dade County Public Schools then. They sent him into my office. They called me, “Can you see him?” Three out of the eight people on the school board and knew this person, the family personally. I’m like, “Okay. I cleared my plate. Get him here on Friday.” He comes in and he’s just like stone cold. There’s walls all around this guy. I pulled out the Rorschach chart or flats and I started using them therapeutically. About halfway through them, I knew exactly what had happened. This man had been sexually assaulted.

[1:31:39] Ashley James: What’s the Rorschach thing you’re talking about?

[1:31:42] Dr. John Huber: The inkblot test.

[1:31:43] Ashley James: Oh, inkblot. Okay. Really? You knew. So you’re holding up weird inkblots and he says, “I see a giraffe. I see a lizard.”

[1:31:50] Dr. John Huber: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said all the things and I’m like, “This guy’s been violated.” So I put the cards down and I said, “So when were you raped?” The guy turned white I thought I was going to call an ambulance. He’s like, “Who told you?” He goes, “I told nobody. Nobody knows this. How do you?” He just kind of freaked out for a few minutes. I let him vent. I go, “Well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks. I got all these. See all those degrees on the wall? They’re actually good for something.” I was able to get this guy to give us a shot.

Miami Dade, as big as it is and all the problems it has with being big, that has some amazing things. For example, they have high school campuses on some of the community college campuses there. Adults can go there and get a high school degree through their Community College. It has a community college transcript and all that kind of stuff, but they’re actually working for high school degree. Then they can take their college credits to their bosses. So adults who didn’t finish high school are going back and finish high school.

Well, I picked up the phone. One of the psychologists I worked with who was stationed at one of those schools inside one of the college campuses. I’m like, “Hey, here’s what’s going on. If his parents find out what happened to him he’s gone.” I mean this kid, he had demonstrated that he would do it. I mean there was some history there.

[1:33:17] Ashley James: He’d commit suicide?

[1:33:18] Dr. John Huber: Yeah. So, the guy goes, “Let me talk to my principal.” We sat and talked to the principal. Principal said, “If you two psychologists are willing to this, I’ll do everything I can. I don’t need to know what has happened with this young man as long as this is the right placement for him.” So we had our admission review and dismissal meeting. We went through and we figured it was just going to be the parents, him and a couple teachers. We walked in and there’s almost 30 people in there because it’s a college campus. These college professors don’t know what’s going on. “I want to see this.” We’re like, “Oh my goodness.” So, me and the other psychologists sat next to each other. We just kind of mumbled through stuff and just started signing paperwork and passed it around. Everybody acted like they knew what they were doing. They signed the paperwork. We got the kid in. He graduated. I got a phone message left on my answering machine in my office that next summer. It was about seven minutes long. He started off by telling me, “I planned on killing myself the weekend after I met you.” He went from there to, “I can’t thank you enough. I just got a full ride to a major university.” He gave me the major university and all that kind of stuff. “You gave me my life back.”

[1:34:33] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:34:34] Dr. John Huber: So when people criticize psychoanalysis, man it’s not right for everybody but when it works it works. The Freudian inkblot tests and all that kind of stuff. There’s a place for that and we need to need to show it respect. The reason why though that we really push that and you see it so much besides us being seductive it was the first time somebody had put together and organized theoretical orientation for psychotherapy. What went on before then was there was this guy called Emmanuel Church. He would go around and he was kind of the Oprah of the day. He would go to town theaters and people would come in there. People would come up and talk and their families would go up and he’d do family therapy in front of the audience.

[1:35:23] Ashley James: Wow.

[1:35:24] Dr. John Huber: Of course, who could afford to go? You got all your doctors and attorneys and your businessman and all this kind of stuff. So they were paying this guy tons of money. People would volunteer and be a victim and he would actually help them work through things. The doctors were sitting and going, “Man, look at how much money I could be making,” but the Hippocratic Oath says we either have to have research proof or we have to have strong theoretical orientation and we had neither one of them. So this guy could do it as entertainment and made lots of money. Then all sudden we had this book that come translated from German called Interpretation of Dreams by a guy named Sigmund Freud. He’d written a theoretical orientation for talk therapy. Now doctors could go do that. He was the game-changer.

[1:36:16] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:36:17] Dr. John Huber: We went from there to okay let’s break this down. What if this is really working? We found out some specific things. Even if you go to a psychoanalytic school where they’re going to teach you psychoanalysis, the first techniques they show you are Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy because if you can’t get your patient coming back to therapy, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best therapist in the world if they’re not there to do therapy. What do we know about Carl Rogers is that he makes that person feel valued and empowered and they want to come back. So you start with that and then you go do your orientation, whatever you do best at that point. So, it’s just a lot of skill. The best predictor though of whether you’re going to be successful in therapy is not what orientation the therapist has.

[1:37:03] Ashley James: Really.

[1:37:04] Dr. John Huber: It’s how long the therapist has been doing therapy.

[1:37:07] Ashley James: Really.

[1:37:09] Dr. John Huber: Because just like I told you, when people say what is my orientation? I’m a cognitive-behavioral therapist when it comes to therapy, but I know how to use eclectic psychotherapy. I can use Freud. I can use Jungian therapy. I can use Gestalt therapy, but I don’t start with that. I start with my patient. What is my patient going to respond to the best? How do I know that? Experience. I find out through my structure of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy that okay, this isn’t working, that’s not working, this get a little bit of benefit from here so we’re not going to throw that out but I need to tweak it a little bit. I have to keep the same goals in mind the whole time. The cool thing with, again cognitive behavior, I can count and measure and I can make progress. So, I tend to keep part of that cognitive-behavioral perspective in there even if I pull in psychoanalysis or hypnosis or something like that into my treatment of the patient. Because then I’ve still got that benchmark that I can say, “He’s making progress,” or “He’s not making programs.”

[1:38:19] Ashley James: I imagine hypnotherapy or any of your therapy actually would be really positive while working with someone who’s doing the ketamine because their resistance has been dropped.

[1:38:34] Dr. John Huber: Their defense mechanisms have been dropped. I use that word specifically because that’s one of the things Freud talks about, our defense mechanisms. We lie to ourselves. Even in cognitive behavioral therapy, we lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves that, “You know, I’ve been smoking for 15 years. I’m not going to get cancer.” We lie to ourselves, “Oh, it’s not going to happen to me. Those rules don’t apply to me. I’m John. It’s not going to happen.” It will. It’ll catch up. You play the game long, enough you’re going to get hit with a flag.

[1:39:09] Ashley James: My friend is in marriage counseling and her husband is coming up with these lies. She’s just staring at him. She’s kind of dumbfounded. She doesn’t even know what to say to the therapist. She’s just so, in the moment, she’s not a type of person to fight or argue. She’s just observing and kind of shocked because he believes his lies. He’s saying these lies that are just like totally not true, like measurable. He said, “We’ve gone on seven family vacations,” or whatever he’s mentioned. She’s like she can count three. She’s like, “No.” He says, “I always take the kids to the park on the weekends.” He’s done it three times in seven years like that kind of thing. He believes his lies. It’s just really amazing to sit back and then go, yeah, how much do we lie to ourselves and believe it? “I’m going to go to the gym tomorrow.” “Just one chocolate bar.”

[1:40:06] Dr. John Huber: Yeah, exactly. That’s the crazy thing about lie detector test because if you believe your lies you’re not going to show up as lying.

[1:40:12] Ashley James: Wow.

[1:40:14] Dr. John Huber: So that’s why that’s not what we should be using. With the best lie detector test we have is that jury of your peers and that judge up there not some machine. Because you get all these other perspectives. You don’t just get yours when you go into court. We have other witnesses there. We have DNA testing there. We have drug testing. We have alcohol testing. We have fingerprints, whatever. We got all this other stuff there. It’s not just you and that machine, because again if you truly believe or heaven forbid you’re a truly antisocial personality disorder, a true sociopath and don’t mind the fact that you may have harmed somebody significantly, you’re not going to have a physiological reaction to that. So a sociopath is less likely to fail a lie-detector test. That’s who we want to try and catch, right? Then why do we keep using them? Well, we keep using them because the whole game is we want to scare the person enough to make them think that we really can tell they’re lying so they just cop a plea and tell us what really happened.

[1:41:27] Ashley James: Wow. I did not know that about lie-detector test that if you believe the lie that you won’t get caught. Right. I guess, yeah. Because it’s measuring the stress response.

[1:41:40] Dr. John Huber: Exactly. Your heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, respiratory. Yes.

[1:41:46] Ashley James: Psychopaths would not have that.

[1:41:49] Dr. John Huber: Yeah. Unless you maybe hurt their car and then you’ll see a physiological response.

[1:41:56] Ashley James: Right. Don’t they believe that they own people like inanimate objects like a car?

[1:42:04] Dr. John Huber: Well, the inanimate objects have value to them. People are just objects to be used to get certain things they want. So when you’re through getting what you can get out of that person you throw them away. It doesn’t matter what happens to them.

[1:42:16] Ashley James: How do we know we’re dealing with a psychopath? What if someone goes, “I wonder if I’m married to one or I wonder if my boss is one or what if my coworker is a psychopath?” What are the signs to be aware of?

[1:42:28] Dr. John Huber: Why don’t you just him bring down in my office and for a specific sum I’ll just figure that out for you. I’m pretty good at it. What you want to look at, what I told my college students, the people when they’re dating whether a man or a woman if they let their friends call you all sorts of names and put you down and demean you but they blow up if they touched their car wrong or they slammed the door too hard on their car or they have a favorite hunting knife or a gun or something that they treat like it’s the Holy Grail, red flag. Don’t walk away, run away. Because that inanimate object is more valuable to them than a living person. Run away. Another thing, it’s funny how it happens, dogs. Not just one dog but every dog this person comes around doesn’t really like that person, red flag. Dogs pick up on our physiology. That’s why seizure dogs, true helping dogs that are trained, can pick up on your seizure thirty to forty-five minutes before it actually happens.

[1:43:48] Ashley James: Wow.

[1:43:50] Dr. John Huber: You’ll be safe. You got a seizure dog, oh, it’s time to go. So they’ll take you and sit you downtime. Go lay down on the couch over here. They got their patterns of behavior so we have to train the people to read the dog’s movements too, but it’s pretty amazing when that happens. You get patients that are no longer slamming their heads on the corner of the coffee tables because they started having a seizure and were expecting it.

[1:44:15] Ashley James: Right. Very interesting. Dr. Huber, I could talk to you all day long. Yes, I definitely want to have you back on the show, but you knew that. You’re such a pro. Every show you’re on they want to have you back. You’re very entertaining and educating. That’s the perfect combination, right? To be entertained while you’re learning. So, you’re an excellent guest. I definitely want to have you back especially when you published your book, especially when you can share more formation about ketamine that after some things have happened in the near future, hopefully. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. I love your mission that your nonprofit is here to normalize mental health. That going to a counselor should be like we take a shower, we want to have physical hygiene, we go to a mental health counselor to make sure we have mental hygiene, right?

[1:45:22] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely.

[1:45:24] Ashley James: Just make it normal. Normal, healthy people can go to therapy.

[1:45:27] Dr. John Huber: They should, even if it’s just a check-up. I tell people that. “Why? I don’t have any problem.” Think about it, your world is going great. If you go see a therapist just to kind of know what you look like when world’s going great and then the bottom falls out, that therapists already has a history with you and they know where you need to be. But more important than that, if you’re one of those people who tend to not have problems for real and you cope and you manage, your friends come to you all the time for help. There’s been more than one time in most of those people’s lives where they go, “Hey, buddy. Why don’t you go see a therapist?” They’re going, “Oh, okay.” But instead of saying that, “Why don’t you go to my friend John? I’ve talked to him a couple of times.” They’re more likely to go see me then instead of let’s just pull up a phonebook and find a therapist here.

[1:46:15] Ashley James: Ah. So get a relationship with a therapist so that you could even help your friends and send them to your friend the therapist you’ve been seeing. It’s good to have one in your pocket.

[1:46:26] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely. One more therapeutic tool for you to help function and cope. I’m not saying you have to see them. You can go in there and meet them one time. You feel comfortable with him, you talk a little bit, you just want to, “Hey, things are going pretty good right now, but if something happens I want to have it. I know my kids are getting ready to graduate from college. My daughter is talking about getting married. I just don’t know how I’m going to react to all that. So I want somebody who kind of I already know. I don’t want to have an introductory session that’s been three sessions trying to figure out what my life looks like normal before we start therapy.”

[1:47:02] Ashley James: I have a friend who’s a personal chef in Seattle, very busy woman. She has a boyfriend and she has a daughter with this boyfriend. The daughter’s about four or five years old and she’s a very busy woman. She’s a busy mom. Every day is driving to a different person’s house and cooking for them. That she cooks five-days-worth of food in one afternoon. She’ll have maybe two clients a day. So it’s just like go, go, go, go, go. She made a post on Facebook that was really beautiful. To all her friends she said, “Listen, you guys say I’m a great mom. You say I’m a great entrepreneur. You say like wow you’ve got your whole life together. How do you do this? How do you pull it all together? How do you have a successful career and have a great relationship and you’re also like a really attentive as a mom? How do you do this all?”

She goes, “Listen, I do it because I see my therapist three times a week. I sometimes see them more than three times a week. My therapist helps me stay successful and stay sane.” She goes, “Everyone should have a therapist. Everyone should have a mental health counselor. It should be like going to the gym. You go to the gym three times a week. You go to your therapist.” She goes, “That’s why I don’t explode at my boyfriend and that’s why I don’t completely like go off the rails with my kid. When my kid’s frustrating, when my boyfriend’s being crazy and when my life is being insane I don’t take it out on the wrong people. I don’t take it out on people. I don’t blow up at people because I am able to like deal with it and work through it with my therapist. Then I am a loving attentive mom that is present to my daughter. I don’t bring my work home with me. I’m able to be intimate and loving and vulnerable partner with my boyfriend because I don’t take my frustrations out on him.”

So she just basically said to all our friends the same mission that you have. She wants everyone to know that healthy human beings go to therapy. That if we’re not going to therapy it’s sort of like not taking a shower and not going to the gym. If you’re not really having that like checking in with yourself a mentally and emotionally, then there’s like some like dirty laundry being built up in your closet basically. So, I love that she pointed out that we could use therapy like a mental gym and just keep ourselves fit and healthy mentally and emotionally.

[1:49:46] Dr. John Huber: Absolutely. That is what we’ve got to do. I take my own advice. I tell my patients, “Look, you’re spending too much time on your cell phone.” Two years ago I took a 60-day break from internet on my cell phone and all that. It’s hard doing what we do and not having connections online. I can do it, you can do it.

[1:50:14] Ashley James: I love that. Yes. I know you have a whole talk about the phone and how it increases, it’s been shown to increase anxiety and depression. We want to, even though people are probably listening to this on their phone, but we want to spend less time with electronics and spend more time with real people, more time with connecting with ourselves. Before we hit record though you said something beautiful about going outside. Would you like to wrap up today’s interview with that?

[1:50:40] Dr. John Huber: Well, that’s where I was going to go.

[1:50:41] Ashley James: Is that where you’re going. I knew that’s where you’re going. Awesome.

[1:50:42] Dr. John Huber: That’s where I was going to go. One of the best things, we have to get connected. We have to get back to being human. I do it. I mean it’s 28 degrees outside and my wife just thinks I’m nuts. I go outside, I take my shoes and socks off and I put my feet on the ground. I just breathe, focus on the stars, focus on the possum running across the fence line down the road. Just be and breathe.

There’s research out there about being in physical contact with the ground and what it does to your neurochemistry and your brain. My goal is to make about 20 minutes. Sometimes it’s really cold, but cold and rainy is the worst. I don’t know if I do five minutes on some of those days, but I try to do it every day. I got my little chairs sitting out there right next to my hot tub so if it gets real cold I can jump in a hot tub and keep my feet on the ground. Sometimes I’m out there for an hour and a half with my feet in the ground. My dogs love it. They come curl up around my feet. It’s really funny because when I first started doing it they didn’t know what was going on. We have rescue puppies who’ve been abused and stuff like that. Now, man, they come in they get between our legs and kind of wrap themselves around us. It’s like they’re trying to help us make that connection, it’s like they picked up on what we’re doing.

[1:52:10] Ashley James: I want you to listen to, I’ll send it to you. I have an interview with Clint Ober on grounding and earthing. He did, I believe it was 24 scientific studies where they prove that –

[1:52:23] Dr. John Huber: Yeah, I read some of his studies. I haven’t read all of it.

[1:52:24] Ashley James: You did? Okay. Awesome.

[1:52:27] Dr. John Huber: I would love to hear the interview.

[1:52:28] Ashley James: Yeah. He has a great story that when we ground ourselves or you could use a grounding mat if you don’t want to go outside, but the going outside part is fantastic. You’re connecting with the Schumann resonance, you’re connecting with the earth energy, but when you put your bare feet on the ground you’re releasing electrons. So there’s an actual measurable anti-inflammatory effect that happens because we’re releasing all these excess electrons that are causing damage. That’s the connection between the mental and emotional body. The physical body and this energetic body that we have. You’re bringing it all together in that moment when you’re spending time outside in nature breathing, feeling your body, connecting back with the earth just releasing and letting go of all that excess energy and connecting with the universe. Then you can start to process your day in a way that is cathartic.

So, it’s beautiful. I love that advice. I think we should all do it. We should all get out in nature more and put our feet in the ground and just breathe. Thank you so much, Dr. John Huber, for coming on the show today. Listeners can go to mainstreammentalhealth.org to check out your nonprofit. Of course, all the links to everything that Dr. John does is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:54:02] Dr. John Huber: I always like to say and remind people that you should always leave something for somebody and a good something. For example, the things I’ve learned today about your interview style made me feel extremely comfortable. I think it helped me open up a lot. So I really appreciate you giving me that during the interview. I want to remind everybody that life is really what happens while we’re making plans so just buckle up.

[1:54:31] Ashley James: Buckle up and love yourself and love each other. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I can’t wait to have you back on the show.

[1:54:40] Dr. John Huber: Awesome. I can’t wait to be back.

[1:54:43] Outro: Are you in to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com, takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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412 The Missing Link To Unlocking Your Optimal Health Lies Within Your Colon, How Colonics Support The Body In Healing All Systems, Parasites, Cancer, Immune, Detox, Energy, Sleep, David DeHaas, Naturopathic Health Coach, Colon Hydrotherapist 0

Feb 17, 2020

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching

Join the Facebook group: LearnTrueHealth.com/group
David's sites:
www.LivingWatersCleanse.com

www.HealingTheIncurables.com

Colon Hydrotherapy

https://www.learntruehealth.com/colon-hydrotherapy

Highlights:

What colon hydrotherapy is
What happens on their 10-day cleanse
Benefits of doing colon hydrotherapy
Importance of eating organic food
What liver cleanse is
Contraindications for colon hydrotherapy
Two types of colon hydrotherapy: open and closed

In this episode, David DeHaas shares with us what colon hydrotherapy is. He shares different stories and testimonials of people that have undergone colon hydrotherapy. He shares how the health of the people who have undergone colon hydrotherapy has improved.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. When it comes to building true health, no stone should be left unturned. Today’s episode is going to turn over a few stones that might not have been on your radar and it’s very exciting. Colon hydrotherapy is something that for some people is the missing link, the key, the final step to helping them get to the next level in their healing. So, it’s very exciting that we have on the show with us a man who specializes in colon hydrotherapy. He teaches us everything we could possibly want to know about cleansing detoxifying and restoring our health using colon hydrotherapy. We just jump right into the interview. So when we start, it’s just jumping straight in. We just start going, hitting the ground running so I know that you’ll really enjoy this wonderful conversational interview today.

I want to let you know, if you’re interested in becoming a health coach and it’s something I’m very passionate about. I think everyone can benefit from going through the training that IIN provides, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. They have an excellent special going on right now and for listeners, they give us a significant discount. I negotiated with them. I asked them to give the Learn True Health listeners a great discount. So they do provide and a wonderful discount. Now, starting next month, starting in March, the price of admission for their online year long and also accelerated six-month health coach training program goes up by $800. So the best time to join is now. If you join by payment plan you receive $1,500 off by mentioning the Learn True Health podcast. If you sign up as a paid in full for your admissions you get two thousand dollars off. So that’s a very big count.

They also have other sales going on. So just when you call IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, talk to the salespeople there. They’re low pressure. They don’t pressure you. Most of them are health coaches. In fact every time I’ve talking to someone on the phone there they are health coaches themselves and so they love talking to people and helping them to plan out their goals. So if you just want to plan, a goal planning session with one of the admissions staff there, you can talk to them and plan it out and see how becoming a health coach either for personal development, personal growth reasons or for professional reasons or both can benefit you. So you can pick their brains, you can ask for more information.

You can also go to learntruehealth.com/coaching. That’s learntruehealth.com/coaching, which gives you access to a free module of IIN so you can get a feel for their program and see if it’s right for you. I highly recommend just googling IIN. That’s just the letters IIN and then calling them and talking to them and just getting more information from them and picking their brains and have them help you to see if health coaching is right for you and if the health coach training program is right for you. Because they are wonderful people. This entire program is designed to help us understand how to heal the body physically with food as medicine, mentally and emotionally help you do it for yourself and for others. So the best time to join is now. The best savings is now.

If you want to know my personal experience of going through their program or you have any questions for me, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me on Facebook. Come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group or you can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. It makes a really big difference to our friends of family to help them, to give them all the tools, to help them achieve true health. Let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to Learn True Health. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

[0:04:40] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 412. I have been on your site but I forget, what town are you in?

[0:04:54] David DeHaas: Boise, Idaho.

[0:04:55] Ashley James: Boise, right. Idaho, that’s not too far from me.

[0:04:58] David DeHaas: Where are you at? You’re in Seattle aren’t you?

[0:04:59] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s still a day. I could drive there in a day.

[0:05:06] David DeHaas: 19 hours. Yeah. You’ve been doing this a while. You’ve been doing this for what? You got about 300 something episodes?

[0:05:13] Ashley James: Yeah. We have 407, I’m publishing 407 today. I started four years ago in March.

[0:05:22] David DeHaas: Wow.

[0:05:24] Ashley James: Yup. 2016. March 2016.

[0:05:27] David DeHaas: So, I just started a podcast a bit ago. Had some of couple of cool people on. You know who Ann Louise Gittleman is?

[0:05:35] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. I’ve interviewed her. She’s awesome and her husband. You got to interview him too.

[0:05:39] David DeHaas: What? I don’t know anything about him.

[0:05:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I interviewed him too. You got to definitely check him out. He beat cancer. You should listen to my interview with him because it’s wild. He escaped the hospital. They were killing him with the chemo. He actually broke out of the hospital and drove away. He’s like, “I am never going back there.” Anyway, so he healed his cancer after that. His journey of health is what led him to meet Ann Louise. So now they’re together, but he now interviews people on YouTube who have beat cancer. He has this one interview that is wild and will blow your mind. This guy healed his cancer with an $8 deworming medication used in animals. Apparently, it really works. A ton of people, tens of thousands of people have used it and reported that their cancer went away. So they figured out there’s five reasons. It actually turns back on the body’s, the immune system’s ability to detect the cancer. But the pharmaceutical knees don’t want you doing it because it only costs $8 and it’s over the counter.

[0:06:51] David DeHaas: Well, it’s kind of like me. I used red salve. Cost me what, $10.

[0:06:57] Ashley James: Well we should get into that in the interview. That would be interesting. So anyway, yeah Ann Louise Gittleman. That’s great. You got her on the show. Now that you’ve had her on your show you should interview her husband because he’s wild. Well I mean you could contact them and get his information, but I can give it to you too. Yeah. James Templeton is his name.

[0:07:17] David DeHaas: Yeah. When I had Nicholas reaching out to people, reaching out to you for example, yeah. I didn’t get to talk to him of course. She was a blast. I mean I’ve watched her on because I think she’s a member of I think I-ACT. I’ve spoken there many time International Association of Colon Hydrotherapy.

[0:07:37] Ashley James: Well, I knew her because when I was like 10 years old or nine years old or something like that, our family got worms. So we got tested. The test show that we got one parasite from Mexico and two parasites from owning cats and dogs. My mom brought home her book Guess What Came to Dinner. We read it and we got on a cleanse. Isn’t that funny? So, I’ve known her for so many years. So to interview her was kind of a trip.

[0:08:09] David DeHaas: Yeah. I’ve had that book forever. In fact I thought the book – yeah I’ve had it for a long time. Did you know that when she was a young gal, she was in New York City and she was telling me in the podcast she said, “So I was at New York City. I was working in this hospital, this kid come in. He had leukemia and I determined he had whipworms and heavy metal poisoning.” She says, “We did a lot of colon hydrotherapy, a lot of cleansing,” and I go, “Whoa, whoa, who. You mean the hospital had a colon hydrotherapy?” She goes, “Oh no. They didn’t.” I had to go and search really hard to find a colon hydrotherapist because this was in the 1970s. She says, “So he got completely cured,” and she says, “And I got fired.”

[0:08:48] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Of course she would get fired.

[0:08:51] David DeHaas: It devastated her. She went away for a year and then she said, “I’m going to go back into this field. I’m going to get back on the horse,” so to speak. Yeah, isn’t that wild?

[0:09:00] Ashley James: Oh, that’s so wild. What’s the name of your podcast?

[0:09:03] David DeHaas: Detox with whole body cleansing.

[0:09:06] Ashley James: Great. Well, we’ll make sure the links to your podcast is in the show notes. Yeah. In the show notes of this episode. So listeners can check it out. Normally I do a really formal start to an interview, but since you and I just got chatting and it was so cool I think I’m just going to include our chat in the interview. So, we already got started. David DeHaas, it’s so good to have you on the show this is going to be so much fun. I know you’ve listened to my show. You know my interview style is a casual conversation where we get to really dive into some interesting information. When your office reached out to me to come on the show, I was thrilled. I love colon hydrotherapy. It’s a tool that not many people know about. I think a lot of people are really afraid of and there’s a lot of misconceptions. So I’m really happy that you can demystify colon hydrotherapy and show us that it’s actually a very powerful tool that we can use for healing and it’s safe and effective and gentle. So, welcome to the show.

[0:10:15] David DeHaas: I’m glad to be here.

[0:10:17] Ashley James: Absolutely. You’re really passionate about holistic health. You yourself have a story. Can you share with us your journey that led you to want to specialize in colon hydrotherapy and Naturopathic medicine and helping people to heal their body naturally?

[0:10:36] David DeHaas: Yeah. I didn’t choose to be here. I think I’m more of got chosen, but backing up years ago when I was a young lad, I started having children. We had an issue with my daughter. She had been vaccine injured. Our house cleaner says, “Go check out this guy. He’s a homeopath.” I go, “What’s that?” This is 1991-ish, somewhere in there. So it began there and then it was like, “Oh, there’s a whole another world here.” I was always kind of sick, not sick. I mean, if you looked at my physique you’d say, “Okay, this guy is really healthy,” and doctors would tell me that, but yet I was always tired, aches and pains, walk like an old man in the morning. I mean, I hurt all the time. I love to play basketball. I was just, it take me an hour to warm up to play. It was like, “What’s going on with me? I’m 30 years of age.”

So, eventually I met a gal and get this, she had no credentials. She was learning iridology and herbology. She was in a little farm in Dietrich, Idaho and a little a single-wide trailer house on a little dairy farm, seven kids. I went and sat on her couch and she looked at my eyes she says, “Oh my gosh.” She says, “How often do you go to the bathroom?” I go, “I don’t know. Maybe once a day, once every three days sometimes. Why?” She goes, “Well, you need to cleanse. You need to do some colonics.” I go like, “What’s a colonic?”

So, she shared with me. So, I said, “Okay.” I mean I’m always been the guy that’s, “Okay, what else is out there?” I’m always the curious cat. I’ll try anything once, maybe twice. So, I was looking to get better. So then I met a lot of cool natural, like all-natural healers. Many of them didn’t have any degrees, no backup but they were very very wise, very very sharp. So that’s where I began with colon hydrotherapy model myself and I actually started in my own home. In the meantime I was transitioning from a real estate career to a career in network marketing talking about nutritional supplements. So that path kind of led me to explore, got me to traveling. I got to travel around the world and I got to meet a lot of really cool people that knew a lot more than I did and other people did.

I mean one time, I had fungus on my feet so bad my feet were black, it itched like crazy. I was like, “What am I going to do about this?” The doctors looked at me and says, “I don’t know what that is. It’s not fungus.” I’m going like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s fungus.” So finally I realized, I got to figure this out on my own. I had to become the master of my health. So I’m a voracious reader. I read all the time. I fall asleep at night reading all I can about health and nutrition because I had to get well. I knew that one day I might have cancer. I’m lying in bed at 38 years of age thinking like, “Am I going to live to see my kids graduate from high school? Am I going to be able? Am I going to be on earth in 10 years?”

Eventually I found out I did have cancer. By the time I knew I had it, I already knew what I would do if I had cancer. So I didn’t go the medical route, I went David’s route. Part of that was doing deep tissue cleansing with colon hydrotherapy. So, long story short, eventually I thought I set this business up for my daughter to run, which we did, but I was only going to be referring people to her. I was going to be involved at all. That was not my path, I thought. Anyway, long story short I was just watching the amazing changes. I got all of Dr. Bernard Jensen’s books. I was reading about Dr. Bernard Jensen. In fact, I just interviewed Dr. Ellen Tart Jensen a few weeks ago. Oh my gosh, amazing stories. Anyway, divine intervention basically inspired me to stick around here and do more than just be the connector. I mean, I’ve always been a networker. I’ve always been the connector, the one who’s telling the story, who’s getting people involved in whatever it may be. So, now here I am teaching and leading the world to understand that colon hydrotherapy is an easy, effective, it’s not embarrassing, it’s very private, it’s easy to do. Once you do it, it’s no different than showering. It’s just basically a shower on the inside. Here we are.

[0:14:41] Ashley James: Right. A lot of people who are don’t realize that the gut is on the outside of us. We think that when we put something in our mouth it’s now inside our body. Anatomically really, the gut is just another part of us that’s outside of us because it hasn’t been absorbed into the bloodstream yet so it’s still technically outside of us. It’s an interesting way to think about it like the inside of a doughnut is still outside of the doughnut not inside the doughnut. Thus, cleansing the colon, you could think of it like washing your skin. Cleanse your colon. People who have eaten the standard American diet often have the fecal matter caked on. It dried up and caked on. There’s a very unhealthy biofilm that can accumulate parasites and be an environment for unhealthy things to thrive in our intestines.

So I love that you said, you take a shower on the outside then we should do some colon hydrotherapy. Can you tell us a bit more about the history of colon hydrotherapy? Because obviously, cavemen weren’t washing their colon. So, how did this get started?

[0:16:06] David DeHaas: Well, doing enemas and cleansing actually goes back into the age of the Egyptians, in the Essene Gospel of Peace back in Jesus’ time. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, they actually discovered that back in that day the Essenes advocated for cleansing. I don’t have the script in front of me, but basically it said this, go out and find a long trailing gourd the height of a man, clean out its inwards and fill it full of water warmed by the sun and stick it in your hinder parts. Let it run every day until the water runs as clear as the rivers foam. You will see every evil foul-smelling thing of fear come out of you. Fear, false emotions appearing real. So, there’s a whole emotional connection to this as well. So, 2,000 plus years ago there was not 80,000 chemicals, right? There wasn’t cars and automobiles. Why were they saying you should need to cleanse? Because we have fear and our autonomic nervous system runs 95+ percent of our innards, our insides. That colon in the small intestine can get twisted and distorted. The average person listening to this podcast, that’s you out there, is packing 12 to 15 pounds just extra gunk plus parasites.

What’s amazing about the intestinal tract is you have the surface area the size of his tennis court in your intestinal tracts. It’s about 30 some feet long. More neurons in it than your spinal column. Every organ and part in your body, whether it be your eyes, your ears, your spleen, your heart, your kidney, your liver, your legs, your arms, your ears, connects to the intestinal tract. So basically, how it lives is how you live. If you’re packing around parasites, which every one of us are. If you’ve eaten pork you got parasites. If you’ve had sushi, you definitely got parasites. Have you walked barefoot, have pets, have sexual relations you’re just passing parasites back and forth. So, we all have parasites. They outnumber us. You cannot avoid them, but we want to minimize the amount that we have. They’re pooping and peeing in us and maybe create their own energy. You definitely get rid of them.

I mean, think about full moon. Full moon, those parasites are birthing new babies. What happens on full moon? Well, if you ask the hospitals, the police departments, the fire departments they’re busy because people are doing things they normally wouldn’t do because the parasites, their beings, their energy and they will make you do some crazy stuff. Some more than others. So, it’s really important to understand that that 30 to 36 feet of intestinal tract is very important to know how to manage it. Back in the early 1900’s you had two amazing pioneers, Dr. Harvey Kellogg who was a gastroenterologist himself. Who after doing 20,000 surgeries says, “You know what? There’s got to be a better way. Well, what if we do cleansing?” So, he’d bring people to Battle Creek Michigan where he would do enemas and do all his cleansing and teach them how to eat right. After that, most of his patients all but after 40,000 treatments, all but a handful needed surgery.

So you’ve run 20,000 surgeries to just a handful after doing 40,000 treatments. Then he have Dr. Bernard Jensen. Dr. Bernard Jensen was very sick and he discovered cleansing and was one of the developers of developing the current day Colema Boards and Colon Hydrotherapy systems. So, it saved him from his disease. So he began teaching others. Here, he became a chiropractor and of course became known to create the iridology charts. He treated over 350,000 people in his day. Most amazing story about all this is at age 88, Dr. Bernard Jensen got prostate cancer. Now, I have seen many people who through bowel management and deep tissue cleansing using colon hydrotherapy have healed their prostate cancer including my dad, which I’ll share that story in a bit.

So anyway, he gets at 88 years of age. He gets down to 88 pounds after having prostate cancer and he gets hit by a car. He’s paralyzed in the waist down. Now, when you get down to 88 pounds at age 88 the doctors told him chemo wouldn’t work. Well, first he healed himself from prostate cancer then he got smashed by the car. So, now he’s down to 88 pounds and the guy says, “Okay, well it’s going to be a lucky boy for you to live.” He says, “Okay, I’m a lucky boy.” So he went, get this, he went to North Idaho. Sought out a doctor friend of his to help him out and be his coach. Now, the moral of this story is that everyone needs a coach even everyone who knows what to do. Basically, this guy coached him through Jensen’s own process. He needed to get away. He need to get to Southern California where his ranch was. He get away from everyone to just focus on healing his body. He healed it, he did. He went back to work. I have met some of his students who in the early 2000s, prior to him passing at the age of 93, took classes from him in iridology.

So he completely healed. His daughter-in-law, Dr. Ellen Tart Jensen, told me that she says, “Yeah. I think he would live to be far older than that but he had so much he wanted to express, so much he wanted to get done. He began teaching. He was a tireless worker. He just worked all the time.” But anyway, he recovered and lived until 93. God bless him. Amazing person that brought this technology to us. Of course since then, the colonic beds had become really very sophisticated and very easy to use, very private. Much easier than what they used to do in the old days. So, pretty cool story.

[0:21:54] Ashley James: I bet. Very cool. One of my mentors, Dr. Wallach, who was a veterinarian and a pathologist before becoming a Naturopath says that prostate cancer, men who die from prostate cancer die from the treatments not from the cancer. It is such a benign form of cancer that is so, it’s one of the most easily reversible forms of cancer. The best thing to do is to wait and watch and not let them poke it and prod it and administer the chemo and surgery and all that. He says that if you have it, that’s the kind of cancer you go really slowly into any form of treatment like you just sit and wait and watch and do natural medicine because he has seen so many men reverse it. That the men that give in to the chemoradiation, surgery will die within five years. The men who don’t do that and do natural medicine survive. He says you could live years with prostate cancer because it’s not it’s one of those ones that are very benign. It doesn’t metastasize quickly.

So, he really warns people to just slow down and don’t jump into the chemoradiation, surgery route, the cut, burn and poison route, but to slow down and look at all your options and see if you can use natural medicine. Of course now there’s Naturopathic oncologists out there who will work with their patients and help them to navigate natural medicine. You mentioned that you had cancer yourself and you healed it. I didn’t catch, what kind of cancer did you have?

[0:23:40] David DeHaas: So my cancer showed signs of exiting on my back in the form of a mole, but it also was connected around into my liver. Let’s go back to prostate for a hot moment. I got two great stories to share with you. The first was when we were just getting involved in this, there was a guy that came and he had his PSA number was over 42. He’d been measured by the University of Utah at least three times. He was trying herbs and different things, parasite cleanses and so forth, which is all fantastic. He did the deep tissue cleansing with the colon hydrotherapy and he went back and he got measured and his PSA number had dropped to zero. So, the doctors looked and says, “Must have made a mistake. Let’s measure him again.” So they measured him three different times. They say, “Well, either our machines were all wrong the last three times you were in or you’re a miracle.” He says, “Yeah. I guess I am.” He didn’t tell them what he did.

My dad’s story though, my dad was amazing. My dad knew something was up, went to a doctor, doctor says, “Yeah, your PSA is about 13.” Within about a month it’s up to 38. So of course they say, “Well, it’s fast-acting…” I talked to my dad and I say, “Well, yeah there’s an oncologist here, but I think what you need to do dad is you need to get back on and do some more cleansing.” So, he’d already done some cleansing. I think he had already done a couple of 10-day treatments, but he went to the oncologist and says, “Yeah, with spot radiation we could probably get it down to about seven-eight but it’s going to come back. When it does, nothing we can do.” So my dad says, “Okay. All right.” So he started the spot radiation and he started cleansing same day.

Before he was finished with his 10-day protocol, the numbers had already dropped significantly. The doctors looked at him every day going like, “This guy’s just changing so fast.” They gave him two years to live. My dad has lived 12+ more years. Very healthy, very active. He can do anything a 50-year-old can. In fact, he and my sister put up 10 cord of wood in three days last fall. His PSA number has been 0.00347 ever since. He just did another 10-day cleanse. He’s 86 years of age and he’s looking great.

[0:26:04] Ashley James: That’s cool. It would have been interesting if he had done the cleanse and then waited to do the radiation to see if he even needed it. Because now it’s like someone could argue, “Oh, the radiation was what did it and everything else is just placebo.” The fact that he is still here 12 years later and still super healthy. I could not do that. I couldn’t cut that many cords of wood. So, he’s definitely healthier or more physically fit than I am right now.

[0:26:32] David DeHaas: Yeah. The doctor looked at him and says, “Do you want to just do your own thing?” Dad says, “Well, maybe I should do both.” Anyway, it was a hard decision for him to make.

[0:26:42] Ashley James: Yeah, it is. A hindsight, yes, but you know what, he made the right call. He’s still here today. He’s still healthy. So, he listened to his gut. I think that’s really important to listen. Don’t go to a doctor that tries to pressure you into anything but instead educates you on all your choices and allows you to listen to your own intuition after giving you fully informed consent. So, the fact that he wasn’t pressured into anything and that he was given his choices and he got to make his own choices and he was empowered as a patient is really important. I think that also helps with outcome, patient outcome when they believe in the process that they’re going and they’re actively part of choosing it. So, I love that you shared that.

Interesting about PSA numbers for the men listening and for the women with men in their life, Dr. Wallach says that now, this is something they didn’t always used to do, but just watch when a man who’s about 40 or 50 years of age, that’s when they start to get their prostate tested by their doctor. You bend over and cough and all that. What Dr. Wallach says is now, doctors will test. Basically put the finger up the rectum to palpate the prostate, which irritates the prostate. Then they take their blood work. He says that artificially will elevate PSA levels because you stimulated the prostate. So he says to get accurate levels, get your blood work done before you have your prostate checked. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that, but I thought that was really interesting because you can get some false positives from taking the blood work after getting the physical exam or falsely elevated.

So, yeah. Can you just explain what a colon hydrotherapy session is for those who have never heard of a colonic before?

[0:28:45] David DeHaas: Yes. So most people have heard of an enema. So, this is a lot more than an enema. An enema you’re going to put a little tube with a bag full of about to two pints of water, maybe a quart. You’re going to get on the floor and insert the tube in your rectum and you’re going to put the water in there. Then you’re going to go, “Oh my gosh, I got to get on the toilet and let go of this.” Now, in a clinic session you’re in the privacy of your own room and you’re on a specially made bed. There are two filters that filter the water and kill all any bad things that should be in the water. There’s a rectal tube, it’s going to be inserted into your rectum about an inch, inch and a half. The farthest that tube can go in is about three and a half, four inches at best so it can’t hurt you, it won’t harm, it can’t poke a hole in you. There’s no danger.

[0:29:31] Ashley James: It’s the size of a pencil so it doesn’t hurt.

[0:29:33] David DeHaas: Size of a pencil, yeah. Size of a pencil. Then you’re going to turn on the water and you have on there, our systems we use you have control if you want to turn it off but now that water comes in. In a session, about 45 minutes to an hour, you’ll have about 15 gallons of water that’s going to gently go in and go out. So it’s kind of a washing machine action if you will. So water is going to go in and the fecal matter is, anything that’s in there very hard, if you’ve got pockets of diverticula for example, that’s going to help dissolve that. Those can pop out of there. You’ll begin basically to create peristalsis. Most people, is listening, are constipated. Now, they may go once a day well the problem is, that’s not enough. If you eat, what’s that food doing? If you eat three times a day you should be pooping three times a day. If you’re eating twice a day you should be eating and evacuating. Most people do not and so what happens is because of stress, the colon gets distorted, twisted. The colon should be about three inches in diameter. It get as big as sixteen.

[0:30:36] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[0:30:37] David DeHaas: It can also become what we call spastic colon, which it can get down to maybe half-inch, inch. So now we’ve got a blockage especially if you’ve got hard stuff. We’ve had clients come in I mean regularly. This is a regular deal we’re doing. Have them go in once every three or four days, once a week, once every two weeks. I’ve had a client that came in here, once a month. I mean that’s just shocking to me. How do you go once a month?

[0:31:07] Ashley James: Wait a second. They only pooped once a month?

[0:31:11] David DeHaas: Once a month.

[0:31:12] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That’s really dangerous.

[0:31:16] David DeHaas: Especially in women, a lot of women got taught that you shouldn’t fart, you shouldn’t have anybody smells. So they will hold on. When you do that holding on, which is what I used to do that’s what created my constipation I think, part of it. Now you’ve taught that colon to constrict and you get constriction in your colon. Some people are embarrassed to go poop in public. I’ve known schools where teachers go, “No, you can’t use a bathroom until we go to recess. You got to wait until you go to lunchtime.” Of course lunchtime where they give you 15 minutes to quickly eat, go out to recess and get back and sit in the seat. So, you don’t have time to properly go evacuate. So we create this from 3our children the taboo of not going in public, not going using a public restroom. I know many people I’ve interviewed that said, “I’m embarrassed to go poop at work or when I was going to school.” That’s usually when it starts. A lot of people for severe constipation started sometime as a young child or maybe in their teen years or a lot of people in their college years when they had some emotional traumatic event happening. Maybe it was a bad deal with a boyfriend or a lot of stress in the classes at college.

It’s pretty amazing to see people get on the colonic bed. What that’s going to do, that whooshing action is going to re-get that muscle start to push back and recreate peristalsis. First, you got to clean out that 12 to 15 pounds. The average person on a 10-day cleanse loses about 12 pounds, the average.

[0:32:48] Ashley James: That weight loss, you’re not saying is fat. You’re saying it’s caked in fecal matter that is toxic and fermenting and decomposing inside of them causing toxic buildup.

[0:33:01] David DeHaas: Right. So think about the neurons. You have more neurons in your gut than your spinal column. Neurons are like little cellphones. What would happen, Ashley, if you cover up your cellphone with poop? Would you be able to get a call? Well, no. So, in your gut these neurons aren’t firing and wiring the nerves. So, if those nerves aren’t firing and wiring, you’re going to have an issue in your body. So it’s triggered by there. Give you an example, I referee a lot. I had what I thought was a groin pull. My left leg hurt. Now if you look on an iridology chart, the connection to the groin is just on the, if you feeling your left side of your body down low on the left by your leg, that’s the connection in the colon to the groin. So I think like, “Dang it. I can’t referee this week and I got nine games coming up. This kind of bummer.” I had to lift my leg in and out of bed. It really hurts. So I thought, “You know what, I’m going to do a colonic.” I did a colonic. I got it done and I went home and thought, “Wow, 85% of my pain is gone. I think I could referee.” So I went out two days later and I refereed. I refereed nine games. I was like, “Wow. That’s amazing.”

I had a hip pointer same thing. Those aren’t very sore. I was refereeing one night then, “Oh gosh, I can’t run anymore.” Same thing. Came to the office late at night, did a colonic, pain next day was gone. So it’s amazing to see the connections. I’ll give you another example. I had a contractor. Been swinging a hammer with his left arm and shoulder for 40 years. Now he couldn’t do it. So for four months he went away and he did parasite cleansing, which is great. He did some chelation therapy. That’s all fine, but the problem was he had an issue in his colon. I said, “Look, until you clean this out, it’s not going to get better.” He says, “Well.” He’s just so embarrassed to come in. He’s just so embarrassed. So he didn’t want his friends to find out. So I talked into doing three colonics. Did three colonics and says, “Oh, I get it. I’m feeling starting to feel better.” Five days later, he walked in the office and he could swing his shoulder and swing a hammer again.

[0:35:07] Ashley James: I love it. That’s really interesting that there’s this connection between the colon health and the health of the rest of the musculature and the nervous system.

[0:35:19] David DeHaas: We’ll watch face color change as we’re going around that. We take 10 days to do our 10-day wellness retreat. Each day they’re getting deeper and deeper and deeper. We’ll literally watch the color on the face change like the sun coming up in the morning. We’ll see it go all the way around the face. It’s pretty amazing.

[0:35:36] Ashley James: Wow.

[0:35:37] David DeHaas: So a little bit more about digestive. So people don’t realize this, but in your small intestine, well first of all most people don’t chew well enough, right? That’s where everything starts. Your mouth should be your blender. I got a little ditty. I say, “No. The thing you got to do is chew, chew, chew because it’s the right thing to do. Chew, chew, chew cause it’s right thing to do.” Make your mouth be your blender. Masticate that food, the saliva comes up. Now starting to the digest. Enzymes are being created down below. The pancreas is getting fired up saying, “Hey, I got some stuff coming my way.” The gut acids are starting to be produced. Now, when the gut or the stomach receives, it’s starting to do its thing.

People who have acid reflux, for example. What do the doctors give them? Stuff just to decrease acids. You want more acids. You want those digestive acids, juices to help break down the food and then flow into the duodenum and then to the small intestine. Once it gets in the small intestine, now we got the food. What happens, it breaks down further. The gallbladder, if you still had your gallbladder, has squeezed out some bile to break down fats. Things are breaking down. Now you have about the surface area the size of a tennis court of what I call shag carpet.

So shag carpet is what is called a villi. Villi is what absorbs the vitamins and minerals that have been broken down from the food you eat, into the bloodstream to go the cells. Because at the end of the day, what we got to heal? We got to heal the cells. Let’s heal the cells. But the highways to get there, the small intestine, the colon and the blood, the blood if you’re getting stuff dropping into the blood that shouldn’t be there, well you’ve got a problem in your intestinal on tract. They call that leaky get, in other words the junctures between those shag carpets, the villi, gets really big and now stuff drops in there and the body says, “What the heck? This is bad,” and attacks. Now you get a label called leaky gut or I’ve got food allergies or food sensitivities or I’ve got lupus or fibromyalgia. No. What you’ve got, you got a very toxic body.

Let’s reduce those toxins. Let’s clean up the blood. Who cleans up the blood? The liver, but the poor liver, the poor thing, it’s like the furnace filter. If you never change your furnace filter in your home pretty soon that furnace is going to blow up because there’s no airflow. If you don’t change the oil filter in your car, guess what, eventually the car’s going to break down. So that liver does about 2,000 different transactions and one of us cleaning up the blood. So people now are changing, “Well, I got a thyroid issue. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, my hormones are out of balance.” Yeah. They are because your blood is dirty. The poor old liver can’t do everything it needs to do.

So pretty soon you’ve got, and I see this in young kids today, teenager, young adults. I’ve got fatty liver. Well, a fatty liver is a toxic liver. In other words, your body is really toxic. Pretty soon the liver says, “Well, geez, I’m full. Let’s see, what else I can do here. Oh, I know. I’ll create fat. I’m going to create some fat stores.” Now people are gaining fat. They’re going like, “Oh my gosh, I need to go into weight loss. Maybe I’ll do this diet or that diet.” Maybe they’ll lose some weight and they gain it back. They go, “Why am I gaining my weight back?” I tell you why, you’re toxic. I’ve seen people with gastric bypass. Oh my gosh. They come in here they go, “Yeah. I did well. I lost 180 pounds, but now I’ve gained back 30.” I’m looking at them with their dark circles under their eyes and their skin is very patchy and greyish. I’d be like, “Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me at all. You’re really, really toxic. We got to drop the toxic load. You’re never going to be able to keep off fat.”

So, I always say first order protocol, the amount of heavy metals and pesticides and all these parasites pooping and peeing in you all this toxicity, let’s clean out that. Let’s clean that stuff out. You’ll feel better. You’ll have more energy. Your joints won’t hurt. It’s just going to change. I remember when I first cut to do my first one, I walked onto the court, played basketball. The thing that hit me was like, “Oh my God I didn’t have to stretch out for 45 minutes.” I didn’t have to jog for a while. I just went out and played. When I got done I had no body odor. I went, “Whoa, no body odor. Wow. That’s amazing.” So, yeah. Getting this deep tissue cleansing is the best amazing gift. The coolest thing is, because I see people come in here all the time and they’ve got arthritis.

So let’s just take Megan. This a great case. Megan came in, 32 years of age, about a year ago. Deep dark circles under her eyes. Had two kids, basketball player in college, amazing athlete, but now, all of a sudden, she started getting fatigued and not feeling well. Gets married and has two kids, she’s teaching school and she could just barely get through the day. Her dad’s a physician. He tried everything. They put her on Adderall at one time to give her energy. Of course, they gave her the diagnosis, “It’s all in your head. You’re depressed.” Well, heck yeah she’s depressed. No one can figure out what’s going on. She tried all kinds of different things. I mean long list. I walked in, I looked at her. Of course I knew right away. She filled out her intake form. I looked at it. Of course the first question we ask is, “How do you poop? What’s it look like? What’s the smell like? What shape is it in? Is it diarrhea-type? Is it fluffy-like? Is it little rabbit pellets?” So, she of course explained that to me. I go, “Yeah. No one’s ever ask you how you poop before have they?” All these years she goes, “No.” I say, “Yeah. Basically Megan, you’re full of poop and you need to do some cleansing.”

So she did. Everyone wants to stick their toe in the water and say, “Okay. I’m kind of nervous. Should I do this?” Then they go and they do their first colonic. They come down and go, “Okay. It feels a little better.” They do a couple more. She did our 10-day protocol a year ago. Oh my gosh. She went from pooping once every 3 to 4 days to pooping daily. Dark circles went away. We then nicknamed her Miss Sparkle. Her mother and father looked and went, “Whoa. What happened to you?” Kids had their mom back. She’s able to get through the day easier. I mean before, she told me when she went to the zoo with her kids for a day she’d have to sleep for three days. At age 32. There’s lots and lots of people like Megan. So if you’re like Megan listen to this. You got to find a colon hydrotherapist. You got to do some deep tissue cleansing and not just one or two. You need to do more than one or two. When you’re constipated, I tell people that you’re going to have to do 7 to 10 immediately and then it’s going to take a while to rebuild that muscle and get that back. You’re going to get it back. Everyone’s different. I don’t know how long it’s going to take you. But I can tell you this, I did a bunch of colonics early on and then we figured out this whole 10-day process. I have now done 500 colonics. Someone say, “David, why have you done 500 colonics?” Because I keep feeling better and better. I’m 62 years of age and I’m doing stuff I couldn’t do when I was 30.

[0:42:16] Ashley James: I love it.

[0:42:17] David DeHaas: Four years ago I refereed 55 basketball games in the span of three weeks, 21 days. I figured I ran about 15 plus miles a day and went skiing on Sunday”. I thought, “Oh my gosh. That is such amazing that at 58 I could do that.” I know. I’m like this old miracle. I’ve done a lot of research of course throughout the years. I’ve met people who’ve been in the industry a long time. We all get reinfected of course with the ball of pollution we have. You’re going to get reinfected, it’s just life. So, think about it, the Essenes were saying 2,000 years ago, “Let’s cleanse.” I say to you today, if you want to be well, your first protocol, bowel management. What’s the bowels look like? How do you poop? Let’s get that well first? Because what if it does work? It’s so cheap. It’s so inexpensive compared to everything else. I mean everyone comes in here they spent, like I did I spent lots and lots of money, hundreds and thousands of dollars to try to figure out how to get well. You can do some colonics for very, very inexpensive. Average cost of colonic across the country is probably around $100-$125.

[0:43:23] Ashley James: It’s a lot cheaper than getting on medications and needing a surgery and being depressed and sick.

[0:43:30] David DeHaas: Oh my gosh. I had a gal come in here. Oh my god. This is a cool story too. So she came in on a Monday. I showed her around. She says, “Okay, I want to do your 10-day wellness retreat.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “But I got seven doctor’s appointments this week.” I said, “Okay.” She says, “Can we work around this?” I said, “Well, are they really necessary?” She says, “Well, they’re all checkups.” I say, “Well, your choice but if it was me, I’d probably hold off. I mean, that’s about 14 hours of your time. Wait 10 days. Let’s see what happens.” She says, “Okay. I’m in.” So she jumps in, 10 days later different lady. Didn’t have to go to the doctors, which doctors don’t want to hear that.

I always say to people, “Look, this might not be a totally a 100% fix, but if we get your gut clean, if we get the body functioning, you’re able to absorb the nutrition then you’re going to be able to change. If you go to your Naturopath or whatever, you’re going to give absorb those nutrients. The amount of money you spend is going to be a lot less and you’re going to make your Naturopath, your homeopath look like a champ because you’re getting absorbed. Chiropractors, same thing. I got some chiropractors in town who know what we do. They’ll talk to their clients, they’ll find out, “Oh yeah, the adjustments aren’t working, right?” He says, “Hey, well how often do you go poop?” They’ll tell them, “Oh you got to go see the poop guy,” which is me. Dr. Rosie calls me Dr. Pooper, the poop daddy, yeah.

[0:45:00] Ashley James: That is so funny.

[0:45:01] David DeHaas: Anyway, so we get them in here. Then they go back to her or their chiropractor and guess what, the adjustments work because neurons are firing and wiring. You got to get things firing and wiring. If you’ve got toxic gut, it’s not going to fire and wire properly. We got to get that clean, get the gut clean.

Lymphatic fluid. How many people that you’ve interviewed have talked about breast cancer? People don’t understand that lymphatic, taking out lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are not an accessory. They are a very important part of your anatomy. So think about lymphatic. To paint a picture, you’ve got about 800 lymph nodes in your body. What it does is it basically, think of it kind of as a fancy sponge with a kind of suction tubes and there’s these little nodes. They’re kind of a one-way flusher. Then what they do is they pick up the intestinal fluids from around the capillaries of your body. It sweeps it up and it takes it up and it dumps it in your vein. Now, for it to get there there’s no pump. The pump is us jumping up and down and running and moving. Most of us don’t do that enough.

So, we have a machine, we have a vibration machine. We put people on and help move that lymphatic fluid. Most people get done they start itching. I go, “Yup, that’s a sign. Your bucket’s full. Your toxic bucket’s really full.” So now that dumps that fluid, 45 pints. Now you got 10 pints of blood, so put that into perspective. The blood’s got to pump, it’s got the heart. Lymphatic doesn’t have that luxury. So we got to be moving. Most of us don’t move. So it’ll be a mini-tramp, these vibration plates like what we sell here and use here, awesome. Two minutes on that is like one hour of work. So, they’re great. So we put them on there, we’re moving that, we’re getting that lymphatic fluid cleared out, it’s dumping into the blood, poor liver’s getting hit with more toxic soup, but as we do that those lymph nodes are not going to get stagnant.

We had a guy come in and he had, I mean, really a lot of blockage and his lymph nodes under his left arm. So we put on that vibration plate and had him basically wipe his hand across his armpit and in five minutes he had stuff moved out of there. Of course you need to do some liver cleansing. So, that’s the other part of what is really important to be doing but you can’t do liver cleansing until you’ve done colon cleansing. Because if you’re doing coffee enemas for example which, is pretty popular today, what that does, coffee enemas basically help you stimulate the liver to kick out bile, which is great but if your colon, small intestine’s toxic, guess what, the liver says, “Oh my god. There’s some toxic stuff down there in the colon. I better reabsorb that.” Now you could get sick.

[0:47:29] Ashley James: Let’s break that down though. I think you’ve hit so many important points and you spoke so quickly. Those that have never heard this before may not have fully gotten the lesson. The liver removes toxins from the body. Actually, we’ve had a few guests discuss this in detail, but there’s a really interesting system where it’s almost like part of the immune system that tags, like attach a tag to a toxic chemical to be removed from the body like pesticides and also even hormones. When women are finished with estrogen, the liver converts it into a non-active form of estrogen to get rid of it. Too much of that though can become a toxic level of estrogen and have estrogen dominance. So we have hormones that the liver has to get rid of. We have metabolites the liver has to get rid of. Then we have all of the 80,000 chemicals in our food, water and air plus the artificial crap that’s in our food today the liver needs to get rid of it.

So the liver is getting rid of healthy, though doing healthy functions, but then also all the unhealthy stuff that’s in our diet the body tags it, the liver detects it, the liver pulls it out of the blood, puts it in the bile to then be released into the small intestine and to hopefully exit the body quickly through our poop. But if we’re constipated, meaning if we are not pooping three times a day, we’re constipated. If the poop slows down then it gets reabsorbed because bile is a very costly thing for the body to make. So the body is really smart, it will reabsorb as much bile as it can. The problem is that when we were invented, when God invented us or however we arrived here, there weren’t all these chemicals so it was safe for our body to reabsorb some bile. Now, there’s obesogens and Bisphenol A and microplastics. All of these horrible chemicals, 80,000 plus chemicals in our environment and in our food and water, that the colon cannot tell the difference between healthy bile that it’s allowed to reabsorb and bile that actually has attached into it these toxins.

So by having a slower poop basically, having slower bowel movements, we are now reabsorbing these toxins. If we are really constipated as women, we can reabsorb toxic form of estrogen that it gets reactivated and it’s an unhealthy form. So there’s a lot of bad stuff that can go on by the bowel not moving healthfully enough. So we’re obviously, most people are not eating enough fiber, that’s one thing. Most people are chronically dehydrated, that’s another. But then you’re saying most people don’t have a really great diet, most people don’t have a great microbiome, a healthy microbiome, most people have dysbiosis of some way like bacteria, parasites, fungus, yeast. They’ve got some kind of overgrowth, some kind of imbalance. If you’ve gone on antibiotics you likely don’t have a healthy gut biome, unless you really, really, really worked at building a healthy gut biome. So we have that going against us, then they have years and years of eating highly processed crap food, the standard American crap diet like dairy and meat, will rot in the intestines especially if they have constipation on top of that.

So, we have toxic foods. We have toxins getting reabsorbed into the body. We have gut dysbiosis. Now, the colon itself, the muscles have been overstretched, like you said, don’t have tonicity. So now physically we have a problem plus all of the nerves that are around the gut and 70% of the immune system that surrounds the gut that has now been compromised. The microvilli that you mention or the finger-like projections like a shag carpet that help absorb nutrients are not functioning because they’ve been whittled down. Also the small gaps in between them, those junctions in between them, have been compromised. So now there’s leaky guts. We are absorbing partially digested particles, which the immune system is reacting to creating these illnesses like you mention, creating the immune system to overreact to foods and create allergies.

I know many people that heal their seasonal allergies after changing their diet and cleansing. So, all of these things domino. Changing one thing may not make a huge difference like, “Oh, I ate more fiber,” or “I drink more water.” You’ll notice actually people do notice some positive results, but it’s really this is accumulation of a lifetime of toxic colon that has just tipped over. Now the person is in pain and stiff and feels like they’re 90 when they’re 30 and is fatigued and just downing the Starbucks every day because they have to just get through the day. They don’t know what’s wrong with them and they go to their doctor, which MDs have almost zero training in nutrition. They have something like five hours of training. They don’t have the tools to teach you what to do. They never ask you how your poop is unless they want to give you a drug. Meanwhile, this is the beginning of health. The beginning, the root cause, the beginning of health is in the gut. So I love that you’re painting this picture that it all starts here, but it also all dominoes here.

So we have to look at all of those factors. If you have had a lifetime of this, then changing everything but not doing colon hydrotherapy is really you’re missing a big key. You’re missing a big component of healing if you still have a toxic colon. So that’s why I think this so important because for some people, it is the last missing key that puts everything back in place.

[0:54:16] David DeHaas: Yeah. The picture I always paint is imagine if you left food in your refrigerator that got moldy and rotted for maybe two or three months or two or three years or how about twenty years or thirty years, right? You can’t just throw a probiotic in there or fresh food and expect it to change. I mean, “I’m taking probiotics.” That’s great, but the problem is, I mean, it’s not going to help much because you’re so toxic. Well, we got to clean out the refrigerator. You mentioned some good points. Most people are dehydrated. I was one of those. Makes a huge difference. Give you another great example of a story. A lady came to see us 84 years of age. Her poop problem started when she was in her 20s. In between children, she had her gallbladder out. Next child she had her appendix out. They did a hernia. So hernias, appendix, tonsils the trifecta there says to me you are constipated and of course she was. I remember after her second colonic she called me and she says, “Oh my gosh.” So she just got done cleansing, right? But she went home and she had to poop. She says, “David, that’s shocking.” Because she goes once every four or five days. All she could do all day long is just sit in a chair. She said, “I can get up make breakfast, the rest of the day I’m just sitting there.” When she was done she goes, “You know what, I’m 84, I’m going to go back taking up painting. I’m going to start doing some fun stuff.”

It’s funny too, I get people come in and they go and they’re kind of hunched over and they’re shuffling and their joints hurt and they’ll tell me, “Well, I really don’t have anything wrong.” They got arthritis, they got brain fog. I look at them I go like, “Oh man, you’re only living part of your life.” I mean they say, “I’m normal.” What’s normal? Jack LaLanne, in my opinion, that’s the normal I want to be, right? I want to be able to pull a rowboat across the San Francisco Bay with my teeth at 72. I want to be still strutting around and working my buns off at 90 something years of age. I mean, that should be the normal. Dr. Jensen, he had people hired all around the world and interview and really research who’s living long and why are they living long. Of course he did truly determine, it was all because of nutrition value they were getting. Their teeth weren’t falling out because they were getting proper nutrition. We don’t get proper nutrition. We’re buying stuff in boxes and our stores are a 100,000 square feet when we basically need about 3,000 square feet for produce and a few meats. We’re eating out of the wrong kind of cookware. We’re eating out of the wrong type of containers. You should be drinking out of glass. You shouldn’t be drinking out of plastic. You need to throw away your Teflon pans, those non-stick pans are one of most toxic killers. I mean that stuff is just – when I got cleansed, when I got my body cleaned out, what’s really amazing, now here’s a guy I mean as a kid I raised hogs. I loved pork, I love bacon. Everyone loves bacon, right? So, what I noticed after getting clean is if I eat a food that’s bad for me, if I eat pork, I begin to sweat. If I eat out of a pan, if the food’s been cooked in Teflon, I break out in a sweat. I literally get a, I guess you might say a fever. My body or my teeth will hurt. My body will tell me, “Bingo. Dude, you just put something that they shouldn’t put in.”

When your teeth are well, they’re secreting a fluid. When they’re not well they’re taking it in. That’s why we get cavities. So, if your body is really at homeostasis it’s going to give you a sign. So, I don’t even go close to touching any of those foods anymore like I used to.

[0:58:24] Ashley James: I love that you brought up plastics. Don’t eat out of plastics or drink out of plastics. I interviewed a Naturopath that was, oh shoot. What’s one of the Beatles that’s still alive? Not Ringo, the other one. Paul McCartney.

[0:58:40] David DeHaas: Yeah, Paul McCartney.

[0:58:41] Ashley James: Paul McCartney’s wife and Paul McCartney were big vegan activists. She would travel with them and she would bring all of her own food with her. She ate a whole plant-based diet. So when she got breast cancer it was really curious. She was eating so healthy, why’d she got breast cancer? Well, unfortunately she came to this Naturopath and I interviewed him. It was really fascinating because he does a lot of work with cancer. I think he’s in Arizona. He’s a really old school. He’s been, I think, practicing for 40 years. He said, “Let’s test.” He figured it out. He actually figured it out. He goes, “Tell me about your routine for the last 50 years. Tell me about your routine. Paint the picture.” He figured out that she was bringing all of her own food. She’d cooked beautiful, beautiful vegan food and put it in Tupperware containers and bring it on tour and heat it all up in the microwave. Then eat her food heated up in plastic. Well, they tested her tumor. They found the exact, he said, “Bring me your Tupperware.” They tested the Tupperware and they tested her tumor. The plastic in her Tupperware was in her tumor. Unfortunately, she came to him too late to save her life, but they got to the root of it. Because there’s so much now we know, so much more now than back then that plastics are endocrine disrupters. The body does not know how to handle them. So, if the colon is backed up and the liver is backed up, the body really doesn’t know how to handle it and also can’t eliminate it. It gets built up and built up.

So, what happens is the body then puts it in our fat cells and stores it there and it disrupts our endocrine system. So it’s just so bad. We have to definitely be cautious. I keep saying this in the podcast. If you want to be a statistic, if you want to – one in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. That’s the truth in the United States and in all the industrialized countries, it’s very similar statistic. One in three people are diabetic or pre-diabetic, one in three people have obesity. The number one cause of death is heart disease. So, here we have these statistics. If you want to be a statistic, keep doing what everyone else is doing. Keep doing what the masses are doing. But if you want to beat the odds and not be a statistic, you have to be a salmon and swim upstream and be the oddball weirdo that doesn’t drink out of plastic, that doesn’t have Teflon that doesn’t do what everyone else is doing. I have right here beside me, you could hear this, this my mason jar. I drink my water out of a mason jar. I like drinking a lot of water.

[1:01:42] David DeHaas: Awesome.

[1:01:43] Ashley James: So, I got my mason jar here. We travel with all of our food in the glass version of Tupperware basically. My husband bought me as a gift because I told him I wanted it. So, a big purse that’s actually a thermos. You could get them at Bed Bath & Beyond. I cook all my food at home. We pack it up in these glass containers and bring our own. We don’t you do one-use plastics so we bring our own utensils. When we go out for the day, we bring snacks and bring healthy food with us. We just went to the zoo with our son the other day. We sat by the zebras and I had brown rice, steamed green beans, instant pot sweet potatoes. We just sat there and ate that. I think we had some fruit also. But you have to be kind of oddball. You have to be the black sheep. Yeah. Some people are going to think you’re weird or criticize you. You might lose some friends but those people weren’t going to support you in your health goals. You’ll find new friends and find a new community that are totally into wanting to be healthy.

I just got to this point where it’s like I rose above it. I’m like, “Yeah, this who I am. I’m that oddball health nut that won’t eat something that isn’t organic. You know what? Because my body notices the difference.” Because when I ate the standard American crap diet, I was so sick. I was in my 20s. I lost my 20s. I did not get to enjoy my 20s. I was so sick. I was a prisoner trapped in my body and I was incredibly ill. I’m in so much pain emotionally and physically from being sick. I had to really make some big changes. I’m still making changes. I’m still adjusting. I’m still growing. I’m still gaining health.

You’re never done with this. You’re never done learning to be healthy, but it does start with this mindset. I think that when you shift to this mindset of I’m going to do the opposite of what the masses is doing and look towards natural medicine, then going and sticking a tiny tube up your butt and washing your colon with water really isn’t that far-fetched.

[1:04:05] David DeHaas: Well, exactly. I was like everyone else. I was the addicted two Reese’s peanut butter cups, two Snickers bars, 5-6 Coca Cola’s a day, hardly drank water.

[1:04:21] Ashley James: Well, you only ate two Reese’s? Isn’t there three Reese’s in a package?

[1:04:24] David DeHaas: Well, back in the day it was two.

[1:04:26] Ashley James: Oh, okay. I was going to say what happened to the third one man? It’s three Reese’s for me.

[1:04:29] David DeHaas: I got gypped. Anyway, of course there’s Big Macs, fries, Burger King, Wendy’s. Yup, that’s all the fast-food. That was the life that I knew. I remember people telling me, “You need to drink more water.” Why do I need to drink more water, I’m drinking Coke, right? So, when things get bad enough you got to start making some changes. I always convey to people, look at it, whether you’re a meth addict, a heroin addict we’ve had smoking people coming here that’s been smoking for 40 years can’t quit. It’s all the chemicals. What happens now is your autonomic nervous system it goes like, “Yeah, we want those chemicals, David. You know what, we’re going to turn things on to make you go get those chemicals. We want that Snickers. We want that Reese’s. We want that dose of heroin. We want that cigarette.” It’s all the same. The addiction’s an addiction. It’s just that your body’s been conditioned to fire and wire based upon what the chemicals you’ve given it.

So, when we start detoxifying the body, I’ve had people smoked for 40 years and in three or four days they’re like, “You know I had no craving this morning to smoke, David,” or “My sugar, I tried to eat sugar and they didn’t taste so good,” after the fourth or fifth, sixth day when they’re in here. Sometimes the first day we were getting them organic soups and juices. In the first day, “Oh, I didn’t like that so much.” But day three or four they’re like, “Oh, that was really good. What was it?” I go, “Same food we had the first day.”

So, your autonomic nervous system, look at it, it’s telling you, “Dude, give me a cigarette.” You’re going like, “Well, I don’t want to.” Of course there’s people that will, “Just do mantras and look in the mirror and say I am smoker-free and I am going to run and blah blah.” Anyway, you can say that all you want to your brain. Your autonomic nervous saying, “Dude, it ain’t going to happen dude. We got you wired. We got you where we want you. Give us some sugar. Give us some smokers. Give us give us whatever.” So, the transformation, you know it’s a couple steps forward. Maybe it’s half a step back and you keep going forward, you keep doing more cleansing and the toxins start pouring out. Those skin issues you had, the can’t sleep at night, you got the frequent urination going on, you’re walking like an old man. All these things can be healed and changed but we’ve got to begin within. Chasing it with chemicals is not going to chase it long-term. So we’ve got to get this cleaned out well. When you do that, when you get the parasites out, you get the heavy metals start to flowing out. Now your hormones start humming a little better. You start getting, “Oh, I’m making some progress.”

So then, things begin to change. But yes, it’s a process. You got to begin someplace and begin doing it and just don’t stop, keep going.

[1:07:19] Ashley James: I have a fun, fun story. My experience with colon hydrotherapy, when I was a kid I was totally grossed out by it. My mom brought me to Dr. D’Adamo, the man who wrote the book Eat Right for Your Blood Type. He was our Naturopath when I was six, not his son. He’s passed away because he lived a ripe old age. His son now has continued on the legacy. So there’s Peter D’Adamo and James D’Adamo. So the father, the original D’Adamo, he was my Naturopath growing up. I went from being very sick to being incredibly healthy overnight. It was amazing. He looked at my eyes and my ears and took my blood. He said to me, “You are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat and sugar. Stay away from them.” I looked at him and I knew those were the ingredients of chocolate bars because my favorite chocolate bar was a Coffee Crisp, which isn’t sold here, it’s a Canadian chocolate bar, at age six. I said, “Well, when can I have a chocolate bar?” He said, “Once every blue moon.” I thought that meant once a month so I was pretty happy about that. Little did I know my life was totally going to change. We came home and she threw out everything in the pantry. We basically ate a more whole foods diet, switched to soy milk, really gross thick soy milk because there wasn’t really cool options like there are now. We went wheat-free. So, we didn’t eat much gluten because we were wheat-free. They didn’t know what gluten, gluten wasn’t a thing back in the 80s.

So we just ate a lot of real food: brown rice, legumes. We did have meat because he said O blood type should eat it and lots of vegetables and I took his supplements. Overnight I went from being sick all the time to not being sick once. If I caught a flu, it lasted 12 hours. If I’d get a fever, I go to sleep, I’d wake up I’d be fine. I even had German measles and it was kind of like a three-day cold. It wasn’t that big of a deal. I just sat around and watched some movies and then it was over. It was pretty interesting that my body was buzzing with health. Then I hit 13 and I rebelled. I stopped the supplements and I started eating all the cafeteria food at school. I totally rebelled against my mom and all her hippy woodoo, voodoo health stuff because she was totally into it. I spent my teenage years totally rebelling. I paid for it in my 20s and then I had to spend all my 30s up until now reclaiming my health. So, I’ve had the experience, it’s sort of like rags to riches to rags to riches again.

In that, in my childhood, my mom would go for colonics. She’d come home and tell me how amazing it was. I think she was a wackjob, crazy and thought that was the grossest thing in the world. Of course a 7-year-old or a 9-year-old or a 12-year old doesn’t want to hear that a doctor is putting a tube up their butt and water and all that stuff, but my mom would say, “You can see your poop and you can see what’s coming out of you. It’s so cool. There’s this little viewing tube and you could see stuff.” My mom totally thought it was the coolest thing. Her girl friend who’s Japanese saw a giant tapeworm because the water comes out slowly and there was this viewing tube. She saw a giant tapeworm as long as her intestines and she stopped eating sushi that day. I was just like, “Are you kidding me?”

Interesting that Dr. D’Adamo’s clinic when it was in Toronto, they would use an enzyme in the water from a cactus. Have you ever heard of this? It wasn’t just pure water, it was water plus an enzyme that they said would also help to break down the stuff that was kind of caked on. Have you heard of that?

[1:11:07] David DeHaas: No, I haven’t.

[1:11:08] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve talked to a lot of other colon hydrotherapist and no one’s ever heard about it. So, I was just really curious that they would do that in the water along with everything. So, my first experience was my mom basically telling me it’s cool. Of course I’m a kid so I think everything my mom tells me is not cool. That I had to come back around and realize how cool it actually was. I wish my mom was alive today and I could go back and tell her, “Oh my gosh, everything you said it was right.” It’s so funny. We come around. We come full circle and we realize our parents were right.

When I was really, really sick in my 20s I had some sessions of colon hydrotherapy. It felt as though I got some relief from it, but I hadn’t changed my diet, I hadn’t changed anything else so it wasn’t a permanent lasting change. I think I did about 10 sessions in my 20s. I got bought like a punch card with this woman, like a whole package and kept coming back every few weeks. Like I said, I didn’t change anything else. So, you can’t just do it and keep eating crap food and keep smoking and keep drinking alcohol and still think that it’s going to save your life. It’s really helpful but you have to also make the changes throughout your whole life.

Then back in 2011, I was probably at the peak of my, well almost at the peak of my sickness. I had gone organic. We had figured out to eat organic food, which stopped my constant chronic infections. I thought that was really neat that just by switching to organic, my body responded really quickly to that. I still had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was still type 2 diabetic. I still had chronic, chronic adrenal fatigue. I was exhausted all the time. I couldn’t lose weight. No matter what I did I was constantly dieting and constantly felt like I was a failure because I would fail every diet. What happened was I get really sick every time I lost weight. Well, I didn’t realize until years later my liver was so backed up that every time I lost weight my liver couldn’t process all the toxins being released from the fat. Then I would get very sick and I’d have an over toxic reaction.

Well, in 2011 I met a Naturopath who got me on supplements and told me to go gluten-free. He told me to eat more whole foods. Within days of doing that I started to drop pounds of water like just pounds of water came off of me from cutting out some bad foods. What’s really interesting is that I noticed that my body put off an odor and my stool put off an odor, a heavy, heavy burning rubber. Like if you ever smelled tires, like car tires that were burning. It was a stench so putrid and it was coming off of my breath, off of my body odor, but mostly out of my bowels. I was feeling really off. So I called this Naturopath and I told him what was going on and he said, “You need a colon hydrotherapy session now.” So I called up the one in Seattle. It’s called Tummy Temple. I called them up and I was their last appointment of the day and I went in and it was like amazing. It was amazing. So I had already, I changed my diet. I was on supplements. I was moving in a healthy direction but then adding the colon hydrotherapy was exactly what I needed. The funny thing is, you know it’s serendipity. The colon hydrotherapist, it turned out she used to be the neighbor of my Naturopath. They actually knew each other on Vashon Island. So, it was just really neat how it all came. It all kind of was confirmation. She’s like, “Yeah, who sent you?” Then I told her and then she goes, “Oh my gosh, we used to be neighbors. I’m friends with his wife”

So, I just thought that was interesting because he was in a different state so I didn’t think like, “Why would they know each other?” But that was confirmation. So I did about 10 sessions. In addition to the eating healthier way, in addition to supplements, in addition to everything I was doing, it was the final sort of key. I dropped 25 pounds in that month, between the water weight that I lost. My ring size went down one-and-a-half ring sizes so I know I lost water weight. My rings went flying off my hands. Six months later they were still flying off my hands so we got them resized and that was nine years ago and my rings still fit fine. So I really lost a ton of water weight kind of edema and inflammation. I know I also lost whatever was caked on in there in my gut.

My husband, his bowel movements for his whole life were between one poop every week sometimes two poops a week. I didn’t know that about him until we started working with Naturopaths because they asked. That’s something I didn’t know about him. Because it’s not like you follow your husband around and want to know like what he’s doing in the bathroom. I thought that was really crazy because for me at least I went every day. I knew I did but he was going like once a week. So he had some colon hydrotherapy sessions, which were great. What really helped him though was eating a gut-healing soup and I have the recipe on my website. It’s just a soup that is just filled with cabbage and beets and other gut-healing vegetables and we made into a puree. He drank it every day for one meal a day. So he still ate all the other food he ate but he just added it. So for one meal a day he had the soup. After seven days, and that was coming up on six years ago, he now goes three times a day.

[1:17:14] David DeHaas: Woohoo.

[1:17:15] Ashley James: I know. So, food can also heal the gut. The food could harm the gut and food can heal the gut. But colon hydrotherapy was we both used it at this moment in our life when we made the shift. We shifted our diet to eat heating healthy food. We shifted supplement. We shifted our lifestyle. We started drinking water instead of crap. Shifting everything and then adding colon hydrotherapy was like I don’t think we would have gotten the same results if we hadn’t added it, if that hadn’t been part of shift.

[1:17:49] David DeHaas: Speeds up everything, yeah. I’ve got a couple of chemo doctors who are patients that went through chemo and they’re sending people here to now detox and clean out the body afterward. So some people are going to choose that. Yeah. So, let’s get those chemicals out of the blood and out of the liver. That’s awesome though. I mean, what a big win. Actually, the dairy industry they’ve got a slogan, “Three a day, your yogurt your cheese and your milk. You got to have three a day,” which of course going to make you have asthma and plug up things. I’m thinking, “No, no.” We even have a shirt that says, “Three poops a day.” “Poop like a boss.”

[1:18:28] Ashley James: If a food has to market to you, don’t eat it. When they have to promote something to force you, there’s no commercials for broccoli or kale. The really good healthy foods, the advertising dollars come from an industry that wants to make sure you eat it. So, just don’t take your nutrient nutritional advice from marketing. You know what I mean? That’s just…

[1:18:59] David DeHaas: Exactly. Well, right now I mean, so people are on a celery stick right now, which is celery’s great but it’s got to be organic. If you eat non-organic celery you are just speeding up the amount of pesticides and chemicals in your body. You’re just getting a straighter shot of pesticides, really. So, yeah it’s going to make things, “Well, but I can’t afford it, David.” I say, “Well, you’re going to be spending some money here in the future.” “Oh, but I have insurance that covers it.” “Yeah, but you’re going to be sick and you’re going to die earlier.” So, choose how you pay, choose when you’re going to pay, but an investment now in good food and it’s not that much more. It’s really not that much more. I mean, I tell people. They’ll employ people I said, “Look.” I had a gal come in if I have to call her employer to tell him what she would be doing. She already missed two months of work. She had to cover one eye to be able to see the screen. She couldn’t squeeze her hand to hold the remote. I’m thinking, okay, he’s paying her $10 an hour. I go, “No, you’re not. You’re paying her about $60 an hour because she’s only working, you’re not getting a full day out of her. So I mean about 30% of your employees I mean they’re brain fog. The lack of critical thinking, the no energy to get things done. Everything that slows down and it’s costing the employers in this country. Billions of dollars just in lost time and wages because people are, “I got to get coffee and a doughnut so I can stay awake,” or “Oh, I’m sorry I missed that order. I couldn’t finish that sale because I wasn’t thinking clearly enough. Oh, I forgot to dot the Is there on that contract. Whoops.”

So, this goes deep. I mean, not being able to function and be cognitive is affecting a whole host of industry and businesses.

[1:20:52] Ashley James: But it’s profiting. It’s profiting some businesses and industries.

[1:20:55] David DeHaas: Well, the chemical industries love it, but if you’re an employer and you got people working for you, spend the money. Don’t spend it on insurance. Spend it on getting your body detoxed and cleansed and some nutrition in people. Rip out those Coca-Cola and Pepsi machines. Rip out the microwave, throw that away and let’s get whole food in the gut. Let’s get the gut well.

[1:21:20] Ashley James: Yeah. I had the CEO of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition on my show recently.

[1:21:24] David DeHaas: Yeah, I listened to that.

[1:21:25] Ashley James: You did? Yeah. They have free avocados.

[1:21:27] David DeHaas: I got bowls of avocados. Yeah. Avocados. I was going like, “Awesome.”

[1:21:32] Ashley James: Right, because if someone owns a business and they have employees, “They’re thinking, man free avocados. That’s going to add up. But if you have your employee eating healthy fats, healthy whole foods, that’s a healthy snack instead of some kind of packaged food with MSG that’s going to jack up their brain. The quality of their work is going to be better if they’re eating healthy. That just makes sense. I mean, to paint the picture of the contrast between my life now, the quality of my life now and the quality of my life five years ago, I was on a health kick five years ago. I’ve been on a health kick since 2008. I’ve been desperately seeking health actively, daily every minute of my life and every moment of my life since 2008. The contrast, even five years ago to now, I wake up and my brain is on. I am jumping out of bed. I am effortlessly going to the gym. I was just thinking that this morning in the gym when I was doing cardio, I’m like, “This is effortless. I could not do this five years ago. The feeling of ease in my body and my brain and my brain’s ability to be here with me. Even at night, it’ll be 7:00 at night now. I won’t want to wind down, although I know it’s healthy, I know I should be winding down. I still have my full cognitive ability to be here and to keep going if I needed it.

I thought that was really cool because five years ago, I even then felt really strained in the morning. Brain fog would happen. I’d have to really push myself to motivate myself or I’d need a substance like some kind of beverage to get me going. I don’t have that anymore. That makes a huge difference in the quality of a worker, right? In both respects, I was still on my health path. I was still doing healthy things, but the changes I’ve made in the last few years have made it so that I am like always on. So I’m just thinking, imagine if all of the employees out there were at their 100% capacity? How much more profitable would an employer be? So it really is in the best interest of an employer to invest in the health and the environment, the health of the environment and the health of the individual employee. That makes total sense. What would you say? You think employers should pay for their employees to come do your 10-day detox?

[1:24:15] David DeHaas: Yeah, definitely. If you think about, every business has got their ROI, the return on investment, right?” If you’re missing out on sales. You’re missing on getting things done properly in your business that money is leaking. It’s seeping out of your business. I see it all the time. I’ll give you a great couple of other stories. This gal was about 21 years of age. College wasn’t great for her. She had a hard time with college. So, she was working here part-time and working someplace else. She’d come in here. She’s always smiling happy. Her church sent her on a mission. I’m thinking, “Oh, man. She’s going to go to Boston Massachusetts.” Yeah, go away from home. There’s going to be stress. She’s kind of in that sick not sick state. I told her, “So McKenzie, we’re going to give you a 10-day cleanse.” She was so excited.

So, before they go on this mission I guess they have a talk at the church. She was like, “Oh my gosh. I never talk. I escape talking. I don’t want to be in front of the public.” Now she’s got to go on a mission she’s going to be talking to a lot of people. So, she does her cleanse and during this cleanse, she had to give her talk. On day eight, she’d just done her liver cleanse. She comes in, of course her skin’s looking brilliant. She comes in the door and she’s smiling. I go, “McKenzie, how’d it go?” She goes, “Oh my gosh, it was amazing.” I said, “Well, tell me about it.” She says, “People come up to me after. I talked.” Then they say, “Oh my gosh. McKenzie, where have you been? That was an amazing speech. That was incredible. We’ve never heard you speak like that ever.” She goes, “You know what, David?” I go, “What?” She goes, “I can’t think.” I went a couple of weeks later and she had to speak again. I listened to this and she like knocked it out of the park. The missionaries that have been away for a year or two years, some of them came back. They’ve been out two years. They came back, they talked. She nailed it. I mean, here’s a gal who struggled with school.

So, if you got kids out there struggling with school, you might want to give him some colonics, you might want to start thinking about, “I need to detox and cleanse to get those neurons.” Because brain, let’s talk about brain. Where does the brain connect? Transverse colon. If you got headaches, migraines, brain fog, bipolar all the transverse colon. Our colon hydrotherapist Chandra, she came to us in 2013 and she had been having migraines once a month for 12 years since 9/11/2001, interestingly enough. This put her out for about a week. For a week. 144, and my wife looks at her and says, “Oh yeah, you got parasites.” My wife’s amazingly intuitive. She goes, “I do?” She says, “Yep.” So she does the 10-day process. Guess what, it’s been six years, no migraines.

[1:27:10] Ashley James: Love it.

[1:27:11] David DeHaas: I know. I mean, it’s just firing and wiring neurons to nerves. Let’s detoxify the body. If you’re not pooping like we’ve talked about, three times a day. If you eat and you don’t poop, you’ve got a problem. So, let’s poop. Poop well.

[1:27:28] Ashley James: Okay. Well, this idea of parasites being in the biofilm of the gut. The biofilm is like this film that coats the gut. When we have a colon hydrotherapy session we’re washing the colon. Do we lose good bacteria? Does it wipe out the microbiome that’s housing the good bacteria? How does it get rid of the bad stuff but not get rid of the good stuff?

[1:28:01] David DeHaas: Great question. Okay. I’m getting back to my refrigerator analogy. If you’ve got old rotting gunky stuff in your trunk, in your colon guess what, your microbiome is already destroyed. If you’ve had antibiotics, your microbiome has been destroyed. We’ve got to clean it out and re-establish. So, you’re not going to get out all the bacteria. I mean, this colon hydrotherapy session is going to go into your colon. It will not going to go into your small intestine, but once we get the colon working right, guess what’s pulling it’s creating peristalsis and then stuffs coming out of your small intestine. We’re doing some other things up top to push things through. Once you start cleaning that out and getting that well and you give it a way to move, then you can put again like putting fresh fruit in the refrigerator that’s been cleaned, there’s no molding anymore. Then that microbiome is going to be reestablished. Look at it, my feet were totally black. I had fungus, severe Candida `yeast and I was able to use cleansing to reestablishment. I had psoriasis. My arms, it blew up. Oh my gosh, it was so horrible.

Let’s think about what happened to old David? Well, when I was young kid my mother says, “Oh, I think I should have the kids. I think I should take them to the dentist. I think I’ll go take him to Dr. so-and-so, okay.” So, of course he was one of those that was the drill fill-in bill and next thing you know I’ve got a cavity. Every time I went to him I had a new cavity. I got what in my mouth? I got mercury? Then later, “Let’s put a gold filling in there, David, that’ll be better.” No. So mercury, and I met Dr. Hal Huggins in 2004, I had 13 amalgam fillings and a root canal. I got them all removed at once. Had to go out of the country to do it up to Toronto. He supervised it. But what was amazing is that when you have mercury leaking yeast Candida is there to protect your body from mercury from converting to methyl mercury, which is far worse. So, of course I had yeast Candida, which means I’m craving carbohydrates. So if you’re craving carbohydrates and you’ve had mercury in your body and by the way, there’s so many sources of mercury. If you’ve had them out and you didn’t have them out properly and even if you did, there’s still mercury in your tissues of your body.

So it’s a process of continuing to cleanse out the body and using chelators and herbs and things to help pull those out the whole time. But again, if the pathway is blocked things aren’t sailing out like they should be. But I got those mercury fillings out and I went to Huggins the next day and I say, “Oh my god. Doc, I dreamt last night. I saw movies in full cinematic color. It was like freaking awesome.” I used to have frequent urination at night. I’d go to the bathroom seven-eight times a night, which means I wasn’t really sleeping. That went away. That went away.

[1:31:04] Ashley James: Interesting.

[1:31:05] David DeHaas: I know. Of course, most people had antibiotics. What do antibiotics do? They destroy everything. So you’ve had your antibiotics, I just had a customer here to cleanse, he had tons of antibiotics every day for a long time. It’s amazing. So, antibiotics are destroying your microbiome. So most people have probably already destroyed it, but we got to clean everything out and let’s reestablish it. You can do that pretty quickly through nutrition supplements and through foods and so forth, but until you get the old gunk out and get that those heavy metals out, it’s a tough go.

[1:31:43] Ashley James: So you, for example, have been doing cleansing for a long time so you don’t have this rotting gunk for 20 years in you. So when you get a colon hydrotherapy session, does that wipe out your good bacteria? How does that work? How do you maintain a really healthy bacterial colony, a diverse bacterial colony in your gut and use colon hydrotherapy on a regular basis?

[1:32:08] David DeHaas: Yeah, good question. So there’s a couple of ways we do that. So we do that with what we call reforestation with proper nutrition. We can do it also with foods, but again, if you’ve got old stuff sitting in there and every once in a while, David will go off and maybe eat some things he probably shouldn’t be, maybe travel, a little stress. So, I come do a colonic and oh my gosh, it feels so much better. So yes, through prebiotics, probiotics, foods, sauerkraut, kimchi. All those things going to help reestablish. You got to work here with your Naturopath or your chiropractor who’s versed in this and your colon hydrotherapist of course.

So, on our 10-day protocol when we people come here and spend 10 days with us, they’ve got about 50 hours of being in our office because we’re doing a lot of education. We’re giving you lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of education. In fact, one gal speaks to me. “Oh my god.” She goes, I would have gone to how many umpteen seminars to even get close to all and spend how much money but I’ve gotten these last 10 days.” So we were to give you a lot of education so you really understand what’s going on so when you leave you really understand how your body works, why you want to be eating those foods. Again, you get rid of the chemicals, now you’re not craving the things you used to crave. We teach you how to muscle test so when you go to the store, hey, people call me “Well, David, should I take this?” I go, “You know what, what’s your body say?” Your body knows. So we teach them how to muscle test so they can go to the store. People always laugh. I always see people looking at me when I’m muscle testing for something. But they do it. They’ll pick up an apple or an orange or they’ll pick up some food in a box and it goes, my body want this, is this safe for my body? They go, “Oops, no. Well, maybe not have that.”

[1:33:55] Ashley James: I love it. It’s so funny. Yeah, kinesiology is really interesting. There’s this gluten-free market. I don’t go there often but once I a while my son wants something processed that’s gluten-free. So we go there for some certain, there’s this vegan bread that’s gluten-free or whatever. So once in a while a treat for him. I was in there looking at some new stuff they had. This woman was poring over these different brands of bread. She’s like, “I don’t know.” She goes, “I normally don’t eat bread. I just really want to try one. I don’t know which one’s going to help me or which one’s going to harm me.” I said, “Have you muscle tested? The guy who works there looked at me like I had two heads. He was horrified. He was just silently horrified I could tell. Somewhere along my life I gave up that embarrassment should bother me. I’m going to be myself no matter what. I can’t control other people or what they think of me. So, I I’m just okay with that. I’m not going to let embarrassment stop me from helping someone.

So she put her stuff down and I showed her. I said, “Have you ever muscle tested?” She didn’t, had never heard of it before. I said, “Put your arm out.” I did the experiment. It’s like think about something you really, really don’t like and just hold your arm, try to keep her arm up. I just push on her arm like with four ounces of pressure. She can’t even keep her arm up. She was like, “What.” I said “I just take two fingers and just push on her arm.” I said, “Okay, now think about someone you love, think about love.” I pushed down on her arm as hard as I could and it wouldn’t budge, I couldn’t move it. I said, “Okay. So now, close your eyes so you don’t know which package I’m giving you. So like your conscious mind can in your fear and just hold it into your energy field and then hold your arm up.” So just with two fingers I’m just gently pushing on her arm. We tested all three and there was clearly one was a very strong. She could keep her arm up. I said, “Okay. This is the one.” She felt it. She could feel. When she really got quiet and felt her energy and felt her body and felt the tension or the relaxation in her body when she held that item, she could feel that there was strength or that there was a weakness that would overtake her depending on which package she was holding. So she thanked me and got that package.

I thought that was really neat that we can use this when we kind of come to a crossroads. Obviously we should use our cognition, read the label. That’s my first step is use my conscious recognition of ingredients. If I don’t recognize, if an ingredient looks suspicious, I don’t need to eat that. If I read it and there’s tons of ingredients in it that aren’t really meant for human consumption, I don’t need that. If it comes to whether I should have an apple or banana, not a banana because I’m allergic to bananas, but whatever an apple or an orange then yeah it can be fun to do muscle testing to choose as one of the tools in our tool belt. I think the most important thing is that we start listening to our own intuition and use muscle testing as sort of like after we’ve checked in with our intuition, after we’ve checked with our conscious mind let’s just check with our neurology and see what our neurology is saying about this item as a third check. So I think that’s really cool that you teach that.

Can you walk us through and pretend like we are coming to your clinic for a 10-day detox and wellness retreat in Boise, Idaho. Beautiful Boise, right? Tell us what it looks like. So do we stay at a hotel? What do we eat? Just tell us the whole thing like we’re preparing to come to your clinic.

[1:37:51] David DeHaas: Sure. So prior to arriving, you’re going to get a book and some videos you’re going to watch. You’re going to get about three and a half hours of just understanding some basic things that you need to be aware of before you come in. The power of the mind, what you eat the supplements you’re going to take and so forth. We give you all the supplements that you need for this cleanse. So everything is inclusive. Then when you come in, so the first morning you come in you probably go back and grab a juice, organic juice. If you’re coming in midday you might decide to have some organic soup. Then you’ll go off and you’ll meet with my lovely wife Wendy, who is an amazing intuitive healer. We have a pulse frequency machine that is called the on-demand. I don’t know if you’re aware of it but we use it and we start muscle testing right away. We want to get the body back to balance. So it’s using pulsed frequency to help, as I say, clear the blockages so that the energy grid in your body is now unblocked so that the power lines are running true.

[1:38:51] Ashley James: Is this machine, you put it on the wrists and on the head?

[1:38:57] David DeHaas: No. Well, there’s a couple of devices. You can put it a couple different ways, but basically there’s one that goes around your neck, there’s one you can hold and there’s one that goes around your belly or your knee or wherever you’re working on. So, you’ve taken your supplements that that morning, there’s going to help there. Then they’re there to move stuff through. Then you’re going to go and you may watch an educational video. For example we are going to teach you a bunch of emotional tools. So we all got our emotional stuff and at the end of the day what create all this disease is your emotional stuff. I mean we pick up stuff from when we were little kids and most of us have got cell memory that we locked on to that bad event that happened maybe it’s someone at recess that said, “Hey, you’re stupid,” or “I think you’re ugly,” or the teacher says, “You’re not going to be very good,” or whatever it was. Maybe you saw a horrific accident or something. So we have cell memory and these patterns keep rolling and we keep creating. So we’re going to teach you a bunch of tools to help break that pattern.

Then you’re going to maybe get on our whole body vibration machine, which is going to help move lymphatic fluid and while you’re on it you’re going to watch another video, another educational piece. Then you may go away on our infrared biomat for a half hour. On some days we may be doing some energy work on you or you may just be in there in a meditative state. You may then go back to my wife for some more instruction. There’s some reading material every day. We give you a lot of emotional tools, we give you a lot of stuff to look at. Some things may resonate with you really, really well and other things not so much. It’s all good because it’s your cleanse and every cleanse we tailor to that person. So, occasionally I get someone says, “Well, what are you going to put my mind? Are you going to like woo?” or people, you better be careful if you go there maybe they might have some religious thing that they do.

No. So, this is your cleanse. When you come here it’s all about you. I don’t care what your religion is or what your beliefs are. It doesn’t matter to us. This journey is for you and you’re going to go through it. We don’t get caught up in religions and all that stuff.

[1:41:03] Ashley James: You yourself are Christian. I saw a cross behind you. So, I know I have a lot of Christian listeners. So you’re a Christian though and if someone came in there Christian you honor their religion. If someone came and they’re of a different religion you honor them like Christ would. You respect people for who they are and where they are. You’re just there to help them heal and love on them.

[1:41:28] David DeHaas: Exactly. It’s all about self-love. We teach you how to self-love yourself. Most people would begin there. We give you the exercise. Let’s say mirror work every day. I love myself. I love myself love. A lot of people, that’s really hard to begin with. I’ve had every religion, non-religion, atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, cults. I mean, I’ve had everyone come here. When they come to get done they go, “Oh my gosh.” I’ve had one gal and she’s been everywhere with cleanses and in yoga retreats and all this stuff. She found us somehow and she came here from, she passed like 100 colon hydrotherapist to get to us including her own in California. She comes to us, she said, “I just went. My dad died. I wanted to get away. I want to get rebooted.” She says, “I had no clue all this stuff you did.” I said, “Well, what do you get out of it? She goes, “Oh David.” I go, “What?” She goes, “I’m now, at 66 years of age, I get it.” I say, “What do you get?” She says, “I get the connection between me and God.” I go, “Really?” Now, we don’t necessarily teach that but just because of all the cleansing, getting rid of parasites, getting that toxic load out of the body. We serve up all this information, right? I’m going to tell people, “You’re going to gravitate to whatever you need to gravitate to and you’re going to pull from that and you’re going to get what you need to get. I’m not going to get in the way of that. You are going to pick that out.” I always tell people, “When you come here, don’t get overwhelmed because we give you a lot of stuff but be like Nemo.” Remember the movie Nemo? He had to get to Australia to find his dad, right? He’s out there, he’s swimming so hard. He go, “Hey Nemo, get in the flow.” He goes, “Flow, yeah. Get in this current and it’s going to be easy.” So Nemo jumps in the current. Poof, easy path to Australia.

So, that’s the way it is in our journey is that at the time when we’re ready, the information you need and like I say, we serve up a big buffet of information and tools. I’ve had people sometimes like, “No. I don’t want to do that.” I’m like, “Okay, don’t do that.” They’ll be like, “Wow, this is awesome. I’m going to do this, this, this and this.” So, it’s a buffet table of those tools, emotional tools. It’s interesting, at the end of the day as we start, like this gal just said to me, “David, I came here purely for a physical cleanse.” I go, “Yeah, what did you get?” She goes, “I’ve been doing emotional work for years and years.” I go, “Yeah?” She goes, “I just did so much in 10 days. It’s amazing. She couldn’t even put it in words,” So, I hear that all the time. Again, it’s not something we dish up and say, “Hey, you’re going to come here and cleanse emotionally.” Because some people kind of freak out and get worried about that. But the reality is is that if you’re open to it you and you’re willing, it may happen.

It’s been pretty cool watching the happenings. The reason why I’m so excited about this is I get to watch these miracles happen. Not only physically. We have people fill out an exit form where they’ll go put a Google review. It’s really interesting to me how many people say, “Not only did I heal, my eyesight’s better,” or “my Lyme disease is not like it was, it’s gone” or “my joints feel better, I’m walking,” whatever that is, they’ll say, “Not only do I feel physically better but emotionally, mentally and spiritually.”

So, anyway. So you’ll do that. You’ll do [unintelligible], you’ll get in the colonic bed. Usually people say, “That colonic, I really love being on the colonic bed.” So, even if they come in nervous and kind of scared about it they get done and they go, “Yeah, that’s awesome. Give me some more of that.”

[1:44:58] Ashley James: How many colonics do they do in the 10-day cleanse?

[1:45:01] David DeHaas: 10 days.

[1:45:01] Ashley James: Oh. So they get a colonic every day.

[1:45:04] David DeHaas: Every single day. All these tools I mentioned to you, they do every single day. That’s why they’re here five hours. Then they’ll go to their hotel. In the middle of that session they may go get some more organic soup and juice and so forth and hang out. People tell us that they can feel the love. I think we got a really good environment. They feel safe and they’re really able to let go. At the end of the day it’s about letting go, letting God and just boom, letting it happen.

[1:45:34] Ashley James: Yeah. Do they only eat when at your clinic because they’re on a cleanse or do they also eat out at restaurants? What does that look like?

[1:45:43] David DeHaas: Most people do not eat at restaurants. I’ve had a few that that feast for days. They were like, wanted to go have something. But no, they will at the Candlewood Suites is where we recommend most people stay. They’ve got a little place you can cook stuff or they’ll take the soup home from us. So they may have a little something, something, maybe an organic hard-boiled egg or they’ll have some soup. It’s a soft food diet so you’re not fasting. So soft food means what? It means, hey, if you have a yam don’t eat the peeling, don’t have an apple and eat the peeling. Don’t have nuts or seeds, don’t have a salad. We want you to be very soft food diet. We want to give the digestive system a break because you’re pushing things through and moving things through and we want that carpet to re-heal and rebuild and regenerate and it will do it very, very fast. It’s amazing how fast that.

So if you got nuts and seeds you don’t want to put a carpet down over nuts and seeds. You want to make sure that pathway’s clear and open. So, you don’t starve, the food’s good and if you want to eat something else when you leave here, we coach you up on what to eat. So just basically the soft food diet. So that could be some scrambled eggs. That could be anything soft food. But again, we teach people first of all, anything you put in your mouth, you got to masticate. Chew it until it’s juice.

[1:47:00] Ashley James: Chew everything. Everyone all the time should chew their food more. That’s a really great advice because it stimulates the liver and the pancreas to immediately create digestive enzymes and tells the stomach to get digestive enzymes going. We do not chew our food enough. There was a listener, we have a great Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We had a listener once say or once type into the Facebook group something along the lines of, “Do I have digestive problems? I can see the food I ate like maybe it was olives or corn or something but in the toilet basically.” It was funny how many people wrote back like, “You’re not chewing enough. You need to chew your food.”

[1:47:45] David DeHaas: Here’s the song you need in your brain, chew, chew, chew, because it’s the right thing to do. Chew, chew, chew, because it’s the right thing to do. Yeah.

[1:47:54] Ashley James: And you just keep going.

[1:47:55] David DeHaas: Keep chewing. I had a gal. Oh my gosh. She told me she had last eaten popcorn eight years ago and what came out during the cleanse? Popcorn seeds.

[1:48:06] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[1:48:08] David DeHaas: My mom had eaten cilantro, I remember this, it came out. There’s a parasite that came out and it had cilantro. I go, “Did you eat cilantro last night?” She goes, “The last time I had cilantro was like three months ago,” but yet this parasite had had it.

[1:48:21] Ashley James: Had what? The parasite was like attached to some cilantro?

[1:48:25] David DeHaas: Yeah. We had, speaking of parasites, oh my gosh. We had a gal that spent about $72,000 over the period of four years taking nutrition and supplements to help get rid of her parasites. She said to me, “David,” and she appear like sick or unhealthy but she says, “God, if I could cut this down,” I said, “Well, let’s just jump on the cleanse.” So she did. She spent fifteen days with us. She had amazing buckets of rope worms. It’s on our Youtube channel. That’s probably the most viewed video.

[1:48:55] Ashley James: I watched some of the videos on your YouTube channel of the parasites coming out of people. It’s pretty awesome.

[1:49:01] David DeHaas: Yeah. Anyway, she took it back to her Naturopath and the Naturopath goes, “What are you guys doing? What’s happening here?” So, yeah. She got out a bunch of them. What’s amazing to me is it’s not the big guys. I get these 4’9”, 117-pound women in here and they’ve got tapeworm 6’, 10’, 12’, 20’ long. It’s like, what? Or nests. I mean nests like softball-sized nests that look like spaghetti coming out. It’s amazing. They’ve been in there for a long time. Don’t think that you have to go to a foreign country to get your parasites guys. They’re around us.

[1:49:39] Ashley James: They certainly are. We started this conversation talking about Ann Louise Gittleman. That was my experience when I was around 10. Our family got parasites and we read her book, Guess What Came to Dinner. It was just amazing to me that people assume that because we’re in a first world country, we have really clean water and we have shoes on our feet that we don’t have any that we’re like, we live in a sterile environment. That we’re sterile. It’s just not the case. Life is dirty and we are animals. We have to get that we’re equal to, we’re on the same level as cows and monkeys that we are animals. We’re animals and so of course we’re going to get parasites because all animals get it because that’s just how it works. It’s our job to deworm ourselves. That’s something that we knew as humans to do and animals naturally do it. In the wild they’ll eat certain foods to help deworm themselves. They just know what to do, but we don’t because we’ve given up our power to the medical establishment. We’ve handed over all of our thinking over to this idea that we go to a doctor and the doctor just takes care of our body like a car mechanic.

I remember something was wrong with our car and my husband just handed it over the car mechanic. Then afterward, my husband was kicking himself going, because he went to school for mechanics way back in the day and he goes, “Well, why did I do that? I know exactly how to fix that. Why did I totally just give over my power and just assume that a mechanic would know, that I don’t know anything and a mechanic knows everything. I know this stuff. I could have done something about it.” That’s the mindset. We get into this mindset that MDs are all-knowing and that we know nothing and that they’ll know everything to fix us, but they’re not taught everything. So giving over our bodies and waiting to get sick and then going to the doctor and not taking any action, not advocating for ourselves that’s the perfect storm to become a statistic.

So, listening to the podcast like this and learning and then implementing everything you learn, that’s how we’re going to get as healthy as possible because we have to be our own mechanic, right? We have to listen to our body and go, what’s going on? Like you said, people say, “I’m healthy. I don’t have anything wrong with me. I’m healthy, but I have headaches and stiff joints and I’m tired all the time and I need coffee to get started in the day and I go only poop once a week.” Well, that’s not healthy. Any symptom means you’re not healthy and 70% of that of the adults in the United States are on at least one prescription medication, meaning at least 70%, at least 70% of the adult population in the United States is sick. Because they’re so unhealthy they need a medication. They’ve gotten to the point where their body is breaking down and is toxic. A medication is fantastic and life-saving when we need it. Unfortunately though, most people wait to get sick and not take the actions needed. So I love, all the listeners here are turning their life around and learning from people like you so they can be the salmon and go swim upstream, go against the grain and turn their life around and be an example of optimal health. Let’s live like Jack LaLanne and we could all live well into our 90s being physically fit. I love that idea. You mentioned liver cleanse in your 10-day detox. What does a liver cleanse look like?

[1:53:36] David DeHaas: Well, the way we do it, we start teaching to you about day four. It’s about a three-day process that we had to go. So you’re going to be taking some things, some supplements and some herbs and so forth. Then you’re going to have a night where you go through a process where you’re going to help clear out the liver. You may see a bunch of bile stones come out, usually most people do. What’s also interesting about that is that usually after liver cleanse day, Ashley, parasites are starting to really jump out. I think a couple of things really happen during that process is that people finally get to day seven or eight and they realize that, “Oh my gosh, I can let go. It’s safe to let go.” So when now the liver is saying, “Oh, wow. We’re cleansing out.” The colon is saying, “Yeah, baby. Let’s go.” Really, that’s the next three or four days they’re on the cleanse it’s more than the previous seven days. It’s amazing.

So, we’ve really got to that point even though we may say, “Yeah. Well, why would I block letting go?” Well, emotionally, remember your autonomic nervous system, the guy that’s out there jacking you up because they’re still wanting those chemicals to be coming, right? So that’s gradually changing. As you’re mentally, emotionally and spiritually letting go, then more things let go. One of the other things we really are cognitive is about teaching how powerful we are and how we can use our own energy to heal. I mean, what do I want people leave here? I want them to be able to go back and understand that they can use their energy to help other people heal as well. I mean, we’re all-powerful beings. It’s just not someone that’s got the special gift. People tell me, “My hands are really hot,” which they are. I can feel energy and I can help boost energy in people. But it’s the person themselves that are doing it.

So, we’re teaching heart coherence, we’re teaching the mind-stuff, we’re giving them as experts what Bruce Lipton has taught us and Gregg Braden and all these. So we’re giving all this these, like I say, buffet table of stuff so that people can really start putting the whole. When I spent 20 years fumbling around, reading all these books and going here and there, we’re giving it to you, serving it up all at once so that you can understand that, “Oh my gosh. You mean, I can go home and lay my hands on my son?” For example, I had a gal that came in. This the wart story I call this.

So, she says, “David, my son’s got warts.” I go, “Oh. Kids are so easy. Get this. This is what’s going to work.” So go home and have your son do these affirmations at night before you go to bed. Just tell him, “I love myself. I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.” Let’s see what happens in a few days. I tried this with my son. My son had got warts and he had warts for like a couple years. We tried all the stuff, natural stuff, unnatural. We tried everything. Finally one day we got the book from Louise Hay and we pulled up what the cause was and she started saying that information and three days later he had warts and he had one on his foot. He’s a very active boy and of course now it hurts to walk. Guess what, the warts were gone in a few days. This gal’s son, same thing. Warts were gone in five days. Kids are so easy. Kids just boom, pick it up because they haven’t been so programmed like us adults, but yeah that’s cool.

[1:56:55] Ashley James: Is it because it turns off the sympathetic nervous response to say the affirmations?

[1:57:03] David DeHaas: Well, okay. I don’t know exactly technically what is happening there. I just do know that when we are putting our energy, our feeling – so Gregg Braden in his book he has the Isaiah Effect. Here’s the story, so Gregg was up in these monasteries in Tibet and he’s asking the abbots, “How do you pray?” The abbot looked at him with a twinkle in his eye, oh my god. Here’s the best question ever, right” Because most people ask the question like, “What do you eat? What do you do? How long you pray?” No, he says, “How do you pray?” Here’s where we all screw up, right” We go to church and let’s pray for Billy Joe. Her husband’s got cancer and she’s not feeling well and we’re saying, “Oh, yeah. Too bad.” We’re sitting there and we’re praying with, “Oh my gosh, so sad.” The abbot looked at Greg and he says, “With feelings.” So if you’ve got the feeling in your body, you change your cells. When you’re happy and joyous and have gratitude and gratefulness and happiness, those feelings change chemistry. So, when you’re saying I love myself, you cannot test negatively when you say I love myself.

When you do a muscle test and say, “I’m going to try to do something.” What’s something you love to do, Ashley? What’s just something you love to do?

[1:58:25] Ashley James: Interviews, podcasts interviews.

[1:58:28] David DeHaas: Okay. So, when you say, “I love doing interviews,” you’re going to test positive for this. When you say, “I try to do an interview. I hope to do an interview. I want to do an interview. Someday I’m going to.” You test negatively. So, boom. All that energy through your cells changes. So when we’re praying or we have a setting an intention and it’s an intention with sorrowness, unhappiness, wishfulness. Look at it, things aren’t going to change. I’ve got a group, this is just something I do on the side, is I’ve read Lynne McTaggart’s book and I’ve taken her courses and we do an intention. We’ve got people on the phone.

[1:59:08] Ashley James: Is that the Power of Eight?

[1:59:10] David DeHaas: Yeah. Power of Eight.

[1:59:11] Ashley James: I’m going to interview her.

[1:59:12] David DeHaas: Oh, awesome.

[1:59:13] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really excited.

[1:59:14] David DeHaas: Yeah. I’ve been doing it since last summer. We just set an intention. We put the person in the circle and we’re just sending positive energy. Some people feel it and all of a sudden, “Oh my gosh, that pain is gone,” or “This has helped.” So we get into a state of coherence where we’re happy. The reality is, when we get sick, we’re not happy. We don’t have joy. But what if we set the intention like, “I’m healed. I feel great.” You put that joy in your heart, put that happiness, that gratefulness, that relief. Put that through your heart center and express that into happiness. You’re going to change. You’re changing chemically. Now, you may not be healed right then, but over time that you’re changing energy throughout your whole body and things began to change. I’ve had people walk come in here bankrupt or have emotionally bad relationships or pissed at somebody.

I had one gal, she was so mad at men. She’d had a bad divorce. She had men stalking her. She was attracting the negative energy. She comes to the cleanse and she gets done. The job that she was trying to get all of a sudden, boom, they’re calling her. They say, “Hey, we want to interview tomorrow.” Then I go, “You tell me that they haven’t returned a call for six months and now they want to interview you tomorrow?” That happened. She walks out of here and six months later stalking went away, six months later she found the love of her life, got married, had another child.

I had another guy he was cirrhosis of the liver. Get this amazing story, oh my gosh. His face was purple. My son called him Santa Claus. He’d played a little bit too much in his earlier life. I needed some plumbing done. I say, “Dennis, you’re a dead man walking. I need some plumbing, you need some plumbing too.” I said, “Let’s trade.” So he comes over and we put him on the cleanse. I said, “Just be aware,” because the color in his face changed. The purple redness, you see people with a lot of redness around their skin, that’s all liver. That’s usually a lot of heavy metals and stuff. So that all went down and started decreasing. He walks out of here in 10 days later and he calls me says, “David,” I say, “I don’t know what’s happened,” he says, “but my phone wasn’t ringing before that cleanse and now it’s ringing every day. Not only that, I could spend maybe five hours working or some days not working at all. Now I just did 10 hours under a house all day I got energy.” How cool is that?

Recently, get this. Recently Ashley, he says, “David,” speaking of liver cleanses, I remember when he says, “I need to keep doing these and I haven’t. I went in to get some life insurance and they say, “Oh, so yeah. Your cirrhosis,” do they say in remission? I don’t know if that’s the right words or not but he goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold it. Hold it. What did you just say?” They go, “Yeah, yeah. It’s paused, it’s in remission. It’s not getting worse.” He goes, “You guys told me that would never change. You told me always it would be getting worse, worse, worse.” They just looked at him. They don’t say a word. Dennis comes in and he says, “I got to do another liver cleanse. I need this colonics. I need to keep doing this.” I mean, that was a pretty cool story.

[2:02:34] Ashley James: What’s he look like now?

[2:02:35] David DeHaas: Oh it looks great. Pink face, he’s not a Santa Claus anymore. He’s had some cancers and he’s treated that alternative as well on his own. So he came in here he got empowered. He got the belief that he could heal himself. You give people some belief, you give them the ability to understand that they’re the powerful beings. At the end of the day, David DeHaas can’t change you. You got to change you. I can give you some suggestions. I always think of myself as a cheerleader. I’m going to help coach you through this. I’m going to cheer you up to get through this. Because you go through this and sometimes people have a healing crisis where they, you get a little worse before they get better. That’s the time where I got to get on the pom-poms and say, “Let’s go. Let’s keep doing this.” Your body’s going to detox and you may get a little worse. Every once in a while I have someone who starts, they throw up. They go, “Oh my gosh, that’s not good.” Then I go, “No, it’s great. Your body is saying, hey, let’s get the stuff out. It’s going to do whatever it can to move it out and it just happen to be you not only pooping it out but you’re also vomiting it out. This is going to go away in a bit. It’s going to be okay. You don’t want to suppress it.” The problem is that too many times we suppress it like Nicole.

Nicole was 22, worked for me part-time. I gave her a three-day cloning cleanse after she worked with me that summer. I didn’t know this at the time but she went home and she threw up, I mean a lot. She says, “I’m not going back. I’m doing that. I’m not doing that anymore. I wasn’t aware of this. Well, three days later she’s one semester away from graduating and all of a sudden she’s got severe migraines. In fact, they were constant, 24-hour a day, no medications would cut the pain. When she sat up, she would blackout for five minutes. The doctors did a spinal tap then they say, “Okay, we need to put a shunt in your brain.” That’s when I heard about it. I go, “What? What do you mean? No, no, no. Why isn’t she in here?” Her mom says, “Well, the last time she was here she threw up.” I said, “Well, there was your sign. That’s a severely toxic body at age 21. To do a colonic and then throw up, there’s your sign.” So I called her up. She came in, she spent 18 days. Now, the doctors had told her that, “Look at it, you’re going to be on medication. You’re not going to be able to eat Boise, Idaho.” She couldn’t look at a computer screen. If she did that would cause problems. She couldn’t look at a TV or anything. They say, “Basically, you’re going to be on medication for the rest of your life. We’ll put a shunt in your brain. We’ll help you manage this but you’d have to stay here little girl. This is your life.” I said, “Come on.”

So, she came in. I filmed her just about every day. Eighteen days later she was back at school and she graduated, went out to get her master’s and she now works in College of Idaho and is doing great. Pretty cool story.

[2:05:29] Ashley James: She’s off all those meds and she doesn’t have any migraines?

[2:05:32] David DeHaas: No meds, no migraines. Travels the world, does what she wants to do. Yeah.

[2:05:38] Ashley James: So sometimes you got to push through. It’s like maybe the first colonic stirred some stuff up but that means you got to keep going.

[2:05:45] David DeHaas: Yeah. You don’t go into your refrigerator and you go, “That stinks all that rotting food.” You don’t stop, right? You clean all of it out. We’ll dirty it first, right?

[2:05:54] Ashley James: Are there any contraindications? When should someone not have a colonic?

[2:06:01] David DeHaas: Yeah, there are. There’s two types of colon hydrotherapy bed systems, there’s open and closed. We use the open gravity-fed very gentle small tube. The closed system is a tube about five inches in diameter. They’re pressurizing the system. A lot more contraindications for them. The association puts out contraindications and they got a list. But what I have found to be true over the years is that, I can’t remember all of them right now off the top my head, but yeah. There are a few. They’re on our intake form. But anyway, I’m drawing a blank right now. There’s a list of them. But what I found to be true over the years is that, well hemorrhoids, for example, are one of them. I’ve had people tell me, “I don’t care. I’m plugged up. I need a colonic.” I mean, I’ve had pretty severe, but you get a hemorrhoid. What’s a hemorrhoid or a cyst or a tumor? It’s just a place for your body put toxins. I remember those people that shows on their own volition to ignore those contraindications and that the hemorrhoids went down and actually pretty quickly, pretty surprising.

[2:07:10] Ashley James: Interesting.

[2:07:12] David DeHaas: Yeah. You can only do that with the open system. You couldn’t do it on a closed. The tube’s too big.

[2:07:17] Ashley James: That was my next question. What is the difference between an open and closed? Because I’ve done both. I enjoyed both for different reasons.

[2:07:24] David DeHaas: Yeah. The closed system is, again therapist is in the room, again for some people that’s a little uncomfortable having someone there watching you poop. They’re going to fill you very slowly, gently. Then now the process are there, they can swish your belly around. That’s all great. Then when the poop goes out, you got a 5/8 inch tube. If the poop’s bigger than that, they have to either squeeze that tube and help squeeze that water and hopefully break up that hard. If you got poop as big as your fist, which many people who are constipated do, you may end up getting off that table because they’re not on a table that you can just poop on it’s a massage table. You go to a toilet and release. Now on the beds that we used, it’s a toilet if you will. It’s not a toilet, but it’s a bed where you just poop.

[2:08:09] Ashley James: It’s like a lie-down toilet.

[2:08:10] David DeHaas: Yes and you just let her go. Tubes very tiny, like you say, it’s tiny the size of a pencil. The poop just goes around that rectal tube. I mean, I’ve had people fill our three-inch tube like rock-solid poop as big as that three-inch diameter tube all the way full where I’ve had to, especially people with opioid, induced constipation, where they filled it, plugged it up. We have a flusher jet. There was one time, the gal, my gosh. We ran that jet the whole time but she was just solid. Now, on a closed system, usually the closest to people –

[2:08:46] Ashley James: You can’t do that.

[2:08:48] David DeHaas: Yeah, they’ll send them to me. Then you’re going to have constant release. So the beauty of that is it’s again, what we want to do when we get peristalsis happening. So think of peristalsis as a squeezing of the colon. That’s what helps move the poop. When the small intestine dumps into the large intestine on the right site or just above your hip, that’s liquid and then it’s going to go up move up. So what moves that up as peristalsis, the squeezing action of the colon. It goes up, moves across your transverse colon and drops down and begins to dry out. So, now the problem is is that stuff can get stuck down there and it could get very constipated. It gets as big as 16 inches. That’s stuff’s traveling through pretty slow. So, when we’re when you’re hydrating with colon hydrotherapy, that’s going to help begin to dissolve that. The cool thing about an open system is that, if you just relax and let the water do its work that colons going to start taking directions. It will go, “Oh, I’m going to push now. I got enough water, I’m going to push automatically on your own.” Whereas the closed, you can’t push back. You got to let the person turn it off, release it. You might have three releases, wherein an open system it’s just constant in-and-out. You’re releasing all the time. You might have 30, 40, 50 releases.

[2:10:00] Ashley James: Very cool.

[2:10:03] David DeHaas: Yeah. So, it’s fun. It’s fun, it’s relaxing. Most people, they get done, they come in of course they’re nervous, everyone is. I was too. I get done and I say, “Well, how’d it go?” They go, “Oh, you know what? I feel lighter and refreshed.” Yeah. That’s most. Now, every once in a while you get someone that goes, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got nausea.” I go, “Yup.” I tell people, “Look at it, if the next day you’re feeling nausea and you feel like you don’t want to come in, you want to come back in because your body is saying let’s go and there’s just a lot of maybe heavy metals or whatever toxins that are moving past. Your body’s picking that that’s why you don’t feel good. Don’t wait. Let’s get back on the bed. Let’s keep cleaning it out. That will pass faster than then if you keep it in.”

[2:10:49] Ashley James: Yeah. There’s one of the videos on your YouTube channel where a guy had kept coming in. He wasn’t feeling good at the beginning then he kept coming in. He passed the microbiome. The entire microfilm, I should say, the biofilm. Biofilm was this like leathery thick mucus that was coating his colon. It released and it came out. Then he felt so much better. I’ve heard that from many people who either do water-only fasting or juice fasts or like a series of colon hydrotherapy sessions. When they pass, the body finally lets go and releases the biofilm. They were feeling really sick before and then they pass it and they feel amazing afterward. I’ve also heard that from people who are on, like Dr. Jay Davidson who I’ve had on the show, his parasite cleanse. So it’s like when you release it though, when it leaves your body, because it’s just so diseased and it’s housing the parasites that are giving off all these toxins on their own. So, when you release it you feel so much better. Can you tell us a bit about this, the biofilm and releasing it using colon hydrotherapy?

[2:12:09] David DeHaas: Yeah. So, colon hydrotherapy is hydrating. What we like to also have you be using is some bentonite and slim at the same time to help kind of stimulate that action to get things moving through. But think about this, again, I always like going back to the refrigerator analogy. You’ve got this stuff that’s been trapped in there and things are passing very slowly through your system. Like you say, you’ve got parasites in there you may have heavy metals you have all this gunk. So that’s going to come off and you’re going to re-establish, as I call it, the new carpet. Now you’re going to be able to absorb the micronutrients into your bloodstream, because remember the end of the day, we got to get stuff into the blood to get to the cells. You have 50 trillion cells. So we got to get that nutrition there. So, again, you got to let that old stuff go. It builds up over time. I haven’t got a good analogy right now to use. The other thing that people need to understand, here’s what people get kind of weirded out too, diarrhea. People are having constant diarrhea or they’ll have a lot of diarrhea or they go from diarrhea to rabbit pellets. What’s diarrhea? Diarrhea is a body’s amazing, it’s the fire hose of the body. You recycle two and a half gallons of water per day in your colon.

Well, when you get a bug in there the body says, “Whoa, dude. We don’t want this bug in here. Let’s get it out.” Well, how are we getting it out? Let’s turn on the jets. Let’s just give him some diarrhea. Let’s blow this out of here. Okay. Let’s go. Now you’re sitting on the toilet, you go, “Oh my God, this just feels horrible.” You think, what can I take to stop diarrhea? No. You should probably come in and do a colonic. Hence, that action, clear out that bug, whatever is in there and change it. So, that’s usually a severe microbiome dysfunction. You’ve probably got a lot of yeast Candida with it. Everything is out of balance. Look at it, we got to clean it up, reestablish. The sooner you get all that toxicity out of there the faster that will heal and repair. Then again back to your micronutrients, back to the foods you’re eating and getting that restored. The body’s amazing. I looked back at Dr. Jensen and the work that he did. I’ve met some of his sons and daughters of the parents that he helped heal. We’ve seen them here at Living Waters as well.

I mean, I had a guy come in, just to give an example, severely constipated, in and out of the hospital, on meds of course for six months. When you’re on meds, okay again, the brain connections transverse colon. How do we cut pain? Okay, we got to cut those signals. So, now your colons not working when you’re on these pain meds. So, we get constipated. I experienced that with my wife. My wife had fell and broke a bunch of bones. She was in the hospital 24 days. We’re like, “Sheesh, I wish we had a colon hydrotherapy bed down here.” But he comes in and he had severe fatty liver. He had had a shunt putting in his bile duct, but he’s plugged up. He couldn’t walk and he wasn’t very cognitive either. We had to lift him to put him on the colonic bed. We did that. We did three colonics, he says, “I’m going to do your 10-day thing.” I said, “Okay.” His wish was to get home for Christmas, which is five hours north of us. He couldn’t. No way he’d be in a car at that time for five hours.

Anyway, so he kept and in five days he was actually walking with a walker. Next thing you know he’s able to get up on his own, we don’t have to lift him. His skin color changed from gray to pink. On the last day I filmed him. On the last day he gets up and sits down, gets up and sits down on his own unaided. Of all the people I’ve seen, he had two feet in the grave. I looked at him and I say, “Well, as I see it, you’re either going to live or you’re going to die. You’re definitely closer to dying right now. It’s your choice, what do you want to do here?” Of course he’s severely backed up and he said, “I can’t poop. Yeah, let’s go.” So, they jumped on the cleanse and went forward. It’s pretty cool.

[2:16:28] Ashley James: So, how is he doing now?

[2:16:30] David DeHaas: He lived another year. He actually got so he could walk unaided. I don’t think he would have made Christmas that year but he got another year of life. He had some other heart issues going on. I sent him home with instructions and so forth. They’re pretty happy with what happened, but again probably a little too late coming to us. But hey, he got another year.

[2:16:58] Ashley James: Man, he got to go home for Christmas which was his wish.

[2:17:00] David DeHaas: He got to go home for Christmas. He got to see his kids. He got to resolve some things that emotionally he needed to resolve, which was pretty doggone cool. There were some things that he was hanging on to take care of and he met us. He bought that time basically. I’ve had Parkinson’s people come in and dragging on their feet. Then we’re learning more now. I mean, we’ve learned so much about the microbiome in the gut in the last 10 years. There are now tons of evidence about how Parkinson’s is definitely a gut issue. I remember, oh my gosh, this one guy comes in first day and again, what caused it? “Well, David, back in the 50s I was putting my arms up in DDT up to my elbows. I was growing these root crops.” So he had a lot of chemical toxicity, DDT. To get up out of a chair someone had to pull him up. He’d shuffle. First, he stayed with his daughter here in Boise. He says, “David, the first night it took me a half-hour to get those stairs, thirteen steps.” He says in three or four days I think it was he says, “I went up and down like I should normal person. On the fifth day here, again, I always had to lift him up off the clinic bed, pull him up off the massage table. Fifth day, he sits up on his own, flips his round and stands up and he go, “Dang.”

This is so interesting, human behavior is so funny. Great guy, awesome guy. I mean, very wealthy. Hands-on lots of businesses, in his late 70s. He had this big real estate project going on. He says, “David, I got to break away from here for a few days. I just got to go do this. I got to take care of transaction. It’s a $4 million transaction.” I say, “Well, I think it’ll wait a few more days,” but he got, “I’m feeling really good though.” So he got driven here by someone else. Shuffles in. He goes out there hops in his truck he says, “I’ll be back, I promise. I’ll be back.” Hops in his truck, takes off like and I look at him and go, “Amazing.” So anyway, you can’t get everyone. I mean you can only coach people so far but he was like, “Hey, this has been awesome dude. This has been really great. I really appreciate everything. I have to take care of this.” I mean, he’s in late 70s. The guy’s probably worth millions.

[2:19:30] Ashley James: Did he come back?

[2:19:31] David DeHaas: He did not come back.

[2:19:33] Ashley James: That’s so funny. So, he was just hobbling. He was hobbling in and then you just got him to the point where he was healthy enough so he could go out and work again. Then he’s like, “Okay, I’m good.”

[2:19:45] David DeHaas: Right. Of course, what happens to us human beings we’ve all did this, I did this, right? Oh well, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’m not that bad. I mean, okay. I’m tired, I’m fatigued, I can just kind of push through this. Yeah, it hurts the morning when I wake up, but maybe tomorrow, right? We all, us human beings we’re so, we’re crazy most of the time. We think, “Oh well, we should take care of this first.” We don’t really look in the mirror and say, look at it, “I need to be selfish and take care of me first.” Especially moms. Moms will take care of everybody first even when they’re sick and they can barely move. That’s just human nature. But my goal as a cheerleader is to get people to take, hey, self-love. Be selfish. It’s okay. Take care of you first especially you moms. Look at it, if you’re not well, no one else is going to be happy. Take care of you. On the airplane they say, look at it, “Parents, put your oxygen mask on first before you put it to on your children, okay.” Take care of yourself first. You’re going to have a happier household. When mamas are well and dads are well, you know what, everything else is going to be a lot happier. It’s just human nature. I see it all the time. You know what, I do the best to – again, from where he was, he was 1,000% better. So, I can’t blame him. I mean, he was like, “This is great. I don’t need to be any better,” is what he’s thinking, right, and I’ll get back to it. Of course, you got for him, he had like several businesses and so he’s taking care of this and this and this and yeah.

[2:21:29] Ashley James: Not taking care of himself. That’s a really good lesson because we get to this point, even with injuries or with getting over a cold, like you just, the second you feel better, you overexert yourself and then you feel worse again. I’ve had so many times where people come to me, I get them on a really healing protocol, supplements. Get them on a really great protocol and they’re doing amazing. The first week they feel like a million bucks. Then they come to me sometime the second week and they’re like, “Oh, I’m in so much pain.” This happened so many times, I know exactly why. I say, “Well, tell me what you did this week. What activities did you do?” “Well, I ran through the yard playing with my grandchildren. I went for a walk with the ladies. I gardened” and they started listing off all these things. I’m like, “Before you started working with me, what was your activity level like?” “Well, I sat all day and I watch TV.”

It’s like the second people feel good they just, when the pain is gone, we totally overexert ourselves. Then of course you are aches and pains, you just did more activity in the last week than you have done in the last five years. Of course you have. That’s just normal, but you’ll still have a long road of wonderful healing and building a foundation of health. This is what I do, is if I have the cold, a head cold or whatever, then the next day I’m feeling good then I’m like, “Okay. Great. I’m done. It’s over. Let’s go,” and I go 100% again that my body’s like, “Nope. You have to rest still. After you’re recovered from a cold or flu, you should really take two weeks to slow, like really go to bed early. Even earlier than you should and drink lots of healing soups. Even if you’re not feeling sick anymore, your body has to recover from that and you need to do extra self-care.

So, it’s interesting that people get to this point where the second they feel a little better, they’re just like, “Oh, I don’t have to do any work anymore. I’m good.” That’s when they should double down because its money in the bank. Every activity that is building a foundation of health is money in the bank. Every glass of water you drink, every colon hydrotherapy session you get, every vitamin or eating an apple or a whole food, going to bed early is your depositing money in your health bank. The best time to do it is when you don’t feel like you need it. The same goes money for actual money in a bank. When you need money and you haven’t been depositing any into your bank account, that’s when you need it the most, but when you should have been doing it the most was when you didn’t need that money and you just put it away, tuck it away in the bank account.

So, when we don’t have ill health is when we should be building our health to prevent it, to prevent illness. We can really clearly see that when we spend time every day doing emotional self-care, mental self-care, spiritual self-care, physical self-care, energetic self-care; when we spend the time, carve out time for ourselves that we will see for years to come the positive ramifications of that. You can see people in your life who neglected themselves and they are now experiencing the result of that. I keep coming back to that the body is like a garden. You tend to the garden all year long and you fertilize and you mineralize those soil. There’s a microbiome in the soil. There’s so many things we can do to constantly create a healthy garden. Our body and our gut is really, there’s a lot of similarities between a healthy garden and a healthy gut. It does take constantly helping it and avoiding things that harm it. I love that this another tool, colon hydrotherapy is another tool we can add to our tool belt.

Robyn Openshaw was a guest I’ve had on the show before. She’s green smoothie girl. She is vegan. She does promote a whole food plant-based lifestyle. Although, I think she does things once in a while like bone broth. She’s not against it but she does eat whole foods and lots and lots and lots of plants. Just recently her boyfriend did her cleanse, which is a whole food plant-based eating basically where you’re not eating processed food you’re just eating lots of plants, a variety of plants. I think he’s about two weeks into it. She just posted this on Facebook. She posted it publicly so people can see it, but she said, “My boyfriend just, he never believed me when I said that your poop shouldn’t smell. That if your poop smells, that you’re actually toxic and your diet is wrong. Because when you’re really healthy and you’re eating a really healthy diet your poop shouldn’t smell. He didn’t believe me. Two weeks into this whole food plant-based eating, his poop doesn’t smell and he couldn’t believe it.” I made a comment in that thread about, yeah. It’s interesting that people eat dead decaying flesh and dairy products, which contain infected pus. This is proven. It’s not conspiracy. The USDA, they allow a certain amount of particles of blood and pus from infected cows in dairy. I know that sounds really gross, but if someone is consuming dairy, they have to understand that it’s not clean at all. Also, us humans are not meant to consume the milk of any animal at all. We’re not meant to consume milk after we’re an infant let alone the milk of another animal. Although we have adapted to in times of survival, humans have used dairy because they had to. I’d rather have someone trick dairy than die of starvation. So in those terms we did, but we don’t need to anymore. It’s not healthy.

So, there’s a lot of evidence that dairy is really unhealthy for us, but the marketing in the food industry would tell you otherwise. That eating rotting decaying flesh of animals is very toxic for the colon. Now, you’ve mentioned eggs a few times. So you are not promoting a whole food plant-based or a vegan diet. You have a lot of experience around colon health. What kind of a diet do you see is the most healing and healthy for the gut?

[2:28:40] David DeHaas: Yeah. You said you interviewed Peter, Eat Right for Your Blood Type. Peter D’Adamo.

[2:28:47] Ashley James: I haven’t interviewed him. He was my Naturopath growing up. Yeah.

[2:28:53] David DeHaas: He wrote the book Eat Right for your Blood Type. So, we have found that, we typically ask people what the blood type is. We have found that to be pretty much true. Every once in a while I get an A, if you’re type A that usually means you should be plant-based. Dr. Huggins was pretty big. He was a guy that did a lot of studying. He inherited all of Dr. Weston Price’s research and did a lot of studies on his own. He was pretty big on eating what’s right for your blood type. He says if you’re Type O, you need a lot of protein he says, “You need to get it from a hoof.” So, we have found, I’m a B+, my wife is O. She takes some supplements, some extra protein, amino-based supplements as well, which really helped her. So we found that to be pretty accurate over the years. Again, I tell people look at it, muscle test. What’s your body telling you?

So, yeah. I do. I’ve always been an egg guy. I love eggs. I do. I don’t eat near as much steak as I used to. Lamb, for B guys, that’s B+ people, because we’re so positive. Lamb’s good for us. I noticed that to be true for me. So, I always say to people, “Again, at the end of the day, let’s clear out your body. Let’s see what you’re testing for and go with that and understand. Your body knows. Once you understand how to do this, you can choose. That will serve you. If someone’s saying, “Hey, you know what, everyone has to be a vegan. Everyone has to be a vegetarian,” whatever. No. I don’t get on that bandwagon. I have found some people that go on that sometimes they’re having some issues later on, but again, you know what, you know you. You do you. Muscle test. Understand what you need and I think you’ll be okay.

[2:30:55] Ashley James: Yeah. I always thought, because I was O blood type and I was raised to just almost only eat meat and vegetables are a garnish, when I did so much to correct my health, like I just couldn’t get over the hump and then I interviewed so many people that said the most healing, cleansing thing for the body is whole food plant-based no processed foods. So I tried it, and I thought, now I was of the mindset that I had to have meat at every meal. So even the thought of having a one meatless meal was just absurd, like my brain couldn’t wrap my, didn’t make sense. But I tried. I did a 21-day challenge, 21-day cleanse where I ate lots of salad, steamed vegetables, two pounds of steamed vegetables a day, lots of starchy vegetables and also non-starchy vegetables, brown rice, tons of legumes, nuts and seeds. Basically lentils, beans, peas. So all plant-based protein. I was getting around 50 to 70 grams of protein, but it was from plants. I was getting 50 to actually between 50 and 70 grams of fiber a day, which was amazing. So good and I couldn’t believe it. Because before that I struggled to get even 15 grams of fiber. I felt full and I could not believe, within days I had more energy, more mental clarity than I ever had. I had already been on eating organic, eating whole foods. I had done paleo and keto. I’ve tried everything, but this, this for me has been revolutionary. I don’t have cravings anymore. I don’t have the feeling of being weak. I used to feel weak if I didn’t eat meat. I don’t get that. I just thought that was really neat that I feel very strong in my core.

So, even if someone were to just eat more vegetables or just get a variety of legumes and nuts and seeds and just eat more plants and learn how to cook. That’s why I started this membership called Learn True Health Home Kitchen. It was to teach people how to eat more plants. Some people don’t want to cut out meat, but eating more plants is healthier and is healing. Would you find that you help people to eat more plants because people just are not eating enough fiber? What kind of diet changes that you help people that you see helps a 100% the population?

[2:33:37] David DeHaas: Yeah. So again, I go back to when of course when they’re here we’re teaching lots and lots of things. Like for example you mentioned eating lots of beans, my wife, beans she can’t touch beans at all. So, she stays away from those. So again, I talk to people about, “Okay. Let’s definitely fruits, vegetables.” I’ve got people here in Boise that advocate for being a fruitarian. That doesn’t resonate for a lot of clients especially if you’ve got heavy metals and you got yeast candida and you’re doing a lot of fruits. Some people go, “Oh fruits, yeah.” So you’re going to have more sugars and that’s probably not going to serve you well. So, there’s a balance and I think that people need to, that’s why I always have them start out with, “If you want, here’s some education. Eat right for your type, look at that, see what resonates. Let’s start muscle testing yourself. See what you are resonating with.” Then I think that is something people need to become empowered and begin to figure out what is best for them. But again, I always start first of all, organic only. You got to have organic. You can’t eat the non-food. Well, you can but you’re going to be sick. Usually people get on that as you probably experienced as well, after a while, guess what, your body you eat something that you used to think you liked and you eat it now, you got a reaction. You’re not going to feel as well. So, yeah. God gave us fruits and vegetables. I think it’s why I like Thai food so much. I like a little spiciness to it.

[2:35:21] Ashley James: Yum.

[2:35:22] David DeHaas: Yeah. Turmeric and cayenne. Cayenne is a wonderful ingredient. Cayenne is so amazing. Amazing thing. I’ll tell you my first experience with cayenne, because I had a lot of allergies. I had severe allergies. One of the things that my in-law says, “Well, you know, cayenne is great for allergies.” So I started taking a little bit and they told me a story. I didn’t really believe them because he told me the story of my father-in-law was out logging one part in his life. His chainsaw bucked and hit him in the cheek. He’s three hours from a hospital. So he had a whole bag of cayenne because his mother drank cayenne pepper every morning. Every single morning she’d have some cayenne in water and she lived all-natural until 105.

[2:36:09] Ashley James: Nice.

[2:36:10] David DeHaas: So, he takes the cayenne, puts it in that wound and butterfly bandages it and goes back to work and no scar. My brother-in-law says, “Yeah, David.” He says, “It was bad.” He was telling me chainsaw bucks and hits you in the face, it’s not going to be pretty. No scar. I go, “Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.” He says, “Yeah. I got in this car accident and I cut my hand here and I put cayenne in it, butterfly bandaged it and I didn’t have stitches.” “Yeah. Yeah. Sure.” So one day I’m out, this back in the 80s and I had the old mobile phones where it had the big box in the trunk and a phone handle upfront. I’m taking it out and I raised up and I hit my head on the edge of the car lid. I got blood spurting everywhere. My in-laws were there so I say, I walked in and of course blood’s everywhere, “Should we go to the hospital?” He says, “Well, hold it. What the hell. Let’s try to this cayenne thing. Let’s just cut this back and throw some cayenne in there.” It was bleeding pretty good. So, we did it, we put cayenne in it, cut my hair back and put a butterfly bandage over it. I don’t know, for some reason about a week later I was at a doctor’s office. He goes, “What did you do to your head? So, I cracked it open. He goes, “Wow.” I go, “Yeah.” I said, “How’s it look?” He goes, “Looks really good.” I say, “Yeah, all I did is I put cayenne pepper in it and put a butterfly bandage in. He goes, “Well, that didn’t anything.” I say, “Well, you’re looking at it and you tell me it looks great.” I said, “Dude, I had blood everywhere.”

[2:37:42] Ashley James: That’s so funny.

[2:37:43] David DeHaas: So, anyway, that was just part of the learning experience that I had. Anyway, I don’t know how we got off on cayenne pepper but great thing to be –

[2:37:53] Ashley James: To add to your food?

[2:37:55] David DeHaas: I just had another great guy in here who’s very well known for, speaking of soils. He runs some garden centers here in the area. He was telling me some of his cayenne stories. Pretty interesting stories, but yeah, cayenne’s awesome. Everyone have that little cayenne. If I went back on the day when I used to get sick, I don’t get sick anymore but I get really sick. If I ever got a sore throat I would take some cayenne, put it in some water juice and I would juggle it down. Of course you’re going to feel the heat against your throat, but I did it every two hours with vitamin C in between and another product called Immune Formula which has Echinacea and goldenseal and some other products in it. I can alternate every two hours. Cayenne just cut that pain in the throat. I’d heal that day.

[2:38:34] Ashley James: Yeah. My mom taught me fresh lemon juice, hot water, cayenne and some maple syrup or honey. We would drink that all day long if we had a sore throat or if we were coming down with a cold and then it would just blow itself right out.

[2:38:50] David DeHaas: She was too kind to you giving you the honey, I just take her straight.

[2:38:53] Ashley James: Well, I was a kid. She had to figure out how to get it in me. Yeah, the cayenne and between the cayenne, I think we also put ginger in it. Yeah, that’s right. We put ginger in it and the lemon juice for the vitamin C and the ginger for the tummy and then the cayenne for the throat and then the honey because I’m a kid. Yeah. That was the home remedy. Absolutely.

[2:39:16] David DeHaas: That’s going to help move out that mucus too. So if you’ve got some mucus, that will help it. The other thing too, I’ve had a guy come in with pneumonia. In fact, his daughter was on the 10-day cleanse and she was having this amazing changes. She says, “Yeah, my dad was at the hospital last night.” I go, “What for?” She says, “Well, he’s got pneumonia.” I say, “Well, why is he in here?” He had never done colonics yet, right? So he sends his daughter but he hasn’t come in. I go, “Tell him get down here.” So he comes down and he comes in. After the first colonic he said to me, “David, I have not slept through the night in years. I slept like a baby. I can’t believe how much better I feel.” I say, “You’ve only done one day.” He goes, “I know. What’s going to happen today?” I say, “Oh, it’s going to get better.” So yeah, he did I think three or four colonics in a row. His eyes got clear and all that. Yeah, getting that mucus out, getting that gunk out of the trunk. Again, what you’re doing with cayenne and the lemon juice another great thing to help move that out. We also use ginger here and lemon on the cleanse as well. Good stuff.

[2:40:16] Ashley James: Fun. Awesome. Do you add anything to the water when they’re doing colonics like at the end? I’ve been to places where the last sort of water flow into the colon contains probiotics. Do you do anything like that where you add stuff to the water?

[2:40:34] David DeHaas: Yeah. So we don’t generally add some stuff to the water but we do add some stuff that you can and you muscle test to see what exactly you need. So, again giving your body the ability to drink that from the hinder parts is a cool thing.

[2:40:51] Ashley James: Awesome, Is there anything that we didn’t cover today that you just really want to make sure that we cover?

[2:40:57] David DeHaas: If people really want to do a deep dive, I did a webinar that goes into a deep dive on how the colon works. I even bring on Dr. Charina Holmes and she talks about what’s going on in the gut. That’s at healingtheincurables.com, healingtheincurables.com. So, people could go watch that and really get an education on colon hydrotherapy and how the gut works and how all those nerves, I have pictures on there of how the nerves connect to the gut. I go into a whole and its very layman’s terms so people can understand. I think everyone from first grade up should probably watch that webinar just to understand.

[2:41:35] Ashley James: Oh, cool. We homeschool our four-year-old so he’s about to be five. He’s already doing first-grade level stuff. So we’ll watch it together because he’s really interested in anatomy. He likes to draw and color the body, like the anatomy of the body.

[2:41:51] David DeHaas: Awesome.

[2:41:52] Ashley James: So, yeah. Neat. I know we have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast with their children, actually. That’s why we keep it a clean show with no swearing, friendly for the whole family. Some topics though, when it comes to like some kind of health things maybe should be PG-13, but other than that, it’s a safe podcast to listen to for the whole family. So your webinar healingtheincurables.com. Is it incurable?

[2:42:22] David DeHaas: Incurables.

[2:42:23] Ashley James: Incurables, with an S.

[2:42:24] David DeHaas: Healingtheincurables.com. I teach a thing called the four natural laws of healing. Thank you V.E. Irons for that and Dr. Bernhard Jensen. So, yeah. There’s a lot of good stuff in that. Of course we got stuff on our website as well at livingwaterscleanse.com so a lot of good, in fact we have a video on there on how a colonic is done. So if you go to livingwaterscleanse.com, you’ll actually see my wife show you how a colonic is done.

[2:42:55] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve watched that video.

[2:42:57] David DeHaas: Ten minutes long.

[2:42:58] Ashley James: Yeah. A lot of your videos. They’re fun. Just go watch the videos and see the testimonials and see the stuff that comes out of people because that’s like crazy. That’s so crazy. Then you really want that stuff to come out of you too. I know my listeners are really into parasite cleanses or at least I am, and then the ones that are interested, they talk in the Facebook group about it. So yeah, if you think you’ve got parasites, if you’ve never done a parasite cleanse and you’re an adult, you have parasites. That’s basically what it is.

[2:43:30] David DeHaas: Parasites don’t like the warm water. They don’t like that. They hate it. I mean, that’s what really helps all the herbs and all that stuff and using zappers and pulse frequency. All that’s great. People come in and have done all that over the years they come here and they add the water by doing the colonics. Those guys can only hang on so long.

[2:43:52] Ashley James: It’s like a tidal wave. It just pulls them out.

[2:43:54] David DeHaas: Whoosh.

[2:43:55] Ashley James: Yes. Nice. Awesome. David, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all this great information. It’s been wonderful. Livingwaterscleanse.com is your website. Of course, the links to everything that David does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there a final message that you’d like to leave listeners with to wrap up today’s interview?

[2:44:21] David DeHaas: Oh, final message. Well, I think the important thing is you need to poop like a boss. If you’re sick, get a colonic, come on. Guys, it’s really simple, really easy. It’s going to cut your sick-care costs and it’s going to improve your well-being. Find a colon hydrotherapist. I mean, we’d love to have you come to Boise, Idaho and join us. But look at it, there’s great colon hydrotherapists throughout the country. My mission is to make colon hydrotherapy as popular as those little stand-up pharmacies on the corner.

[2:44:54] Ashley James: Very good, very nice.

[2:44:56] David DeHaas: Bring your friend. I always tell couples, there was a couple that came in yesterday and I say, “Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” They say, “Yeah.” She had done colonics and he hadn’t. I say, “You can’t date him until he’s cleaned up. We can’t date the unclean.” He looked at her and like, “Oh, I guess I got to get some colonics.” I say, “Yeah, because what he has, you’re going to have.” So, yeah.

[2:45:18] Ashley James: Very interesting. Bring a friend. All right. Thank you so much, David. This has been a pleasure to have you today.

[2:45:26] David DeHaas: All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate what you’ve been doing. I’ve listened to quite a few your podcasts. They’re awesome.

[2:45:32] Ashley James: Oh, thanks.

[2:45:34] Outro: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview, I know I did. It’s such a wonderful journey to be on this health journey with you, learning alongside you. I’ve been so into health for so many years building my health back. To be able to share it with you is a real blessing. Come join the Facebook group the Learn True Health Facebook Group if you haven’t already because it’s such a wonderful community to be part of a supportive community of people like you who are looking to build their health and gain their health back and be as healthy as possible. Sometimes we feel like black sheep but our own family or in our own social circles, but when you come join the Learn True Health Facebook group you feel supported and you feel like you’re not alone.

Another place you’ll feel supported is my new membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Whether you don’t know how to cook at all or you cook all the time, you are going to get so much out of our membership. I paired with a really good friend of mine, Naomi, who’s an amazing cook and is a total health advocate. She figures out how to cook in a way that makes children happy, that makes the whole family happy and that’s healing using healing ingredients, healing foods that can be adapted for all different kinds of diets and lifestyles.

So come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH. I made it affordable for everyone because I want you to join me. You can support the Learn True Health Facebook group, support me in continuing to do these interviews by joining the membership. Also support you to gain more recipes and more ideas more lifestyle tips and tricks. I put a ton of work and a ton of effort into the Learn True Health Home Kitchen to teach so that I can empower you to get your health to the next level and to always be cultivating true health.

Every week I add new lessons so you’ll continue to gain more and more and more. There’s well over seven hours of content that you can pour through right now and I add new lessons every single week. So please, come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, support the Learn True Health podcast, support me and what I’m doing. My mission to continue to bring you these interviews and support you and your family in optimal health. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for supporting the Learn True Health podcast. Have yourself an excellent rest of your day.

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MamaSezz: The Miracle of Food-based Medicine

Highlights:

How MamaSezz plant-based delivery started
Benefits of eating beets
Eating a whole food plant-based diet helps in healing
How Mamasezz delivers meals responsibly
Testimonials from customers: lost weight, unhooked from food obsession
HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired
Importance of planning meals and snacks

In this episode, Meg Donahue shares with us how she started MamaSezz, a whole food plant-based meal delivery company. We learn the different struggles that they faced and how it became an opportunity for them to create healthy foods delivered for people with different lifestyles. We also learn how their company values people from their customers to their staff and even our environment.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s episode. I feel like everyone should listen to at least the first 20 minutes. Oh my gosh, Meg’s story is amazing and so inspirational. If you’re struggling with health problems, if you have a family member that’s struggling with health problems get them to listen to this. I’m really, really excited to impart this information because we have to get this out there. People need to know that there’s a way for the

m to heal their body using food that almost looks miraculous. The results are almost, it’s almost a miracle. The science is there and it’s been proven. So really, enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you love. Now, Meg is giving us, is gifting one of the listeners $169 package. So you can go to the Learn True Health Facebook Group for the next week or so. We’re going to have a post after I publish this. We’ll have a post on the Learn True Health Facebook Group. You can comment and you can get a chance to win $169 package of whole food plant-based delicious food that’ll be shipped to you for free. So, one of our listeners is going to win that.

Now Meg is giving all of the listeners $15 off. So, you can use coupon code LTH on her website, mamasezz.com. That’s MAMASEZZ.com. You can also look in the show notes of today’s podcast as all the links to what Meg does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. So get the $15 off coupon using the coupon code LTH. Excellent. Be sure to go to the Facebook group for your chance to win this beautiful package that Meg is gifting us. Thank you so much for being a listener. I’m so excited to get this information out there. I can’t wait to hear what you guys think of this episode after you listen to it. Then come into the Facebook group and let us know what you think. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

[0:02:19] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 411. I am so excited for today’s show. We have on with us, Meg Donahue. She’s the co-founder of mamasezz.com, a national plant-based meal delivery and lifestyle company. MamaSezz is MAMASEZZ.com. I love your website actually. It’s really cute and all the food looks so delicious. So, I’m really excited to talk to you today about starting a company focusing on helping people who are super busy to also eat in a healthy way. I think that’s a really unique niche to get into.

[0:03:12] Meg Donahue: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here, Ashley. I love the work that you do.

[0:03:15] Ashley James: Awesome. So, I’d love to just dive right into your story. You are an entrepreneur, you’re a speaker, you’re a writer. What happened in your life to make you want to start a plant-based meal delivery service?

[0:03:31] Meg Donahue: It’s a really good question. It was not at all on my radar, I’ll say that. I was a pretty healthy junk food, meat-eating, dairy eating, grew up in farm country person. At 50 I had had my first child and she was a preemie. During that time, my mother who was 80 also got sick. I’m just giving the back story so you can kind of have a setting for it.

[0:04:03] Ashley James: I want the back story.

[0:04:04] Meg Donahue: Are you sure?

[0:04:07] Ashley James: I’m in awe of you right now. You got pregnant at 49?

[0:04:11] Meg Donahue: I did. It was awesome but at 26 weeks, I woke up in the middle of the night and my legs were just double their size. They had just felt like somebody had taken a hose and just was pouring water into my body. I called my doctor and minutes later I’m at the hospital. I had acute preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure and edema, this massive swelling. So, I was 25 weeks at the time so it’s a very delicate time for babies where their lungs and their eyes haven’t quite developed and there’s brain development. So, they said, “We’re just going to ship you to the local the regional big hospital, Dartmouth-Hitchcock here in New England and just kind of put you in a room to be quiet and dark until and right up as out as long as we can and try and get another week and a half.”

[0:05:12] Ashley James: Is there a reason why the room had to be dark?

[0:05:14] Meg Donahue: Yeah. Because it’s really interesting. It’s when sound and light can raise your blood pressure. So, you’re just trying to be very calm. So, during this time my family of course wanted to visit, my partner was with me, but there are no outside visitors. So, actually my mom was also very sick. She got congestive heart failure. She was 80 and had been kind of in and out of the hospital at that point herself. She said to my sister, she lived two states away, “Hey. I’m going to drive to go see Meg or you’re going to take me or I’m going to walk.” So, my sister said, “I will take you.” So, she showed up and by this time I had gained, in that week, 65 pounds of water weight. My head was swollen up like Dick Butkus. I don’t know if you know him, but he was a football player from the 60s. I had slits for eyes. It was a very intense time.

So, my mom was in a wheelchair and my sister brought her to the door. I’ll never forget. I looked over and she got up out of the wheelchair. My mom, her whole life up until she got sick, had been what we would consider a really healthy profile person. She played tennis, she golfed, she was active, she read, she had a lot of friends, good family life. So she had all of those elements that we – she wasn’t overweight, she was fit-looking. So, prior to her getting sick and being pretty much unable to walk more than 10 feet, she was that person.

So, she showed up at my hospital room door. I looked over and she got out of the wheelchair and it was like she was when she was 40 again and that kind of vibrant energy. She came over to me. My head was really like a basketball. My back was so swollen. It was just a nightmare. She grabbed my hand and she leaned in and she said, “You’re a fighter. You’re going to be okay and your baby’s going to be okay.” Yeah. I didn’t have any reason to believe her at all because at that point everyone was preparing for the worst things that can happen. There are a lot of them, but I did.

Sometimes you just believe your mom. At that moment I did. She went back and kind of collapsed into the wheelchair. My sister took her out of the room and they were going to go get a cup of tea to get her and then get her back to Maine. Moments later, my blood pressure spiked so high they said, “No. You have to have the baby now.” So, they wheeled me in and I gave birth by cesarean to a little over a pound preemie. Yeah. Very tiny. I said, “She’s perfect just very small.” So, I had this baby and then I still kept getting sick. Normally, preeclampsia, once you have the baby that cures it. Then you’re on the mend, but I had more complications. On top of that my mom collapsed because all of it was just too much. So, she was in the ICU. So, we’re on three different floors in the hospital.

[0:08:49] Ashley James: Oh no.

[0:08:51] Meg Donahue: I know. It was nuts. We were there for three months. My daughter was in the NICU for three months. For her, she ended up doing phenomenally well. She has no residual impact of the big scary things from being a preemie. She’s tall and she’s eight now. But we were all in different like NICU, ICU, cardiac ICU for my mom. I was in the high-risk ward for after pregnancies for a while, but we were there for three months. So, during that time, I rented a hotel suite because it was far away from my house and would stay there. My mom would come in and out of the hospital and stay with me. I realized there’s no way she’s going home. She can’t navigate her day. She can’t shop, she can’t feed herself, she can’t do these things. She was just kind of rapidly going down.

So, while I was up there, we renovated a little garage apartment in my house. I said, “Mom, why don’t you just come home with me for a while. Really what I knew and from what doctors had said, there’s nothing more we can do. She has less than 10% heart function, kidneys are failing. What happens is your lungs, because your heart can’t pump fluids and your lungs fill up and then you have to go in and your lungs. So it’s just like this ecosystem that isn’t able to, it collapses. That was her body. So, I think she was just too weak to say no. Because it was like a separate garage apartment, it’s like 500 feet from my house because she’s very proud and private, she said okay. We just brought her home and the same day that I brought my little daughter Annie home three months later.

So, I had this little preemie who was in quarantine for two years because her lungs were very fragile, which meant you know nobody came over unless they had every shot in the world and Purelled themselves. Then I had my mom. My mom was not getting, there were a lot of trips to the emergency room. I’d call my brothers and sisters. I’d be like, “This is it.” They’d all come in and she’d kind of just limp along. So one night up, feeding Annie and I couldn’t reconcile how can this incredibly healthy person, now at 80, all of a sudden everything goes. It just doesn’t make sense and who’s survived it. So, I just researched that who survived this level of, just googled it. That was congestive heart failure. I came across Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn who wrote the book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease.

[0:11:48] Ashley James: I love him. I had him on the show. I just love him.

[0:11:51] Meg Donahue: Beautiful. Yeah. He’s wonderful. T. Colin Campbell as well and the work there and a lot of other people, but Dr. Esselstyn’s book I just bought it and said the next day, “Okay, we’re doing this.” So, I started cooking her these meals, these very tiny, I mean they’re like bird-sized meals, whole food plant-based. So, soups and smoothies. So, over the course of like four or five months she started to get better and that she wasn’t getting worse. She could walk, then started to walk around her apartment. When I say apartment it’s maybe 15 by 22. It’s not a big place. Then she started to walk outside and could walk up and down our driveway. We’re saying, “Something’s going on here.” The color came back to her face. If she went back to Maine it was going to be hospice care. That was that, but she had come to Vermont. So, she was that level of sick. Then all of a sudden she’s starting to get healthier. Then within a year, she’s 80. So, then by the time she’s 81 she’s starting to drive again. She joined the senior center because we’re in a new state. Then she joined the pool because she likes to swim so she started swimming three and four times a week. Over the course of three to four years, her heart function went from less than 10% and dropping to the low end of normal. She’s doing great. She’s going to be 90 this year.

[0:13:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, I’m crying. I’m so happy. Oh my gosh. She’s still here.

[0:13:45] Meg Donahue: She’s here. She learned to play the uke. Her big first goal once we realized you’re kind of out of the immediate woods here, it doesn’t look like you’re going to die next week, she said, “I just want to be able to see Annie walk.” Now, Annie is over at gram’s house, her little apartment because she still lives with me, every day. She sees her grandchildren every day. I see her every day. We have fun. She shops. She’s really active. So, that whole experience really woke me up because I also started eating this way because I was cooking for everyone. So, everyone in my family me, my partner started eating this way. I had arthritis. I was a lifelong athlete and I had arthritis in my hips, which is kind of like older athletes feel just like oh yeah something’s going to give. The knee, the hip. So, I just had accepted it, but then I woke up one morning and I woke up because I was not in pain. I thought, “Oh my goodness. Could this be the food too?” Sure enough, inflammation is what causes it.

So, these things just totally captivated me. So, I went to Cornell and I did their course work on it. I called all the doctors. We had previously a background in natural and organic food. My partner had a very large organic bread company in Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and Bic. So, we had sold that. So we thought we were out of the food business but realized, wow this food is miraculous in that when you go from foods that are hurting you to foods that heal. That’s all you need to do. You don’t need to exercise a ton. All these other things you don’t have to do right at the beginning to give yourself a baseline of health. All of these illnesses that we are oddly thinking that it’s normal like type 2 diabetes, obesity especially obesity in children, hypertension, other forms of heart disease. A lot of cancers are preventable or at least mitigated by just shifting your diet. I thought, “How do we not know this?

So the deeper I went in and I wasn’t too naive to the side of food that is food marketing that creates a very palatable taste profile, which is high fat, high sugar, high oil in a lot of foods. That our food had moved from real food, which has some salt and sodium in it, some sweet to it to really hyper super-sized palate and that people were hooked on it. We had actually even moved away from food. It’s like the whole derivative market. Remember when the market crashed it was all about derivatives because it was a derivative of a derivative. That’s really what our food has become. I just got on fire that this is such a simple solution. Everybody, everybody benefits. The planet benefits, people benefit, our economy benefits because we’re not crushing the health care system, relationships benefit. So, we started making these. We said, “Let’s do it. Let’s start making these meals.” Did a lot of research for about a year to how do you get a taste profile with whole food plant-based meals.

So, there’s no additives, there’s no preservatives in our food, which is really common in vegan foods. A lot of vegan junk food. Preservatives and chemicals to give it either a taste or to keep it on your shelf longer. We said, “We need to get away from that if people are really going to have our food and have the experience where their body gets to just be flooded with nutrients and thrive.” So, we spent a lot of time with food scientists and chefs and we came up with, I think, some products that they’re familiar. I said, “If my football-playing brothers like this, then it passes.” I needed them to not going to like, “Oh, it’s a salad.” We wanted to be very open because I came to this, I was clueless. It’s shameful how clueless I was, but I was. I wasn’t a bad person, I just didn’t know. So, shaming didn’t help me because we had those friends who are like, “Oh, you’re going to eat that tuna?” Then wreck the whole dinner. I said, “I don’t want to be that person because I know people come to something when they’re laughing and happy and they feel good. So, let’s create that type of company where if you’re not wholly plant-based that’s fine, just have some of this and integrate it in your life.” Then for people who are sick, if you have a heart disease I say don’t mess around, why would you? Just go all in, see what happens.

So, we really created foods that fit anybody. Wherever you’re entering into a plant-based or if you’ve been eating vegan and plant-based your whole life or if you’re just starting or if you have a specific illness, we try to create a product and we curate them into bundles that will suit you. I think it’s worked out pretty well. We partnered with the American Institute for Cancer Research for people who are going through chemotherapy and treatment because we know that having good food handy and ready-made because our food is already made, you just have to heat and eat it, is a huge benefit when you already feel sick. We have a heart-healthy bundle. We work with Dr. Esselstyn to create that. We worked with TrueNorth. So, we picked some really key people and then develop some bundles specifically for that.

We work with, I don’t know if you know Dr. Jamie Dulaney, she’s just a rock star. She’s a cardiologist. She said she traded in her scalpel for her spatula. She has a lifestyle and wellness practice. She’s also an Ironman athlete. She said, “There are some specific things that we need as athletes when you’re plant-based that you can’t always get.” So, we created some custom products. We have this beet product, which I have to send you because it’s like rocket fuel. You put it in your smoothie with a little juice and a banana and increases stamina. Any research on beets will tell you this, but decreases inflammation, increases stamina, increases endurance. A lot of high-level athletes love it. So, that was her secret weapon. She started pounding our beet. We made it with her and then we made a performance bundle for athletes that need a little extra. Different nutrients, different vitamins and a little more for more calories. So, that type of thing. That’s our story. That’s how we got here and how MamaSezz came about.

[0:21:02] Ashley James: I love it. I was crying the entire time about your mom. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, she’s still here and she was at 10% a heart and her kidneys were failing.” Sounds like she had COPD.

[0:21:18] Meg Donahue: Oh yeah.

[0:21:20] Ashley James: That was her at 80 and all the MDs gave up on her. They all said go home to die, go home to hospice. We really have to wrap our brains around this. We have given over our power and our medical authority. We’ve given over our decision-making to these MDs that we put on a pedestal.

They are really well-intended people. They are highly educated. They really do want to help, but it’s like asking a plumber and check my car engine. They’re not trained in how to heal the body. They’re training how to manage drugs and manage symptoms and sort of just keep us alive with allopathic medicine, but they’re not trained in school about nutrition and healing the body. It blows my mind.

So, all the doctors and all the times she went to the ER and all the time she was in the hospital, MD allopathic drug-based medicine was not going to get her healthy. It was just going to maintain and sort of just keep her from dying. Then she comes home and eats your whole food plant-based no salt, sugar oil, cooking and it’s delicious and she was eating food that was dense in nutrition and optimally designed to heal the heart. She’s here years and years and years later and she’s driving and she’s active and she’s having the quality of life that some 70-year-olds don’t have. Just blows my mind.

[0:23:00] Meg Donahue: It’s really true. I remember one time when I was in, at this time I didn’t really know, but I remember thinking, “Wait a minute, she’s a heart patient. Why are they giving her tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches? That just seems wrong.” I didn’t even know all that I know now. This was before we had the company. It was crazy. What I think happens, she has a story of her doctor. Because earlier, before all this, she had had a pacemaker. He said to her, “You’re never going to feel as good as you did before in your life.” It stuck with her. She’s had a lot of doctors but that particular one just stuck. She goes, “What a horrible thing to say to somebody.” It turned out to be so dramatically wrong. But I think that if a lot of people, a lot of doctors and I think it’s changing a lot but I think that they have the tools that they have to work with.

Nutrition is a very difficult thing to control. You can control a pill but you can’t control what somebody eats. People aren’t great at self-reporting. So, I think that they are trying to hedge their bets and rightfully so because they have an oath to do their best. If what they’re seeing is somebody who may or may not follow through and then they die of a heart attack or I can give them a stent and then they can hopefully change their diet. That’s what I see a lot. I’ve run into some flat-out resistance to it, but a lot of it is that an abundance of caution and an understanding that most people aren’t able to comply. That was one of the reasons that we said let’s make it so flat out easy to do this that people can get over that initial hump that first month. That first two months. Because our products are not like a meal kit or anything. They’re more like what you would stock your fridge with. So, you get your almond milk, you get whatever other things and you get your MamaSezz products. You can eat them just as they are or you can mix and match them with other things and make other meals. That’s what we wanted. To make it so easy for people that the multi-ingredient things are already made for you.

We do veggie burgers you can put whatever you want on a veggie burger. We do the chili, we’ll do the lasagna and we have a great new breakfast bundle coming out with frittatas and flatbread. It’s all gluten-free. There’s no flour. It’s amazing, but to make it super easy for people because that’s what we saw in a medical profession that doctors were really wary of. It was accurate because it is hard to comply especially when you’re not well and you have habits and probably addictions to different sugars and flours and foods and things to comply. So they hedge their bets and we try and help on the other end. Okay, go ahead. Keep taking medication, but do this as well and have your doctor monitor your medication so you can wean off the things. That was really what happened with mom because we didn’t know what the heck we were doing but all of a sudden her blood pressure dropped like a stone. I’m like oh my god. What we realized is because she was getting better, her blood pressure, she had high head high blood pressure, dropped but she was on blood pressure medication. So it dropped too much. We have to like scrape her off the floor and then got her blood pressure medication adjusted as she got stronger and stronger. It went down and down. It was a weaning process.

[0:26:58] Ashley James: Wonderful. So, she’s off of medication now?

[0:27:01] Meg Donahue: Yeah. She had had like a genetically high cholesterol. Some people just produce more cholesterol. So, she’s on something for cholesterol. She had had a thyroid issue. So she still has a small amount of that. So it’s like everything is on a– initially, I have master’s degrees and I had to have a spreadsheet just keep track of her medication. When she first came it was just insane. She’s on B12 now. She does D, some vitamins and things like that. Then she has a few of the other ones, one for the thyroid and then a cholesterol.

[0:27:42] Ashley James: So, she’s on two prescription medications instead of an entire spreadsheet of prescription medications?

[0:27:48] Meg Donahue: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[0:27:51] Ashley James: I love it. We had a similar testimonial from, in the Learn True Health Facebook group we get testimonials all the time from listeners by listening to the show and following the advice of people like Dr. Esselstyn who’s been on the show. My listeners then report back. We had one woman who took pictures of her old medication and her new medication. She went from something like nine or ten bottles down to two bottles. She changed three things in her life, things that she learned from the show. She changed three things. Most of those meds were pain meds. She says, “I am now out of pain.” She’s out of pain. She’s goes, “I’m going to start exercising now because I’m out of pain.” This is the quality of life that people can have by shifting their diet.

[0:28:47] Meg Donahue: And you. You’re bringing that message to them. I mean, that’s what we need. Somebody who can bring quality content to people that’s research-based. We knew we wanted to be grounded in research and that’s what you are where you’re bringing people. This is real. It actually works. You can always test, know if a diet works not by whether you lose weight or not or if you have more energy, but if you get your actual physical numbers done. So, that’s we tell people is like, “You might want to do keto but what I would do is get all of my numbers done first and then six months later get them done again or a year later and follow it.”

[0:29:26] Ashley James: I like that. I like that you brought that up, that testing. That’s exactly what happened to me. Through the last 15 years or so, I have reversed type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on monthly antibiotics for, polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility. I had five basically diseases and I reversed it with food and supplements and lifestyle changes. That’s why I started the show because I learned so much from Naturopathic doctors and from these holistic doctors. I thought this is crazy. The world needs to know this. The world needs to know that just switching to organic made my chronic monthly infections go away. One change, just one. I didn’t even give up sugar. I didn’t give up dairy. I didn’t give up meat. My first change back in 2008, 2009 it’s like right around 2008. It was right when Netflix started streaming the first health documentary. The first health documentary said shop the perimeter and buy organic. We were still eating the standard American diet. I did more shopping the perimeter and I chose organic and within that month my chronic infections went away. I just turned to my husband I’m like, “If I can change one thing, something so big by changing one aspect of my food.” Yeah.

That began my journey into just diving in because I’d been going every month to the MD and they just kept giving me drug after drug after drug. How many years could I have lived on countless antibiotics? I would have had to be on antibiotics for the rest of my life just constantly. Would I still be here? I mean, I might have died from cancer or something because my immune system was clearly not working.

[0:31:21] Meg Donahue: Yeah. It sounds like it had just, probably which is a healthy response to a lot of toxins. Your body’s like forget it, we can’t do this, alert, alert. Luckily, I don’t know how you had the wherewithal to find it, but luckily you did. That’s amazing.

[0:31:41] Ashley James: Divine intervention. It was. It was definitely.

[0:31:43] Meg Donahue: Yeah. I hear you.

[0:31:45] Ashley James: There’s a lot of that.

[0:31:47] Meg Donahue: We’re angel driven, you know. We say that. I think it was right around that year when we were doing this. We had done this. I did a public art show and it was called watching angels because our town had been hit by floods. It fires. We’re a small town in the hills of Vermont. You wouldn’t think there’d be floods but there was this massive flood that went right through the town. So, I did this art show called watching angels where I got artists from all over the world to send in angels. It was outside. We would put them in weird little places or curious places with a message, an uplifting message. Then we had these two big 24-foot gratitude boards in town where people could go write what are you grateful for. It was amazing, Ashley. It was like this vortex. We kept it going for 30 days and we documented it. What we had said was that was kind of like it just dropped into my mind. I was drawing one night and this whole idea just came into my head. I was like, “I’m not really a public artist but okay, I guess I’ll do that.”

So, I just kind of found my way through and it turned out to be this really remarkable thing for the town, which was cool and I was glad to be a part of. The same feeling happened when MamaSezz really coalesced into an idea that we’re going to do this. I was sitting. I got up early. I was sitting at my breakfast table. It was like this idea just came down and the whole thing. I said, “Okay.” That’s what we’re going to do. Here we are two years later.

[0:33:35] Ashley James: Wow. I know that feeling of –

[0:33:38] Meg Donahue: I had a feeling that it would resonate with you like, “I’m going to what?”

[0:33:42] Ashley James: Yeah, because there’s no safety net. There’s no one there to catch you. There’s no paycheck. You might put your whole life savings into it. I mean, when you’re starting a business, it might be years before you get paid. So, it’s like there is no safety net. You could be, and you are so bold, you’re launching- I mean this country wants McDonald’s. What are you thinking? People want to eat fast food. What are you thinking? So, you’re going against the norm. You’re really going up against the norm and you’re saying, “I bet that there’s there are enough customers out there that desperately want a pre-made meal service that is going to help them heal their body.” That is so bold because most people, not the listeners obviously, but the majority the people want–they don’t even think about health. It’s not even in their consciousness to think about it. So you really we’re taking a huge risk to create a plant-based meal service that is designed for athletes, designed for heart patients, designed for weight loss, designed for the different kind of niches, but that it’s super healthy clean food. When the majority people out there just want to go through a drive-thru.

So, that was bold of you in that moment to say, “I’m going to launch this,” because you could have failed but you didn’t and I love it.

[0:35:22] Meg Donahue: Well, thanks. I think too you might be giving me too much credit. I don’t know if I thought about it. I think you might probably measured it as clearly as you might have. I would have gone like, wait a minute. I think it’s the same thing that galvanized you is when you’ve had your life just really transformed and you can see how amazing it is. Then I just felt like giving it away. It just felt like I have a golden ticket. Anybody who had like type 2 diabetes. I don’t want to be the person who’s like talking to their ear off about plant-based food. I said, “Well, maybe I’ll just create a company and then we can get,” and this is the lifestyle part is it was really important that we have solid information for people because there was so much woo-woo kind of not accurate science. Maybe an accurate message but backed up by kind of not strong arguments or science. So, we decided early on that we’re going to invest a lot of our time and efforts also into creating solid information for people because I wanted it. I ended up really just having, it’s a life or death situation for me. So, I was highly motivated but not everyone hopefully has to come to it being that motivated. They can just come to our site and go, “What is nutritional yeast? What do you do with it? How much B12 do I need?” Get those initial answers done and really find well-documented, well-researched information.

So, that’s the other part of what we do because it’s not all about food. Food just kind of gives you the platform to then go lead the rest of your life. There’s a lot of other things that can go into that.

[0:37:19] Ashley James: Food gave your mom ten years plus, right? Of quality living. She went back to swimming. She went back to driving.

[0:37:34] Meg Donahue: She travels.

[0:37:36] Ashley James: She travels. She’s super healthy. It gave her her life back. Food can give us our life back. I want us to stop thinking about, “Well, but what about my bacon? What about my meat? But I love cheese.” Just stop thinking about that. Let’s say if we add up all the hours of the day that we spend eating, okay it’s an hour a day. You’re suffering for 23 hours a day from whatever illness and you’re worried about the one hour a day that you enjoy your cheese? I mean, this is what I struggled with. It took me a while to kind of come around because I had to wrap my brain around. I realized, I came to the realization that dairy was hurting my health. I had to do a break from dairy and see if cutting out dairy would help. The hardest thing to let go was cheese because my husband and I would eat a brick of Tillamook Cheese every weekend. It was the big kind from Costco. Seriously, it’s the size of a foot. We would sit there and we would like, that was our you know. It took us a weekend and we’d eat it. I mean, we would kind of look at each other like, “Where’s the cheese?” “We already ate it.” It was a huge break. It’s like the size of my head.

Cream in the coffee. I had to kind of have a come-to-Jesus talk with myself and go, “Okay. So what? So what I don’t enjoy my coffee like I enjoy my coffee-less? So what? So I find something else to snack on instead of cheese. I am suffering right now and I don’t need to.” So, I had to buck up and try a different way of eating. Then all of a sudden I had these huge results. I’m like, “Okay. It’s worth.” But I went through a struggle. It took me a while to transition. I slowly transitioned. I slowly ate less and less meat and more and more plants. My husband however, he went vegan overnight. He just woke up and just said like everything in his being said, “I never want to eat meat again.” Since I’m the cook in the house so I have to cook now I have to figure out how to cook plant-based, okay. So, that helped my progression into the plant-based world.

What I found is that I had more energy in one week of eating more plants than I had eating all the meat in the world. We were raised to believe that meat gives us energy. We’re raised to believe that meat makes us feel good. So, I was surprised because I thought for sure I’d feel shaky and weak because again, I lived as a diabetic for many years. I was afraid of carbohydrates. I was afraid that eating yams or potatoes or grains, whole grains or even vegetables. I was afraid of vegetables for many years because I was afraid of carbohydrates. Really, I had to face all these fears and all these beliefs about food. I had to examine them and go, “Is this science-based? Is this based in reality or can I reorganize my thinking about food because I’d never tried eating just whole foods?” Okay. Stir-fry with no oil and there’s easy way to do it. Sauté a bunch of vegetables. Really delicious. You use the spices I love. Put it over some brown rice. All organic of course. Make my own tahini sauce or something. Make my own lemon garlic sauce or whatever I want. So delicious. I thought for sure I’ll be hungry in an hour, I’ll be shaky, I’ll be weak and it was the opposite. My energy lasted longer. I just began to feel better and better.

I told you this before we hit record, but yesterday I had for breakfast, actually it was really an early start because I woke up just after 4:00. So, sometime in between 4:00 and 5:00 I made a big bowl of homemade sprouts and a big bowl of sprouts with avocado and homemade sesame sauce like a tahini sauce. I had that for breakfast and then I didn’t eat again for about 8 to 10 hours. I can’t remember exactly when I had breakfast because I know I woke up at 4:00 but I basically didn’t eat again until 2:00 PM. I kind of looked around going, “Oh, wow. I’m just starting to get hungry now.” That wasn’t me in the past when I was a meat-eater. I had to eat like every three to four hours or else I’d be ravenous. So, I always thought I had to have meat to feel satiated. So, this is just a big, big shift to go, “Wait, I just ate plants and I am more satiated and eating me actually caused me to be hungry more often.” So, I had to constantly face my belief system about food and go, “Okay, I’m looking at foods to heal my body.” Is my belief system and also my desire for oh is it going to taste good because I just talked to a client yesterday and I was talking about broccoli as an example. I said 100 calories of broccoli is like two and a half cups broccoli. So, just to give a comparison, it’s very filling and nutrient-dense, but it’s volumetric. It’s low-calorie but big volume so you can eat a lot of a non-starchy vegetable, feel very good, you’re getting all these nutrients. She goes, “Yeah, but that’d be boring.” I was like, “Yes, exactly.” People are worried about eating healthy because it’s boring, but it doesn’t have to be.

[0:43:14] Meg Donahue: Yeah. I think that you’ve touched on so many important points that we’ve seen with people transitioning to eat this way. One of the ones that you said is you had to kind of come-to-Jesus moment. If you have a health issue, then that’s usually where the rubber meets the road. I say to people, “You’re going to need to make a decision about what you want to do here and accept that there will be some things that are different than what they what used to be. Just do it for today. Then when tomorrow comes do it for tomorrow. Add more things, more good stuff to your plate and have the meats or the dairies be smaller. Then add more of this amazing buffet of possibility over here that are plant-based, it’s colorful, rich amazing foods. Eat those first and then eat the other.” When you can flip it that way and just kind of wean the others away, you allow your buds, which takes some time to change because we’ve really been just kind of saturated with the idea that you have to have massive amounts of salt, sugar, and fat for something to taste good. A potato chip is a good example of that. That the reason they taste so good is because those elements are so so high and it’s addictive. That’s why you can eat just one. It’s not because that particular taste is so unique and amazing. It’s that combination of those elements are so amazing.

So, it takes a while for your taste buds to readjust, but like you said, when you begin to have the benefits and can allow yourself that, it so outweighs the other. I totally get that for people who grew up eating a certain way, changing can be difficult. There is a point where you make a decision, well, what do I want to do? If you can know that on the other side of it is not like food that’s just going to be blah the rest of your life because I think that’s the fear or I’m never going to have enough protein, but to do what you did which was to really allow yourself the experience of it and then to be reflective enough to say, Well, was that true? Did I really have an energy drop? No, I didn’t. Am I really starving? No, I’m not. Did that taste bad? No, it tasted good.” To let yourself do that enough so that your body is like, “This is what I crave, I don’t crave the other anymore.” That happens. That happens to everybody. It takes about, they say, 66 days to really ingrain a habit if you do it consistently. Everyone would like it to be three days but it’s really, that’s just our physiology and our psychology. It just takes some time and to give yourself that time. The gift of health we call it because you know the benefits are just so profound even if you don’t have an illness, especially if you don’t have an illness. Just to be able to live your life with that level of sustained clear energy with a focus is really just amazing. That’s how we’re meant to live. When you can read all the ingredients and you could grow them in a garden of our food, but for a lot of foods that we see, there’s just absolutely no place that they are found in nature. They’re found in a lab. It’s not surprising that our bodies don’t process them or recognize them that well.

[0:46:55] Ashley James: How long have you been offering MamaSezz? How long have you been shipping meals?

[0:47:04] Meg Donahue: We launched in February of 2017. Pretty quickly, made the decision to ship nationwide. So, we ship fresh. It comes in a cooler. This is another thing that bothered me when we first started. I wanted to see what other company was doing, how they did it, what worked and what we could glean from it. What I ended up with it was a garage full of just boxes and ice packs and liners. I thought, “This is crazy. So much of this is just going to land up in a landfill.” Talk about being the ugly American. I’m going to get these ten meals and I’m dumping all this in a landfill. We need to crack that nut.

So, we decided right off the bat that this is something that we have to create a model that handles that. So, what we do with a two-tiered approach. The first thing that we do is we give you a shipping label and we take everything back. So, you get your box and all of your stuff and then you just put your ice packs back in, unless you want them, and the liners and you just ship it back to us. We recycle and reuse all of it. The other thing that we’re doing is, I grew up in part on the ocean in Maine and realized that our oceans are really getting hammered. What can we do to help raise awareness about that and also monetize potentially taking the plastic out of the ocean? So, we said, “Well, we could probably make boxes, shipping boxes out of ocean plastic.”

[0:48:45] Ashley James: Oh, cool.

[0:48:46] Meg Donahue: Yeah. So, that’s our under the wire project that we’re working on now is to pull the plastic from the ocean, pelletize it, make boxes out of it. Because that you can reuse and reuse. You can do 50-60 trips with that. Then when the box is no longer usable, you can repelletize it and make a park bench out of it. So, that’s our idea, our second idea. Our first is of course we take everything back because this is it. We get one planet, one life. Maybe it was after the 50-mark in my life and then seeing how fragile it was for my daughter and then at my mom at her stage in her life is that it is so rapid and so fast. What am I going to leave for my children? What kind of world am I going to leave? What kind of environment am I going to leave? Are they going to be struggling with things that I never even could imagine? How do we set a tone in a company that can leave it better than when we got here or at least stop the burn? So, that is a big part of who we are and why we do what we do.

[0:50:04] Ashley James: Brilliant. So, you have been shipping out since 2017. In the last few years, you must have testimonials. Can you share some that are in the forefront of your mind?

[0:50:20] Meg Donahue: Yeah. We have so many customers. This is because startups are tough, at least food businesses, it’s a difficult business. There are a lot of moving parts when you make your own food. We don’t outsource our food to others, to a co-packer, which a lot of companies do. We do it all ourselves. We have a brilliant plant, brilliant shipping facilities, but there are a lot of moving parts. So, what keeps you going is knowing that what you’re doing matters. That it’s impact is somebody’s life in a really positive and in many life-changing way. So, we hear from our customers every day. We came out with a weight-loss bundle and I had resisted it for a long time because I didn’t want people to just focus on their weight and not on their health. But what I realized is that weight is sometimes what gets your attention. If this is the way we can get people’s attention and then they end up having this health and the weight drops off because it always does when you’re plant-based. So, we developed a weight-loss program. The most moving pieces are people who have had life-long 10, 20, 30, 40 pounds that they have lost and gained back and lost and gained back and been caught in this struggle, which is an excruciating struggle because every day, for every meal you’re measuring it against, am I my gaining weight or am I losing weight? Am I gaining weight, am I losing weight? Do these pants fit, don’t they fit? When you get up in the morning, am I bloated, not bloated?

So, this whole massive amount of energy that is sucked up by how much do I weigh? What they, a lot of people have believed is it’s their psychology is somehow off.

[0:52:12] Ashley James: Or they blame themselves. They blame themselves. I was too weak. I couldn’t do it.

[0:52:17] Meg Donahue: I had a crummy childhood. I had something. All of this stuff, maybe those pieces are true, but what we know is that there’s flat-out science that says if you put too much sugar, fat, salt and other chemicals in your body it’ll alter your body chemistry and so that you begin to set up a craving in there that is just like any other addiction and you are powerless to it. So, what you need to do is to get that out of your system and let your body heal. When you do that you will lose weight naturally because you will no longer be in conflict with food. So, we’ll get messages from people and they’re ecstatic about the 10 or the 15, 20, 30. We’ve had people lose 65 pounds on a program. That is wonderful because to be released that. But the number one thing that is so moving is that they tell us, to a person, I have unhooked from food obsession, which means that the weight issue is you’re done. You paid that electric bill. You don’t have to go back to it. You’re not going to be next month. If you keep eating a plant-based diet, you’re not going to be in conflict with food. You’re not going to have to get up and think, “Should I eat this or shouldn’t I?” All of that energy and it’s not just women. So many men have it. They suffer differently than women, but it’s still a struggle. They might go to the gym more or women too, an obsession with working out, which has to do. I used to do in college, it helped get through college. I worked in gyms. I remember, it was during the early 80s. When they first started putting calorie counters on treadmills. The population of our gym changed from men to women.

Women would come in and it was not to get fit but all of a sudden the marketing had shifted. So, where if you could workout you could burn off last night’s whatever. That’s what happened, is working out became a way to get rid of calories as opposed to a way to get healthier. If working out did not burn calories, people would not do it for the health reasons. They just wouldn’t. That is what happened. That’s what happened and marketers got it. Now you’ll see everything has a calorie counter on it. Everything tracks, “Oh my goodness. Are you burning calories?” I can say I am never ever. I don’t count a calorie. I don’t think about calories. This is somebody who when I was in my 20s had a pretty significant eating disorder. So I was all that. I was as hooked into food as you could get. It’s gone. Just gone. That is the piece that is the most moving.

We’ve had a woman in her 50s, she lost 65 pounds. Then the transformation of her life because her orientation was no longer about food and my own weight and my inability to lose weight. Those are really gratifying.

[0:55:30] Ashley James: Being at peace with food for those who have suffered emotional eating, overeating, binge eating or food addiction. It’s over 10% of the population has this. It occupies every minute of the day for them. I know because that was me. You’re right, whole food plant-based diet has given me peace in my body. I interviewed Dr. Ellen Goldhamer, the founder or co-founder of the TrueNorth Medical Center.

[0:56:01] Meg Donahue: Yeah. We work with him.

[0:56:02] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. You mentioned him or you mentioned the TrueNorth Medical Center. He co-authored the book The Pleasure Trap. I really recommend reading it or listen to it because Chef AJ narrated it. I love her. I’ve had her on the show twice. He talks about the pleasure trap. He talks about the hyper-palatable foods in our society that really have hijacked our brain and hijacked our ancient survival mechanism. Because 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago however long it was that we were evolving and growing and being here on this planet. Whatever your belief system, everyone believes we’ve been here at least 5,000 years depending on what religion you’re a part of, but we’ve been here long enough. That back when there weren’t restaurants. Maybe we had to hunt or forage or gather whatever. That the body, we would go through times of famine.

In order to survive the famine, our ancestors had to gorge on high fructose fruit when it was in season. That’s why fructose is the only carbohydrate that doesn’t, actually the only macronutrient that doesn’t trigger the satiety mechanism in the brain. So, what that means is you could not imagine drinking a liter or two liters of coconut cream or whole dairy. Whatever it’s called, whole milk. If I were to hand you two liters of, I don’t know what the conversion is in American, gallon? Whatever what the unit.

[0:57:51] Meg Donahue: Like two gallons.

[0:57:52] Ashley James: Two gallons. Okay. If I’m going to hand you two gallons of high-fat milk and tell you to chug it you would be like, “Are you going to pay me a million dollars?” Maybe, but that doesn’t sound appealing. You drink a glass of high-fat coconut milk and even a glass would be too much. It’s just too much. But if I were to give someone two liters of a soda-pop like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, a teenager would down that in a day and have no problem. They would definitely have problems like sugar high, but the fact is that something with fructose doesn’t trigger the satiety mechanism. So, they use fructose in foods to make us consume more of it. Because we were meant to gorge heavily on fruit and never fully feel full so that we could gain weight so we could survive the famine. So, that was healthy back when it was in a whole food form. Then they took fructose and they isolated it and highly concentrated it and they put it in all packaged food. In some way or another, most potato chips have some form of sugar in them along with the other things that trick the brain to make us want to have more and more and more of it.

So, our brains from a very young age, have been hijacked by these Frankenfoods. As well as the marketing. I’ve discussed this on the show before. It hit me, when I was a child and I’d watch Sesame Street or whatever. Whatever that had commercials because I don’t know if PBS has commercials but whatever kids show I’d watch. The commercial would come on, it would be a Kellogg’s commercial or there’d be Cheerios or there’d be Lucky Charms or whatever with all these fun, childlike characters. You’d get a prize or there’d be cartoons on it. So, it would be this very friendly, calming thing for a child. It wasn’t threatening. It was something that looked delicious. It was something that was comforting.

So, you grow up going down the aisles seeing your familiar friends on these boxes and seeing all the familiar logos on all these highly-processed foods. It isn’t threatening to your neurology because you grew up with these brands. Our neurology is threatened by something new in an unconscious level. Especially for food and especially for children, they don’t like new things. But we grow up as adults and now we’re buying the same brands that we have been essentially brainwashed to trust because we grew up and they were part of our childhood. So, we just kind of blindly trust so much of the food that’s on the shelves and on our plates and in the drive-thru because they were able to market to us our entire lives. It’s like 1984. They’re able to just George Orwell our brain and hijack us.

So, we have to kind of pull ourselves out and go examine our belief system around food. I had to ask myself, “Why do I want to eat this? Really. What is motivating me? Why do I want to build my cells? I have 37.2 trillion cells. Do I want it? The next bite I’m putting into my mouth, do I want my body to be made out of this food?” Like some kind of potato chips right, as the example we come to. “Do I want to take oil, highly-processed oil, GMO, with pesticides and some fried potato chip with heterocyclic amines,” which is carcinogenic. It’s a massive carcinogenic compound that happens when you take certain foods and process them in high heat and then highly concentrated salt and sugar and MSG and other chemicals. “Okay, do I want to build my cells that are going to support me in health? Do I want to build my brain with this food, build my immune system with this food?” If we looked at every single bite we put into our body and we ask ourselves, “Do I want my eyesight, my eyes, the next cells to make my eyeballs, do I want them to be made out of this food? Do I want better eyesight or worse eyesight?

[1:02:17] Meg Donahue: You’re nailing it. It is not logical. I think that’s one of the things that’s really baffled me in my own life is that I’ve make a lot of decisions that they aren’t logical. I know that the times that I make those decisions are usually something’s going. I’m hungry so we tell people, we call it HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired. That address those things. First is hunger because it’s very hard to make a good food decision when you’re hungry and there is something that is going to taste good and give you the boost that you want. You might even intuitively know it like it’s a cookie or those types of really sweet type things or chips that are fast and they give you a jolt. So, if you can avoid being hungry in the first place with whole food plant-based foods, it’s much easier to not want things that are bad for you we found. Because you’re right, it makes no sense, even when you’re informed, that people still make bad decisions.

So, well knowing that we say, “Well, give yourself a little bit of a break.” Don’t make yourself be hungry just like you wouldn’t make your baby be hungry. They’d give them really good food. If your baby was angry you’d kind of pick them up and go, “Hey. It’s all going to be okay.” You can do the same with yourself. Lonely, of course with young children. You wouldn’t just stick them in a room alone. You nurture that need as well. Tired, of course, I think most people are working more than they have at this time in our lives. Just phenomenal stress financially, physically in our world that we’re so interconnected. I don’t think we can [Unintelligible] of being in a very connected and wired world for amazing as it is. How much of our energy and mental focus it gets kind of distracted and chewed up by that, which then leads to a kind of like trying to catch up when you get out of it.

So, those are the parts of the lifestyle that we try and address that putting good food in your body is the number one thing. It’s a whole lot easier to make decisions when you have that in your body, but to understand that there’s all these other pulls that you’re just going to do stuff. If you know any, you probably know a lot about recovery from alcohol and other addictions that it makes no sense that somebody would lose their license, lose their children, lose their job and then still go do something that was so damaging to themselves. We know that that is because there’s an active addiction going on. Once you can get that out and then give people the tools to deal with that time of recovery of when you’re no longer, when you’re learning how do I live differently and how do I make different decisions. So, that’s a part of what we really focus on as well are to give people the other tools to go from consistently making bad decisions to making fewer bad decisions around food, to making good decisions and have some compassion for themselves.

[1:05:46] Ashley James: One thing I would add to your HALT, I love it, is hydrate. So maybe hungry and hydrate.

[1:05:53] Meg Donahue: That’s cool. Yeah. That’s perfect because hydrate would be one, number one and then a hunger. Because a lot of times I think I’m hungry and I’m just thirsty. I don’t even know the difference.

[1:06:07] Ashley James: I’ve done a lot of work with the thirst mechanism. It’s strange, a lot of people think they’re, “Oh, well I’m not thirsty so I’m not dehydrated.” It’s far from the truth. In fact, thirst is sort of like, you know when your car says, “Okay, I’m about to be out of gas,” but you actually still have like 50 miles? My car does that.

[1:06:31] Meg Donahue: Right. Right.

[1:06:31] Ashley James: Okay. Thirst happens when the tank runs out and the car all of a sudden just stops. We’re like, “Oh, we need more gas.” That’s when thirst actually kicks in. When we are below empty and we actually needed to have sort of drinking water 50 miles ago.

[1:06:51] Meg Donahue: That’s a really good analogy.

[1:06:52] Ashley James: Yeah. I just came up with that.

[1:06:53] Meg Donahue: That is so good. That is really good.

[1:06:56] Ashley James: Whereas hunger comes when our tank is like 60% still full. Our body’s like, “Okay. I just made some room in the stomach. You can eat now.” We eat more calories than we need because our brain, for all the years that we lived without restaurants and without grocery stores, we didn’t have access to regular meals. So, our brain was desperately seeking calorie-dense foods in order to not die. So, now that we have access to constant supply of food, our brain goes, “Fantastic. We can be 400 pounds and we will never die of starvation.” That’s your brain’s job is to try to get all of us to be 400 pounds because we have a constant access to fuel. Our brain loves gaining weight because it wants us to survive the famine. We don’t need to eat three or six meals a day. We’re being told now that we should eat, “Eat six meals a day.” We don’t have to, but we definitely want to get nutrients in us.

There’s 90 essential nutrients the body needs. The body needs omega fatty acids, which we can get from plants. The body needs protein or in the form of main amino acids, which we can get from plants, an abundance of it and all the amino acids. That’s my pet peeve is when people say, “Oh, but you have to eat meat because there’s certain amino acids you just don’t get unless you eat meat.” Oh man. That was my first myth. I totally believed that. That was the first myth I busted for myself doing the research. We need 60 minerals, which we can get from, it’s a little bit harder to get all our minerals because of the farming practices. But if we eat organic, and sometimes we can supplement with a trace mineral if we are deficient. Eating plants is going to ensure that we’re getting more minerals than eating animals because animals don’t make minerals. Cows don’t make minerals. Cows don’t make calcium. Cows get their calcium from their feed. Then you could take supplements so we can just skip the middleman and take our own supplement or eat lots of greens.

So, we need 60 minerals. We need two essential fatty acids. We need 16 vitamins. We could definitely get all the vitamins from plants. I went through and looked at all the nutrition. I was like, “We got to get this dense amount of nutrition in us, but we don’t need to eat 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 calories a day and a lot of people are.” I know that I was constantly hungry. I had to work on that. What’s going on? My hunger mechanism was just constantly out of control. Whereas I never felt thirst until I was incredibly dehydrated. So, the hunger mechanism can kick in when we’re still 60% full. We have to sort of check-in with ourselves saying, I love your thing, check-in, is this really hunger or am I angry, lonely, tired?

I have a sign on my fridge that I made that says, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how hungry are you?” Because I check-in with myself and I go, “You know what, it’s a three. I probably need a glass of water.” So, checking in and having that self-awareness has really helped me because I would have totally got in and had a snack because you know what, it’s fun to eat. There’s a word, and I don’t remember the word in Japanese but I love this word. There’s a word in Japanese that means I eat not because I’m hungry but because my mouth is lonely.

[1:10:32] Meg Donahue: It’s true and eating is fun. We have a thing where we say, “If you think you’re hungry have an apple and if you don’t want eat an apple you’re not really hungry, you might want something else.” But I’m a believer in being prepared especially when you’re starting to shift things because our mind is really tricky. It’s just going convince me of something that I’m going to regret later. So, we try and prepare ourselves. I tell people, and we do this in the weight loss and in other things, one, we have drink water before every meal. It’s shown, if you’re trying to lose weight if you can drink 16 ounces of water before each meal and a green salad, you’re going to lose up to 22% more than you would otherwise. So, that’s an incentive, but you also are getting those things. You were hydrating.

Then to plan. You don’t have to be maniacal, but when you’re doing something new, it’s a lot on your brain to make a decision every single time you have to eat or might be hungry. So, go ahead and give yourself a break and plan out your meal. So, we help people do that. We specifically plan snacks, because what happens is exactly what you said, “Yeah, I’m hungry. I think I’ll get something.” Then the know chips are there or whatever. You stop for gas because food is everywhere. It wasn’t when I was growing up. You got gas at a gas station. You didn’t get dinner, which is what you do now. So, food is everywhere.

There’s so many times you have to decide, will I eat that or won’t I because it’s everywhere. So, we pre-make those decisions. Plan your snacks. Plan your snacks. So, make sure. Just like I do my kids when I pack their lunch. I know they’re going to get hungry so I give them a great snack. They look forward to it. Then they’re not hungry and they come home and my kids are super healthy. So, I do it for myself. Plan your snacks. Like, “Oh, cool,” because food is also very sensual. It’s so fun and it’s such a big part of our lives. So many wonderful things happen around a table and around cooking and around eating that you don’t want to take that away to make sure that you’re actually really are enjoying it. It isn’t like taking you over.

So, that’s why we plan snacks so that you get that. Great, this is a treat, cool. Food is a treat, but make sure it’s a real treat not something that you’re going to like, “Oh, why did I eat that?” It’s so over that. It feels like so 90s or 2010. I don’t know but that whole, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that.” Well, I did. That can take so much energy. So, just plan for and give yourself. Then when you get in the habit of it, it just makes sense. We plan for so many other things in our life that really don’t impact us in the same sort of way. So, if you just plan, “Hey, this what I’m going to eat this week.” Don’t feel bad if you don’t do that, but just know that it’s there like you’d put gas in your car because I have a long drive. So, I think I’ll put gas in my car. I’ll plan to do that. it’s just that kind of reorientating our thinking so that you’re super taking care of yourself in a way that you would for somebody that you just love beyond measure and let them to never feel thirsty or hungry or tired or any of those things. To care for ourselves with that same affection.

[1:14:13] Ashley James: On the weeks that I have planned out the meals, I have such low stress that it made me realize how, so I’m the cook in the house. We have a four-year-old, who’s almost five, and I have a husband. So, I’m responsible for, and we also have a cat, but I pre-order. We actually get the cat food shipped to us so he’s taken care of. So I have three people I have to feed every day, me, my husband and our son. The three of us. Being responsible for my food is stressful enough because I have such, for many many years have focused so intensely on healing my body and getting to a weight and healing my liver and all the complications that have come up. I’ve had so many results and I’m still working on my health. There’s no tip of the Mount Everest of health. We’re all still getting somewhere. We’re all still improving our health.

So, my consciousness is around how I can in a way that brings me the most health and then I have to feed a four-year-old and then I have to feed a husband. Everyone has different palates. Everyone wants to eat at different times. Everyone wants different portions and wants different ingredients. We also have food allergies in the house. If I’m working, then my husband’s with our son. My husband, he tries his best but I feel like I’m more responsible for creating healthy meals than anyone else in the family so I take it upon myself.

On the weeks that I’ve planned ahead and I have pre-made food like on a Sunday. I’ll take half a Sunday and just make a ton of food and have it all packaged up and have it in the fridge. The rest of the week, there’s a level of peace in me. It was like I just came out of yoga class but all week long. I just can’t believe how much peace I have in my body because there’s something in the back of my brain like a constant worry about, “Okay, what am I feeding my son? What am I feeding my husband? What am I going to eat next? What am I cooking? What am I cooking? What am I cooking? Oh, I got to go to the grocery store. Oh, we just ran out of this. Okay. My son’s hungry. Okay, I got a feed of a snack.” It’s just this constantly worrying in the back of my mind that just takes up a ton of energy. I don’t even notice I did it until I did an entire week of meal prep. That voice didn’t even need to be there. I couldn’t believe how much energy it took. I just wonder for the listeners. Because even if it was just for me, like if I didn’t have to worry about other people, I still would be thinking those thoughts like, “I got to go to the grocery store. I have to make sure I cook this. I got to make that salad. I have to steam my two pounds of vegetables. I got to pre-soak my beans.” I hate it when I go to cook beans and I haven’t pre-soaked them.

[1:17:10] Meg Donahue: Exactly. That’s why we started the company. Because with that level of stress and if you’re trying to eat healthy and you’re eating plant-based, it’s a lot. We’re busy and we have other things. It’s not like you’re just home and all you have to do is plan meals. But it’s still a lot.

[1:17:30] Ashley James: No, we’re busy.

[1:17:32] Meg Donahue: Yeah, we’re busy. So, that’s what we said. It’s a lot easier. We said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a personal chef without the awkward small talk?” The food arrives. It’s there in the fridge. I know what I’m going to have for breakfast. I know what I’m going to have for lunch. I get a meal plan that tells me suggestions. If you have a family, we have a family bundle and with a very hearty kind of familiar taste profile. So, it’s not like these are crazy weird things. But at any time, I could go in the fridge and I know I could get a MamaSezz chili, I could get a MamaSezz Moroccan stew, or a MamaSezz veggie burgers. All of our soup freezes well too, but it’s all there. You always know you have it. Because it’s that level of stress, that’s when hungry, angry, lonely, tired that’s when things tip. We make decisions out of expediency. It’s totally understandable because we’re getting crushed by the amount of stressors that we have. It’s real. It’s not like a made-up and we just got to suck it up and get better at it. It’s real. There’s so much going on with families and work schedules and just timing of things. It’s just like, “Oh, I forgot this. I got to go to the store.” That sets everything back a half hour and that means the evenings, so you know.

That’s what we try and alleviate is that juggernaut of stress so that you can just go about living your life and enjoying really good food and it’s there for you. If you want to make something else of course you can, but you have the basics there at any time.

[1:19:17] Ashley James: I love it. Back around 2013, I was doing a job that took up so much of my time. It was like 12 hours a day. There was no me time at all. It was just a project. It was going to be a few months. I basically just had to pour all my waking hours. I’d wake up and immediately start working. I had to pour all my waking hours into it and I was very passionate about it, but it was something that I couldn’t even afford to cook or to even go out to eat or anything. I had to put all my time into it. So, I started googling a meal delivery service or whatever. Uber Eats wasn’t around at the time, luckily. I ended up finding some kind of delivery service, sort of like yours, but not. It wasn’t plant-based. I wasn’t plant-based at the time but I was eating paleo. This company did paleo meals. Because we were gluten-free at the time. We were trying to eat whole foods as much as possible. So, we did it for about three months. I mean, obviously not your delicious food, but just the ease of having meals delivered that were already made that I could just heat up either on the stove or in the oven. I don’t do microwave. I know some people can or choose to. I don’t choose to. That was it. I didn’t have to think about it. I really enjoyed it. I found less expensive than if I had gone out to restaurants. More expensive obviously than if I cooked it for myself, obviously. I felt as though it was a good investment. It helped me get that project done, which was helpful for us, obviously. So, I thought, “Wow, this is really cool.” I considered continuing to do it. But then I had the time, plenty of time after that to be able to cook and our diets changed. I always thought that was really interesting.

So, we did it for three months and it really helped us get over the hump. I thought that that was a great resource. They were just sort of coming out these meal kits or whatever. This was totally pre-made food. They give you a little card that says, “Here’s your breakfast. Here’s your lunch. Here’s your dinner.” Then there are other companies. I’ve tried one since, that have prepackaged ingredients and you kind of have to mix them together to make your meal. I tried a vegan one. It was the most complicated thing ever. I got, oh my gosh. The things taste good, but I had the hardest time. It was a big box and it came with 40 different packages. It wasn’t organized. Then they give you this recipe list and you have to find each package. There’s not like find the blue package or find the red package. All the packages are black and white and you have to read every single freaking all 40 of them to find the tamari or whatever. Then you have to read them all again to find the jackfruit. Oh my gosh. I got kind of pissed off. I ended up just mixing and matching the ingredients and just cooking them. Just cooking them on stove whatever it was because I couldn’t. I felt like I was given a Lego set with the wrong Legos. There’s no way that there’s a jackfruit. Oh man. They gave me too many jackfruits or they didn’t give me enough tamari or whatever.

I just felt that that was a real bummer because it actually came recommended by a Naturopathic friend of mine. She was like, “Oh, this is the best of the world.” I think she just loves it because they have some kind of brownies or something. I’m not into desserts as much as I used to be. So, I was like, “Well, I’m interested in the health food.” So, that was really annoying. Then I have friends who get the meal delivery service where they send one box a week. They give you all the ingredients. They give you a recipe and you have to cook it yourself. So, it really doesn’t save you any time.

[1:23:43] Meg Donahue: It stresses me out.

[1:23:50] Ashley James: Yeah, right. It doesn’t save you any time, but it does kind of I guess save you a trip to the grocery store. That’s nice. They give you a recipe, but you still have to cook it all yourself and it doesn’t really help you for all the other meals. It’s just more of if you have time and you sort of want a hobby like I would like a cooking hobby, but I’d like someone to do all the shopping for me. I want to be given the recipe kind of like a surprise, you’re making this recipe this week. That’s kind of fun if you want a hobby and you have a lot of time. So, there’s different companies out there that will ship you food depending on how much time you have. The people who have the most amount of time I guess is the meal delivery service where it’s just a box of raw vegetables from a farm. I’ve done that before because it’s cool to buy directly from a farm. You’re supporting local agriculture. You’re getting from a local organic farm. That’s really sustainable and beautiful. Or you have to go to the farm itself and pick up your box. That’s also cool. That’s different because you still have to do all the thinking and cooking yourself.

Your way of doing it, you have really clean ingredients. You’re working with doctors that regularly heal heart disease and other major diseases like diabetes and also help people with addiction and weight loss and those things and athletes. So, you’re working with doctors to design, making sure that the nutrient profiles are optimal for health. Your focus is on health. That your food is delicious. Also your food isn’t weird like some weird vegan thing because I’m totally into the weird vegan thing. I’ve just embraced it all, but I can see my tempeh would be a bit threatening. My sprouts and my sauerkraut might be a little weird for people. But you’re like chili and everyone gets happy about it. So, your foods’ delicious and it’s familiar. There’s zero stress because it just gets shipped to you.

I’d like to talk a bit about sort of logistics. Is it in plastic? Is the plastic BPA-free? How do you prevent leaching from plastic into food? Have you looked into that? I’d like to know that because that was a big concern for me when I was buying it. Is it organic? Is it non-GMO? When you cook, do you cook with cookware that doesn’t have nonstick like Teflon? How strict are you guys when it comes to the being non-toxic?

[1:26:17] Meg Donahue: Nitty gritty?

[1:26:19] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:26:20] Meg Donahue: We’re pretty fanatical, I think.

[1:26:22] Ashley James: Nice. So am I.

[1:26:23] Meg Donahue: Yeah. The big issue is plastic. The number one rule when you’re making food for people is you don’t want to harm people. You don’t want it to be dangerous. So, you don’t want any microbes that could harm people getting into the food. Plastic, unfortunately is the most effective way to do that. Glass can work but glass is also very dangerous in a production facility because if you drop a piece of glass, shards can go anywhere. So, we have zero glass in our production facility. Most high-level production facilities don’t. We use recyclables. We also take everything back. So, if there’s anything that somebody doesn’t feel like they want to, even though all of our ice packs are recyclable, some people just don’t want to do it. We take it back and we recycle everything appropriately.

Our facility is really, it’s probably like a surgical suite to some people. We are fanatics. It’s a cleanroom. You can’t get into our plant unless you go through a cleanroom. You are scrubbed down. You’re definitely in surgical scrubs, all of the production. We worked with labs to say, how do we make this food so that it is not- what we’re trying to do is to inspire health. Every point, what can we do to do that? So, I think on those I think we’re doing a good job. There’s always places where you can do more. So we do as they come up, we try and address them. I think for organic, we were one of the first organic breads in the country. Vermont Bread Company back in the 80s when people were saying you can’t have organic bread because you need to put chemicals in. A bread will rot on the shelf. So, we figured out a way to do that. So, organic is hugely important to us. We really respect the certification. What we know in our sourcing is we are 99% organic. There’s one or two items that occasionally you can’t get 100% organic. Local farmers, they might be a farmer in transition. Which is a real issue, farms that were not organic who are transitioning to. There’s a three-year period where they’re really doing amazing things and it’s costing them a lot of money. So those are the farmers that we end up buying for those products that at that moment we can’t source.

[1:29:11] Ashley James: I love that. I love that you’re supporting farmers that are transitioning. I wish there was a certification that we could put on our food that’s like, “Pesticide-free. Farmer transitioning to organic or something.” I don’t know. Some acronym.

[1:29:25] Meg Donahue: Because they’re just amazing those people. They’re really putting a profit, an easy profit on hold and hoping that they can make it through this period and then regain it or at least break-even. It’s really noble work. So, we try and support there where we can. We’re keen into regenerative agriculture. We work with Dr. Ron Weiss down in New Jersey who has this amazing, I don’t if you’ve ever talked with him but I would definitely. I’ll give you his information. He’s brilliant. He’s an incredibly compassionate man. He bought this huge farm in New Jersey. He’s doing a lot of this work of turning from non-organic to organic. Is very keen on regenerative AG because like you referenced earlier that the nutrients in our food, even organic food today compared to organic food 50 years ago does not have the same amount of nutrients. So, we’re kind of destroying our topsoil. So, how do we address that? He’s doing some beautiful work with that. He’s just he’s a wonderful, wonderful, brilliant guy.

[1:30:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love it. Just the fact that mamasezz.com is organic or like you said 99% organic, that in of itself is worth getting your pre-made food delivery service just to ease the people’s minds. Okay, I know I’m not eating pesticides. I know I’m eating really clean food. On top of that, you’re eating really healthy food that’s also delicious. Five years ago even when I wasn’t plant-based, I would have prescribed to your food delivery service because my focus since 2008 has been eating organic because it made such a big difference in my immune system. I’m sort of an organic snob when I go grocery shopping. My little son when he was two would be like, because kids are parrots, he would say, “Is it organic? Is that organic?” It’s so cute. I’m like, “Yes, sweetie. You can have this apple. It’s organic. There’s so many times when he’ll be like, “Oh, I want grapes. Momma, I want grapes.” I’m like, “Oh, they’re not organic.” Then he just stops. He’s like, “Okay.”

[1:31:50] Meg Donahue: He gets it. He gets it.

[1:31:52] Ashley James: You definitely don’t want to eat grapes when they’re not organic. Yeah, he gets it. It’s like, “Okay, we’re eating organic.” Then we’ll go, “Okay, let’s go find you something to eat. Let’s go find you an organic banana or something else. Let’s go find you something else.” Then he goes, “Okay.” So, it’s not about you can’t have food. It’s about let’s make healthy food choices. He doesn’t want the chemicals in him, because we talked about it at a kid level.

[1:32:17] Meg Donahue: It’s true. Kids intuitively get it. They really get it and they’re very honest about it. They’re very, “Yeah, but I like this. It tastes good.” We talked a lot in schools and things like that and our own kids, but they get it. We, not we’re organic and so just because if you’re organic your non-GMO. We also, I think something that people underestimate is the impact of preservatives. Even citric acid, we don’t use citric acid. We use our own system to package the food so that it has a long shelf life without preservatives or any chemicals. You nailed it. Why would you put chemicals in your body?

So, one of the things when I talk about being a lifestyle company is we realized, wow, so we’re not eating any chemicals but look at these creams that everyone’s using. Almost every cream you have, even if it looks organic, has some sort of chemical where actually if you put it in a beaker, you would never pour it on your skin. You would just like forget it.

[1:33:25] Ashley James: Cosmetics, right. I interviewed a woman who makes cosmetics at home. She sells them on Etsy. She healed herself from alopecia. Actually, when you buy cream from her you have to keep it in the fridge because it’s made from scratch. Yes. It’s so divine her cream. You would pay $200 a jar for this cream in a spa. This cream is so luscious. It’s so affordable. Her name is Emily. It’s Remedies by Emily. That’s it. Etsy store, Remedies by Emily. I’ve had her on the show twice.

[1:34:04] Meg Donahue: That’s so cool. I would love to talk to her.

[1:34:06] Ashley James: I can hook you up.

[1:34:07] Meg Donahue: Yeah. We’re coming out with a cream line. What we say is, the more of us doing this good work, because there’s so much bad stuff out there, the better. So I never feel like anybody in this space is a real competitor because there’s just so much opportunity. So we like to support anybody. But we felt so strongly about it. We said, “Let’s develop a cream line that is as clean and amazing as our food line.” Because people are what they put in their body and on their body. So, that’s coming out. I was just thinking that might be something good, a fun sample to give all of your listeners. I know we talked about some other things, but that might be something that we could do because we’re launching that soon. You just feel better. When you see my mom’s skin, I’ll send you a picture of her at 90, it will blow you away. It’s amazing. She uses it every day. She’s a skincare snob. She is just is, but she looks amazing. So much of it you’ve nailed it is why would you put something on your body that one wouldn’t eat or you wouldn’t want in your body because your skin’s your largest organ. It absorbs everything. It has to go through your liver. So, it was a natural progression for us to do the skin cream as well.

[1:35:33] Ashley James: It’s true. We often think that the skin is this impenetrable barrier. I’ve interviewed her several times. I want to hook you up with Kristen Bowen as well. Kristen Bowen was 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair. I’m going to send you that episode. It’s my first episode with Kristen. Now she’s totally healthy. She has a concentrated magnesium soak from the Zechstein Sea. You go get your blood tested for your magnesium levels and then you do a challenge. You get one jug of her undiluted concentrated magnesium soak. You soak your feet in it, just two ounces of her concentrate in some water. You soak your feet for an hour a day and then you go back and get your blood tested. 76% of people are fully self-saturated that they completely have beaten the deficiency. Then the other people need to do it for like another two to three months. Then there’s a small percentage people that are still or magnesium deficient and that then actually it sheds a light on a underlying health issue that’s burning through their magnesium. So, it actually helps them to discover, like go deeper with their Naturopathic doctor and discover what’s going on. But they could have gone the rest of their life and possibly breaking down because there was an underlying health issue burning through the magnesium.

[1:36:59] Meg Donahue: That’s brilliant.

[1:37:00] Ashley James: So, yeah. So, 76% of people get the full cell saturation in one month. That’s totally transdermal. It’s through their skin. Now I was taking a magnesium. I was taking 600 milligrams of a liquid magnesium supplement, which I felt good every time I took it so I knew I was absorbing it. I could feel it. I took it for 10 years and I still was magnesium deficient. I did her magnesium soak and it was so life-changing for me. So, I was like how is it that I’ve been taking an oral supplement and eating tons of vegetables and I’m still magnesium deficient? So, I absorbed all my magnesium from her soak. So, our skin absolutely can absorb things depending on the size of the molecule. Even shampoo. You can put chemical shampoo on your scalp. Even though it’s only there for like a minute or two, they can find it in your bloodstream and it’s harmful for the body and the liver. So, yeah. So cosmetics of all kind deodorants and everything we put on our skin, plays a role in harming us or could actually help us and heal us.

[1:38:05] Meg Donahue: Help us and heal us. Exactly. That’s beautiful.

[1:38:09] Ashley James: I love it. The most important thing is food because we build our cells from food and hydrate. Then the second most important thing is reducing the amount of chemical exposure we have. So, I love that your food is organic. I love it’s non-GMO by default because it’s organic. When you cook the food are you making sure that this facility is they’re not using Teflon, they’re not using things that off-gas or add any chemicals to the food?

[1:38:37] Meg Donahue: Yeah. In a production facility, the cookware is a little bit different. So, it’s pretty high-tech some of the things that we do, which are cool. We worked early on with a lab. The lab scared me to death going through and what could possibly happen. There were a few long days where we’re like, “Well, how the heck are we going to do this then?” Some of it requires just a bigger investment.

[1:39:14] Ashley James: Can you give me an example of what you had to invest in? Because you could have cut corners. I’m really getting a feeling that your ethics and your love for people, your love for your customers. That you’re willing to go the extra mile, work with a lab, spend extra money that you didn’t necessarily have to. Because we have been duped by all the food companies out there. They cut corner. Every restaurant we go to chooses the least cost full way to prepare the food. Restaurants aren’t going to make a profit if they’re choosing the most expensive, most high-quality ingredients unless they’re charging an arm and a leg. So you always have to balance profit and what’s going to cost you. But the fact that you took a year to really make sure that the food was safe and clean and non-toxic and filled with nutrition and the right nutrition. Can you give me some examples of the hurdles that you could have cut corners on but you chose not to because you honor us as your customers?

[1:40:14] Meg Donahue: Sure. I think one of the very basic is the level of cleanliness and that seems like that should be a no-brainer. If anybody’s ever worked in a kitchen for a restaurant and then you clean up at night and you put stuff in the fridge. So if you take that and raise it to the level of you are going into a surgical unit with somebody who is having open-heart surgery. How meticulous are you going to be about making sure that there are no germs and that there’s no way that that person is going to be harmed? That’s how our kitchen is run. We have whole days that we clean before, we clean after. It’s very time consuming and probably more expensive than most that at the baseline you need to do.

Then how we package things. Some of it is proprietary so I don’t talk too much about it. I’m happy to talk off the air, but we went through a lot to make sure that our food is safe and that we have a good shelf for it. We test our food. That’s the other thing. There are so many good companies out there that do this as well. I do think that most entrepreneurs, they get up in the morning and they don’t think, “How can I rip people off?? I think they’re thinking, “How can I pay my payroll?” So there are some very tough decisions that somehow people make. You can’t always nail it and keep the doors open. I think more times than not, that’s what happens for people. There’s a scope creep with those where they kind of snowball.

So, we had a little bit of a luxury of having had a business and then having a little bit of time where we could begin to make some decisions. I think that there are so many people doing great work too, but we knew. Our co-founder and my partner, Lisa Lorimer, had such a strong background. There is not a more ethical business person that I know of. Anybody who has worked with her over a 30-year career will tell you that. That is just who she is. That’s how the whole organic bread, it was squishy white bread when she started her bread company here in a goat shed essentially in Vermont. Then it became this national business. It’s built on that kind of, if you do the right thing, I mean she wrote a book about it. Dealing with the tough stuff. How do you deal with these difficult decisions that entrepreneurs face and to do it as ethically as you can. To deal with the times sometimes and how do you deal when there’s conflict and you can’t always do everything that you’d want to do 100% just because we’re all human.

For safety to deliver for people, what we said we’re going to deliver, that’s our bottom line. There’s no sense being in business if we’re not going to do that. We’re in our 50s. This was something that we could have had a much easier road going forward. It matters to us. So, if we’re going to do this for real, we really want to have an impact. There’s no point at all in cutting a corner because we gain nothing. Then we have a business that means nothing to us and it’s not helping people. That’s really where we come from. I think we do a good work. Our employees love us because we treat them well. We pay livable wages. We give people benefits. We did that. Another decision we made early on that it’s a tough decision because that’s cut straight into your profit, but we said you want to be able to have a vacation, buy a home and not stress if you’re in an entry-level job. So, we try and pay a livable wage. We do pay a livable wage and we give full benefits to people. Those are the other parts of a company that matter to us because they’re people and it’s relationships. That’s why we do it at all.

[1:44:54] Ashley James: I love to vote with my fork. It makes a really big difference.

[1:44:59] Meg Donahue: That’s so cool. That’s a great way. That’s a great way of saying it.

[1:45:02] Ashley James: One of the first documentaries that helped me on this journey had a speech by the original founder of Whole Foods. He said, “Vote with your fork.” They outlined this change in the dairy industry that years ago there was this weird hormone given to animals that then we would consume. It wasn’t good for us. It wasn’t good for them. Was it like the HRR whatever? I can’t remember the name of the hormone, but basically, if you look at your milk now, if you look at all your dairy products now, there’s this thing that says No and there’s like HRR something something. No added hormones. Why is it? Why is it that that hormone was taken out of the dairy industry?

The consumer, and this was over ten years ago. The consumer began to become educated and voted with their fork. One of the largest buyers of dairy is Walmart. I didn’t know that, but you know Walmart’s huge because they have grocery stores. Walmart, because they saw their customers didn’t want to buy the dairy with that, they were like turning their noses up at it, that Walmart was one of the companies that helped to get this hormone taken out of the dairy so their customers would keep buying their dairy. That kind of shocked me because you’d think it would have been like Whole Foods or someone that actually cares about the environment or something like that or cares about health.

Basically it was about the profits. Like, hey, customers are not voting with their fork. That’s why I say vote with your fork. I vote with my fork. I’d rather pay 50 cents more for something non-GMO or organic or whatever. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to break the bank, but you know what I am, or local. Let’s say pay 50 cents more for that bell pepper because the farmer two miles away grew it rather than shipping it in from Chile or whatever. That money, in the grand scheme of things, is not going to hurt that you paid a little bit more, but you just supported and you just voted, you just said, “Yes, farmer. I want you to succeed. I want you to keep thriving as an organic local business,” for example. So, if you can afford it, as a consumer if you can afford it, vote with your fork. Don’t buy products that the companies you don’t believe in, the companies that are harming us. Buy products from the companies that are helping us.

I love shopping at Costco. I feel like there’s this little halo above my head when I go there because Costco takes care of their employees. You talk to the employees their badges say like, “I’ve been here since 1999.” You talk to those employees who’ve been there a long time and ask them like, “How does Costco treat you?” versus Walmart versus working at other companies. You’ll be really surprised. They are very happy. They have good retention. Yeah, it’s hard to work there. It’s a warehouse. It’s hard work, but the company pays better and values the employees. I believe that every human on this planet deserves to be happy and like you said, they deserve a living wage. So, if someone can afford it they should buy from MamaSezz because you’re supporting a company that supports your health and support its employees. It’s just like this win-win situation. There’s no conflict of interest. It’s all about like, “We want to help you because you want to help us and you want to help others.” I’m just very congruent here in your level of ethics is wonderful. I love it.

Walk us through what it looks like to be a customer. So we go to the website. Now, you’ve given us $15 off, that’s really cool, with the coupon code LTH. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/mamasezz. Use coupon code LTH, get $15 off. They can check it out. They can try it for themselves. Walk us through. So someone goes to the website for the first time. What happens? What should they do?

[1:49:27] Meg Donahue: Sure. So, when you get to our home page you’ll see that we have some featured bundles, which are probably our most popular meal bundle packages. They’re based on what most of the people are buying. So if it’s a weight-loss bundle or a peak performance or a chef’s choice, which is where we put together a variety of meals and that you can have that on a subscription every week, every other week, every month or just pause it and have it once. So, you’ll see that our initial products are there or you can buy things ala carte or look at all of our specialty bundles. So, primarily once you get to our collections pages you’ll see that we try and curate the food in ways that will serve you. So, if you have a family, we have a family bundle and a meal plan so it makes it super easy. You can just go to whatever one suits your need. So, if you’re alone and you just want meals just for me that’s great. If you want just breakfast, we have a breakfast bundle. If you want to just put together your own bundle you can do that from all of our ala carte products.

The easiest way is probably buying a curated bundle. Then you just click, “Yes, I want this.” What you’ll get is, you go through checkout, but when the food arrives, it’ll arrive if you order by 8 PM on a Sunday, it arrives the next Thursday or Friday. It arrives fresh because we make it all fresh. So, this isn’t like sitting in a warehouse and then we pluck out when somebody bought. You order it and then we’re going to make it fresh that week for you and send it to you. So, it’ll get to your house on a Thursday or Friday, It’ll come in a box that is like a cooler box with ice so you don’t have to be home. FedEx will deliver it. All of the meals are packaged. They’re center of your plate food. So, some companies they’ll give you like a TV tray, like TV dinners that had a meat and then a salad and then a dessert and it’s all on one plate. So, that’s not our model. We’re much more encouraged kind of a more engaging with your food. So, we will give you a bag. We have some things in stack bags.

So a stack bag of lazy lasagna that’s two servings. You take out your servings and you heat it up on the stove or microwave if you like to do that. Then you’ll have your lazy lasagna. We’ll give you also suggestions of other ways things you might want to add to it. So we’ll do that with every single product, but when you get them they can go right from the box into your fridge. They’re ready to eat or you can freeze them. You can follow our suggested meal plan or mix and match it however you want. You have meals that are based on what you need. So, if you have a heart condition, we have a heart-healthy bundle. If you’re a performance athlete or a weekend warrior and you want to not feel the aches and pains of inflammation on a Monday, then you eat our bundle. You’ll bring down that inflammation, which is great and it increases performance. We work with a lot of, lot of athletes who really do well with what we have.

Some of our most popular ones are the get me started, keep it going bundles, which are just kind of regular meals that are the staples of what you’d have in kitchen when you eat plant-based. That are time-consuming and kind of distracting to make. So, we really thought about what are the things that you would replace the pizza and mac and cheese of when you’re not plant-based. That kind of easy food that is really super fulfilling. Everyone’s going to go, “Yeah. I want that.” So, those are what we want. We want to stock your kitchen with MamaSezz foods so that you’ll always have those meals there just like you always have almond milk or whatever your other staples are. You always have your MamaSezz veggie burgers. You always have your MamaSezz ricotta bake. You always have your MamaSezz marinara because we make an amazing marinara tested by Italians. That’s what we do. We go with the people who really know it and say, “Does ours measure up?” If they’re like, “This is so lame.” We go back to the drawing board and we’ve had a few of those. We’ve had a lot of failures. Oh my God.

[1:54:04] Ashley James: Well, that’s when you know you’re succeeding because you have to experiment in the kitchen to be able to adjust it. Now, marinara is typically vegan or plant-based anyway but what you’re saying is it’s oil-free and it doesn’t have sugar in it. It doesn’t have processed food in it.

[1:54:22] Meg Donahue: Exactly. No preservatives.

[1:54:24] Ashley James: No preservatives. Yeah. So you’re really making like an authentic, real one.

[1:54:29] Meg Donahue: It is like you just got it out of like somebody grabbed their stuff from their garden. You know that difference. Then they put this thing together and you’re sitting outside and you’re eating and it’s so fresh. The taste just pops differently in your mouth. Your body knows. It just responds to it differently. Anybody who’s had fresh food has had that experience where there’s just devoid of any of the other additives, preservatives, little chemicals, citric acids, little like, oh but it’s organic citric acid, whatever that goes into food. When it doesn’t have that, it tastes amazing and your body responds differently. That’s the bar for our food is that we just want it to have that fresh taste that you can open it up and you eat it and you feel great and it’s easy. It’s super easy. It had to be easy. We had to solve that problem.

[1:55:27] Ashley James: Love it. What about people with allergies? You obviously are dairy-free and egg-free and gluten-free. Those are like some really, really common food allergies, but what if someone’s allergic to corn or they’re autoimmune so they’re avoiding nightshades. Can they look at the ingredients or do you have a hypoallergenic package?

[1:55:46] Meg Donahue: Yeah, you can look on the ingredients. All of our products have an ingredient panel so that you can pull up and see. We are, like you said, gluten-free. We’re not nut-free so we tell people. If they say, “Hey, I have a nut allergy.” We just say, “It would not be safe.” Even if you’re having products that don’t have nuts in them. We use cashews. We don’t have peanuts and things like that. We use cashews. You still can be some cross-contamination in a facility. So you just don’t want to risk it. We would much rather people not buy our food, not have to worry and not have a reaction that nobody could foresee. So, we just tell people no with the nut allergy. It’s so serious nut allergy because those are a big deal.

Nightshades, we do have some people who are really kind of growing and an understanding of how that can be a sensitivity. We haven’t parsed it out. That might be a good idea for us to do. You can definitely look through and see which ones fit your profile. All the nutritionals are right there.

[1:56:55] Ashley James: Yeah. Maybe come up with an autoimmune package that’s focused with a lot of anti-inflammatory foods and spices and then no nightshades or like no or low grains. That’s temporary. We can heal autoimmune disease. If you go to an MD, most of them will say, “You have it for the rest of your life. You have to be on XYZ medication for the rest of your life.” It’s not true. I’ve interviewed dozens, dozens of people who’ve reversed and no longer have autoimmune disease. You can reverse it. It does take being very diligent with your diet. There is a diet, it’s almost like a cleanse, it’s like a detox, that you go through where you really focus on not eating any foods that trigger your immune system but also healing the gut. So, for some people temporarily, they need to eat like an autoimmune, grain-free, nightshade-free, high antioxidant diet for about a year. Then also eating fermented foods to help heal the gut. They just go through this transition. I’ve met so many people that after eating that way, they’re able to slowly add back foods. They’ve already healed their gut. Now their body doesn’t react to grains anymore. Their body doesn’t react to nightshade anymore.

There’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that we can use food as a major component to healing autoimmune condition. So I love that that you’re so focused on creating different packages specifically for people that are looking to heal something. So people with allergies could easily go through and see the ingredients. You have different packages for weight loss, for heart health. For athletes and you also have family packages. What about kids? So, if I were to buy, how would I or how would one of the listeners with kids who wants to take some of the stuff that you’re sending and put it in their lunches because it’s just going to save them? Because the amount of stress I have when I have to pack lunches in the morning. So, do you have packages for helping families to pack lunches for their kids?

[1:59:02] Meg Donahue: Yeah. What do you pack for lunch? Sure. So, I have two kids. I pack their lunch every day. It is, again, a little bit of a planning. The foods, what we say is, kids might not like all plant-based foods because they can be sometimes picky. They usually like one, two, three, four. So, we’ll identify those. In the family bundle, we’ve got some really kid-friendly items that the kids love the lasagna. We have a little veggie loaf that the kids love. It’s like little burgers. You can make burgers out of it or meatballs if you want to. The kids even like our chili because it’s not hugely spicy. Frittata, our frittata kids like. Everyone loves this particular product. It’s a high-protein breakfast bar. It’s like a blondie brownie but it’s no processed sugar. It’s made of beans and chickpeas. It is like the go-to. My kids love it because it gives them that steady burn. There’s enough sweet so they’re like, “Yum,” and it’s a treat. It’s not a bar filled with junk. It tastes like this really yummy brownie, not as sweet. You get the nice steady burn. They absolutely love that. That’s a great thing to pack because you know your kids are getting protein. They’re getting all these nutrients. They’re getting that feeling like they got a really cool treat and they did. So, that’s one that we pack for kids too.

[2:00:47] Ashley James: I love it. Is it sweetened with dates or fruit or how does that work?

[2:00:50] Meg Donahue: Yeah. This one is dates. So dates. We make our own date syrup. So, you get the extra nutrients because they’re not skinned.

[2:01:01] Ashley James: I love dates.

[2:01:05] Meg Donahue: I know. They’re delicious.

[2:01:07] Ashley James: They’re so great to cook with. I visited a date farm once in California, just a few hours outside of Las Vegas. It’s fascinating. They’re a beautiful fruit that grow in the desert. They’re beautiful. They grow in a place where no other life seems to exist. Then these trees pop out of nowhere in an oasis and they’re able to just make the most beautiful sweet fruit. They’re so nutritious. They’re so great for energy and for baking and for replacing sugar. So I love that. That’s really cool that you guys make your own dates syrup.

It’s very exciting because so many listeners just don’t have time. They don’t have time. They want to eat healthy. It’s also so overwhelming especially if someone’s facing a health issue or they worried about they’re having to cook for many different people. I mean, there’s just so many concerns and you really take care of them. Like you said, by Sunday night they just click, okay I want this and then it arrives on Thursday. It takes care of the majority of their food for a week. Can they become subscribers that it just automatically arrives? How does that work?

[2:02:24] Meg Donahue: Yeah. We really resisted subscriptions for a while, but we just found that our customers kept asking for it. So we said okay. We make it super easy to subscribe for whatever cadence works for you. So if it’s weekly or bi-weekly or monthly or once a week and then you don’t want to order for another two months. You have really a lot of control over how it comes. But to be able to reorder the things that you liked easily and just have that kind of, okay on Fridays my meals for the week show up. I know what I’m going to be eating. I have this great meal plan. So, that part of my life I don’t have to think about. I can focus on all the other cool things that I like to do or have to do in some cases. So, that is how it works. Our ala carte can also be on subscription. If you have some ala carte items you want on subscription you can do that as well.

[2:03:18] Ashley James: Very cool. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you want to you answer?

[2:03:24] Meg Donahue: You’ve been amazing. I was just thinking people are so lucky to have, because I know, entrepreneurs know that there’s a lot of heartache, there’s a lot of passion and awesome things about doing things on your own. There’s also, as you referenced earlier, there’s a fair amount of stress and can be hard. To do the work that you’re doing and bringing really high-quality messages to people. You vet people. You do the work and you spend the time. It’s really a wonderful service that you’re offering to people. I’m sure you have thousands and thousands of fans who know that as well. I just want to thank you for that because it does matter. You have a great sense of humor and to be able to bring this message to people in a way that is fun and enjoyable and it’s not so hard. That’s kind of like where, “Eat your fruits and veggies. Go outside and play and your life will be better.” That’s our motto. This is mama’s kitchen. We’re just going to take care of you. We’re going to give you what you need. Don’t worry about it. As long as you tell us what you need, we’ll give you exactly what you need. We have that affection. You have that same sense. You’re doing work that is it’s noble work. So, I really appreciate it.

[2:04:49] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Meg. The feeling is mutual. I’m definitely passionate about spreading this information because you don’t even know how good it feels until you do it. I was just constantly shocked while I was making the transition to eating more and more plants. I did it over a period of time whereas my husband just did it overnight. He said to me about three to five days into being vegan, and again he came from a carnivore diet. His entire life was mostly meat, very few plants. Most meals were only meat. That was my husband. Then he just woke up and said, “I am never eating meat again.” That came out of nowhere because he had a joke. He would say, “I eat vegans daily,” was his jokes because cows are vegan. He actually only pretty much only ate beef. It was just beef breakfast, lunch and dinner and coffee. That was his diet his entire life and energy drinks and ice cream. That was his diet when I met him. He came up, it was his decision. About three to five days into it, somewhere in the first week, he turned to me while he was eating. He said to me, in all dead serious he said, “If you had told me that this food,” plant-based food, “would taste this good I would have done this years ago.” He’s constantly in awe. No oil, no salt, no sugar. I’ll use Bragg’s Liquid Aminos or something. We use seasoning. It doesn’t taste like tasteless. There’s salt. Naturally occurring salt in the food, but it’s not like adding tons of the table salt. It’s no oil, no processed food, no sugar, tons of plants on his plate. It tastes amazing. It tastes really good. He’s always in awe of how good it tastes. He always like jabs me a bit because once in a whiles we’ll go to restaurant, of course vegan. He goes, “Why do we go? We just paid $50. Why do we go out?” The next day we’re going to be eating like lunch or dinner and he goes, “This tastes so much better than that. Why did we even go out?”

[2:07:11] Meg Donahue: It’s true.

[2:07:12] Ashley James: That food was covered in oil and covered in a bunch of other stuff. It’s nice to go out to dinner, but it’s never as good as real like whole food plant-based no processed food. So we did. We neuro-adapted. It does take a little bit of time to neuro-adapt to it when you’re used to potato chips or whatever. I can’t believe how good I feel and I want the world to know. Also, I tried being vegetarian before and I felt horrible. What was I eating? I was eating vegetarian subs, vegetarian pizza. I was eating just processed food. So a lot of people I think have maybe had an experience with not eating meat or eating some form of vegetarianism and it really failed for them. Then they say, “Oh, well vegetarian’s not healthy. I didn’t feel good. Meat makes me feel better.” So, don’t even associate whole food plant-based with vegan or vegetarian. It’s totally different. It’s cutting out processed food. Even if you are still eating some meat and you’re just adding more and more plants because that’s what I did.

[2:08:22] Meg Donahue: That’s great. That’s a really good strategy.

[2:08:24] Ashley James: Thank you. I learned from Dr. Joel Fuhrman. I had him on the show. His thing is the Nutritarian approach. If you’re still going to eat meat, okay. Eat more and more plants, more plants, more plants, more plants. It crowds out. The plate becomes fuller and fuller with nutrient-dense foods that heal your body. Then eventually I would have meatless Mondays. Then I just have one meat meal a day. Then all sudden it became one meat meal a week. Then also of a sudden I just stopped. It just stopped. I turned around and went, “It’s been weeks since I’ve had meat and I actually don’t feel like I need it. I actually feel better without it.” The occasions when I did have meat the next day I felt horrible. So, it’s really just listen to your body, eat more plants, eat less processed food, eat more real food and keep eating more real food, Keep noticing you feel better eating more real food.

I’m not here to tell people that they don’t ever have to eat meat again because I think that’s very threatening to some people. I am saying though, whatever diet you prescribe to, eat more real food, more plants. If you want the extra support, I think that the MamaSezz food delivery service because it is so focused on healthy food in a way that’s going to decrease your stress and give you more time. Oh my gosh, I just think your business is wonderful. I love it. You’re giving our listeners $15 off using coupon code LTH. I think that’s fantastic. Of course, the links to everything that Meg Donahue does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Meg, is there any final advice you’d like to leave with us to wrap up today’s interview?

[2:10:06] Meg Donahue: Maybe an observation is that if you’re on the fence and not sure or you know people in your life is that what I found has worked best is a very compassionate approach to other people and to give them really good food and let them experience it. Like you said, it’s very similar to what Joel Fuhrman said that as you change, the things that are not good for you will naturally go away if you are consciously adding more good things to your plate. That’s really our ethos is eat your fruits and veggies. Go outside and play. Enjoy your life. Life, it’s spectacular. To have the energy like you did when you’re a kid like when you just got up from dinner and then you went outside and you play because you felt so good. You didn’t have to like go lay on the couch like you’d eat an opossum or something and had to digest it. That’s the feeling that we know and that’s, Ashley, that you know and we want people to have. Is that joy of life where food is a part of it and enhances it and gives you energy to really experience life to the fullest.

[2:11:34] Ashley James: Brilliant. I love it. Eat your fruits and veggies. Go outside and play. We’d say that to our kids and then we should start saying it to us, to ourselves. Go have fun. Eat your carrots and go have fun. You’re giving away a package that’s worth $169, I believe, to one lucky listener. I’m going to make sure I add this to the beginning of the show as well and put it in the show notes. So one lucky listener. So I want all the listeners to go to the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’re going to put a post thereafter this episode goes live asking what you loved about today’s episode. What did you learn? What did you love? Why you want to be the winner to try MamaSezz? Yeah. Then we’ll pick a random. I will pick a lucky winner. That would be really awesome. Thank you so much for giving every listener $15 off using the LTH coupon code. I think it’s really cool. Thank you for choosing one lucky winner to receive a package. This has been awesome. It’s wonderful having you on the show. Thank you so much.

[2:12:41] Meg Donahue: Thank you so much. It has been beautiful to be here. I really appreciate it.

[2:12:46] Ashley James: Be sure to go to MamaSezz.com and use the coupon code LTH to get $15 off. Visit the Learn True Health Facebook group so that you could be one of the lucky winners to get the $169 package of delicious organic whole food plant-based food.

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Available Natural Treatments For Cancer And Other Diseases

https://www.learntruehealth.com/available-natural-treatments-for-cancer-and-other-diseases

Highlights:

No to generalized treatment, yes to personal evaluation
Importance of letting go in healing cancer
Disease as a motivational guide
Four pillars of cancer treatment
PEMFT, ozone, hyperthermia to treat cancer and other diseases

In this episode, Marcus Freudenmann shares with us different ways to treat cancer. He explains the importance of wanting to live in treating cancer. He also shares with us that each cancer treatment should be personalized and that generalized treatment doesn’t work for everybody.

[0:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 410. I am so excited to have back on the show, Marcus Freudenmann. I love saying your name. Did I get it right?

[0:00:21] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Pretty close. Freudenmann.

[0:00:24] Ashley James: Pretty close. Freudenmann. Marcus, I loved our first interview episode 147. I really feel that everyone in the world should hear the things you shared. It was so eye-opening to have you on the show. So really listeners, go back and listen to episode 147 when you can. Marcus is a wealth of information. He spent pretty much a decade traveling the world and learning and studying from the top holistic doctors and experts who are getting really good results in curing disease especially cancer. Marcus created a documentary about his experiences. He’s been very busy. Since we had you on the show about two years ago you have built up your website trulyheal.com. I know you give us a special link, trulyheal.com/Ashley, that’s a-s-h-l-e-y. So trulyheal.com/Ashley is a special link for the listeners.

I’m really excited to learn from you today because of the last two years of your life you have learned even more and you’re here to share with us today. So, welcome back on the show.

[0:01:45] Marcus Freudenmann: Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

[0:01:48] Ashley James: Absolutely. So, what has happened in the last two years? Where has your focus been professionally? Because I know you’re passionate about bringing the truth about healing and putting the power back into the individuals lives so that each and every one of us can learn how to be the healthiest versions of ourselves. You’re very passionate about exposing the truth in the latest science, but really getting into it and exposing the truth even though sometimes the truth might get you in trouble. So, we thank you for risking yourself to expose the truth today, Marcus.

[0:02:31] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Well, the concept is always the same. You look for solutions. Especially with cancer with Lyme disease with all of those diseases. There are so many proclamations, so many cures, so many things that people advertise. We’ve been following first based on clients recommendation and then on doctor’s recommendation. Many of those treatments and we follow it through with what they do, how they work, what kind of research. That’s been since many years the focus, but it became more and more obvious that we are not only dealing with the ignorance in the conventional treatments, it’s also in the alternative. There’s so much hype, so much sales pitch in many of the advertisements that it becomes a maze of irritation and confusion and temptation for most patients. That’s been something that becomes more and more obvious.

We’re living in a world where everybody can advertise pretty much everything and can make claims however they like. That’s something that starts to annoy me more and more. I was working with a lot of clients that are broke. They invested money into pretty much everything and nothing worked. It was funny, I had an interview with Dr. Rau in Switzerland when he said, “Marcus, you’re asking all the wrong questions. Why do you keep asking about treatments? Treatments are not relevant. Treatments are not something you should focus about. Just focus on what’s the cause.” Then I said, “Well, but there’s so many.” He said, “Yeah. But that’s what we need to find out. If we look at three patients and all three patients having a disease like let’s say breast cancer.” He pulled out of his drawer and he has all the different diseases categorized to different groups. He pulled out of a drawer three charts and then he showed me and said, “Look. This client here had corporate stress. She’s never satisfied and happy. Non-stop stress, stress, stress. Not good enough.” You can see that it comes from trauma out of the childhood, resentment, serious problems with parents combined with a bad diet and very high inflammation, leaky gut. On top of that even those performance drugs to keep her active, to keep her alive.

That’s one client where you have one treatment protocol, which is very obvious. Then you have another client comes in has breast cancer too but it’s triggered by EBV virus, Epstein-Barr virus, combined with mercury and cadmium. Her test levels were off the chart. It was based, first of all on her amalgam fillings, but the second part was based on her hobby. She was painting. We know that painter’s paint, those artistic paints, are full with cadmium. Then she had two root canal fillings. He said, “Look. That’s number one. Dental treatments. Pulling out the mercury fillings. Detoxing the body, getting rid of heavy metals and then dealing with the EBV virus, which is promoted dramatically through heavy metals.” So, we know that if you have just an infection or just heavy metal, they don’t really cause something like cancer or fibromyalgia or any of that. But if you have both in combination, they become up to 20,000 times more toxic.

Then the third client had deficiencies in vitamin D, selenium, iodine. She was more or less depleted, her whole body, from a very uneducated diet. She was exposed to mold which slows down all detox pathways. As soon as you have a moldy environment and you live in that for a while, all your detox pathways are shut down. Plus she had a CYP1B1, which is a DNA SNP impairment that impaired her detox pathways even more. So, she was building up more and more and more toxins. Based on the deficiencies, it’s usually an indication. The body tried to detoxify, try to detoxify and was flushing out everything and that’s why she had cancer. He said, “That’s an evaluation that we do. So one needs massive support in nutrition and detoxification. The other one needs infectious disease and heavy metal treatment. The other one needs some psychologist to help with the stress and trauma in all her past life so that the self-loathing changes, which then changes dietary intake.”

That’s where I found the whole industry whether that’s most of the cancer clinics, most of the marketing and advertising is lacking. People do not focus on why they have cancer. They focus on what can I do to kill it? I get hundreds of emails every day. I try to answer them every morning. Sometimes I have a bit of a backlog. It’s quite intense. It’s always like, “What kills my cancer? How can I get rid of my cancer? How can I fight?”

We’ve been instilled with an attitude of fighting a disease, which is actually just a warning sign showing us you are moving in the wrong direction. You ignore certain things that would be important. Because it’s so individualized, it’s really difficult to find out for yourself what are the contributing factors. That’s mainly the work we’ve been so passionate about. To develop a program that really covers all aspects of that disease.

[0:08:49] Ashley James: So, the three cases that the doctor pulled out of his drawer, all three were people with cancer?

[0:08:57] Marcus Freudenmann: Breast cancer, yes.

[0:08:58] Ashley James: All people with breast cancer. So, specifically. So, if those three women were to have gone to some hospital in the United States, oncology ward. Pretty much any hospital in the United States, in the oncology ward to an oncologist they would be given almost an identical treatment. Nowadays, the oncologist will do some testing to see if it’s hormone-related and they might suppress the hormones. Their methodology is either you do chemo and then surgery and then radiation or you do surgery and then chemo and then radiation. Then on top of that, you might do some hormone suppression drugs. That’s basically the cookie cutter.

[0:09:57] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Standard protocol.

[0:09:58] Ashley James: Standard protocol. That is hailed to be the most advanced and has a 2% chance of causing leukemia, has a very poor outcome if you want to live longer than five years. There are women who survived breast cancer, absolutely. There are many who don’t. I just lost my best friend, one of my best friends to her battle with cancer in December. She did the natural holistic method for eight months. She ran out of money and then decided to do chemo. They had her on chemo and radiation for two years. The day that she was in the hospital in a coma about to die her oncologist called her husband and said, “When is she coming in for her next chemo session?” He downplayed how bad she was. Her liver had been failing. The oncologist kept pushing them to come in and come in. Even the oncology nurses were saying that the type of chemo they had her on was known for killing patients before the cancer does.

So, I watched her deteriorate very quickly. The question remains in my mind, if she had stuck with just natural methods would she have just lived longer than if she had gone the conventional route? She suffered, the last two years of her life was pure suffering. Whereas, I know women who have gone through chemo and came out the other end and that was ten years ago. They’re totally happy and they’re healthy and they’re fine. The cookie cutter for cancer, the cut, burn and poison, does not take into account what you said. It just focuses on the tip of the iceberg.

The doctor that you mentioned he holds these three files in his hand and paints the picture of the root cause of their cancer coming from three totally different places. If you had taken those three women and put them through cut, burn and poison, the first one still would have had the stress, still would have had the poor diet and the stress incredibly lowers the immune system. She might not have survived. She might have gotten an infection. She might not have even survived the surgery. The second one had Epstein-Barr virus and heavy metals so she was immunocompromised. So, no matter what cut, burn and poison you do she would still have been immunocompromised. The third –

[0:12:37] Marcus Freudenmann: She would have been, she would have probably died on the first round of chemotherapy because if your detox pathways don’t work, then chemotherapy is recycle, recycle, recycle. That’s the people where we see even a small treatment like vaccination would be very impactful. That’s the children that become autistic. People who have their detox pathways impaired and have severe problems in that concern or have been born into an environment where mold was already established in the mother, they have no detox. Then giving a drug, then giving chemo or any kind of harsh chemical substance just recycles, recycles and it distributes more and more into the body and poisons the body.

So, it’s always based on–and sometimes you wonder where you hear things. I was at the seminar and it was a business seminar. The speaker said very clearly, “If you don’t know where you are at you cannot make a plan to health.” I was like, “What does that mean?” He said, “Take the America map and then you don’t know where you are but you know you want to go to Chicago. If you don’t have a location from where to start you could drive into the wrong direction because you need to know first your personal location.” It made kind of sense. I think it’s the same thing with health.

We invest into everything in treatments without investing into the investigation on what causes my problem? What is the main reason? I hear that a hundred times from patients that say, “Marcus, look. That’s $250 for a test. Well, I could buy a treatment or supplements for that.” That’s something that can often then go astray with no effect, no results. You just said it, she was first eight months on alternative treatments. Again, I’ve seen people that were — a friend of mine, personal experience wherein a very very dear friend. First client then friend then very good friend and then you accompany them all the way. He was spending almost 1 million dollars going from clinic to clinic to here to there trying out buying this buying that spending so much money. Towards the end I said, “Wayne, look. Why don’t we just sit down and work out all the causes and really focus on that.” Unfortunately at that stage he was already very weakened. We got through. We did all the tests, which are sometimes quite simple. Gut biome, toxicity test, infectious disease test, deficiency test. Not the standard one that is done in the clinic where you just check in serum, full blood test of all the minerals. We did that and his results were shocking.

He said, “How can doctors tell me for two years that my blood is absolutely perfect, that I’m absolutely fine and then I get the full blood test back and it shows I’m deficient in pretty much everything.” So, there is difference in test. There is difference in evaluations. So, that became actually our main focus in finding the real best tools to determine our location, GPS, knowing exactly where I’m at and what my situation is so that I have a roadmap towards health. That has proven to be extraordinary. So many patients could drop certain treatments. The second one with the amalgam fillings and root canals, this is something everybody talks about. If you have cancer you need to check your teeth and many people start treating the teeth but you check whether you have that output of thimerosal from your teeth. Whether your root canals produce heavy loads of bacteria.

There is so many possibilities to test instead of just pulling our teeth spending $20,000 with a dentist. You could invest the money more wisely if you know that that’s not related to your cancer. So, that’s where I believe my job and my task is. To help people to find what is best suited for them.

[0:17:19] Ashley James: I think it’d be really interesting if you took all of your emails, of course removing personal information like names, but if you took all your emails and all your correspondence with people asking questions and compiled it into a book or some kind of articles and websites. Something that people could search because you’re probably answering the same question over and over in different ways. You’ve probably given so many really interesting and well-thought-out answers that I think it would be worthy of publishing. So, I’m just put I’m just putting it out there.

[0:18:02] Marcus Freudenmann: I thought about the idea and put it on the website. We had for while Q&A questions. I categorized them in different groups. It was before we did the transformation and change to the new website. You know what, it’s very hard to explain but people need that personal contact. If it fits for that person that might be okay, but I’m still special. Yes, we are all special. It’s like finding it for myself. We offer a service on the website which is an evaluation for you. It’s only $250. It goes through 280 questions. It really covers so much ground. It gives you afterward an evaluation on which areas are most important to look at. It creates a timeline. It’s a really powerful program. We had thousands of people go through that. It’s actually one of our biggest turning points because it’s personalized. It’s not what the doctors do. It’s not what alternative doctors do, cookie-cutter. It actually really takes in account your personality, your upbringing, your birth, your parents’ diseases, your inherited diseases, your inherited environment, your inherited habits. It goes through all the body systems. How you digest? How does your poo look like? How your environment at home is? What kind of environment?

We give a lot of tips in that process on how to test for heavy metals, for EMF and all those things and formaldehyde so that it becomes more or less already a full education program parallel to giving you that evaluation in the end. That has been a huge breakthrough.

[0:20:01] Ashley James: Yeah. When did you create that?

[0:20:03] Marcus Freudenmann: Probably in the last two years.

[0:20:07] Ashley James: I mean, that’s after over a decade of interviewing and working closely with all these doctors from around the world. What I like about, you have a talent for seeking out doctors who are getting real results and then figuring out the exact root. Like getting to the root of it and figuring out what the driver is. What doesn’t work all the time but what does work all the time. You just have this way of cutting through so much misinformation and so many half-truths and really getting exactly what the science is saying, clinically what the results are saying works. I like that you always are focusing on the root cause. What is causing? What is the environment of the body that created the disease? How do we support the environment to be an environment to the body that does not create disease?

[0:21:09] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Look, the main problem that we have with cancer is that it’s not just that it’s caused by carcinogens. We know that. We consume hundreds of them every day. So, it’s not just the carcinogen that causes the problem, it’s also what stops my immune system from actually dealing with the disease. Because if you have 50 people and they all have cancer cells in their body, we produce, you and me and everybody, produces every day hundreds and thousands of cancer cells, but our immune system gobbles them up and get eliminates them and stops them from growing. As we get older, our system slows down our immune system doesn’t work anymore, our oxygen levels go down. There’s so many different reasons for cancer then to start growing.

The problem today is that it’s 27-year-old mothers. That’s where my biggest passion comes from. If somebody is 80 and 90 and they develop cancer, well, we all have to die of something so I’m not too worried about that. We had a long life. If somebody comes just having two little babies and then being diagnosed with cancer and trying to survive, it’s a jungle of misinformation. It’s so much marketing and advertising that people get lost in so many different beliefs. “Just drink ASEA water. Do this. Do that. Do this. Do that. Here is another remedy, $250 only.” It’s always told with those miracle stories. “My cousin survived. She just had one cup of that and all her cancers disappeared.”

I follow it through. I was at a workshop invited at one of those cancer conferences as a speaker. There were about 200 cancer patients in the room mixed with professionals. I asked, “Who of you has tried,” and I just went through lateral GcMAF. Many of those treatments that are promoted as a cure and it didn’t work. Almost the whole group went up, all hands went up. Then I asked, “Who has tried and where did it work? Who has seen it witness themselves?” Only the stallholders who put their hands up. It was kind of embarrassing and I pointed that out, which I told you stepping up to the truth and doing things slightly different and exposing the marketing behind was one of my insights that I had. It was so obvious. There was one person who had significant results from one of the treatments. When we follow through, I always taken, if anybody in the audience has such a case where one particular treatment really did a massive transformation changed and it helped them to reverse the cancer, please contact me on the website: trulyheal.com/Ashley. You will find up on top a little contact button. Send it to me and contact me. I’m always searching for those treatments which have significant results where we can prove that it actually had some help.

It was shocking how many people came afterward to me and said, “Marcus, thanks for actually speaking up because there is two problems. One is it’s me. It works for everybody else but it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’m not worthy of living.” You have no clue how much guilt and shame and whatever is associated with the diagnosis of cancer. It’s such a significant emotional burden already. Then you get told, “It works for everybody else. You must have done a mistake,” or “Only in your case it doesn’t work.” That’s number one problem. So, people feel guilty about having no results.

The second part is, nobody is really brave enough to say, “Look, it didn’t work for me. It didn’t work for my husband. It didn’t work for the other friends. It’s actually a fraud.” Because they always think maybe it’s just for them or their case is different. That’s why I told you that generalized answer is what people don’t need. They really need a personal evaluation, what is important for them. I see that at workshops, I see that in seminars and I see that in my emails. Even if I have answered that question in five videos already, it’s like in my case thank you. It’s true. We’re all special. We’re all individuals. We all have our own needs so that’s why we provide that service.

[0:26:10] Ashley James: You mentioned the guilt and the shame of the cancer treatment not working. You could apply that to either the standard oncology chemo radiation surgery, whatever form of chemo, right? Your cancer didn’t respond to this or whatever. We’re going to have to do another round. We’re going to try this chemo now or we’re going to do another thing of radiation because your cancer is spreading or your cancer is doing this, your cancer is doing that.

[0:26:42] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Just take dietary recommendation. Ketogenic diet cures cancer. Just go on to a ketogenic diet. It works for about 7%. The rest the cancer is so clever, so intelligent, so incredibly adaptive that if you change to a ketogenic diet and you do it well, not just half-hearted a little bit with ketone bodies, you do it properly it still thrives because it can start to convert even fat metabolism into energy. So, I’ve had people that change to a ketogenic diet and the cancer grew faster. So, and the same it’s vegan and then it’s vegetarian and then it’s the Gerson. We all have those beliefs. Most of it is from hearsay not from personal experience. You see all those famous people who go through and they do, Jessica Ainscough for example, she did a fantastic promotion of the Gerson diet and was doing so extremely well. She was prognosed five years and she died after four years. After she passed away, all of her books, all of her website, all of her promotions were taken down and disappeared from the web, from the publisher because they didn’t want to interrupt the process of people believing in Gerson.

So, it’s like we sell hope, we don’t sell results we sell hope. That’s where I believe we’re wrong because there is a diet for everybody but we need to find out which one. If you have kidney problem, you need to know that you have to really be low on proteins even vegetarian proteins because your kidney is the conversion the transformation is difficult. If you have liver problems or gall bladder problems in fat metabolism or your pancreas doesn’t produce enough lipase and you have a too fat diet with the ketogenic diet, this is really adverse and causes massive problems. If you have leaky gut and high inflammation in your gut and you go onto a raw diet, so many things that can just be completely adverse because we follow hearsay mainstream. Follow the followers instead of checking out properly what is important or relevant for you.

[0:29:12] Ashley James: So, the ketogenic diet, 7% of the time is exactly what that person needed and helps to kill the cancer because it starves the cancer, but the rest of the time, the cancer adapts or that it isn’t the kind of cancer that that dies off if you starve it of glucose. I like that you point out that the raw diet, very healthy for some people. Just the most healthiest thing in the world for some people. Other people it could be poison, poison because their gut isn’t capable of handling it. We have to focus on healing the gut, healing the microbiome. Others might eat a high-protein vegetarian diet or Atkins diet and they’re destroying their kidneys or their liver. It all depends on the person’s chemistry. That’s why we can use food as medicine but there’s not one diet for everyone.

[0:30:13] Marcus Freudenmann: Exactly.

[0:30:14] Ashley James: There are studies that show that higher meat consumption has a higher cases of cancer than lower meat consumption. Across the board, they see that in preventing cancer there are ways to eat that can complement the body in not creating cancer. I know your focus has been on helping people cure it. I definitely want you to talk about prevention.

[0:30:42] Marcus Freudenmann: Can I just go into that very short?

[0:30:44] Ashley James: Yes. I do.

[0:30:45] Marcus Freudenmann: When they talk about meat it’s also what kind of meat, where does it come from, has it been grain-fed, is it hormone-laden because it’s just from a normal butcher? There’s no discrimination done. Do I eat just lean meat which has no fat which is not really healthy for the body? There’s pro-inflammatory meats and there is very healthy meats. If you eat liver from an organic butcher. Differentiations. If I go to McDonald’s that’s dog food. Not even worthy of being dog food. That’s the meat they calculate in those studies. So, always cautious. We have to really step back not just superficially but completely and look at what we are looking at. Many of the studies are sponsored. Many of the studies are manipulated. They take into account very very few of the reasons that we actually are interested in. That’s why just saying meat is bad is completely reversing the Mediterranean diet, which is actually really healthy. It includes some fish, it includes some healthy meats but we don’t take the garbage, we eat quality.

So, it’s something that we found very important that we don’t judge too easy and too fast and are too manipulated by what people want us to believe.

[0:32:14] Ashley James: The most important thing is to know where you are, know where you stand. Like you said, you can’t get to Chicago if you don’t know where you are. You can’t get to health if you don’t know what your body actually needs right now. Because if you have heavy metals and mold exposure versus you have nutrient deficiencies and you have a DNA SNP for preventing you from fully detoxifying versus you have a leaky gut or you have an autoimmune and leaky gut and you have food sensitivities. There’s not one diet that’s going to fix everything. We have to shift our mindset around food and really see it as medicine. I could go to a drugstore and there’s some medicine that would help me and there’s some medicine that would hurt me, right? If I injected myself with insulin it would not be healthy for me, but you inject a type 1 diabetic with insulin at the right time and it is a very healthy thing for them. Yet we’re using food just like we’re going to a drug store and just randomly picking a drug and eating it and taking it.

[0:33:31] Marcus Freudenmann: Even worse.

[0:33:31] Ashley James: Right.

[0:33:32] Marcus Freudenmann: We use it as a religion.

[0:33:36] Ashley James: Yeah. You’re threatening some people’s belief systems because there are some people who would really heal their body on a raw vegan diet versus some people would really heal their body on a ketogenic diet versus some people really heal their body on a Mediterranean diet. We have to let go of dogma and look at what does my body need right now? Because my body in five years might need this nutrient but right now my body needs this nutrient and this medicine. So, we have to look at that every meal, three meals a day is actually like three doses of medicine.

Now, you talked about the shame and the guilt that patients feel as their cancer treatments are failing them. Whether it’s the traditional cancer treatment or whether it’s any kind of holistic cancer treatment or cancer diet. Whatever they’re doing. Many people feel shame like their body is failing them and they’re somehow bad and wrong because it’s supposed to work for people. So, it’s supposed to work so if it’s not working for them then they’re the ones left feeling shame and guilt and somehow less than. That’s not the case at all. It’s that these therapies are not a cookie-cutter for everyone. That each individual is really very specific that we have to look at exactly what’s going on with their DNA. with their nutrient deficiencies, with their heavy metal load, with their exposures to certain environmental toxins like mold, with their stress levels, with their emotional health, with their diet overall, with their viral load, which organs are weak, which organs need support and the list goes on and on.

So, you can’t just do a cookie-cutter. You bring up this point of feeling guilt or shame because the body’s failing them. This reminds me of at least two-thirds of the adult population has dieted at some point in their life. Diets have failed them but they don’t blame the diet, they blame themselves. “I did Atkins and I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t resist the carbs and now I’m eating carbs again I gained all the weight back and more.” Well, no. It was the diet that failed them because the diet wasn’t healthy for their body and yet they’re taking on guilt and shame. Shame depletes our magnesium stores. Shame causes stress levels and depletes our nutrients. So, shame is an emotion that is moving towards creating an environment in the body that will sustain cancer. We have to look at that our emotions will play a great role in healing us or in creating an environment for disease. I feel that there’s a great amount of shame that we all feel when we go to do something healthy for ourselves and it backfires. We say to ourselves, “Oh, look. That must be my fault because it’s supposed to work all the time.” Because we’ve been marketed to.

So, I like that you’re pointing out that there so there’s so much BS out there and that it’s not your fault.

[0:37:10] Marcus Freudenmann: Let me just point out one of the other points that really significantly made a huge change in our approach. When you go to so many clinics, you will find that many of them have specialties. Many of them have a main focus. It always depends on what the doctor experienced. So, in Germany we found several clinics that focus on the mind. Whether that’s radical forgiveness or the breakthrough experience or whatever they use as a means to help clients. Different types of meditation, breathing techniques, which is by the way something would like to speak about because we always say what makes the biggest impact. It’s definitely oxygenation of the body as one of our hooks that we use.

Let me just continue the train of thought first. Every single clinic has certain specialties. In the beginning I made little mind maps. I call it my flower power map because it had those little colorful flowers and it looked really pretty. Then we added more and more. Every doctor we spoke with and showed the map added their components. It just became a maze of different research and deficiencies and everything and we categorized. What I found is that very few clinics really solve or help the clients solve that mental and emotional problem of guilt, of shame, of feeling worthy, of feeling too self-important or too driven. Many, “I beat this cancer.” It’s like they have to prove something instead of letting go, relaxing and not being the star of the whole thing. It can go in both directions. Not only that you feel intimidated, you can actually feel empowered by it. You have something to talk about. You become self-important.

So many people write books and start blogging and share their experience and put so much pressure on their bodies and mind and stress levels to prove that they can do it. Then being defeated halfway through the program. So, we need to learn what actually the lesson is for everyone. I deal with their mindset and what cancer actually tries to show them. If stress is a big factor of work stress. I had one friend. I tell the story shortly in between. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctor said, “You know, we don’t even need to do chemo. It’s about two months, three months maximum that you’ll be here. Just get your affairs in order. Go home.” He had 27 little tumors and two or three big ones in his body spread out. When he first was diagnosed.

He came to me and said, “Marcus, do you see any chance?” I said, “Look, the only chance I see is letting go. Letting go of everything that holds you in a stressful situation. Letting go of your addictions. Letting go of whatever. What is your dream? What do you really would like to do before you pass away? Because we all have to. So just see that you have a chance now to live your dream.” He said, “I would like to go on a walkabout.” I said, “How can that be a dream? Flies in the Australian desert. That’s not something you dream about. He said, “Yeah. I saw a movie so many years ago and it just kept with me. It’s been my dream.” I said, “Yeah. Watch out what you wish for it might come true.” He started his walkabout. He left his penthouse apartment, his Porsche, his mobile phone, cell phones, business, everything. Just put a backpack on and started his walkabout.

I lost track. No contact anymore. He had no mobile phone. Half a year later he reported back, “Marcus, I’m feeling better than ever before. I’m now close to Uluru. I’m having this a camp here. I live with Aborigines. It’s absolutely incredible. One and a half years later I heard next time from him. He was in Perth and he was just cleared, cleared of cancer. No more indication of cancer. His scan came back as neutral. He didn’t eat a healthy diet. He most was fasting. If he ate, those little backcountry stores, they don’t have anything healthy. Canned food, no vegetables, no nothing. You don’t get that in the desert. He was living tribal. He was living off the land but he was exercising, moving, no stress levels, sitting around the campfire at night. He said, “I don’t ever want to go back to my life as it was before.” He is still cancer-free. He is still teaching people how to step out of the box. He is phenomenal. He lives north of Perth and really the most isolated parts of the world in tribal communities. He is doing fantastic.

So, it’s not the diet. It’s not the remedy. It’s not the treatment that can sometimes change. It’s letting go of that which makes us sick. It can be different from everybody to the next. That’s what we try to find out. What are the things? They can be mindsets, they can be resentment to the past and anger issues with the parents. You know how I learned that? I was running a workshop that was called loving cancer. It was like finding the blessings out of everything we see as soon as we get diagnosed. Things that we change. We learn more about our body. We become more body-conscious. We hear symptoms and signs a lot faster. We change our friends and community around us. All those who drain us with energy and really make our life difficult, we learn to isolate. We learn to say no to certain things. We do not comply all the time. A lot of women, housewives that get diagnosed, all of a sudden realized that they have demands and require time as well.

There’s so many things. Because we did it in a group setting with 20 people, you had all of a sudden insights and other people had that illumination, that breakthrough and they felt the blessings. Then the whole room said, “Oh wow. Yeah. That’s definitely true. That changed for me too.” So, it was like a build-up of gratitude that cancer brought into their lives. That was so amazing. One of the biggest factors that we always realized is that as soon as you see your cancer not as a curse, not as something to be killed, not as something to be eradicated by all means, but is something that helps you to come back to who you truly are, to your personality, to your needs, to actually having an ego and saying no or I choose this over this and not just complying because everybody else does. That was one of the biggest healing factors that I witnessed in so many people. As soon as they do, as soon as they listen to those things, they change. That’s why we built that into our program as well. It’s probably, in my opinion, one of the strongest factors in getting well.

[0:44:55] Ashley James: What you teach, we could all use. We don’t have to wait to get cancer. I’m just imagining someone who has type 2 diabetes. You could apply everything you just said. Your disease is not a curse. Shift your mindsets. Instead of a curse, make it be a lesson to teach you how to listen to your body and how to come back to who you truly are. Shifting your lifestyle, your food. Now you’re moving your body in a way that brings you joy. Now you’re decreasing your stress. Even getting enough sleep affects blood sugar. Someone without diabetes doesn’t notice that when they go to bed at 1:00 in the morning versus 9:00 at night. That the next day, even a normal person, their blood sugar is less in balance if they got fewer hours of sleep and they’re more hungry. People who go to bed later are hungrier the next day. Their blood sugar’s out of balance. They’re consuming more calories through the day than those who, like you said, have a bit of that ego to enforce your boundaries, tell your family I’m going to bed at 9:00. “You can have me till 9:00 but after 9:00 is my time. I’m taking care of myself. You need to be quiet, keep the house quiet because I’m going to bed. I’m going to lie in bed and read a book and then I’m going to fall asleep by 10:00.” The next day you wake up naturally when your body wants to wake up instead of to an alarm clock because you’ve had enough sleep. You notice the next day your blood sugar’s more in balance, that you’re less hungry, that maybe you’re able to do a little bit of fasting like intermittent fasting. That you’re going to get up and move your body in a way that brings you joy because you’re listening to your body. Every day you’re creating an environment because you’re using your disease instead of a life sentence. You’re using it as a motivation to help you-

[0:47:03] Marcus Freudenmann: Motivational guide. Exactly.

[0:47:05] Ashley James: Yes. Yeah. I love it.

[0:47:09] Marcus Freudenmann: Yes. I do too. It’s been my saving grace. You have to be rich. You have to have this car. You have to have whatever. When I have that I’ll be happy, which unfortunately never ever happens. But we put ourselves under so much pressure instead of just really enjoying the moment, enjoying what we have right now. So, there’s so many lessons in cancer that is a healing factor. It’s actually healing not only us because let’s face it, if you’re diagnosed the whole family around you or your friends are influenced by it. With using a disease as a motivational guide, it has so many advantages because we can relax into listening. I think that’s one of the things we seldom do, listening to what our body tells us, what our environment tells us and become an observer. Stepping outside of our active phase into our passive phase. Stepping back and looking at everything. That’s been one of the big things that we found.

What I would like to mention very short because a lot of people always say, “Marcus, you just told me that all those treatments don’t work. That the old pathways don’t work. It’s actually quite doomsday philosophy. So, what are the solutions that actually do work?” I really would like to focus on some of those because it’s not the treatment that is relevant, it’s the resolving of the problem. So, if let’s say we look at the four main reasons to have cancer or most degenerative diseases. It’s infections that we need to deal with. There is latent infections. There is infections that we treated with antibiotics but they’ve never been cured out. They’re still there. Antibiotics just strip the membrane of the bacterium and therefore it’s still there. It just doesn’t interact with the world but it’s still, as I say, pees and poos. It eats up resources. So, infections even if they are latent can be very very dangerous. Then viral infections don’t go away from use of antibiotics so we never ever get rid of them if our immune system isn’t on top. So, dealing with infections is really crucial.

Then we need to look at toxicity. Toxicity is rampant today in so many different forms, whether that’s plastic and petrochemical toxicity that stops many of the body functions that we need. It impairs our DNA. We have carcinogens, we have a teratogens, we have mutagens that don’t work on us they work on the next generation. So, all the chemical processes we need to look at. Then we have the toxicity of EMF and stress that many people aren’t aware of. So, looking at all of those factors is, in my opinion, really crucial. Let’s face it, one of the most important rooms that everybody needs to detoxify and clear is their bedroom. It’s almost half of the life that we spend in that bedroom. So, having that contaminant-free, rejuvenating, energizing is really crucial.

Then we look at deficiencies. So, that’s the main three: infections, toxicity and deficiencies. Just those three taken together can make it or break it. Deficiencies, again I said, it’s very important to know how your body works, how your liver detox pathways work, how your digestive system works, how the liver and kidney system works so that we see how our body can deal with our environment. If I have problems with proteins, reducing them. That just influences the diet. That influences what we are supposed to eat. It influences how we break down those nutrients in the gut. Do we have enough HCL? Do we drink too much alkaline water and therefore dilute HCL? There’s so many little factors that we should look at in regards to deficiencies because replenishing with food certainly the best. But then you live in Australia where there is no zinc and selenium in the ground. You can eat as many vegetables as you like, you don’t get any. So, supplementation is crucial. All of those factors, those three physical as I call them. Then we look at stress. Stress again in so many different areas. Do we have relationship stress, financial stress, work stress, physical stress?

There’s people that are lean and slim and obviously seem to eat the right thing and they do tons of exercise. They actually destroy the body with two single-sided or too fanatic sport. We have so many young people today that they lack so much cholesterol. They are so burned out at the age of 20-25 already just to have that ideal body, just to be slim, just to be beautiful. They’re killing their whole future and killing their ability to have children and produce osteoporosis at early stage. So, it’s not just that fat ones that get sick, it’s the thin ones. I have many that because of their fanatic diets and extreme sports cause problems.

So, looking at those factors in regards to stress, in regards to deficiencies, toxicity and infections, that is what we focus on. When your audience is listening to the program trulyheal.com/Ashley, they come to a training program where we cover in six videos all of those factors that are important to look at. I think, of all the videos that I ever did, 590 on YouTube and many more, they are the most helpful. We have hundreds of people giving feedback that they finally understood what to look out for. Then according to that, we can find very specific the treatment. Then the treatment works because I don’t just do something because everybody else does it. I do it because my body really needs it. The testing is sometimes really inexpensive, really simple but it gives you a head start by knowing where you are at navigating towards Chicago let’s stay with our example. Chicago being pure health is not really a good example.

[0:54:17] Ashley James: Deep dish pizza. Chicago pizza. I want to drive to Loma Linda California.

[0:54:27] Marcus Freudenmann: Okay. Let’s take that one as a navigation.

[0:54:29] Ashley James: Right. Right. You bring up infection being one of the pillars that we need to address, 100% of the adult population, in that case then, has sort of latent viruses and bacteria, that you say, has the membrane’s been stripped with the bacteria. The guts of the bacteria are still pooping inside our body. So, there’s viruses, there’s bacteria. We also have yeast, fungus, and amoeba, parasites.

[0:55:05] Marcus Freudenmann: Fungi, mold, yeast, amoeba. Yeah.

[0:55:11] Ashley James: I’m amazed at, I guess, ignorance or hubris of all of us in North America because we assume that we live in such clean houses, we have access to clean water and clean food. That we assume that we don’t have parasites. It is just not in the case. This mentality has made us totally disconnected from the medicine that our ancestors would take on a regular basis. The herbs that they would incorporate on a regular basis to deworm, to kill the amoeba.

If you go to India and look at their medicine, they’re drinking and I was just telling you before we started recording that I love drinking moon tea, which is a concoction of herbs that are gentle, antimicrobial, anti-parasitic herbs. Also wonderful in decreasing inflammation and supporting the nervous system and supporting digestive health. It’s called moon tea.

My friend Naomi and I just actually filmed making this tea and teaching our members. We do a membership where we teach how to cook real food so you’re eating clean food that is delicious and healthy. We just made this concoction. So, I’m kind of addicted to it because I feel so good drinking it. Also remembering that our ancestors used to take herbs all the time in order to clean out the body of these parasites. Most of us are walking around just Petri dishes with a high viral load.

[0:56:58] Marcus Freudenmann: You just think about the sugar that they use, which explodes everything. It explodes the bacterial overgrowth and viral overgrowth. There’s two major. I totally agree with you with all the herbs. It’s a bit of a science to know what works, but there’s also so much information. There is two major treatments that have been known throughout mankind that reduce infectious load dramatically. Both are related to body core temperature, body temperature. One is ice bath. That really extreme cold environment to get your system oxygenated, to get your system alkaline combined with breathing. The other one is hyperthermia which is really fever therapy. Children get an infection. What do they get? They get any kind of flu or virus or bacteria, their body goes into a strong fever response. The fever then flags, first of all until, oh God now conversion again. We need to figure that one out. It’s 39 at 39 temperature Celsius, which is you can do that while I talk. 39 Celsius is how many Fahrenheit? That would be the temperature that flags all of your pathogens: virus, bacteria, fungi, mold with heat shock proteins. I call that their sprout green hair. Green hair would be a visible sign for the immune system. Oh, this is somebody that shouldn’t be in my body.

Then they start attacking those proteins and those pathogens in the body that have green hair. That’s a very very powerful system at the temperature of 39.5, which is just shortly below 40. Many of the cancer cells, many of the pathogens actually die off. Lyme disease dies off, hepatitis C dies off at 39.8. So, if we have a strong fever and we lay in bed sweating and having that strong fever, that’s when our body officially cleanses from all those infections. We sweat and we put it out. Our blood vessels are expanded. We transport millions of white blood cells directly out of the bone marrow into the bloodstream.

So, in Germany when you go to all of the clinics that deal with infectious diseases and Lyme disease, they all do hyperthermia treatment even in addition to all the herbs, in addition to chemicals of antibiotics. They use that to keep the immune system strong, to produce many many more white blood cells and there is plenty of research. That fever therapy often has shown a complete reversal or shrinkage of cancer cells because they break down just in the same way as pathogens do. So, fever therapy is one of the treatments that we really love. I do it once a week. I’m like you addicted to your tea. I’m addicted to hyperthermia. It’s kind of a weird thing because it’s a tough treatment. Once you feel afterward your energy levels, you feel how your mind clears up.

See all of those pathogens produce neurotoxins. They poop and pee as we call. Those neurotoxins, they play out the mind, they make you tired. You create a huge burden on to your liver, on to your detox system. So, it’s like the more I have whether that’s root canal filled bacteria or whether that’s in the jaw from cavitations or they’re that’s in my joints and elbows and knees or it’s in organs. All of those, especially in the gut, all of those bacteria produce neurotoxins. So, if I kill off many of them I go through that stage. That’s why fever tear therapy makes you sleep a lot, makes you tired, makes you really it’s a tough progress but you come out so cleansed and so bell-clear with your mind that it can’t be explained or compared with any other treatment.

So, I really encourage people to look at hyperthermia as a treatment, as a general treatment because it also detoxifies heavy metals, it detoxifies plastic toxicity. It’s an internal and external detoxification through the skin and through the blood. If you do a hyperthermia, 3-4 days afterward your poo smells. It’s not nice but you realize what comes out. It also is anti-parasitic. It’s definitely the most proven and the most effective treatment of all. We have several clinics when I say to them, “Why don’t you do clay bath? Why don’t you do a zeolite? They all go like, “Because we don’t need it. We do once a week hyperthermia and that’s more than sufficient for any problem that we have from toxicity to infections to cancer growth to everything.

[1:02:40] Ashley James: So, you mention that 39.8 Celsius is high enough for Lyme disease. That’s 103.64 Fahrenheit. So, if someone did hyperthermia to 104, which most people listening, about 104 fever it’s not unthinkable. I recently had a guest on the show. She’s a PhD in homeopathy her name’s Cilla Whatcott. She’s been on the show a few times because she specializes in homeoprophylaxis. The last time she came on the show she was sharing about her three-part docuseries. She actually produced three 90-minute documentaries so there are three movies. It was all about the immune system. It was sort of focusing on what you could do instead of vaccines. It was kind of her, “Here’s the immune system. Here’s what it does. Here’s what you can do to support it.” She actually, while she was filming, developed cancer.

So, it took her a completely different turn. So, the third movie, she actually threw out. The third movie was almost done, she threw it out. She started filming again. The third movie is her journey to heal her cancer. Of course she did 100% unconventional treatment meaning she didn’t do the cut, burn. She did end up getting surgery after she did all the natural stuff. She chose to remove her breast, but she did not go for chemo or radiation. Instead, she did many different things but one of them was hyperthermia, which she swore by. That it played a huge role in her healing.

So, that was my first real-time talking to someone who’d ever experienced hyperthermia. I’ve had fever before as a kid, remembering having 104 fever as a kid. I remember waking up the next day totally fine like just boom. My body killed it. So many questions come to mind. Is this safe? Is this a safe therapy for everyone? Are there some people for whom this would be dangerous? You mention DNA SNPs, are there people who hyperthermia would not be a good therapy for because their body wouldn’t be able to handle the toxic load after the die-off, for example.

[1:05:22] Marcus Freudenmann: I would say the only real handicap that we have is breast implants. It’s a contraindication because due to the heat the silicon, it releases so many toxins into the body. So, if they have a client with breast implants in Germany, they put specially created gel poultices over the top to cool the breast so that they are not impacted. You can do that at home with cold towels and everything. It is something that we call a contraindication. The second thing is if somebody has severe heart problems. Let’s say it’s like climbing up a mountain. You get out of breath. It’s intense. Pulse increase so you push so much blood through your system that it is exhausting. That’s why heart problems and breast implants are the only two contraindications that there are.

If people follow the link trulyheal.com/Ashley and you go up, just above the video there is a button that’s called treatments. You just scroll down to hyperthermia. You click that button. First of all, there is a video that explains all of those treatments and why we recommend them and the research. Then if you click on hyperthermia, it takes you to the hyperthermia academy. We have a list to download with all the contraindications and side-effects that can come from the treatment plus a massive checklist. What to do, how to do it safely so that you can go really to prepare it, how to prepare yourself, how to do your breathing, everything. So as you go through the treatment that you don’t miss any of those steps.

It is a medical treatment, which is used and performed in all European, Russian, Romanian, Austria, Switzerland countries as a standard of care.

[1:07:29] Ashley James: Really? Standard of care? Sorry. You’re kind of blowing my mind here. This is just in clinics, totally accepted.

[1:07:40] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s used in university clinics.

[1:07:41] Ashley James: University clinics. Totally accepted.

[1:07:45] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s called the fourth pillar of cancer treatments because in Germany, as soon as cancer patients go down in white blood cell count, chemotherapy kills off every fast dividing cell in the body. Cancer cells are fast-dividing, immune cells are fast dividing. So, your white blood cell count goes down and then they have to stop chemotherapy because your white blood cell count becomes critical. Then you have no more defense, no more repair that’s why they have to stop. Now they go into one single or a series of two hyperthermia treatments during. They can first of all, reduce the load to about 30-40% of the chemo. So, they reduce the amount of chemo being used to have the same effects, plus they produce so many white blood cells during the process of hyperthermia that they can continue with chemo.

See, I’m never saying chemo is bad. I kind of dislike that we make it so black and white. There is a big gray area. I’ve met many people who did the integrated form. They had chemotherapy but they did hyperthermia at the same time. We have many clients that do that at home. They go through hyperthermia to keep their immune system going, to intensify the effects of chemotherapy. For many it’s a dream solution. So, saying it’s all bad or it’s all good on the other side is something that I’ve come to disagree with. We have solutions on both sides. That’s why when we use such an integrative method like they do at the university clinic and we do it wisely, we can have far better results. We have far less side effects. Actually, we can reduce side effects like hair loss and gray skin and all of those things completely. Patients come out of their chemotherapy with much greater success. Again, there is many studies.

So, hyperthermia is a treatment that we fell in love with, but I always say it’s only suitable for those clients who really want to live. If somebody says, “Oh. It’s a tough treatment. Don’t you have something simpler? Can we not do rather rife?” I always say, “Yeah. Just do whatever you like.” You obviously don’t want to live hard enough. It’s not a treatment for half-hearted approach. It’s a tough treatment, but it is one of the most relieving. You will also find that you have emotional relief. Many people start crying or start getting angry and release their emotional blockages during the treatment. So, you always should have a partner there. I have so many videos on that page that explain the process. There is doctors who explain the emotional factors of hyperthermia then the immune factors. So, it’s all on that training page. It’s really really helpful. That’s, in my opinion, one of the key treatments that we all have to do.

The second one is oxygenation. Oxygen oxygen oxygen. Cancer thrives in an anaerobic environment. If we focus on oxygenating our environment, first of all, the cancer doesn’t need to spread because it always looks for other areas to settle in. As soon as there is plenty of oxygen, that won’t happen. So, oxygenation and alkalinity. A lot of people think when we eat greens then we alkaline the body. I’ve seen people that tried that with all means. Didn’t eat anything else and still were highly acidic. The problem is very simple. Every food you eat, doesn’t matter what, needs to be converted into glucose for our cells to produce ATP. So, everything you eat whether it’s low converting or fast converting sugar it becomes sugar in the end. The second component to produce ATP energy for your body for every cell to work is oxygen.

Now, even though you might eat the most alkaline food diet, your pee and saliva strips stay acidic. That is because we breathe wrong. Oxygen intake. You need oxygen to convert glucose with oxygen into ATP. If you don’t have enough cellular oxygen, if your red blood cells don’t carry enough oxygen, if you don’t have that saturation in the organs, if your hemoglobin is not charged properly enough then that process is impaired. That means you have more glucose than oxygen. That means you start to ferment food. It becomes a lactic acid process and an anaerobic conversion. That is what cancer thrives on. So, the more oxygen we can get into the body, whether you use the Wim Hof method in breathing in there, Indian method or breathing exercises or you just go out in nature, exercise or you do own therapy or you do hyperbaric oxygen. It doesn’t really matter. Oxygen. The new method on sitting on a bicycle with the altitude training, which is very rarely a cancer suitable treatment but it is a possibility.

Things increase the chance of survival, the chance of your immune system actually handling the cancer. The immune system dealing with infections so far that it is, in my opinion, the biggest transformation for every cancer patient. We use mostly ozone because it has a whole lot of effects that compensate even for the lack of exercise, the lack of cytokine production communication. It has 50 different health benefits to the body. That’s why, again, it’s used in all European as a standard of care. It’s a totally normal treatment to boost the immune system, reduce infections, charge your hemoglobin with special energy that then can carry more oxygen. It makes your blood vessels dilate better so that you can get into the fine capillaries all the oxygen where it needs to go. A powerful treatment. These two hyperthermia and ozone are our more or less standard of care. Most important treatments and also most researched products that we use in cancer treatments, infectious disease treatments or any other chronic degenerative disease.

[1:14:47] Ashley James: You’re blowing my mind that hyperthermia and ozone are standard in European countries and yet completely not even mentioned by MDs here. Just not even brought up. Why is it that North America is in the dark ages? Why aren’t we on the cutting edge with you in Europe? Why aren’t we doing the same thing? It’s really infuriating when you look at how much money we pay for medical care in the United States. We spend the most amount of money on medical care than any other country. The U.S., we pay the most for our medical care. We are, I believe it’s 30^th or 31^st, in the world rated out of all the other industrialized nations that we come 30^th or 31^st. That we’re like close to dead last in terms of infant mortality. When you give birth in a hospital it cost over $5,000. That’s if you have a smooth birth and you don’t have a C-section. It blows my mind that if I were to have, God forbid knock on wood, if I were to have cancer and I lived in Europe, that a traditional oncologist would say, “Okay. We got to do some ozone therapy and some hyperthermia,” as part of my care. That’s not even heard of here.

I heard about ozone. I believe we talked about it in episode 147 when we had you on the show the first time. I first heard about ozone back in 2006 when I was working at a company. I was a sales manager for an international training company that taught people how to become trainers of neurolinguistic programming. My employer and my office manager would go to Tijuana and go to a clinic in Tijuana called the Hitt Center, Dr. Hitt. He was an American that would work in Tijuana. He would take your blood and put ozone in it, which is three oxygen molecules. Put ozone in it and then put the blood back in your body. My office manager had cervical cancer. She kind of went there for a week like she was going on vacation. She had absolutely no fear about the cervical cancer whatsoever. She was acting like it was kind of a cold that she was going to get over. She went there. She had seven days of ozone therapy and walked out without any cervical cancer. Then of course she changed her lifestyle. Ate organic, started to exercise. She then proceeded to live a much cleaner, healthier life and take care of her stress levels.

My employer at the time went there because of his allergies were off the charts. It was almost deadly for him to be in a room with a cat. It almost would send him to the hospital. It was so bad. If he was in a room with a cat he might die. That’s how bad his allergies were. After getting ozone therapy and a few other natural immune therapies, he became so healthy that they adopted two cats. I watched this happen. This was my first exposure to ozone. I’m thinking to myself, “Man, why do we have to go to Tijuana to get a therapy that seems to really really work?” It was explained to me was that ozone therapy is wonderful especially for people with cancer because it explodes all the pathogens in the body. Brings down the viral load and explodes all the passive pathogens. So now your immune system, instead of having to constantly keep up with sort of dormant viruses or keep everything at bay, now your immune system could focus on healing what it really needs to, which just blew my mind.

I believe you shared with us some ways that we could at home use ozone. I’d like to talk about that because there’s some concerns that ozone is a toxic substance. That it shouldn’t be inhaled, it should never touch our body. If you go to buy an ozone machine there’ll be all kinds of warnings about how toxic it is. So, how can we use ozone? Is it really toxic or is it benign? Should we always go to a professional or can we do ozone therapy at home?

[1:19:31] Marcus Freudenmann: Okay. That’s a very very important question. Toxicity of ozone is relevant in regards to breathing it into your lungs because you don’t have antioxidants in your lung and they don’t handle that oxidative stress. That’s why not breathing it in. If you smell it in the room, it’s not dangerous. If you smell a little bit of it, not dangerous. Just in high concentrations and large volume. That’s why they made it something negative. The whole concept and why it’s so harassed by the authorities and by the medical professional, whoever is in charge, is because it is absolutely cheap. You need an oxygen bottle and that oxygen, whether use medical or industrial doesn’t really matter. Cost you something like $60 a refill for a 1,000 treatments and that’s it. The device itself, depending on which device, it’s ranging from $700 to $2,000 dollars, which means every single doctor will have absolutely incredible results. The only income is towards the doctor. No chemicals to be sold. No pharmaceuticals to be sold. That’s why it has been harassed all over the world being prohibited, banned. Doctors lose their license.

In America, there’s more and more doctors using it. There’s more and more doctors opposing those regulations and do it as a private treatment. You have to pay privately for it but they use it because they see the effects. There’s hundreds and thousands of research studies and prove that it works for infections, infectious diseases, for so many things. It’s used to heal leaky gut. They use it in clinics in Europe for children. They use it for toddlers with autism. They use it for children with behavioral problems because of gut issues, gut overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth. It is proven to reverse leaky gut. It’s just an immense treatment. Because it is so effective, it works actually quite fast. It is easy to do. They don’t like that. That’s just simply the reason. I can’t see any other reason because there is hardly any other treatment that has so many documented research studies and studies that it can’t make it into the mainstream. So, it’s just simply too cheap.

[1:22:09] Ashley James: Is it safe to do it at home?

[1:22:11] Marcus Freudenmann: Oh, yes. I do it since ten years. We have those treatments, God, 8,000-9,000 devices I’ve sold to people all around the world. From Iceland to Russia to South Africa to Namibia. I can’t tell you all the countries. In the beginning we made dots on the map how far we could reach the world. Then it just became too overwhelming. Every country around the world we’ve delivered ozone devices to ozone bundles. We have a complete training. Again, trulyheal.com/Ashley and then just scroll up to the top. Go into treatments and you will find the O3 Academy, ozone academy. What it’s used for, different protocols for different diseases, how it’s used, how to set it up at home, how to be safe, contraindications, side effects, everything is there. You can get instantly the download. You can watch all the videos. We’ve put a lot of effort in to make it.

Let me just give you my reasoning. The biggest problem when you are diagnosed with cancer or any other chronic disease is cost. It just ends up to be an incredible expense. The more you try, the more you search around, the more you consult with training and everything the more it goes out-of-bounds. I’ve seen so many people broke or using their whole resources that they have just to stay alive. That’s why when you go to have a treatment, in Mexico I think you pay for one ozone therapy something like $130 dollars, $100. In Germany it’s a bit cheaper because every Naturopath is allowed to do ozone therapy so it’s about $80 converted, $60 some of them. But if you have a 10-pack or 20-pack it still adds up. So, what we found and you need to do at least 20 or 30 treatments to see results. It’s a slow-motion treatment. That’s why when you buy yourself a hyperthermia dome, one hyperthermia treatment in the clinic is around and $1,500-$1,000. Here in Australia they charge now in two clinics $1,200. That’s two treatments you can buy off your own dome and you can do it at home the next 10 years.

So, what we found is that that investment to buy a device, have a proper training with it, know what to do, know to handle it properly and then you can run your home treatment. It’s first of all legal. It’s completely legal to treat yourself like doing a diet or taking drugs or whatever. It’s totally legal. Secondary, it’s safe. That’s why we don’t sell the device before you haven’t gone through the training because we want you to really know the side effects and not going to the hyperthermia dome with big breast implants and then you get sick afterward. So, we showcase those things before. Then once you’ve done the training you can purchase the device and you save yourself thousands of dollars. Because they are the most effective treatments plus we teach you all the cofactors. What you need to look out for, which supplements are important, which nutritional values are important. It’s always a whole package. It’s made around the world. We have thousands of people who use those treatments.

[1:25:58] Ashley James: You say 20 to 30 treatments of the ozone before you see results. This is not IV ozone so you’re bathing in it or you’re I believe you talked about–

[1:26:12] Marcus Freudenmann: Rectally.

[1:26:13] Ashley James: Rectally. That’s right. So, you put a small amount of ozone in your rectum.

[1:26:19] Marcus Freudenmann: Up your butt.

[1:26:20] Ashley James: So that you can absorb it because that’s a highly absorbed area. There’s a vein around the anus-

[1:26:28] Marcus Freudenmann: The portal vein.

[1:26:29] Ashley James: Yeah. Portal vein goes right to the liver. So, it’s delivering the ozone into the liver and then throughout the body. So, 20 or 30 treatments, could someone do that in a month? Could they do a treatment every day for a month?

[1:26:45] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Certainly. That’s what the plan is. If you start out doing it for every day, in the morning. For very impatient patients who sometimes do morning and evening if they are really keen, especially in the first week where you want those effects. Major autohemotherapy, which you described before where blood is taken out and it’s bathed in ozone and then drip back into the body is probably a lot more effective. I would say half or double as effective than rectal, but it requires those really big needles in your arm. Children, elderly often have problems with that. It’s a dreadful thing to see that the doctor getting that needle done. It’s always an hour driving or half an hour driving. It takes a lot of time.

A treatment of rectal ozone insufflation is in the morning you go to the bathroom, you go to the toilet you have your bowel movement and then right afterward you lubricate the catheter with a little bit of ozone oil. You insert that into your rectum. Then you blow 250 milliliters. It’s a small amount of ozone into your colon and try to hold it. It doesn’t need to stay long. It’s like a fart that wants to escape so you try to hold it for something like two minutes. Then all the reaction has passed. If you would hold it longer, the only additional benefit is that the oxygen is absorbed. All your white blood cells that live in that final part of the colon in the membrane, in the mucosa, mucous membrane, they thrive with that input of ozone and oxygen. So, it’s like an incredible boost that you give yourself. So, I try to hold it. I have very strong muscles. I can hold it easily. I don’t even feel it, the 250 milliliters. But if it passes early it doesn’t matter. That’s it. That’s the whole treatment for the day. You do that every morning. It’s a two-minute, three-minute treatment if you include washing the catheter and flashing it out in the sink with a bit of soapy water and that’s it.

The Cuba study showed that five rectal ozone insufflations can be compared in its effect to three major autohemotherapy. That’s normally when you go to a clinic like your friend did in Mexico. They have three major autohemotherapy per week. That is pretty much the same as five rectal ozone insufflations. The effects are multiple. First of all, again, you create like a vaccine. The bacteria that die off become a vaccine. The virus that dies off due to the oxidation becomes a vaccine. Your cytokine production is increased. Your oxygen uptake is increased. You produce in the bone marrow what we call super red blood cells. They have highly charged hemoglobin so they take up more oxygen and release it a lot faster.

Now, they live 126 days, roughly let’s say 130 days. So, when you start doing your ozone treatment, that’s when the first blood cells, red blood cells, are produced which are the strongest. But you have still many that are in your body that are sluggish that don’t hold a lot of energy. So you slowly increase that amount of super red blood cells. Once you really change that environment and you have a lot more oxygen uptake, see, when you breathe and you breathe in fresh air, then the oxygen has to be pulled through two membranes unto the hemoglobin. First, the lung membrane and then the red blood cell membrane. That needs a strong charge to pull that oxygen molecule through and tie it to the hemoglobin. Then the blood travels through the body and it’s released in areas where it’s low oxygen content. It’s like a trigger that releases.

Now, if your red blood cells are starving themselves from oxygen they can hardly survive. They’re clamping up and they’re clotting up then they won’t release the oxygen. They use it for themselves. But if you have those super red blood cells they release it. That’s why it’s used for Neuropathy, diabetic Neuropathy for wound healing, for expedited wound healing. For people who have those dying off black spots on their legs and toes because blood circulation doesn’t get there from diabetes. It’s used for wound healing. It’s used to wash wounds. You can use it for toenail fungus, which your immune system is not capable of dealing there because it’s fine capillaries and your oxygen is used up before it gets to your toes, to your extremities.

So, all of a sudden your whole body gets a complete revamp and reboost. Your eyesight gets better. Your skin gets better. It’s used in Italy in nine clinics where I interview doctors as beauty therapy. They use it instead of Botox to take those wrinkles above the lips away to use it above the eyebrows. It’s phenomenal. They remove scar tissue with it. I’ve never seen the treatment that is used so versatile. They use it with children with autism to heal the gut. There is clinics that flood the whole colon with two liters of ozone and then start to recolonize the colon with probiotics and with good like in Ayurveda they use ghee and good oils and good nutrients combined with minerals to recolonize the colon. It’s phenomenal. I’ve never seen one treatment that is used so versatile in so many areas.

[1:33:08] Ashley James: That’s phenomenal. I mean, that it was used instead of Botox is kind of blowing my mind. Now, biological dentists use ozone instead of the old way that dentists would do it, which is to drill and then fill. Drill and fill a cavity. Biological dentists use ozone to kill the cavity, to kill the infection in the tooth. Then they put like an inert substance over it if they have to. But it is used by biological dentists here in the United States, is it not?

[1:33:43] Marcus Freudenmann: Yeah. Look at the process. They kill off bacteria with ozone and they stimulate the innate immune system in that area. Then usually what they do is they extract the white blood cells from your blood with the centrifugal. Then they inject that plasma, the white blood cells, into the extraction. So, the white blood cells boosted by ozone, boosted by oxygen and then do the healing. It’s a phenomenal concept and it works absolutely astounding. So, I’m really upset that it’s so difficult for people to get it, to find a biological dentist, to find a doctor who does it. There is many many more.

Dr. Shallenberger, who I interviewed and Dr. Robert Rowen in San Francisco or north of San Francisco. Dr. Shallenberger is in Reno. They both hold courses and training programs for doctors and professionals. They usually have about 50 to 100 people in the room, doctors and professionals who learn how to do the treatment. They’ve done those courses since two or three years. So, there’s more and more doctors coming forth who step outside the box and say, “Look, I do what’s good for my patients.”

In America, it’s just not advertised. I can’t go and say, “Hey. I do ozone treatment.” Here in Australia, two doctors coming from Germany and very proud, started an ozone clinic in Melbourne and within two weeks they lost their license and were closed down. So, you just need to stay under the radar. That’s why I always say just call a doctor and say, “Do you do ozone therapy?” If they do then they will let you know but they won’t advertise it in a big way because it’s just not helping their licensee. That’s why do it at home. It’s a fraction of the cost. If you buy a kit it’s $1,400 and it allows you to do ozone treatment for the whole family for two years, it’s ten years. It doesn’t cost anything. It allows you also to save in trip and time and all of those things, which I believe is quite important.

[1:36:05] Ashley James: What about HPV, herpes, yeast or Candida infections? I’m just imagining, could you put ozone in a vagina? Can you use it?

[1:36:19] Marcus Freudenmann: Oh certainly. Vaginal insufflations. You connect the hose directly with your catheter directly to the ozone generator. You turn it on 27 milligrams so a slightly lower concentration that you use for rectal. You insert the catheter into your vagina with a little bit of ozone oil. Then you inflate your whole ovarian fallopian tubes. Everything is ozonated. It’s healthy for healthy cells, they thrive. Your pathogens die off so you can use it for Candida overgrowth, you can use it for EBV, for everything, for sexually transmitted diseases, herpes, genital herpes. We have many young people who do that as a treatment.

You combine it with a healthy diet. You combine it with good supplementation. You also combine it with drinking some ozone water or flashing with ozone water but a phenomenal treatment. We have all those videos on the website. How to do vaginal insufflations, how to do rectal insufflations, how to do ozone bagging for external limps. It’s all learned and taught by doctors that we visited to really cover all aspects. So we don’t do things half-heartedly.

[1:37:45] Ashley James: If you had to choose between ozone and hyperthermia, if someone didn’t have the budget for both and they wanted to heal their body. Let’s say they have a disease a chronic disease and they want to heal their body, which one? If they could just choose one right now, which one do you think is more important?

[1:38:10] Marcus Freudenmann: Again, that’s one of those general questions. What is their situation? I would say it’s not so much about the budget or about one or the other. It’s more what is their personality type? See, we have let’s say total three treatments. PEMFT would be what I call the couch potato treatment.

[1:38:33] Ashley James: What’s PEMFT?

[1:38:34] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s pulsed electromagnetic fields.

[1:38:37] Ashley James: Oh. Yes.

[1:38:37] Marcus Freudenmann: It boosts the immune system. So that would be my couch potato treatment. Lazy people who don’t want to do anything and who are not really willing to touch their butt. Let’s face it, many men when you say do a rectal insulation they look at you as if you ask a miracle from them. The next step would be ozone is what most people comply with. It’s already borderline but they comply with it because they feel and see the results. Hyperthermia would be the toughest treatment and you really need to have a dedication to get well. It’s also in sequence in effectivity. Hyperthermia would be the most effective, most powerful treatment to cover such a wide range of problems that you can do especially with a good breathing technique. When you go into the dome, it can compensate for both of the other treatments. So, that’s number one.

Ozone would be treatment number two because it compensates for exercise, for breathing. It’s very convenient. It’s a short treatment but you need to do it longer to have those results. I just had a young lady. She contacted us with very advanced stage of herpes, genital herpes. She started out with flashing and washing with ozone water. Doing the vaginal insulation and rectal insulation because vagina is local treatment. Rectal is the systemic response of the body creating those red blood cells and creating the cytokines. So you have to do both. She did the whole process for four weeks and everything disappeared. So, dedication in that treatment will bring you massive results.

PEMFT is what I call for those people who have no energy left to do anything. They lack well even in the will to do things. If they start using PEMFT it’s like your toothbrush. When it goes whoop whoop whoop and doesn’t brush anymore properly, you put it in that stand and it recharges the battery. It’s similar to us. Every cell is recharged. All of a sudden we go, “Woo, woo. Let’s do something.” It’s an energizing treatment, which has health benefits as well, but the major effect would be energy and pain.

[1:41:11] Ashley James: So when someone is just so fatigued, they’re just so fatigued they just don’t have the will or the energy to really do anything you say PEMFT, which you could just sit on the couch or lie in a bed, electromagnetic pulse. I did a two-part interview on micro frequency, using specific micro frequencies to stimulate certain parts of the body kind of like rife but very specific. So, you dial in a specific Hertz for exactly what they’re looking to work on. Is what you’re suggesting similar to that? That you dial in a certain frequency? Is it a specific frequency?

[1:42:02] Marcus Freudenmann: No. That’s exactly what we try not to do because that’s when it becomes really technical, very complicated. You need to do a treatment two or three weeks with a certain frequency to see whether it actually as an effect. Plus, like rife treatment, you start the treatment you do it for a while and then your cells adapt. Like, “Oh, that kills me. Let’s switch my frequencies so that I don’t respond.” That’s why when you do rife frequency or any of those frequency treatments, which are designed to kill off certain pathogens, then your body adapts after certain while. Then you need to change the frequency, adapt.

There’s whole forums that try to catch the best frequency for Lyme. They always work for a little while and then you need to search again and do scans. It’s too technical. For most patients, way too overwhelming. It never yields lasting results. Whereas PEMFT is a channel recharge. It’s really just simply recharging your body with energy. We don’t care about frequencies. We just simply fill the body with a magnetic field not with electric current, with a magnetic field. That recharges all cells whether it’s your bone cells, your immune cells, your skin cells everything at once.

I sold, actually, many devices to retirement homes. We had one that started out. It was in America one of those over 50 living or over 55 or whatever you call it. They purchased one of those devices. A few clients just used it and sat down and had that treatment. They started to excel. They started to get more feet. They’re better mobility, had overall more energy, more joy in life, libido came back. It was all of a sudden like a reboot. They told everybody. This one retirement village has I think 80, how do you call it, satellites, different villages. They purchased now five devices for each of those communities. They are thriving.

When you see the effects, I went to people that are sitting in agony, in pain because the cells cramp up. They have pain, they have no more energy. They do the treatment for one or two days and you see them walking straight and they stretch out. The nurse said it’s really sweet. We had it in one community and the nurse said, “Marcus, we never ever get rid of a problem which has changed its form. Before we had pain and complaining clients and grumpy and miserable. Now we have parties in the room at night, escaping patients and libido that goes through the roof that shouldn’t be there anymore.” It was so sweet. Yeah. They actually show mostly the effects.

We have a lot of cancer patients that it’s the most expensive device. I said that compensates for the couch potato effect you know doing little and having therefore high cost. Whereas ozone is very cheap in the middle. Then you have hyperthermia which is a tough treatment but therefore it’s probably the most powerful of all. They cover so much ground. All of them deal with toxins. All of them help with detoxification. All of them kill off pathogens. All of them immobilize your immune system. Bring organs back to working function. They oxygenate the body. It’s a treatment that you can do.

You go to the Gesundheit clinic in Giessen in Germany. That’s where you find all super athletes, Olympic players, world athletes, marathon runners. Before they go overseas, before they have a competition they go to that clinic and what do they have? Ozone, hyperthermia and PEMFT as a boost, which is outside of the doping rules so they can do that and increase their performance 50-fold before they go. Plus they don’t get infections when they travel to third-world countries. So it’s a very very popular and famous clinic that all sports people go. So, it’s not only for sick people.

[1:46:30] Ashley James: Oh. Fantastic. That’s very interesting is PEMFT similar to the bemer mat or is that totally different?

[1:46:40] Marcus Freudenmann: It is in the same family but the bemer mat, again, uses frequencies like the iMIS and all of those. They use a frequency which runs for three minutes and that resonates with your bone cells. Then it switches to three minutes of your cartilage. Then three minutes of your muscle cells. Three minutes of your immune cells, three minutes. So, twenty minutes through, it covers pretty much all. It’s a 30-minute program. It covers pretty much the whole range of frequencies. Whereas PEMFT that we use it’s called a ringer device and that’s in clinics use because you can’t have every patient being treated for pretty much everything just to cover one range. In a five minute treatment with a ringer device, with a pulsing magnetic device which causes those muscle contractions, it does the same thing as 10 times being on an oscillating device. So, it’s a lot faster, a lot more effective. That’s why it’s used in sport, in soccer, in rugby. You will find when you look at those sport fields and they have an injury or they fall, you will find that a lot of those athletes are taken to the side and they immediately get PEMFT treatment because it creates faster healing, it prevents edema, it reduces swelling, it takes out any kind of bruising. It’s a really powerful treatment.

[1:48:16] Ashley James: If only the average person had access to all the things that the elite athletes have access to, all the athletes do, then the average person, what every household would have a PEMFT device, would have a dome for hyperthermia, would have a device for ozone. This would be standard, like you said, it’s standard practice in Europe and in clinics there and elite athletes do it. Why is it not standard practice for the rest of us?

[1:48:47] Marcus Freudenmann: I would say thousands of people do. It’s not that uncommon. When we speak about those treatments, you will find that many people already know, many people have, many people do it. It’s not that rare. Yes, the general public is not educated but let’s face it, it starts with diet, it starts with looking and feeling about your body, what your body is telling you. It should be actually not only available because it is available widely. The main factor that we forgot is to educate our families, our children to be more body-conscious, to feel before the disease happens, to know what’s healthy for us what is not, to listen to what my body tells me.

If I eat the same food and I get everyday diarrhea, who connects that what they eat is related to their diarrhea? Sensitivities that come two days late. It’s not that these treatments are not there. They are there since 40 years. Ozone is well-known since a long time as one of the powerful treatments. I think it’s the lack of education. This is why I’m so passionate about that.

If people know and they feel what they can do and you feel the difference from before and after. If you repair your leaky gut and you take some food sensitivities out, how your mind is all of a sudden sharp like a bell. I think we always need to be driven to that place by adversity. I was having my whole mouth full with amalgam fillings. Then my mum said, “It looks ugly. We need to take those out.” Put that white ceramic in so that it looks nice. The dentist drilled them all out in one day. A week later I couldn’t walk anymore. I couldn’t walk straight. I had such a heavy metal poisoning that I was running into walls. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t write. My parents in their panic took me out of school and put me into a private school. Lucky, we had a teacher there who was conscious and he said, “Look, I was reading the grades he was cool and then all of a sudden he dropped. Now, he’s hardly responding. What has happened?”

If he wouldn’t have been there my parents didn’t even connect that the dentist might have something to do with my deterioration because we’re not aware. This is where I believe the biggest problem is. Helping each other to become aware that what we do has an impact on our health.

[1:51:36] Ashley James: To be conscious of what’s in our blind spot. Sometimes it takes going to a health coach or going to someone like you. Going to someone who can help us to look in our blind spots and see the missing pieces. It’s hard to see it in our own life sometimes, but you go to someone who’s trained like a health coach or a Naturopathic physician to talk about your whole health history. There’s a huge difference. You go to a Naturopath, your first session is something like 60 or 90 minutes. You go to an MD, insurance only really covers 15 minutes if you’re lucky. There are really good-hearted MDs out there that want to do good work but they’re not paid to sit down and spend an hour or 90 minutes with you and really talk about your health history and figure out what the root cause is. They’re not trained to look for root cause and to help someone heal. They’re not even paid to.

[1:52:37] Marcus Freudenmann: Times are changing. They are changing dramatically at the moment. I’m really excited about this. We started our coaching program five years ago. Five years ago when we went out and talked about the root cause and what you learn in the program, many people just looked at me like, oh you’re a weirdo. I felt sometimes like out of place, but we stuck to it. We really focused more and more and more onto finding the real problems in our life and how we can resolve them. You see that too.

We had so many clients that went overseas. They have a treatment. They do really well. Their cancers disintegrate. They shrink. They come home into their old environment and all of a sudden cancer come back and grow like crazy. You take them back out of the environment. Well, isn’t it a logical conclusion that we then check the environment and look what’s wrong? Whether it’s their living condition, whether it’s EMF, whether it’s mold, whether it’s the stress level that they go back into, it’s memories that they go back into.

So many things that might trigger the disease. That’s where finding that root problem really became a passion. We have now thousands of coaches and students in the program. I can tell you what, many of them are oncologist, many of them are MDS who heard about the process that we do and that want to give a different service to their clients. With just last month I think we signed up five new MDS and two oncologists into the program. I love that transformation because it just shows that there is a willingness to change and to adapt to a new time. We are living in a new paradigm. With the Internet, everything has changed.

[1:54:30] Ashley James: I love that. Now, if a listener wants to work with a coach who’s been through your training, do you have a list or do you have some way that they can find someone who’s been through your training to work with?

[1:54:48] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s already on the website. We’re just updating it. We have been pretty slack with that because of rebuilding the website. We had to separate the treatment pages from the main page because of legal problems and disclaimers and all of that. It feels like you’re always running a marathon because of legal problems. So, we had to separate that. We had to separate the shop from the whole website. So, it’s been a massive. Right now we’re working to put all the coaches and all the updated coaches and the ones who take on services and filter out those who don’t. We have many that work in a clinic or work in an environment where they can’t advertise themselves. We have a lot of clinics actually hire our coaches as they are finished. So, it’s really fascinating how this thing happens and changes. Yeah. There is a list on the website trulyheal.com/Ashley. Then just go up into treatments, into coaches, into program.

I think it’s also important once you’ve seen the approach that we teach. It’s making so much more sense because I cover all of those subjects in great detail.

[1:56:07] Ashley James: Yes. So, when they go to that link specifically which is for the Learn True Health listeners and for this episode. They’re given access to your free training and the videos that you’re most proud of. Out of almost 600 videos you’ve ever made these are ones that you feel are really effective. So you get access to those, which thank you so much because you love spreading information. Then there are listeners, about 20% of my listeners are holistic health professionals, nurses, Naturopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists, health coaches. So, those who are listening who are in the health field or looking to become to enter the health field, they could take your program, your online program. Could someone who has no background in healthcare do your program or is it only for healthcare providers?

[1:57:00] Marcus Freudenmann: Everybody who is passionate about health. Our best students are often those who have a disease themselves. Many of them are scared. Can I do that? Can I learn? What if I don’t succeed? They go through. We have now nine coaches that started the program with cancer and ended the program without. That already shows because they apply much of what they learn to themselves. So, you need to have at the ability to remember and to learn and dedication to go through. Our program, we call it functional medicine training or functional medicine health coach certification. It’s a very deep program. So, it’s not just a dietary coach or a wellness coach. It’s really deep. We cover all the tests, how to read the test. From DNA SNPs, to liver profiles to whatever.

So, it is not very superficial. It’s actually what I would say what doctors should know. It’s a program that is quite intense, but it is the most rewarding program to know afterward for your family, for your friends. Even if you just use it privately, the insights that you gain are just stunning. Plus we cover mental and emotional problems. We cover lifestyle problems and we cover also spiritual problems. Not spiritual in regards to religion but life purpose, listening to your inner voice, covering many aspects of wanting to live.

See, one of the first things that we always check with patients, do they actually still want to live? The wife drags the husband to the practitioner. You see he is more or less not interested, not focused. If there is no spark, if there is no reason to live, if any of the seven areas, let’s say you have five areas of your life not empowered or not joyful or not successful, then life becomes a drag. It becomes very abusive. It becomes very challenging. So those people don’t want to get well.

So, we first look at how to empower those person in maybe one or two areas so that at least three becomes stable. It is so powerful when you see all of a sudden someone empower themselves and then want to live. Not just being told that they have to do this and this to live longer and they don’t enjoy life. So, there’s so many facets in there that we’ve included from what we’ve learned from other practitioners. I’m not saying we’ve invented any of that. I’m actually just a collector of gems as I always say. I walk along the beach and every gem I find and everything that is shared with me, which is of great importance, we add to the program. So, it covers from the spiritual to the mental to the physical side pretty much everything and lifestyle.

[2:00:15] Ashley James: Brilliant. I know you have worked closely with doctors all around the world that get real results. You’ve collected the information and the techniques that are really really working. I love that your approach is to help someone first identify what created the disease state in their body. Let’s get to the root cause and help us heal at the root level. You’re not ever treating the cancer.

[2:00:47] Marcus Freudenmann: You remember the three ladies?

[2:00:49] Ashley James: Yes. You’re not ever treating the cancer.

[2:00:50] Marcus Freudenmann: You remember the three ladies?

[2:00:51] Ashley James: I do.

[2:00:51] Marcus Freudenmann: The first one wouldn’t need hyperthermia nor ozone. See, this is what I mean that’s why I’m so reluctant to give general advice. Because they might just go because they have cancer. Then say, “Oh. I need ozone.” The first one wouldn’t need either of them because it’s a completely different background of treatment. That’s why that generalization or telling everybody to go to the dentist is not what we should do. $250 dollars is really no money in relation to what you pay the long run to get rid of such a disease. Therefore it’s a real benefit to do that.

[2:01:34] Ashley James: So, do that the quiz on your website, which has them really go through and figure out where the problem is coming from, what to focus on? So, when they go to your website, what is the name of the quiz or how would they find that? It’s trulyheal.com/Ashley. Then where do they go to find that quiz?

[2:01:59] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s not a quiz. I think in the first so second email after you sign up, see you will need to sign up. Sign the disclaimer for the website. As soon as you are in, then the whole website reveals a whole lot more. You can watch the free documentary. You can watch so much more. It’s all opened up but you need to sign in. That’s one of the things we had to do for safety reasons because we’re teaching non-FDA-approved treatments. We teach them to private people. That’s why the whole safety step had to be first, second, third. So, as soon as you sign up you will find that more buttons, more possibilities come out. Then it’s in I think the second email after we talk about the causes, you will get an email where we offer that as a package and why we believe it’s so important. Then it comes with the whole educational program with that. It’s like I told you, we don’t sell before you’re educated or we try not to because we believe it’s important that people make wise and informed decisions.

[2:03:09] Ashley James: Right. Well, you’re saving them time and money and also helping them get the closest to the truth for them as possible. Figuring out what their best path would be because I watched my friend for eight months just throw, it’s like it’s like playing darts blindfolded. “I’m going to try some of this mushroom. I’m going to try some hyperbaric chamber. I’m going to try some vitamin C therapy. I’m going to try some Holly injections. I’m going to try some homeopathy.” I mean, the list went on and on and she spent-

[2:03:42] Marcus Freudenmann: Oh, let’s buy some frankincense.

[2:03:43] Ashley James: Frankincense, right.

[2:03:44] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s $250 and it cures cancer. It never has.

[2:03:48] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, she went to Mexico a few times in the clinic down there. She did so many therapies and spent tens of thousands of dollars. It was great actually. Her cancer stopped growing. It was a fast-growing cancer. All the natural stuff she was doing, it stopped at its tracks and just sat there. It didn’t get any worse, it just sat there.

[2:04:17] Marcus Freudenmann: Wow. See that’s already a huge achievement.

[2:04:19] Ashley James: Yeah. If she had a million dollars in the bank she could have kept just blindly doing all the natural stuff. She was nutrifiying her body, she was eating really healthy, she was working on everything she could all-natural. She could have just kept going if she had a million dollars, but she didn’t figure out how to get to the root of it.

[2:04:42] Marcus Freudenmann: See, this is where we say you invest let’s say $1,400 for ozone, $2,500 or $2,600. I think it’s on special at the moment for hyperthermia. When you have the two treatments that they do in Germany, every day when you go there, you don’t get any. The only treatment that is in Germany at the moment stronger is laser treatment they do additionally, which you can’t do at home and local hyperthermia for local treatment. It’s less tough on the body, but therefore it’s very effective. So, they do those four treatments and that’s what you pay $30,000 for plus some IVs.

So, find yourself and that’s where we go through the program. We teach people what to ask for and what to look for and which test will reveal it. Then what kind of local IVs they can get. There’s so many doctors in America and in every other country that give IV treatments: magnesium, zinc, selenium, Myers cocktail, whatever you want. B vitamins and supplementation. So, that’s where you compensate. Pretty much you recreate your own therapy, but you can do it not only for three weeks and then come back half a year later for another three weeks and again and again until you run out of money. You do it consistently at home. Within a matter of two years most of our clients reverse their cancer.

It’s a slow process. I’m not lying and I’m not saying that you get rid of it in three weeks. You don’t do that in clinics either. It’s a process of transformation. Remember cancer is here to show us and teach us something. So, going away into the inside, listening to our body, becoming conscious which I believe is the main effect that happens. Reconnecting with our loved ones. Stopping the fight and the flights and in our sympathetic nervous system. So many things that are part of the healing process, but as you go through we’ve guided every single step of that process. In the coaching program and as a coach you work with your client that way or you do it yourself and learn it for yourself. It’s a huge transformation. Usually after two years you have either no cancer or you’ve recovered so that it doesn’t keep growing. Let’s face it, if it doesn’t keep growing and you can do that for the next 20 years, hey, that’s a win.

[2:07:21] Ashley James: Right. I know my friend, when she was down in Mexico, met a man at one of the cancer clinics down there who is from the UK. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. They gave him like two or three months to live and that was 12 years ago. He’s still alive. He kept going to these kind of cancer clinics, all-natural, getting the IVs and ozone and all these treatments. He has just halted the growth of the tumor. It’s not getting bigger. It’s not getting smaller. It’s just staying the exact same. He has had a wonderful quality of life.

So, he uses his cancer as a barometer, as a measuring tool. So, if his markers start to go up he’s like, “Oh, what have I been doing in my life? Oh. Well, I’ve been getting less sleep. I’ve been a little bit relaxed in my health regimen. Okay, I’m a little more stressed. All right. I need to take better care of myself.” So he comes every six months and gets thermography and gets blood work done in Mexico, because it’s cheaper. It’s not even available these things. Some of these things that he does aren’t available in the UK. But he goes every few months and just tests to make sure that he is on course. Sure enough, he’s lived. He’s totally blown away the oncologists in the UK because he’s proving that you can live a long healthy life with lung cancer. He’s just stopped the growth of it. So, it does take shifting our mindset from the old fear mentality towards a mentality of healing and-

[2:09:03] Marcus Freudenmann: Of attitude.

[2:09:04] Ashley James: Yes. Yeah.

[2:09:05] Marcus Freudenmann: Gratitude for the cancer, what it brings into my life gratitude. For the lessons that it helps me achieve, the motivation it gives me you. How many people try to diet and diet and diet nothing works and then all of a sudden with that motivational push they manage to shift and break free of their old habits. It’s a really beautiful thing.

[2:09:30] Ashley James: So, I’m really interested for the listeners to go to the link you’ve given us. Trulyheal.com/Ashley and sign up and say okay to the disclaimer. So, they all of a sudden then are given access to this private website with all this information because you want to give a lot of training to all of us. You’re not charging for the training. You’re giving us a free training. Then should someone want to buy the $250 quiz or should someone want to buy a machine from you they can. Everyone could benefit from the training.

So, they go to the website. Is it quite clear when they go to that link how to sign up so that they get access to all this, I don’t want to say secret information, but it’s a private website that they get access to.

[2:10:17] Marcus Freudenmann: It’s secret information. No. It’s just protected that we don’t give out before the disclaimer. Yeah, it’s very logical. Any video that you try to click, the sign-up box comes up. You can sign up with your Facebook or Instagram or Google account or whatever. All the new fancy stuff. You can sign up with a username and password. Once you’ve done that you log into the site and it automatically logs you in. Then you have access to everything. The documentary, we’ve got the new one the old one there. We have hundreds of videos explaining different things. From my daughter released yesterday a video about trauma and how to deal and supplement in the best way when you had traumatic events. What it does to the body. So, it’s so much content. I would say 20 years of love in that final website that we have now and we’re really proud.

[2:11:16] Ashley James: I’m so proud of the work that you’re doing, Marcus. Thank you so much for coming back on the show and sharing your wealth of information. Anytime I talk to you I just feel like we’re just scratching the surface. So, I’m really glad that you’re providing your website with hundreds of hours of free training. So listeners, if they’ve loved learning from you today then they can dive into your website and continue learning, trulyheal.com/Ashley. I know I’m definitely going to dive in because there’s some of your content I still haven’t absorbed yet. So, I’m going to dive in myself. I’ve always been interested in ozone ever since I saw my friends, my past employer has such a profound result with it. I keep hearing that it’s so effective. Then of course you sharing how effective it is. I’m really curious to learn more.

I’m really glad that you’re a resource for the listeners to aid them. All this information is another tool in our tool belt. We have to grow our tool belt and we need to advocate for our own health. Doctors don’t make us healthy. They are there to help us and guide us, but we can’t give over our decision-making to a doctor. We can’t just blindly give over our will to a doctor because the doctor does not come home with us. We’re the ones that heal ourselves with our actions every day whether we’re taking our medication, going for a walk, breathing. I know we’re about to wrap it up. I want to talk about breathing a meditation, which is something you wanted to teach. We are the ones who are taking action. We need to remember that the root word for doctors, docere, which means teacher.

A doctor is our teacher. A health coach is our teacher. Holistic practitioners are our teachers. This podcast is our teacher. We’re the ones who get to assimilate the knowledge. Then we have to take action. That means working on the level of emotional health, mental health, spiritual health and working on physical health. Doing daily things every day. The hundred and two hundred decisions that you make every day either adding up health or stripping you of health. Whether you drink a glass of water when you first wake up in the morning or you drink a coffee when you first wake up in the morning. I’m not vilifying coffee. I’m just saying, if you’re dehydrating your body or if you’re hydrating your body will add to your health or slowly take away from your health. These little things add up.

[2:14:03] Marcus Freudenmann: Let’s say it that way. If you drink coffee and you drink it black without sugar, without milk it’s actually a remedy. It helps your liver detoxify. It’s one of the healthiest thing, again, plenty of research. It’s just if you add all the sugar and the milk that’s when it becomes really bad.

[2:14:20] Ashley James: It depends on the quality of the coffee. Where it comes from, whether it’s organic or not organic, how much you drink and how much water you drink also to hydrate the body. If you’re drinking 90 ounces of not organic black coffee a day, it’s probably less healthy than 12 ounces of black coffee or 16 ounces of black organic coffee that’s blonde brew because it’s less roasted. Then you follow it up with a 120 ounces of water throughout the day. There’s so many ways that we can tweak our lifestyle. If you were to go to bed 30 minutes earlier. Just try it. Just try going to bed 30 minutes earlier than you normally do.

There is a study they did with children in the United States. They found that these children had ADD. They found that just 30 minutes of extra sleep, most of the children, it was a large amount of children. I think it was over 60% of the children saw a significant decrease in their ADHD symptoms. So, just little tweaks throughout the day, little shifts in our decisions and in our motivation and in our mindset can add up big time to helping us prevent disease and also helping the body to heal itself. Using resources like Marcus’s can really go a long way to inform us so that we make better choices. Like you said, what if we switched from cow dairy and sugar in our coffee to a black coffee. It takes about three to five days to adjust.

My husband once had me drink black just as an experiment. This is like 10 years ago. I was the kind of person that put so much sugar in a coffee that at the bottom of the coffee there would be syrup, there’d be like half an inch of thick sugary syrup. That was ten years ago. My husband challenged me to go black. Within a week I could drink black coffee. I didn’t have a problem with it. I thought that’s really interesting. I neuro-adapted to the flavor. I didn’t enjoy it for a few days and then I was fine.

So, as an experiment, what if we followed Marcus’s advice. Just do these tiny little changes adding up. It adds up to something big. Now, adding meditation and adding breathing to our life could just be something little, it’s a little change, but what if it had a huge impact?

[2:16:45] Marcus Freudenmann: I can tell you the most important change and I don’t know if you can relate to that. If I go into the fitness studio and I do my own exercise, I usually go out way too early and way too little exercise. If I take a coach and I work with them I’d triple my exercise. I found that this is really one of the things that changes people. First of all, it becomes a lot more affordable. When you have someone that guides you through the process and especially in a disease like cancer, if you don’t need to do all the changes yourself. You have someone that keeps on motivating, that keeps on reminding.

Let’s face it, it’s an overwhelming amount of things that some people have to change. From their environment to their lifestyle to their habits to everything. We know that when you do two or three things at the same time, you already have a tendency to drop out, to not do them. Because it’s so much, many people give up way too early. That’s why working with a coach that helps you to pull you through, that reminds you that not impatiently but genuinely interested in your health and wellness to take you through is a huge advantage. I’ve seen it for myself in many areas, working with a coach I perform 50 times better. I do a lot better. I have much better results. If I do it on my own, I sneak into my old ways and avoid the pain and do all sorts of things to bypass the lesson. That’s probably not just me. I see it with all of our clients.

That’s why that coaching process or evaluation process, which I wanted to clarify too, it’s not a questionnaire that you fill out and then you get a computer result. It’s actually a person. It’s one of our coaches that works through your evaluation manually, reads everything, puts all the pieces of the puzzle together, may ask you a few more questions to really clarify certain points because some people are not self-aware. They don’t know what to answer or how their stool looks. “Oh, I flash that always down. I never look.”

So, these are things that we really focus on. Once that person has worked through your whole chart, has asked you all the questions, then they will come with the consultation which is an hour to really guide you through. Then you can work with that person and follow up. So, it’s actually a completely integrated service.

[2:19:23] Ashley James: I love it. Very cool. I really like your analogy. If you just work out at the gym alone you might avoid pain. It’s funny. My husband and I go to the gym together. I push him more when we’re in the gym, but he pushes me more before. If I’m trying to make an excuse not to go to the gym he’s like, “No. Come on. We’re going to the gym. We’re going to go for a walk. We’re going to go down. We’re going to go this hike. We’re going to go to this hiking trail.” He’s more motivational to get there and then when once we’re there I’m the one that’s pushing him, which is also pushing me. I’m like, “Come on. Let’s do five more minutes. Let’s go. He’s all like, “I want to give up. I want to give up.”

[2:19:59] Marcus Freudenmann: That’s a great combo.

[2:20:01] Ashley James: It’s funny because there’s this one machine at the gym where you’re cycling with your legs and your arms. I’ll catch my inner dialogues. I really like to list. I like to become the observer listening to my inner dialogue instead of letting my inner dialogue run the show. Because if my inner dialogue ran the show I’d eat like a dozen donuts a day and I’d never move. Our inner dialogue likes to critique us but then it likes to do really bad behaviors. It’s kind of like this just wild child that was raised by wolves. So we have to really catch ourselves and go, “Wait a second. I’m not actually going to let this first thought.” The thought that goes, “Oh, let’s go eat McDonald’s. Let’s not go to the gym. Let’s binge Netflix till 2:00 in the morning.” That voice is this wild child that just wants the instant dopamine pleasure, wants to procrastinate. That little voice it does not want us to be healthy.

So, I have to become the observer and go, “Oh, that’s an interesting thought,” and let it pass. That thought doesn’t need to run me. That’s not conducive to my goals. So, I’m like five minutes into my exercise and that little thought’s like, “Oh, this is hard now. I’m tired. Let’s stop.” I’m like, “I just got to the gym. What are you talking about?” I’ll have an argument with myself basically, but if I push through and I put a goal in my mind like I’m going to sprint until the next mile marker on this machine. I’m pushing myself. I’m pushing myself. I have to set these goals. They’re a little higher each time and see if I can push myself.

There’s been times when I’ve hired a personal trainer. Then you’re not even thinking about that because they’re like, “Okay. You’re doing 12 this time. Okay. You’re doing this weight. Okay. Now you’re going to keep going. Okay, it’s burning. Okay. Keep breathing through it.” They don’t let that voice run you, but when you’re doing it on your own that voice is kind of screaming.

[2:22:06] Marcus Freudenmann: Screaming. I had a very nice experience. I was hiking up a trail in Zion Park to the observation point. I think it’s a long long hike. Always up, switchbacks up the mountain. I was going up and I wanted to give up so many times. My head was telling me, “You won’t make it back down. It will be dark. It’s not possible. You’re too exhausted. You will have cramps tomorrow.” All of a sudden a voice behind me. Actually first thought that’s in my head said, “Giving up is not an option.” I was like turning around and there was an elderly gentleman. He was probably 80. He said, “One foot in front of the other and tell that stupid head of yours to shut up. Giving up is not an option.”

I was like, “Thank you. Why did you know?” He said, “Well, I saw you turning around four times and then still keep going but you were fighting.” I said, “Yeah. I was actually just about turning. The view is good enough from here.” He said, “The view is much better up there and you will be exuberant and happy.” Then we walk together you. He was a lot older. He walked slowly so I managed to keep up with him. When I got to the top I had that first time in my life that hormone endorphin release of my body like that happy hormone. I was so excited. I was sick for three days with sore muscles and calves and everything, but it was worth it.

Since then, every single time I get to that point where I want to turn around or want to stop I say, “Giving up is not an option.”

[2:23:53] Ashley James: One foot in front of the other. Keep going. That is beautiful. You mentioned you want to talk about meditation and breathing. I know this has been a lengthy interview so I thank you for staying with us. You mention that it is very important. It’s very important to incorporate breathing, to oxygenate the body and meditation. Are there tools on your website, after people do the disclaimer and get in there, that teach us about oxygenating our body with breathing and meditation so we can incorporate this very important tool?

[2:24:31] Marcus Freudenmann: I have several articles on there. I’m working at the moment myself since six-month on the Wim Hof method. I tell you what, I’ve been blown away by the results. So it’s something that I will include into our training. You manage to alkaline your body within a matter of 15 minutes so much that it’s absolutely a dream for cancer patients because the high acidity, the lactic acid production of the tumor to alkaline the body in a very very massive form.

So, right now we’re working on it. I had to do. I never teach anything we don’t do ourselves. We never teach anything which we haven’t proven with at least five or six people that it’s true and that it’s working or where we have research. So, it works. It works like a dream. Everybody can do it in a matter of minutes they can alkaline their body and oxygenate the body and influence the immune system. So, we are adding that right now. We’re creating the videos. That will be published in two or three weeks. It’s inline with our program. As soon as you’re subscribed you will get all those articles and everything that’s relevant as well.

So, that will be one of the most powerful trainings. We have the normal breathing techniques and the pranayama from the yogic teachings already in the program, but that’s a new one that I became aware of. Because of the extreme effects of alkaline in the body in such a short time, we’ve just added it.

[2:26:14] Ashley James: Very excited. I’m very excited for that, Marcus. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing all your information. I’d love to have you back and just continue diving into these topics. I’d also really like to interview some of your graduates. You mention that eight or nine graduates who started your program with cancer and they healed themselves after learning all the information from you and implementing it to their own life and now that they are cancer-free. I would love to interview them. I think that’s so inspiring to interview people who have healed their own disease and then share the experience with others. It gives people hope and also educates us on the step-by-step. What it takes to get to the body back from that level of disease back to a level of health. That it’s possible and we can do it.

Listeners, please go to trulyheal.com/Ashley and sign up to gain access to all of Marcus’s free information. I’m really excited to hear from the listeners after they dived into your information. Listeners, if you want to share a testimonial or talk about this, continue the discussion you could go to the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have, I believe it’s 3,700 members now in our Facebook group and growing. We love to have discussions about topics like this. Marcus, you’re also welcome to join our Facebook group. Listeners, as you go through Marcus’s information, as you try his therapies or do his extensive tests, please come to the Facebook group and share so all of us in the Facebook group can learn from each other’s experiences. I think that would also be valuable. Marcus, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[2:28:07] Marcus Freudenmann: I think we’ve already covered so much ground. We don’t want to overwhelm people. I have a tendency to do that every time.

[2:28:14] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. I’m the kind of person that just firehose me with information. I just love it. Obviously everyone who’s still listening is the same. Thank you. Thank you so much, Marcus. Just come back on the show. Keep sharing.

[2:28:30] Marcus Freudenmann: Oh, I’m happy to do.

[2:28:31] Ashley James: Please, send us people for me to interview. People, especially graduates of your program. I’d love to keep uncovering the truth.

[2:28:40] Marcus Freudenmann: We will do. I’ll put the word out and sent them to you. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to be with you. I’m always interested to come back. We can, for example, dive into a particular subject and really make all your listeners understand the basics of each treatment, what it actually does so that they can really make an informed decision. So, yeah. Anytime.

[2:29:07] Ashley James: Oh, I’d love that. Terrific.

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The Power of Sound and Music

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-sound-and-music

Highlights:

How we can heal ourselves through music
There is a way through love to heal ourselves that has been traumatized through toxic thoughts, experiences.
Music expressed through love is the variable that helps things become more ordered.
If we want to be in a state of loving empathy and be able to connect with others, we need to make sure the music we choose matches that.
We want to choose music that is meant to heal us and make sure that we avoid music that isn’t going to bring us healing.
We want to be conscious of that because music can be a weapon or can be a tool for healing.

In this episode, discover how the power of music can affect us emotionally and spiritually. Even knowing that music can have the power to heal us by just having the knowledge on how to correctly choose the music or sounds we would listen to. Flicka Rahn shares her expertise on all things music and sound in today’s podcast.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the learn true health podcast. Today’s episode is uplifting and beautiful and it touches on this blend of energy and spiritual, emotional and physical healing. Bringing it all together something that weaves throughout is music. Music can affect us spiritually. Can affect our energy, our mood our psyche and it can even affect us on a physical level. I know you’re going to really enjoy today’s episode with Flicka Rahn, who is an expert in using music to heal us emotionally, physically and energetically.

I am so excited for the Learn True Health home kitchen. I’ve been working on it. Filming with Naomi since October. We launched just two weeks ago and already all the members who’ve joined are really enjoying it. If you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend checking it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Every week I upload new recipes, new videos, new lessons. There’s over five hours worth of content already in the membership and every week we’re adding more and more. If you want to learn how to use food in a way that heals your body, you’re going to love our membership. It’s affordable. Everyone can afford it and I want you to use the coupon code LTH to get the member discount so it’s affordable and we teach you how to cook delicious food, save you time in the kitchen heal your body with food and food that your family will enjoy. There’s wonderful tips in there for shifting your life and shifting your habits in a way that improve your health. So no matter where you are on the health spectrum and no matter what diet you follow, you will get fantastic tips and fantastic recipes that you can implement to get more healing foods into your life. Please come check it out. I would love for you to see it. We’re having so much fun sharing all these wonderful recipes and videos with you. learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH. Come join us, we’re having a ton of fun. All the members who’ve joined so far are really loving it and I know that you will too. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[02:57] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is episode 409. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Flicka Rahn. Who’s a specialist in healing with music. This is a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart. My dad, he loved music. He was so passionate about it. He was in the music industry. In a unique way he designed a type of speaker that these speakers that are in like home entertainment systems. He designed a type of speaker that you only needed two of them but that they you could hear from different directions and this is back in the 80’s and 90’s. So now I know like everyone just has a tiny little Amazon device in their corner that plays music but back then he designed these speakers that he called it spatial sound that you could be anywhere in the room and you could hear a sound from somewhere else in the room because it would throw the sound around. He always played music and he always shared his passion about music with me and growing up I complained that I was only teenager that would yell at her dad to turn down the music. He would wake me up playing Fool in the Rain Led Zepplin on a Saturday morning. So I just smile every time I hear Led Zeppelin because he would, I mean he just loved he loved all music but he would play he would play everything for me and so growing up him and I would share, we would share our CD collections. We’d go to the CD store together and we just we just shared it so much that, so much of music for me it brings back these really positive memories of love and a connection that I had with my dad. For me, I found that music is healing when you can link it to something like love and you can resonate a sense of like love and connection. That helped me to heal after losing him. I’ve always had a deep connection with music and I know that it’s part of us. I think I feel like it’s part of our DNA. When you reached out Flicka, to be on the show to share your expertise around using music as a form of healing, I thought this would be a wonderful experience for all the listeners. Because all the listeners are here to learn how to achieve true health and there’s a little-known thing that is very affordable that we can all do and that’s using music as a therapy. As a way to heal. Welcome to the show.

[05:37] Flicka Rahn: Well, I’m so happy to be here Ashley and thank you for this really wonderful opportunity to share what I know and what I know works. My entire life has been revolved around music and the sharing of music and teaching of music and playing music and composing music. I taught for 25 years at Texas A&M University as a voice teacher. I also had a pretty extensive career as an opera singer. I have music published by for soprano and piano. I really have studied this. I mean it’s a never-ending study of music and the depths of how it can reach deeply into us emotionally, physically and spiritually. Yes, indeed, what you did share with your father through music was a sense of love and there is no greater force for healing than love. That is really what after I retired from the University, I became impassioned with knowing about what has been used by indigenous healers. Throughout history as healing music and specifically sound. I did a great deal of research and study about those different examples. And because I have so much experience singing and in all forms of worship, temples and churches and fellowships, I just found a lot of commonalities. That I then went on to explore at a deeper level and went and experienced even into South America. Into the Amazon to really understand the healing nature of the music that they used. The shamans in South America in the Amazon. All of this has come around to broaden my – I really laugh people say, “You’re not retired.” “No, I’m I really, I’ve just found another job.” That is creating and composing this music that specifically uses the elements of sacred music that I’ve discovered and using those elements to then create my own specific type of sound. Which I think you will be playing for the listeners at some point.

[08:38] Ashley James: Yes, I’ll definitely play your music that you’ve given us at some point in today’s interview. Did something happen in your life where you were sick or didn’t feel well and you used music, the vibration? Maybe you could explain a bit about this also that music is energy and our bodies are energy. Where we’re made up of energy and so using music as a vibration that moves through your whole body can help to correct the energy in our body. I know this is really out there but if you think about it, we’re actually we’re not solid. Nothing is solid. Everything is atoms vibrating and we’re all a vibration and energy and so is music. There’s been people who’ve shared that certain frequencies, certain Hertz have healing properties. Was there ever a point in your life where you fell ill and used music or had an experience of healing through music?

[09:37] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. But I do want to return to specific frequencies and how some are more powerfully accepted by your body than others. Let’s talk about the time, actually I was in I was in Peru and I used to suffer really pretty profoundly with migraine headaches and because I was about to experience sacred ceremony with the Shipibo Indians, I could not take any medicines for a month. I was just about at my wit’s end because I used it to help with my migraine headaches. Honestly one night, I went down there with my brother and he was in another place in the hotel and I said, “Flicka, you know, you’ve physician heal yourself, okay.” This is I mean this is where the rubber hits the road so I said, “Alright, so what I’m going to do, I will tone every note to correspond with the resonance frequencies of each of the chakras.” I did. I started at the root chakra with the pitch. Which is designated as the note C and for about 10 minutes. Then I moved up to the next chakra and I just really moved all the way up the body to the crown. By the time I had finished toning and it was about an hour that I had vocalized all of those pictures, the headache was totally gone and it never came back. That’s a powerful way because I was self-creating frequency and vibration. We know that quantum physics now teaches us this new view of reality which is which has moved beyond Newtonian physics in that, everything vibrates everything has frequency and yes, there is nothing really solid in that in the quantum world. Where I then begin to work and my knowledge and my studies is, “How do I affect this quantum world that is really at the base of what our bodies are to help people with illnesses that are –“ well, there’s lots of causes for that for the illness to appear into your physical body but they all really start at the etheric body. Which is the energetic body that is right beyond your physical bodies a lot about two inches away from your physical body. That is where I, as a sound therapist work is in the etheric body and trying to bring all of that energy into harmony and in balancing the chakras which respond to sound and vibration and to the healing touch which is really the vibration of love. Reiki has a part in that as well but by balancing and re-aligning and harmonizing the entire body, the electromagnetic field around your body then healing can take place. I have I have witnessed so much of this with my clients. Sometimes after I work with a client it in and really worked very closely with the energetic bodies, it takes a couple of weeks because for the etheric body to then harmonize the physical body. It’s not very often although in my case it was because I think I was highly stressed and stress as we know is not something that can help healing. Does that answer your question, Ashley? I’m sorry, I went on and on.

[14:04] Ashley James: It’s okay. You’ve given me ten more questions. Just that one example where you used the frequency for each chakra and within an hour your headache or migraine was gone. It’s interesting though you were reaching for the Advil or you’re reaching for the ibuprofen, whatever drug you’re reaching for every month when you had these headaches but then when you were up against a challenge, the challenge to go drug-free for a month. Then you were left with needing to like dig into your own tool belt. I think that that’s actually a really great challenge for all of us. All of us, we all have resources and sometimes we forget. Sometimes we’ll reach for the coffee, over-the-counter medication, right? The sugar, the coffee, the stimulants, the uppers and downers. Whatever over-the-counter stuff to get us through the day to mask a symptom. I love that you challenged yourself. You took on the challenge to not medicate for a month because you’re walking into a situation where the healer asked you for one month to be medication free.

That is a great challenge because sometimes we know we have these resources but sometimes we reach for what’s easy just to get us through the day and if we challenged ourselves to not self-medicate, to not go for the alcohol at the end of the day or the sugar when we have the sugar craving or the coffee when we’re tired but instead dig deeper into our own tool belt of resources. Realize that we probably have or the body is talking to us. The body probably is saying, “I’m dehydrated. I need to rest. I need some more joy in my life. I need to eat fruit.” Or whatever the body is saying. The body is – and your case, your body was saying, “I need to be in alignment. My energy needs to be in alignment.” So you dug deep into your into your tool belt and you used the very tools that you have at your disposal and your headache went away. We’ve been trained that it’s really easy to reach for the over-the-counter medication or reach for those things that mask our symptoms but when we mask our symptoms, we’re actually not achieving health. Where we’re stunting our own growth and our own personal growth and development so I love that you use that as an example. When you did that though for that hour, I think you said you were at a hotel, were you singing to yourself for an hour?

[16:41] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I was and it doesn’t need it didn’t need to be loud because even subtle, it was toning. It’s what was it was, Ashley. Toning is not really, it’s chanting without the words. It’s just singing a pitcher tone without words. It’s more like singing an alm but I would do it on the resonant pitch of each of the chakras. Starting off with the note C.

[17:14] Ashley James: Can you teach us?

[17:16] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I think it’s really – thank you for letting me have the opportunity to do this. It’s important that that your body be, check it for stress so that if you are sitting up and in this case, I was sitting up on the bed because the breath then can be deeper into your belly. Like a soft belly breath. I would breathe easily into my belly and then just, okay, here I go. [Singing Sound] I just did that using all of the resonant pitches of each of the chakras. As I closed, did you hear as I closed into the m to the mmm sound, you can feel the vibrations in your head. It was almost like an internal massage and very calming, very comforting and very ultimately healing. That’s all toning is. It’s no big mystery. When I’m teaching people about toning for in my case, I picked a specific pitch and then I moved up the scale but I teach people that whatever tone your body wants to make is the absolute perfect tone for whatever you need your body knows. It will produce the pitch that best heals it.

I always yield to the body wisdom in that case and it didn’t have to – so when I’m working with people, it doesn’t have to match my pitch. It is because we each choose the pitch that the body wants to hear or to feel. Of course, it’s frequency and frequency carries information and you can feel your heart vibrate through all of these toning exercise. It’s just wonderful. I mean you can even do this in the car when you’re driving and you’re in really bad traffic. Honestly, Ashley, I have to tell you this but when I go to the dentist and that is not my favorite place but I tell the dentist, I said, “I’m going to be toning the minute you start that drill.” and they expect it and it, number one, it blocks out a lot of those higher partials in that drill sound that makes them crazy but it also calms me down and I’m breathing slower because I’m releasing the sound slower than the breath I take in. All your listeners may try this. The next time you go to the dentist. I mean it works like a charm.

[20:23] Ashley James: Can you explain how you do that when your mouth is open, they’re drilling in your mouth or they’re cleaning your teeth, how do you do this?

[20:31] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So here I am in my studio right now and I’m opening my mouth like I have to and at the dentist, so it’s like this. [Singing Sound] so the back of my tongue is up against the back of my throat so as to not be you know, swallowing all that water they put in your mouth when they’re cleaning up but I don’t go into the sound the M sound at the end. I just I just hold one note for a long time and again, it doesn’t have to be a specific pitch. It’s whatever your body wants to sound at the time. You think about it Ashley, I mean for any really emotional response that we have to an event. Be it fear or terror, I mean there’s always an explosion of sound that we make as our species has done that to try to balance the body. Screaming when someone is afraid is very beneficial to help bring the body back into balance. Of course, when we’re really happy and laughing or singing. It’s all sound related as the body continues to try to keep itself in a balanced energetic state. That just occurred to me, sound is very connected. Our own sounds that we make to our emotional state at a time. By staying quiet if there’s something that you need to cry about is, you know, your body will take that energy and and hide it into the etheric body. It’s better to go ahead and cry or scream or sound or something so that you keep the energy moving out. Rather than pulling it in to be hidden and that you have to deal with later at some point because you will.

[22:52] Ashley James: It’s so true crying is so cathartic and letting it out, you know, we were taught in the society to hold it all in and then it explodes like a volcano, right? It causes so much internal stress but let it out. I like that you said that when you when you do this alming, your out-breath is longer than your in-breath. I recently had an interview with Forrest Knudsen who’s a yogi and he teaches how to create the heart rate variability which is now the number one way of measuring stress. It’s the most accurate way of measuring stress. They’re now seeing that it’s the most accurate way of measuring your longevity. That if you have poor hurry variability you are likely to die sooner than those who have very good heart rate variability. He said the key to achieving heart rate variability meaning very good healthy heart variability where the heart and the body is in a low state of stress is to make the out-breath be a little bit longer than the in-breath. So by you doing this, you’re actually practicing not only are you using frequency and energy healing but you are also creating heart rate variability and decreasing stress in the body.

[24:15] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. I know exactly about what you were speaking. I’ve used the breath work as well but to add a toning sound to that is even better because then you’re giving your body some vibrations and frequencies that really help with the alignment and the heart rate variability. Yes, stress is a killer. Stress is a killer and we have a stress epidemic now. My music really addresses stress in a big way. I think that most healing music from Egypt, from Tibet to India, to all of the indigenous peoples use ways to decrease stress.

[25:17] Ashley James: Now what about those who are – I have some listeners who are Christian and might not feel comfortable saying ohm because they’re associating it with Buddhism or a different religion. Could they say anything? Could they say Amen? Yes, that’s what I was going to say. Could they chant Amen to themselves? I know that in the like Catholic Church and the very ancient you know, Catholicism, chanting was a really big thing. That they would chant over and over again. I was imagining you could just take a nice deep breath and say Amen over and over again. Sing it to yourself and whatever pitch your body wanted.

[25:58] Flicka Rahn: Let’s just try it.

[26:00] Ashley James: Okay. Let’s try it. Listen listener, you try it too. Let’s all do it. Let’s do it together. Okay.

[26:05] Flicka Rahn: Remember it doesn’t matter what note you pick. Take the deep breath in. [Singing Sound] Take another breath. [Singing Sound]

[26:37] Ashley James: That’s really fun. It feels so calming. It really feels like a blanket of comfort came over me.

[26:48] Flicka Rahn: Yes Ashley, Yes. You see even with just two Amens, all that anchors you again into a feeling of full, you know, completeness and peace. I think this is – it’s a it’s a beautiful practice.

[27:08] Ashley James: If one was spiritual could imagine connecting with source, with God, with Jesus. With whomever they want to connect with. Could imagine bathing in the energy of divine love. They could you know take that take this to the next level, right? Because you’re incorporating so many senses, you’re feeling your voice, you’re breathing in and then breathing out. You’re feeling a vibration around your whole body. It’s sound bathing but you’re feeling this vibration inside you. You’re hearing it and then you’re feeling this energy so there’s several things going on at once.

[27:47] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. Yes. You know, and if you didn’t want to close your eyes, you could look at a picture of whoever you know, a picture of Jesus or a picture of Buddha or a mandala with different colors. I mean there are a lot of ways to stimulate the senses through even sight. As also the kinesthetic and the end the oral with your ears. Yes, they’re very powerful. Very powerful.

[28:19] Ashley James: Now each chakra has a different frequency, so how do you then go up? Like if you said you could start at whatever frequency your body wanted then how do you address each chakra?

[28:31] Flicka Rahn: Okay, so in that case, I would pick the specific pitch. I would start at C and I’m getting a C for you right now. We’re going to start with a C. That’s a C. [Singing Sound] I would do that for as long as I felt like I needed it and then the next pitch is a D. [Singing Sound] E, [Singing Sound]. If you want to go down an octave, I don’t think I have a low E but if that’s not comfortable for you then you can go down an octave. There are lots of tools on apps that you can get as a tuner and they will tell you what note is C and D and E.

[29:37] Ashley James: Okay. Now I know you have a CD that people can download. I think it’s called chakra soundscapes. Is that it?

[29:43] Flicka Rahn: That is exactly it and it actually that is what I used when I was in Peru. I put my earphones on and I toned through each of those tracks. They’re eight minutes a piece so I was toning for a long time. The tracks and the sound would lead you gently into that pitch. People would enjoy that. They certainly could go to iTunes and get chakra soundscapes by Icaros. That is the name of our group and tone along. Just know that I’ve been toning along with you and actually my voice is also on each of the tracks. Yes, that would be an easy way to start to so you don’t have to find an app and know where the note C is. You could just tone along with the CD.

[30:36] Ashley James: Very cool. Tell me about Icaros. That’s your band?

[30:39] Flicka Rahn: Well, it is. It is actually two of us. It is my co-composer and when I did all this research about trying to find the common elements of sacred music throughout the world, throughout history and also through all of the sacred expressions of sound and music. I identified those elements and then I asked Daniel, who is an incredible pianist and to help me create what I knew in my mind I wanted to create. The incredible thing about the CD which if people hear it is all of the music is improvised. Which means we wrote nothing down. We went into the studio and I said, “Alright. We’re going to use C as our resonant pitch and we’re also going to play around with the major triad. For those of your folks who don’t know what that is it’s like, [Singing Sound]. I mean everybody knows that combination of pitches. Then we also used a lot of other intervals that have a very strong effect on our Western ears to help us release energy. Let me come back to that. Daniel and I did this and I use my crystal singing bowls which I have here in the studio and I used a whole set of those and we went through each of the resonant pitches of each of the chakras and his harmonies are absolutely just exquisite. I then improvised around his harmonic progressions. We both know how to improvise so this really came from just this outpouring of love that I was feeling and we both get in kind of the same spiritual space. Then we create from that space. Every time we perform, it is all improvised. We feel the audience and then really it’s a co-creative experience. The audience and us.

[33:18] Ashley James: It’s like spiritual jazz.

[33:22] Flicka Rahn: That’s exactly what it is, Ashley.

[33:24] Ashley James: I want to see you live. oh my gosh. Do you tour?

[33:26] Flicka Rahn: Yes, we do.

[33:28] Ashley James: Okay. Well, tell me when you’re coming up to Seattle.

[33:31] Flicka Rahn: I will. I will. We’re about to go to Palm Spring in about three weeks to perform. It’s not even really performing, it’s to offer the experience is more like it. Because it’s meditation to a sales meeting of Tito’s vodka.

[33:58] Ashley James: So like get hammered and spiritual at the same time. It’d be really cool if they don’t have a hangover the next day because you’re like attuning their bodies.

[34:09] Flicka Rahn: I did talked to them. I said, “You know, we have got to do this in the morning.” So I’ve done that and we’ve also gone to some conventions of doctors and holistic healers. We are going to Mexico in March for a big holistic spiritual festival outside of Mexico City. People are hungry for this now because there is so much stress, Ashley and we’ve lost touch with our hearts honey. It’s we’ve lost touch and what Daniel and I offer is a way to touch back in and make a connection within yourself to your own heart and then it’s so easy to love everybody else. It just naturally flows. That’s what we are finding is during our live performances this happens and everybody just gets up and all they want to do is hug each other. It’s just great.

[35:15] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh. If the whole world if the whole world did that. Can you imagine the amount of change that we could make? I love that that’s your mission. Back when I was 19 I stayed at Kripalu. Which is the I think it’s the largest yoga residential Center in the United States. It can house over 200 people and I stayed there for a whole month. I took their 200-hour bodywork training program. I got to experience several different types of music healing. I had a session with didgeridoos where they would play didgeridoos on my body. We lay down like a daisy, like we’re petals of a daisy and he would stand in the middle and he’d play the didgeridoo straight on top of each chakra. There’s nothing like it. I can still feel it when I think about it. It’s pretty amazing.

[36:13] Flicka Rahn: See the didgeridoo is so rich in overtones and what we call partials. What it does is totally aligned, it’s like a buffet for your body as far as a frequency and sound. I am a big believer in that and Gong’s also offered the same thing. Often times when I’m working with a client, I will put the bowl right on their body just to kind of feed that chakra. That’s what happened to you. I mean, I bet it was an amazing experience.

[36:51] Ashley James: It was very cathartic and then we also experienced on a different day we had the singing Bulls. My favorite however, was that the crystal harmonica and they let me play it. I mean I really want to own a crystal harmonica. Many people don’t know what it is but I believe it was Benjamin Franklin that created it. It was at the time more popular than the piano but it would break often in transportation but it’s a bunch of crystal bowls on a stick on their side and it would rotate slowly and you have to have very clean fingers and you get your fingers wet and you play it as the bowls spin. Oh, my gosh.

[37:30] Flicka Rahn: Oh, ethereal.

[37:31] Ashley James: It’s so ethereal right. Yes. Yes, it does. It just did something for me. I’ve had those experiences and of course, we would ohm. The whole group would ohm like several times and you would be bathing in this vibration of the whole room. I can’t even describe what would happen but I felt so full and so complete. Then often every few days they had drumming circles. Where before and after lunch or before and after dinner, there would be 20 or 30 of us drumming and the rest of us would just be dancing just you know moving our bodies to the sounds of the beat. Everyone wanted to just hug and love on each other and smile. No matter how angry, I mean I was 19. I was going through so many emotions. I could imagine very angsty and no matter how frustrated or angry or you know hormonal or whatever I was going through, I’d walk into that drum circle and I’d walk out just like my authentic self. Like all that other stuff would just peel away. I’ve had these experiences with using music as energy healing and they were profound. I’ve never had a mundane music healing session. Let’s put it that way.

[38:52] Flicka Rahn: Well, it’s like effects like. We are frequency and so when we are into a therapeutic situation where there is vibration and frequency, there’s something in us that knows this is this is who we really are. Although there is some sounds that are not healing. That tend to be very disruptive to the energetic body. I think and people can know what those are but just by your response to them. I’ve had some experience with people who are quite disturbed. Do you want me to go into that?

[39:42] Ashley James: Sure.

[39:44] Flicka Rahn: Okay. I have a degree in counseling as well as I’m a master’s in both music and counseling. I have studied a lot of the psychological challenges that people had. There is one way of releasing a lot of pain and that’s through this action of cutting your own skin and from the person who’s doing the cutting it makes a lot of sense because it’s a focus for the internal pain that they can’t get to so it feels actually good. I’ve also experienced people also listen to extremely loud disruptive hard metal dissonant music as a way of focusing on the inner environment which is you know, really probably frightened and in pain and in trauma. It’s making those tuning, that the cutting and the listening to just really hard metal dissonant really loud angry stuff, it’s a way of putting it outside yourself rather than it being inside. I’ve seen that as somewhat therapeutic but it certainly is not the end goal. To understand why, you know, if it were me, I would want to know, “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? It feels good but why does it feel good?” Then move on to something that is more healing because if you keep doing that disruptive music it just keeps, the neural pathways keep getting deeper and deeper and it’s very hard to then change. Put in some other to feel the release of dopamine and seratonin through like meditation or meditative music. Did any of that make sense? I’m very empathetic, I guess. To how people try to manage their pain and yes, it can be very scary for them. Yes, so-

[42:05] Ashley James: Someone is cutting or if someone recognizes if they’re at the point where they’re recognizing that they’re using self-harm in an effort to self-soothe. How can they use sound or music to help them to make healthier choices for themselves and help them self-soothe in a way that isn’t harmful?

[42:30] Flicka Rahn: Okay, glad you asked that. I am working with a neurologist now and we are exploring the sound of the crystal singing bowls in working with our veterans that have experienced PTSD and are finding it very difficult to re-enter a society. You know, where there’s not the constant threat of death. We do know that their brains have been changed by the trauma and that there are some pathways in in the brain in which see if they heard a backfire, the brain would interpret that differently then say maybe I that heard the backfire because I don’t have the associative memory. Those neural pathways have not been made in me but it in some of our brave warriors it has been. How can you change the landscape inside your own brain to move away from that reactive, the reaction. We also know that what wires together then then repeats. What you want to do is not try to make that go away but spend time and meditation so that that becomes more normal. The pathways of peace, of love, of calmness and there had been a lot of success by people who have taught meditation and a lot of breath work to veterans even over one week. They’ve seen changes and the brain has changed. There is a fantastic movie on I think it’s Netflix called Free the Brain or Free the Mind. One of the two but free the – and it recounts the study that was done with these brave warriors and also with children with ADHD. Who it seems that you know, the neural pathways in there are different from someone of a of a child who can just sit calmly. Through meditation, through breathing, through learning, those techniques those kids have found some relief. I think that weird now really starting to – we intuitively have known the stuff has worked but now there is the data, the hard scientific data that’s coming forward that’s saying, “Yes, what we thought works is working. We can really see that. We can assign some numbers to that.” I really think that’s the next step and that is where I want to go with my neurologist friend who wants to do some studies with what is happening inside your brain when you hear the sound of the crystal singing bowls? Is there something with just the specific sound with a specific frequency? We don’t have those answers yet but we will. That’s very exciting to me because I want to offer some palliative tool to people who are suffering. You know, we all suffer to some degree. Through anxiety or stress or fear and we all have that. So is there a way that we can anchor to a part of ourselves that is not in the drama and then stay observing? I mean that is a meditative technique. I’ve really tried to pull away from the drama of the ego but I think this helps. It helps connect to that higher expression of yourself through meditation, through listening to meditative music. You want to stay away from music with words because that then engages your left brain and you want to get into the right brain which is more holistic. More just stilt in nature.

[47:06] Ashley James: I mean music with words is okay, it’s just if you’re looking to heal with music, you want to avoid words is what you’re saying. What about when you’re chanting to yourself? Like chanting the word ohm, you are the instrument. The word is the instrument in a sense, right? The word is the music coming from you which is the instrument.

[47:28] Flicka Rahn: But you’re not having to analyze it.

[47:31] Ashley James: Okay. Yes, got it.

[47:32] Flicka Rahn: It just becomes like the sound you’re making and then at some point because of the repetition, Ashley. The mind says, “Okay, nothing to see here.” and it then can lift to a higher awareness.

[47:51] Ashley James: Okay. Yes, so chanting of a word becomes a meditation in and of itself and allows you to go into that higher state. I like that you mentioned becoming the observer in neuro linguistic programming. That is a technique where you become the fly-on-the-wall. The third person. Seeing your life as the third person allows you to analyze especially difficult situations where you can then kind of start to see the whole scenario instead of be reactive in this situation. What about headphones versus allowing the music to bathe their whole body? Is there a big difference? Can we listen to this music and gain the same benefit from hearing it through headphones or should we have speakers or the sound bathe or whole body and our whole body feels the vibration?

[48:44] Flik Rahn: I think that it addresses two therapeutic scenarios. If you listen to chakra soundscapes for example with headphones, you are harnessing the effects of entrainment. Which the binaural entrainment, which is webbed into my music. Both of the CDs have theta brainwave state and webbed in through binaural sound. Should I explain that?

[42:20] Ashley James: We will definitely get into binaural sounds in a minute because I think that’s an important topic but I definitely want people to understand like when should they listen with headphones and when should they make sure their whole body’s being bathed in sounds.

[49:32] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So when is the whole body’s being bathed in sound, the sound will then interact with the whole etheric body. The physical and the etheric body. That offers other benefits too because within our etheric body, we have places where there’s like stuck energy. If you want to attain a deep meditative state in your brain, it’s headphones. If you want to address the places in your etheric arc body that have stuck places or negative emotions are caught there, then listen with speakers on either side of you and just sit in the middle of it.

[50:17] Ashley James: Yes, all right. I think you already opened us up to the next question which is, tell us what binaural. I keep hearing binaural beats, right and I’ve listened to this on YouTube. What’s binaural beats? What’s binaural music? What does that mean?

[50:30] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So this was discovered I can’t give you the exact date of when it was discovered but it’s not been some very long ago because our technology has not allowed that with our earphones but binaural beat is, let’s say for example, okay so you’re hearing, it goes from 20 Hertz to 2000 Hertz. All the way through there, you’re able to hear like outside bird calls, your dog barking, that falls within that that spectrum but if you go below that 20 Hertz, you can’t hear it. The sound will be there but you can’t hear it. What a binaural beat does is it’s through the sound technology in the studio, they will produce a sound that a say let’s say 15 Hertz in one ear and then in the other ear they will produce 10 Hertz. Those are two different frequencies and pitches. You won’t be able to hear them but your brain does. Your brain can discern the difference between those two fifteen and ten as being five. Five Hertz that is way below hearing but that then measures and falls within the theta brainwave state which is very deep meditation. That’s where we see visions, that’s where we go into these altered states that really deep meditative state. That’s what binaural beats do for you but you have to listen to them through your headphones so that you get – the beat means that what you hear you don’t hear specific pitches but you may hear a beat. That’s why they called it binaural beats.

[52:35] Ashley James: What effect is listening in, so you want to still listen with your headphones because they does something to the left and the right, in the brain, right? Can they measure – you spent many years in academia teaching so I’m sure you like to look at the science of it. Do they have they ever hooked people up to machines or brain waves so they measure? Do they see that it measurably makes a difference to the brain waves by listening to this?

[53:04] Flicka Rahn: Absolutely. Yes, through binaural beats then they can they can put a do some brain mapping and see that the person listening to the binaural beats has slipped into these lower expressions of your brainwave state like theta certainly alpha. That yes, that’s reproducible and provable. That is a very actually, this is the way I meditate. I put my earphones on and I listen to either my music or you know sometimes others that I really like and I will very easily and quickly go into that low meditative state. Where the deep healing takes place. So yes, it’s powerful and it’s easy and it works. I really encourage your listeners to find some music on YouTube that you really like that says it’s binaural, hook your ear, put your phones on and close your eyes and drift away.

[54:09] Ashley James: Now does it make the difference whether we put the right earbud in the right ear and the left earbud in the left ear?

[54:17] Flicka Rahn: No. It doesn’t matter.

[54:18] Ashley James: Okay. So it doesn’t matter which way we have our headphones on as long as we’re wearing headphones.

[54:23] Flicka Rahn: Yes, that’s exactly right. Yes.

[54:25] Ashley James: Interesting. I always come back to this same binaural beats soundtrack when I am trying to concentrate so if I find that I – I like to multitask. I’ve got a million things going at the same time and I’m like, “Okay. I’ve got to get a podcast episode up. I got to finish editing this and I’ve got to schedule this person.” I’ve all this stuff to do and I really want to focus. There’s this one track on YouTube that I listen to. It’s for studying and focusing and it really helps. I just put it on it’s like a two-hour long track and I I just put it on in the background it with my headphones on while I work and it really helps me to stay focused so I’ve noticed that it works for me. Then they have ones out there for like weight loss and for happiness and for sleep. They’ve figured out different binaural beats that put the brain into a certain state.

[55:19] Flicka Rahn: That’s exactly, yes, yes.

[55:20] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that like how did they figure out that this specific binaural beat makes someone relaxed for sleep and this one makes people happy and this one makes people want to lose weight.

[55:31] Flicka Rahn: Well, I don’t know about the lose weight. I can tell you that if you’re calm and peaceful, you may not want to eat as much because you have stress eating syndrome but we do know about the beta state and right now I’m in beta, you’re in beta because we are actively listening to each other and thinking. Beta is not a bad state to be and when you are in high beta. This is those brainwave states are well known that you are stressed. You’re in you’re in a lot of traffic and you know you’re sweating and you’re that kind of high beta. What happens is you’re not really thinking clearly and you’re in high stress. Your body interprets that is we are threatened so it down shifts into the limbic system like, “I’m going to protect myself.” All of this is not conducive to healing. That’s beta. The next one is alpha and that’s the daydreaming place. That’s where you’re taking everything in but you’re not analyzing or paying extreme attention to something. That’s alpha. That’s also very creative place. That is where you probably go into like this lovely alpha place with your music. Now if you were to go into theta you’d be falling asleep. The different brainwave states are fascinating and they each have a signature brainwave weight that people can see on a screen. We know that these two things correspond the binaural beats and also emotional states and these different brainwave states.

[57:40] Ashley James: When you’re creating binaural beats how do you know that what you’re creating is going to put someone in alpha or put someone in theta, put someone in a more relaxed state?

[57:55] Flicka Rahn: I guess I don’t know that it will but that is when we we’re finished with in the studio, we were finished with our tracks and then I gave it to a sound engineer and I said, “I want theta binaural beats webbed into each of these tracks.” and so it was sub-audible. How do I know it will? I don’t. I mean if someone is really convinced that they’re going to stay in beta they can probably override that but if you say, “Okay. I’m in for it. Whatever.” You just give in, you’ll slip into theta or alpha. There is also another phenomena that I know your listeners know about this. The scientific term is called isochronic beats and that is different from binaural beats. Isochronic means the same thing over and over. Isochronic, one thing over and over. This is what happens when drumming. You’re in a drumming circle you’re getting isochronic beats. If the drumming is fast then you will your brainwave state will align with that faster beat. Warriors who want to get ready to go into battle, if you can remember what was it? Braveheart.

They were getting ready to go into battle and the Scottish Warriors were gearing up, they heard this loud drum going over and over and over so everybody was aligning in training to that drum. There is also a part of the brain that that loses touch with reality through that isochronic heavy drumming. This is what puts people into trance state in many indigenous societies. Through heavy drumming. It’s like the brain pane just shuts down and doesn’t think anymore. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

[01:00:09] Ashley James: It reminds me of being in a stadium at a sports stadium where we’re all hitting the floor with our feet and then drumming starts off [Sound], the whole stadium is just banging really fast and you feel like you’re not in your body anymore. You really feel just out there. That you’re not thinking. You feel like you’re totally in the moment. It’s a very intense but very enjoyable experience. You’re right. You’re definitely not just in like regular beta anymore at that point.

[01:00:42] Flicka Rahn: Nope. You’ve lifted out and drumming can be very healing too. The slower drumming, remember that you’re going to entrain to that slower beat and that means your brainwaves are going to entrain to that slower beat and you can easily be put into alpha. If you could just imagine that whole stadium slowing down and everybody slowing everything down all of a sudden things would get really more peaceful if the drumming or the sounding slowed down.

[01:01:17] Ashley James: You’ve made this chakra soundscapes. What other and I know you have other music for meditation –

[01:01:32] Flicka Rahn: The other CD that we just released is called hymns like a hymn to Gaia. G-A-I-A. Hymms to Gaia and the subtitle is Honoring the Elements. We used the same process nothing was written down. We went into the studio and I tried to, didn’t have to but I tried to like match the water element with the sacral chakra. Which is has to do with water in your body and like the fire element was the heart and very often we see that the heart is shown as the fire of love or the fire. Then we mixed in, after we have to recorded everything then we mixed in sounds which would show these different elements like sounds of wind, sounds of water, sounds of fire, like a fireplace in a cozy cabin and then I also added the ethereal element love I saw as an element and the angelic realm. I see them as part of our energetic environment that we live in. That we may not always know or recognize but it’s there all the time. I loved doing this. We had a great time. It’s a beautiful, it’s a different experience but it can be used as for meditation as well. It’s hymms to Gaia: Honoring the elements. That’s also Icaros which is what I call. The name Icaros actually is what the sacred songs that are sung by the shaman in the Amazon. That’s what they call them the their Icaros and during sacred ceremony, I was so profoundly moved by the fact that I could actually see the sound in the air. I could see it. I saw how the beautiful songs that the shaman would sing would heal and help people manage you know to come to a place where they’re freer and more loving, more centered in themselves through this through these sounds. I jumped on board. I said, “That’s for me.”

[01:04:28] Ashley James: I love that you traveled the world to learn from the indigenous people. I studied Hoonah many years ago. I studied Hoonah, ancient Polynesian spiritual practice and learn to do their chants. Here listening to the chants or doing it myself, I definitely went into a different state. Definitely went into a meditative state but I felt my heart would vibrate, my whole chest would feel full of love and full of energy. It was my prayer to for healing. The chanting was sort of this meditation asking for healing and I would just feel that in the moment it was so it was really a connection there was a connection there with universal energy. It was very interesting my experience with sort of indigenous music for healing. Can you take us back to when you were traveling? Share some stories about or revelations you had as you were traveling and learning from these indigenous people and learning about how they’ve always used music for healing?

[01:05:46] Flicka Rahn: I went because I felt myself that I was in need of some emotional spiritual growth and healing and as I told you before the month before, I promised myself that I would do whatever it took, I was willing to go to any anything to get free. There were things that happened in my childhood some pretty traumatic things that I wanted to I wanted to let go of in a way that was loving and that made sense to me and that I could synthesize the wisdom of those experiences without carrying the trauma. This is what drove me is, I knew that I needed to be in this lifetime as free as I could. If I was going to offer what I knew I what came here to do and that is this beautiful music infused with love so I needed to be infused with love. My own love. That is why I went it was like I cannot do this music and carry any trauma or any bitterness or any resentment or any guilt. I needed to free everything so that’s why I went down to be in the jungle with the Shipibo Indians and went through some very powerful experiences, Ashley.

In which I reviewed my whole life from the perspective of love and saw that everything made sense and so part of this process is experiencing those emotions and then moving through them so the motions the crying and the yelling and that was part of the release. I understood the process and I wasn’t afraid of that. What I wanted more than anything, I was not afraid of the crying or anything. I was afraid of carrying resentment and trauma. That was the biggest fear because that would limit me. That was my profound gift to myself is, “We’re going to do this.” and we did. That’s what drove me and then because I knew that the sound having known, that sound has led me into the divine places in my own heart and I’ve known that I was a little girl. That I would experience these moments of clarity where I knew there was something much more than what I was just seeing out of my eyes and I had some in spirit experience of enlightenment. I was familiar somewhat although the traumas in my earlier life, sometimes drew a veil over what I knew to be true. I not only wanted to know what I wanted to feel, I wanted to embody as much love as I could. So that means I’ve got empty out all the other stuff that isn’t loving. To be a true handmaiden of sound and frequency and love. That is what I did.

[01:09:34] Ashley James: You mentioned that you felt enlightened doing this. Can you take us back to that moment and share with us the experience?

[01:09:47] Flicka Rahn: Yes. It happened when I was probably, there are two times that I can recount which was not a part of a sacred ceremony enlightenmen. This just happens spontaneously. One was when I was probably about seven years old or eight years old. I was laying on a sidewalk in front of my house in Texas and it was just of starting to be dusk. I was just looking up at the sky and I could see the clouds but I could also see the stars were coming and starting to come out. I something left my body and I knew that I was a part of that. I knew it that the little Flicka on the sidewalk was just a teeny expression. I certainly have no words for it. I just knew I was part of this greater reality. I was an intregal part. That happened then the next time enlightenment happened and I think enlightenment is not like one event. It is many enlightenment events in which you get to sense the true-self in little bits as you can handle it. I was driving back from a funeral in Philadelphia and this time I lived in Boston. I was on actually the Connecticut Turnpike and I was listening to Pachelbel’s Canon which is a beautiful classical piece and for me it’s just very spiritual. I was listening Pachelbel’s Canon. It’s Orchestra and all of a sudden I felt totally enveloped and enclosed in this tube of light. Light that was so bright that it I had to pull over because I was so infused with this white light but it was not bright it was just brilliant and of course, I was sobbing because it was so beautiful and I don’t know how long I was by the side of the road in this white light but ultimately it left and I started crying now it’s so beautiful. I knew that that is what I was.

In back of everything, apart from everything that’s what I was. I was this light and I’ve been trying to get back there my entire life but it happened on the wings of music so when I sing now or when I perform music or when I do this music with Daniel, it’s like we cross a bridge into a divine playground of beauty and love. It’s exquisite. It’s what it is. My hope my music can impart some of that reality to people because that’s what that is my intention is to be so connected to love. That is what I channel so it becomes audible love. I mean that’s my wish so if people can sense this in themselves then they will know that they are not the anger, they’re not the trauma, they’re not the fear, they’re not the crisis of the moment. That they are something way beyond all of what we hear on this and dualistic planet experience. Then to identify with that and to not be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid of anything. There’s no reason. It’s all love. That’s all it is.

[01:14:04] Ashley James: I like the saying we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. We’re spirit. We’re energy. We’re in the Christian faith, we’re made in the image of God and in other faiths there’s a belief that were that God chose to become us to experience this world. There’s many different ways of thinking about it but when it comes down to it, there’s so much more than what we can see and touch. That what we can see and touch is the illusion. That energy is the reality. That energy is in this infinite energy, is reality and that the illusion is physical. That the illusion is fear. Yes, the negative emotions are illusions and that what’s true is love. When you said that you realize that you are that light and you’re sobbing on the side of the turnpike. That you that you were enveloped with light but that you remember you remembered that you were light.

In timeline therapy it’s a technique, I’m a master a practitioner of timeline therapy, In timeline therapy, it’s you go into a light state of trance, they’re totally conscious. You travel above your timeline and when I ask people to go beyond this life so go beyond your death people see the same thing. Everyone sees they enter a brilliant light that it envelops them and is them and that you know you could call that heaven. With the afterlife when everyone imagines themselves in in this light state of trance, we all see the same thing and it’s this brilliant energy. I thought that’s just very interesting. That we all perceive when we’re not in our body anymore, the same beyond this energy. I’ve heard so many people who can commune with angels. They all talk about this music that they hear like the angelic realm is vibrating in this music and so between I mean, there’s light. Light energy and music are all just forms of frequency.

[01:16:41] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. That’s exactly right, Yes. Everything vibrates. Through vibration comes sound and yes –

[01:16:50] Ashley James: Now you mentioned that the latest album you created was to help people release energy. Can you tell us what you meant by that?

[01:17:03] Flicka Rahn: Okay. I guess I mentioned that if there is something in your etheric body that really is a block to the free flow of electromagnetic flow. That very often that will show up as discomfort or dis-ease. So you understand what I’m saying about that, is that if you put yourself – for example, you put yourself in that area or of the didgeridoo and you felt it. I mean you felt it in every cell of your being and I’m sure that that was like taking a sound bath that what I do too. I give sound bass once a month at the little clinic where I have see my clients and people come in the bathe and themselves they allow themselves to be bathed in these different frequencies. That breaks up the – is this what you’re referring to? That breaks up the blockages or the places where the energy gets thick. Where it doesn’t flow. So there’s no flow of Chi so to speak. A problem and if there is a free flow then the body is able to bring itself into consonants and heal itself.

[01:18:37] Ashley James: Yes. You talk about maybe the stagnation where people get locked. It’s Interesting. In Hoonah, there’s this visualization of the body as a river. Imagine a beautiful river because in Hawaii they have these gorgeous rivers and so you imagine your body’s this river and the river it represents the flow of Chi. The flow of energy through the body, through the meridian system, through the chakras radiance. Negative emotions and limiting decisions and unhealed unresolved past memories are seen as little black bags where that store that negative experience and are like a big boulder in the river. Distorting the flow of the energy and so their visualization is all these black bags may be stored in your body and you imagine a river with no stones that it flows very nicely. There’s no rapids, there’s no turmoil in the river but you put a bunch of boulders in the river and now there’s waves and it’s disruptive. Their description is you want to really work at resolving the trapped the trap trapped negative emotions and limiting decisions and negative past experiences that are stuck in your physical body.

They’re in your energetic body but there actually can be triggered in your physical body and release them. Gain the positive learnings and heal from them because they cuts off the flow, it creates stagnation. We said release energy. It reminded me of that – I was a massage therapist back many years ago. I had a really interesting experience. I was receiving a massage by my instructor in in college as a demonstration. I was the demo and she was working on my back laterally by my shoulder blade coming up around my arm on the outside of the armpit basically and I began to sob uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop sobbing. The class ended and she held me just put her hands on me on the table and I sobbed for an hour. I couldn’t stop. I had no idea what was going on and I just obviously released but she, I mean, she was a massage therapist for many years so she knew it was going on. 19 years old that was my first experience with this happening and she said that, you know sometimes the body can hold on to the – can in the muscle will hold on to that little button that little trigger and but by getting massage. Massage can be a spiritual and an emotional healing tool as well because it allows you to release these trapped energies.

I imagine combining energy work with like for massage therapists listening, combining energy work with your songs would really help. I’ve had these experiences. My husband had a similar experience. He went for a Reiki class and no, it was before the Reiki class. He had Reiki, his girlfriend, this a long time ago gave him Reiki and he burst into tears, sobbed uncontrollably for an hour and then laughed. He said he never felt love like that before. Just universal love and then he just became a raving fan of Reiki because it was just for him, he just never had anything that allowed him to cry and feel such release. He had no idea where was coming from. We have this trapped in our body as so many of us walk around so stoic because that’s what we were taught but there’s this there’s so much available. So many tools out there available for emotional healing for this release as you say so that we can get back in touch with who we truly are which is connected to spirit, connected to the universal energy. That we are that love and that light actually. I love that you’re creating these tools through your talents to help people achieve that. What about the day to day problems that people have with anxiety, procrastination and motivation? Sometimes people get in this cycle of stress that – we don’t feel stress, right? Stress is kind of like we don’t feel it until we break but we do feel anxiety or procrastination or we do feel sort of get that stuck this or that stagnation in life where we don’t have that motivation and then the anxiety kind of just overwhelms us so we get stuck again. What can we do to break free from that?

[01:23:46] Flicka Rahn: I think all of those reflect kind of this and most of it is subconscious but that there is some fear around that activity. We don’t know. I mean it comes up as anxiety but really if you keep going down deeper and deeper there’s some fear of what’s going to happen or me not being good enough or I’m not going to say the right thing. So what you do is you procrastinate so you don’t have to go into what you fear but you don’t really understand where that is coming from because it’s subconscious. Again, to realign yourself with your Divine self is the way out of that and to become another person and a person that is not caught up in their daily routines of being a certain way or feeling a certain way about a person or going through the same habits. You then try to create this other self that is more whole, more a happier and some of this is through your own observation. “Oh, there I am I’m doing it again. I don’t want to do that because I want my life to be about happiness and love and compassion so I’m going to choose to do this.” Sometimes it’s hard to give up Ashley, because I find that people and I know you probably find this they have an investment in being a victim or they have an investment in being hurt or bitter.

There’s a payoff for them. If they really want to get well then they’re going to have to give up their addiction to those negative reactions and say, “No. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to go towards love and I meditate every day so that I continue to stay connected to this. To the divine expression of who I am.” There are times when I, I’m human you know. I get angry at drivers on the road that are doing stupid stuff so but at least I’m aware, “Oh, there I lost. I lost touch with myself.” Send that person compassion instead of the alternative but it takes awareness and it takes such an investment in wanting to be free or to be whole or to be in love with yourself and in love with the world. If people knew and this is what I am trying to do is to give you a taste of what the peach tastes like. This is the peach. The peach is the best but if somebody says, “I don’t know what a peach is. I don’t even know if I want to come over there and have a peach. I like it over here eating free fries.” That’s what I try to do through this music is to say, “This is the peach. I’m going to give you a little taste of it. Do you like it? If you like it, there’s a lot more.” That’s the deal. When I go over there and I’m eating french fries and I’m thinking, “Oh, my god. I will back off the same, “Look at you Flicka. You’re eating french fries when you could be having a peach.”

[01:27:15] Ashley James: Right. We all indulge in the self-pity and the anger and all that. It’s the human, the ego wants to have a little fun and the ego gets to have it’s fun but then to become the observer and go, “Oh, isn’t that interesting that I did that? Isn’t that interesting? What’s the payoff there? Is this the quality of life I really want? Well, no. Okay. So my ego got to have some fun. Let’s get back to creating a connection with the divine and getting back to remembering that I am loved.” Did you definitely need to become conscious of it. There’s stages of mastery. The first, being unconscious of it. We’re totally unconscious and then there’s that conscious incompetence. Where we have to keep catching our self and building that muscle and going, “Oh, look I did it again.” but now you caught yourself only five minutes into being angry instead of 15 minutes into being angry, right? Then we keep catching ourselves. My husband is a great example. He used to really have a lot of road rage where, I mean he wouldn’t like take it out on people except the people in the car would throw this, he wasn’t happy. I would catch him and be like, “You know you don’t know what that person might be having a really bad day. Maybe they just didn’t see you in their blind spot. You’re always assuming the worst.”

Just reminding him and now bad drivers don’t bother him. Whereas they used to really, he’s a Virgo. No one can – everyone has to be perfect on the road apparently but now he can just he can just let it go. It’s funny because he’ll catch himself and he’ll be like, he’ll say, “Do you see that? Do you see that? Oh, that that person cut me off and I didn’t freak out. Do you see it?” so he got to the point where he’s catching himself going, “Oh, look. I didn’t do that old behavior.” or I’ll catch himself getting angry and then go, “Oh, okay. That’s not who I want to be. That’s not the quality of life I want. I’m not going to choose that.” We have to catch ourselves so in catching ourselves, we create a break state of our neurology and we’re creating a new neural pathway.

[01:29:31] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. Yes. Now I wrote about this very same thing the road rage because it happened – I’m with your husband here. I do it too. Although it’s been so long since I’ve allowed that to you know change mine. The stress hormones which are released when you get angry but I did the same thing. I mentioned this in my book. I want to make sure that we know that all of this information is in my book. That what I’ve learned to do is to say, “I don’t know what’s going on with that person but they may be going to the hospital to see a loved one or they have some emergency.” I reframe the event so that I can stay centered in myself and not get thrown out of who I really am. Because ultimately, I’m the one who pays. The person who you know cut me off they’re on their merry way but I am left with all these horrible stress hormones coursing. The adrenaline coursing through my body. I don’t like the way that feels. Some of it is self-preservation I’m going to stay loving but it’s best for me. Ultimately of course, everybody else. Yes, that is a technique I’m continued, of course we all continue to learn but it has become a lot easier is to look at the event and reframe it so that I don’t spin out of control.

[01:31:07] Ashley James: Do you have stories that you can share from people who have had positive experiences listening to your CDs has anyone shared with you results?

[01:31:19] Flicka Rahn: Yes. A lot of people have said that just listening to my CD it and it’s extremely grounding and comforting and loving. A friend of mine who actually lives in Mexico, I just got back from Mexico. She was going through extremely difficult period and she’s she is a shaman and she said that she saw into that music what it does and I can’t do that but she has that ability. She said it is very – it heals DNA. Now I don’t know that, Ashley. But I’m telling just what she said and she had been through a huge trauma in her life. She listened to it like two hours a day and she said it really helped her come back into herself because trauma tends to separate us from ourselves.

[01:32:22] Ashley James: Right. Well, trauma, they can actually test DNA and see if your ancestor had trauma. They’ve proven this. Because we’re just still we’re learning so much about DNA and epigenetics. Epigenetics means that the certain DNA that can turn on and off. Become like suppressed or can activate. It can turn on and off different enzymatic processes in the body. The best example is and I’ve said this on the podcast before but for new listeners, they did a study where they took white mice. This cute, fluffy, soft white mice and they exposed them to the same amount of bisphenol A. BPA per body weight that we would be exposed to on a daily basis. If we were to touch of receipts every day when we buy things there’s BPA on there. Drinking from plastic bottles and cans that have BPA. You might think, well, I don’t buy those things but if you eat out at any kind of restaurant you have exposure to BPA because restaurants really don’t care. They’re going to buy the cheapest things possible so their canned foods or sauces, whatever. Their condiments are going to have BPA in them. Through the food industry BPA is just leached into our food unless you eat a whole food plant-based diet where you’re buying organic and just cooking everything from scratch which is what I teach. We actually I just launched a membership called learn true health home kitchen. I teach that. How to cook whole foods so that you’re getting the purest nutrition you can to heal the body through food.

So this BPA they exposed these mice to it and the mice quickly turned yellow, their fur went from white to yellow and from a nice softness to a coarse hay straw like feel and then they became obese. They didn’t really change their diet other than giving them the BPA but what it did is epigenetically changed their genes to make them become obese and to make them not be able to make beautiful fur. Then they stopped giving the mice BPA and it took several generations. They followed these mice for several generations before they just fed them water and food instead of the BPA but I think it was over three generations until the mice returned back to being white again and having the soft white fur and not no longer being obese.

Epigenetically their DNA was damaged for several generations. We see this with ancestors of those in the Holocaust during World War II. Those who spent time in Auschwitz or were severely emotionally harmed during World War II. Even their grandchildren they can see when they do DNA test, they can see the epigenetic gene expressions of trauma, of stress. They have higher levels just at resting state of stress hormones. What we do in this lifetime will affect our grandchildren directly through our DNA and though the healing that we do in the detoxifying and the nutrifying that we do, they’re seeing now can actually affect our DNA for generations to come. It’s not only healing yourself that aids your healing for your children and grandchildren. I think that’s it’s really fascinating. The fact that this healer sees that your music has a role to play in healing DNA. I wouldn’t be surprised that everything is energy.

[01:36:01] Flicka Rahn: There is a study that I mentioned in my book and I’m sorry, I don’t have it at my fingertips but I’ll recount what it was. It was a study done by taking some DNA in which they put into a petri dish and they subjected it to heat so the DNA “died” or uncurled. It was essentially destroyed and then they had people hold the dish with the hurt DNA and directed loving thoughts to that, I know this sounds crazy, to the DNA and the DNA recoiled. There is a way through love to heal ourselves and to heal the DNA that has been traumatized through toxic thoughts, experiences, down regulated so to speak. That’s through this the power of love which carries probably I’m thinking a very coherent geometry. That the DNA can then reform around this coherent geometry which that’s also a huge subject that we could talk about. How they’re now understanding that this field that we are in the zero-point field is filled with information and energy but there is a uniform geometry that they’re finding that is common throughout everything that saturates everything. I don’t know if you know the work of a Nassim Haramein. He’s a physicist in Hawaii actually and has been studying the geometric shape of the field.

[01:38:05] Ashley James: Interesting. What you’re saying is reminding me of Masaru Emoto, his work. The book. The hidden messages in water where he would emit love or hate and freeze water and then under a microscope you see that water looks so beautiful in the geometric shapes are just divine when you emit love to it but when you emit hate or anger it looks distorted and polluted.

[01:28:38] Flicka Rahn: Right. Then they give the polluted water to some Japanese monks and have them love that water. They take another sample and the water has reformed into those coherent shapes. It sounds to me like love is the variable that helps things become more ordered. Are you familiar with the work of Hans Jenny and cymatics?

[01:39:04] Ashley James: It sounds really familiar but I don’t know tell us.

[01:39:07] Flicka Rahn: Okay. So cymatics is the study of sound made visible. What he did and this was in like the early 1900’s maybe up through the 50s. He would take like a brass plate and sprinkle particulates on it or sand. Then introduce a specific pitch and then the sound would form into these beautiful like mandalas. Beautiful shapes that correspond and it’s reproducible under the same circumstances that they would always form the same shape. Then there were other researchers who put particulates in water and the same thing would happen once introduced to specific pitches or frequencies. Snowflakes, I think snowflakes just are showing us the geometry of the field. If the field is love then that is like the rosetta stone of all of these expressions. My music is tuned to a 432 and I don’t know if you’re familiar with all of that work. It’s a way of tuning, Ashley. It will sound warmer to you. I’s a little bit not as sharp.

It’s a little bit under pitch because we tuned to at 440 Hertz. Universally, all music is at a 440 Hertz but throughout history certainly in the in the Romantic period it’s a musical period and before instruments were tuned lower than 440 Hertz. Some higher but for the most part it’s 432 Hertz because when you see pitches tuned at 432 Hertz, the geometry is beautiful and it’s coherent. It’s much more balanced. Knowing all of that, all of my music is at 432 Hertz which sounds warmer so your body can accept that geometry because it matches because it’s a whole kind of sacred geometry and the fibonacci spiral and everything. All of those shapes that we see in nature are then reproduced in the sound that if the instruments are tuned down to 432 Hertz. Have you heard an orchestra that the oboe plays one note and then everybody kind of tunes off of that one note that the oboe plays? Have you ever experienced that when you go to a symphony orchestra? Well, they do and then the oboe then is toning an A pitch at 440 Hertz. Then everybody else in the orchestra tunes to that but if the oboist drops it just a little bit, just a little bit to 432 Hertz, then the orchestra would tune down a little bit and the sound is warmer to your ears. Your body can accept that because that is our natural, we are sacred geometry beings. Geometrically, we align with that.

[01:42:56] Ashley James: How does the musician know to go to – I can understand knowing how to play a C note but how do you play hertz? How do you know to go to a certain hertz? You need a device to read the Hertz?

[01:43:15] Flicka Rahn: Yes, and there are lots of tuners out now that you can get that will direct you to that 432 Hertz. Both of my CDs are tuned down to 432 a at 432 Hertz. Certainly, every note is a different hertz because hertz designates the frequency and the pitch. But you have to have a touchstone you say, “Okay. I’m going to use this as my tuning center.” The oboist, they can even use a tuner. They’ll hold up a little tuner. They’ll blow into the tuner and then they’ll go to their oboe and they’ll sure that they match that tuner. You asked me why did things change because it used to be that things were tuned down to a 432. There’s a whole conspiracy theory that goes up around –

[01:44:14] Ashley James: I want to hear it.

[01:44:16] Flicka Rahn: Oh, my god. Okay. We got into it.

[01:44:19] Ashley James: I want to hear it. So because back before TV, music was so – that’s what we did. That was entertainment. Even kings and queens five hundred years ago would pay composers. It was a status symbol to have a composer write you. That’s sort of my dream is I’m going to win the lottery one day and like I’ll pay a composer to make me as a symphony. It’s such a outlandish but beautiful thing to promote the arts obviously but just imagine if you had the ability to have a have a composer write you a song. That was such a big deal and music, we bade themselves in music so often and now, we watch TV and don’t bathe ourselves in music. This was my dad’s, that was his mission was to get people back to listening to music. That’s one of his things why he invented his speakers and promoted that. I lived it. I lived his vision. Well, my dad’s time was before cellphones but his thing was, “Why do families come home and stare at a boob tube together when they could put on music and they could talk and they could connect and they could have this loving family time.” He wanted people to return back to that. Tell me the conspiracy theory around changing the hertz in music. When did that take place?

[01:49:49] Flicka Rahn: Okay. Well, first of all, your dad was so right. There is nothing that forms bonds of loving feelings than doing music together. What would going to church be without everybody getting up and singing a hymn. There’s this energetic flow that happens through making music or listening to music together. Yay, dad. The conspiracy theory and I tend to think it’s not so much conspiracy that it’s really true. During the Second World War, before the Second World War, there were lots of composers. This very famous composer Verdi. I don’t know, it’s Giuseppe Verdi. Wrote many operas and he insisted that his orchestra tune to 432 because he said it is easier on his Sopranos. What he didn’t know is that the geometry of the body matched that specific way of tuning and if you tuned up it goes against the geometry of your body.

He was a big believer in that. At World War II, there was this whole propaganda machine that Hitler got into play as a way of controlling the German population. One way he wanted to control them is to make them a little bit anxious because if you have people who are anxious they’re going to get behind a guy who says, “I got the way out for us. We’re going to go out. We’re going to conquer the world.” but you don’t want them feeling comfortable and loving. No. You want them on edge because you can control them. Goebbels his minister of propaganda decided that all the music that they were going to use is we’re going to be up at four hundred and forty Hertz. Which makes you feel a little bit more on edge and you can go to YouTube right now and look at examples. Look up 432 versus 440 and you can hear the same piece played tuned a 440 and the same piece of music played at 432 and just subjectively experience that. That’s easy to do. That’s fun.

[01:48:18] Ashley James: You know what’ll be fun is get your get your partner, like you get blindfolded and get your partner to randomly choose whether they’re going to play the 440 Hertz which creates anxiety versus the 432 Hertz which is healing. Then you feel your body and you see if you feel on edge or you see if you feel connected and happy and content. That would be a fun home experiment.

[01:48:44] Flicka Rahn: Right. Yes. Well, subjectively, I feel better when I hear music in 400 and here, I wonder if I could do it right now because I have my tuner on my phone. Alright. So here is and I will tune so that your listeners can hear this. Here is a note played in 432. Okay. Now here is the same note played in 440.

[01:49:23] Ashley James: It does sound just like a little bit anxious. I got that, yes.

[01:49:26] Flicka Rahn: So here’s again 432. This is the calm pitch. Okay. Now here is 440.

[01:49:51] Ashley James: Hitler made all the music be played at 440 Hertz to make people anxious and so they’re not happy with their present situation in life.

[01:50:05] Flicka Rahn: Exactly. Yes. That’s the way you control people. Engender fear and anxiety and stress and they’re going to look for a way so that can go away. So he said follow me, I’ll make that go away.

[01:50:18] Ashley James: How did he know to do that?

[01:50:21] Flicka Rahn: That I don’t know, Ashley. That I do not know but interestingly enough after World War II and there is also other conspiracy theories that the Rockefellers who were invested in a lot of, I’m not sure if I’m trailing all of this correctly but I knew they were involved is that then they approached the American Federation of musicians and then the worldwide Federation to make the standard 440. Now you can say maybe they wanted us all on edge so that they could control us and that was a worldwide conspiracy I don’t know. But that is what happened so that if a flute player in the United States can go to an orchestra in Japan and they’ll tune the same way. There had to be a standard but they chose that higher standard so that so that the population would feel ill at ease and not as anchored or centered.

[01:51:31] Ashley James: That’s so interesting because we listen to classical music in the car. Often we’re driving with our son. We often most of the time, I say 90% of time we’re listening to classical music. There are some times when I feel like I should be very comfortable and at ease in this a beautiful song but I’m not. I get agitated. I’m , “What’s going on?” The music is and I have to like change it to a different classical station and I’m just wondering if that was the Hertz. Very interesting that they chose to stick to 440 Hertz around the world. Well, the thing is that if they knew they could prosper from it because when you were feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, you will seek dopamine. You will seek pleasure. You’ll spend money and you won’t spend time doing internal exploration. Becoming a sovereign individual. Becoming a higher thinker. Becoming more spiritually connected.

You’re going to spend more time trying to soothe the anxiety through staying in a low level so it’s easier to control a population that’s uncomfortable or that’s in pain. Than control population of a very comfortable, happy, free thinkers so that really does make sense. We want to make sure we want to be conscious. This is why my husband doesn’t – he prefers that we don’t listen to music with words because he doesn’t want to be enslaved to the mainstream narrative. Let’s just say that. Because when you’re listening to music you’re in a state of trance and if you’re taking in words that are telling you the world is a certain way then you are a slave to that narrative and if you go dive into the history of the music industry, there’s a lot of control there. We have you just did but there’s modern-day music industry. There’s a lot of control there and so I like to listen to independent musicians who aren’t trying to manipulate us but are just trying to spread love like you are. We’re being conscious. I think I like that you really bring up a point to be conscious of the music you play because it can be used as a weapon against you or use as a tool to heal.

[01:53:59] Flicka Rahn: Yes. My business partner her name is Tammy McCreary. She also was a co-author with me. She wrote the last chapter in my book and she is a manager for artists in Los Angeles. She absolutely sees that the music that is being offered now is very detrimental because yes, you’re right. That people do, they are in trance when they listen to music and so that allows the message of the words just to be accepted blindly by a brain that is not really thinking.

[01:54:42] Ashley James: It’s hypnosis.

[01:54:43] Flicka Rahn: Exactly, Ashley. Yes, right. Her goal is to wake up the musicians and say, “You have this incredible power you’ve been given. Be very careful with this because you create the future of our young people.” I get very concerned for them. I really do. I certainly don’t listen to it but your husband is right. Don’t be enslaved by – See now, I didn’t think about that you are in a kind of hypnotic trance.

[01:55:17] Ashley James: I’m a master practitioner and trainer of hypnosis. You’re talking about that music sends you from beta to alpha, what’s hypnosis. Then you’re taking in words that have suggestions that create imagery in your mind. Even in an unconscious level those are, its slipping past the conscious mind and slipping into becoming unconscious suggestions.

[01:55:44] Flicka Rahn: There no evaluation. It just goes straight in.

[01:55:47] Ashley James: Right. You’re not using your critical thinking.

[01:55:51] Flicka Rahn: Yes, yes. Amazing.

[01:55:53] Ashley James: So you listen to something over and over again and you like really – I have a friend who listens to heavy metal and he’s just a very angry person and he reinforces it and you’ve said this earlier but he reinforces it with the music he chooses to listen to. The music we choose to listen to can reinforce our neurology. Can reinforce the way we’re thinking and our thoughts. Create our actions or actions create our behavior and our results in life. If we want to be in a state of loving empathy and be able to connect with others we need to make sure the music we choose matches that. Hopefully at 432 hertz. Now that we know that.

[01:56:43] Flicka Rahn: Yes, right. You know there are stations or YouTube stations that have, this is not ideal but they’ve tuned things down like the orchestral pieces. The famous ones. It’s certainly better if it’s recorded from 430 Hertz rather than to be manipulated by a sound engineer to drop it down. That’s better. So that may be interesting for you to listen to expressions of the same piece to see.

[01:57:17] Ashley James: Oh, so cool. Well, it’s really interesting is after this interview I’m rushing off with my son to take him to the Seattle Children’s Chorus where he is taking classes. He’s four years old. He’s about to be five but he’s taking singing classes. It’s so adorable to see these four-year-olds singing together so that’s what I’m doing later today. I’m about to go bathe myself for an hour in children’s singing which I’m really looking forward to. Flicka Rahn, it has been such a pleasure having you here today. I would love to have you back. This has been so much fun exploring this. Thanks for getting into the really interesting topics and this is the kind of stuff I just love exploring. I really feel like we hit the meat of it by understanding that we want to vibrate with a frequency of 432. That we want to choose music that is meant to heal us and make sure that we avoid music that isn’t going to bring us healing. That isn’t either the lyrics or the sound is not in alignment with our healing goals. We want to be conscious of that because music can be a weapon or can be a tool for healing. I love that you uncovered that for us. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:58:35] Flicka Rahn: No. I just want to really encourage people to like if you’re changing a pattern be aware. Just be aware of what you’re hearing. Go into the supermarket and be aware of what you’re hearing or if you’re out in nature the sound of the birds carry such high healing frequencies so you’re being bathed in those beautiful higher frequencies that are natural in the natural world. I think just waking up and just saying, “What am I really hearing here? What am I listening to? Is that helping me or do I feel more loving now or do I feel more anxious now?” Just maybe understand that sound can have a huge impact on you as we know. It’s sound and music. To not forget about the beautiful gift of toning and help how quickly you can move to a place of peace and just calmness by doing that. If you go to your dentist, give it a shot cool. It works. I tell you, it works.

[01:59:56] Ashley James: Awesome. Cool. I’m going to tell my husband. He’s got a dental cleaning coming up next week. I’m going to teach this to him. That’s so cool. Flicka, thank you so much. Of course, the links to everything that Flicka Rahn does, it’s going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. I’ve decided I’m going to edit this episode so listeners who are hearing this have already experienced. I’m going to sprinkle your music throughout the episode. Also, now at the end of the episode. Thank you so much for gifting us some of your music that we could include in this and if listeners would like to buy your music and buy your book, please check out the show notes of today’s podcasts. Where you’ll find the links to Flicka’s book and her CDs. Also, we’d love to see you live so tell me if you’re ever going to be up in Seattle. On your website, do you display where you are when you tour?

[02:22:52] Flicka Rahn: That is forthcoming. Let’s just put that.

[02:00:53] Ashley James: Okay. Looking forward to that. Looking forward to seeing that information on your website actually. Thank you so much Flicka.

[02:01:01] Flicka Rahn: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been delightful really honey and have fun tonight with your son. That’s great.

[02:01:06] Ashley James: I will.

[Flicka Rahn Music]

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Book by Flicka Rahn

The Transformational Power of Sound and Music: A Handbook for Healers

Male Circumcision And Foreskin Restoration

https://www.learntruehealth.com/male-circumcision-and-foreskin-restoration

Highlights:

Who are the Blood-stained Men
The history of circumcision
Effects of circumcision
Stages of foreskin restoration
What Intaction does
How to properly clean a baby’s intact genital

In this episode, Anthony Losquadro shares with us the history of circumcision and which countries have the highest rate of circumcised men. He also shares with us the effects of circumcision on men. Lastly, he shares how parents should clean a baby boy’s intact genital.

[0:00] Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. I know a lot of moms and dads listen to this show, a lot of grandparents too and some future parents listen to this show as well so this really applies to everyone. Even if you don’t have male genitals I think you will still really get a lot out of this episode. It was mind-blowing to me the things that I learned from Anthony about foreskin and about circumcision. Something that we should all know especially if you’re going to be a mom of a future boy. It’s really worth knowing this information. Please, share today’s episode with your friends and your family members especially those who are pregnant or expecting or who are planning to have children. This episode is going to be that ripple. We throw that stone in the pond and watch the ripple and watch how far that ripple goes and how many lives it can help. So, I’m so excited that you’re listening to this episode and you’re sharing it so that we can get this information out there.

Now, if you’ve been a listener for a while, you know that recently I launched something I’ve been working on for a while. I launched the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, which is a membership where we teach you. We make all kinds of videos, teach you how to cook whole foods, really healthy healing foods. The focus is on using food as medicine, using food to heal the body. Well, one of our members, Emily, just shared the other day in the Learn True Health Facebook group and by the way if you’re not in the Facebook group already you are welcome to join us. It’s a very supportive community. Just go to Facebook and search Learn True Health.

Emily shared her testimonial and it was so good I wanted to share it with you. She says, “I have to share. I joined the Learn True Health Home Kitchen five days ago and have successfully gone from meat three times a day to only after 5:00 PM. My kids are eating actual vegetables less cheese sticks. My daughter’s poo has, for the first time in years, been a normal consistency. I don’t plan on going fully without animal products, but this resource and community that Ashley and Naomi have put together has helped me get a grip on my fridge and put me back in control of what goes in and out of it.” She says that her husband is now back to fasting like he used to before and that since she cut out processed cereal for the last five days that she noticed that her headaches have gone away. She says that her fridge is full of whole foods, lots of plants and that for the first time in this mother’s life she says, “I am not the only one eating those vegetables in the fridge.

So, she’s really excited that all her kids are eating the vegetables. She says she loves the bowls module and the resources that we share. She thanks us and she says that she’s also cut way back on her coffee intake. She noticed that she has so much more energy, that she’s not drinking coffee throughout the day and she’s actually getting to sleep better at night. So, she’s very excited and she wanted to share her experience.

We’ve had others already share since we launched it about two weeks ago that their experience in the memberships has been really positive. The whole resource, Learn True Health Home Kitchen, is for everyone. You don’t have to give up meat to be part of it. We’re teaching you how to cook more vegetables, how to cook more plants, how to get more healing foods into your diet. The point of it is that wherever you are on the spectrum whether you want to eat meat at every meal or whether you want to eat no meat at all or anywhere in between, you’re going to use the videos to learn how to use food as medicine.

Naomi and I choose to eat a whole food plant-based diet. We choose not to eat meat anymore and we’re noticing that’s really healing for our bodies. I respect that everyone’s at a different part in their journey, but if you listen to your body, you can dial in your diet for you. Maybe that means eating more fruit, more vegetables, more whole foods, less processed foods, less sugar, less oil, less highly processed foods and more real food. That’s what we’re teaching you. We also teach how to cook food very quickly that’s very healthy, how to save you a ton of money eating really healthy and how to be able to cook food that is super delicious, saves you money, saves you time for the whole family including picky husbands and children.

So, if you love to learn any kind of resources to heal your body in your kitchen and help your family eat healthy, then come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You can get a free tour. There’s a video that gives you a tour. Just go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH for the big listener discount. Thank you so much for being a listener. I really hope to see you in the Learn True Health Home Kitchen because we are adding new recipes every week. It’s just growing and growing and it’s so much fun to see people expanding their palate and healing their body with food.

Thank you so much for sharing today’s episode. Thank you so much for being a listener. Enjoy today’s episode and enjoy the rest of your day.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 408.

[0:06:08] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest and for this topic. I’m really passionate about this topic and we’ve never covered it on the show after over 400 episodes with all kinds of topics. When Anthony reached out to me, my husband actually saw the email first and he got really excited because the two of us are very passionate about this. It isn’t talked about enough in the society. So, I love that Anthony that you are an advocate, that you are giving a voice to the children who don’t have a voice. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about something that I didn’t even think about until I was actually pregnant. I didn’t even think about it.

We were in San Diego, right around the Convention Center, there was a bunch of men protesting. We were driving by and life has it that we have the right kind of timing in life. So, the red light came and we were right there at the red light, the very first car. There’s a bunch of men standing there holding signs with babies on it. I couldn’t really understand what they were protesting. They were wearing white boxer shorts and white shirts with a big red dot on their crotch. The sign says something like, “I was never given a choice.”

We sat there and we were scratching our heads going, “What are they talking about?” Then finally it hit us. They were protesting circumcision. They were spreading awareness about the choice. The ability to choose whether to be circumcised or not. Well, we kept driving when the light turned green but this sparked a conversation between my husband and I. It began our dive into looking at circumcision and the pros and cons because up until then I thought circumcision was of incredibly positive thing. I mean, don’t all men get circumcised because isn’t the foreskin dirty and nasty and we shouldn’t have it. Haven’t men done this for thousands of years? Isn’t it in the Bible?

Well, lo and behold. We started looking deeper and deeper. We saw that babies die in the United States from circumcision. That it actually causes a lot of damage. My husband ended up discovering that some issues that he’s had his entire life that he didn’t realize that they were actually caused by his circumcision. He said it was okay for me to share this because he said if even one man learned something from his experience or even when parent learned something from his experience, then he would be really happy.

So, when we saw your email that you wanted to come on the show and share your information, oh man I was so excited. So, welcome to the show.

[0:09:13] Anthony Losquadro: Ashley, thanks for having me on the show. You really started off at a great introduction. The group that you saw was a group known as the Blood-stained Men. They travel around the country raising awareness on this issue that like what you said, a lot of people never have given any thought.

[0:09:31] Ashley James: Right. Well, at the time we were pregnant, we knew we were probably but we didn’t know that we were pregnant with our son. So, by the time we were ready to give birth we were 100% sure that circumcision was off the table. We had seen the information and we came to a very educated decision that the healthiest thing for our son was to allow him to be intact. What was really interesting is in talking to our doctors about this because we had several of them, I’m kind of an overachiever in that sense. We had midwives and naturopaths and OBGYNs that we all were working with. All of them started to share these really interesting statistics that blew my mind. That it’s actually becoming more and more common for parents not to circumcise.

My husband’s concern would be that if our son was the only one not circumcised in the locker room he’d be embarrassed or something because his would look different. Well, first of all men, don’t go around staring at each other in the locker room, but he was worried that maybe our son would wonder why he looked different. Then all the doctors were sharing with us that in certain areas of the United States, it’s almost half of men. It’s something like 40 something percent of men are not circumcised. So, it’s becoming more and more common, which is good because parents are waking up to this information.

I’m really curious though, Anthony, what happened in your life that made you want to become an advocate around this? Now, your website is intaction.org. Of course, links to everything that you do is going to be the show so today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Tell us your story. What happened that made you want to become the founder and director of Intaction and that you wanted to give children a voice and help raise awareness around the importance of an intact body?

[0:11:34] Anthony Losquadro: Well, Ashley, there’s a number of things that have impacted my life that kind of put me on the path that I’m on. When I first started, this issues I became aware of it when I was a very young boy. I was maybe seven or eight years old and I went to Florence, Italy. I saw all of these sculptures and statues by Michelangelo for instance. First of all, I saw these statues they’re all naked. So, I thought that was pretty crazy. The male statues, the male figures all had intact penises. I started to wonder what happened to them or why were they different from me? Why were they different from us? Something didn’t seem to add up to me. That’s when the first earliest days I started to recognize it something was being done.

Growing up I always noticed on my body there was a scar on my penis that everybody had circumcised has a scar. It’s from the device they used to crush the foreskin. I could never recall anything happening to me but why was my body this way and why wasn’t anybody talking about it? So, later on in life as I began to research this issue and information became more available over the internet, I started to have a better understanding. The thing they say once you start learning about circumcision, the more you learn the more shocked you become.

[0:13:14] Ashley James: It’s so true. I’m shocked that female babies are circumcised because that is brutal. I guess in our society we accept male circumcision as normal but female circumcision is barbaric. Well, they’re actually both incredibly barbaric.

[0:13:34] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. That’s right. All of the issues that surround male genital cutting are the same when it comes to female genital cutting or female genital mutilation, whatever you want to call it or female circumcision. The word circumcision, first of all, it’s just a euphemism to really cover up what they’re actually doing. What we’re doing when we say we’re going to circumcise is we’re cutting genitals. We are cutting normal healthy body parts whether it’s off of a boy or whether it’s off of a girl. I don’t like to get into a debate who’s got it worse. Do little girls have it worse than little boys or vice versa? Deaths occur in both sides, complications occur in both sides, pain and trauma occur in both sides.

So, I don’t like to say that one has a greater standing on the issue than the other. It’s human genital cutting. We need to stop cutting babies altogether and young children altogether.

[0:14:41] Ashley James: So, you started to look into it. You started to question it. What happened in your life though that made you become the founder and director of Intaction? What clicked for you? Is there a story there?

[0:14:56] Anthony Losquadro: I felt that I had a lot of experience in the business world and I can apply some of this to create change in America and to help educate Americans about why we need to re-examine this issue, but really the seminal moment for myself and for many others in the intactivist movement and we like to call ourselves intactivists, which is just a conjugation of intact activists so promoting intact bodies. In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a statement that seemed to reverse where their previous stance was and they seemed to encourage circumcision despite much lobbying on side of intactivists for them not to do this. It was almost preordained.

When they decided to change the policy. They claimed they were going to study all the literature. They were going to do a comprehensive investigation on this, but I know they pre-baked the cake. They knew what the decision was going to be before they even started it. I know this because I have thousands and thousands of their emails, which I was able to obtain. I can see the deliberations between the committee members. They were going to go to a positive pro-circumcision policy statement way before 2012. They started this in 2009. They issued their statement in 2012.

This incensed many intactivists like myself. The American Academy of Pediatrics, first and foremost people have to understand, they are not an organization that promotes the interest of children first. They are a doctors’ trade association. They are there. It’s all about the money, unfortunately, like many things in this country and many things in the world. I hate to say and it’s a bit of a cliché but it is all about the money. Because if you look in their policy statement in 2012, one of the things they were very outspoken on is that insurance payments must continue for infant circumcisions. So, this is a big moneymaker for hospitals and for the doctors that do them.

So, this incensed many people. It incensed me. I felt like if innocent babies. Our children, have this goliath against them, who’s going to speak for them? Who’s going to help educate the parents to be able to stand up to all this pressure? I could tell you. When my own son was born they kept pestering us, “Are you going to cut them?” “No.” You’re going to circumcise him? Let’s circumcise. They pressure, the doctors pressure parents to do it. So, I felt the need that I need an organization to get like-minded people together to work together, help educate people so they could stand up to this pressure. The next generation of children, the next generation of Americans can have healthy intact bodies the way nature designed us to be.

[0:18:10] Ashley James: You let me know that in the US, over a 100 babies die every year due to complications of circumcision and it was part of a 2010 journal study. That’s unacceptable. That’s just the United States alone, right? Can you imagine worldwide, how many children die from an elective procedure that does not need to happen? Now, let’s talk about the pros and cons so people understand because I’m sure that those that are listening, this is like the first time they’ve ever heard that circumcision is not a great option. What are the pros of having a circumcision? Right and what are the cons? Lay it out for us.

[0:18:59] Anthony Losquadro: Pros, it’s oftentimes a religious or cultural custom that parents feel obligated to get or parents may have anxiety that they feel if they don’t get this done their children may have health issues later on in life. So, this anxiety may compel them to do this or throw reason and logic out the window. So, medically pros there are none. I’ll read you a statement, a policy statement from many many doctors representing over 20 international medical institutions mostly in Europe but all over the world. What they said is, “Circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria or the justification of preventive medical procedures in children. It has no compelling health benefit, it causes pain and it could have serious long-term consequences and it also conflicts the Hippocratic Oath of “First, do no harm.”

So, these are medical institution representing thousands and thousands of doctors that have said this. So, I want people to understand if they think there are health benefits and they may have read things in the news media or the press or maybe they read something online about it’s going to prevent this or it’s going to prevent that. If they were to get past that, first of all, you can’t believe everything you read in the news because reporters often get it wrong and they tend to uphold the status quo. But if they were to dig down into the studies like we have and looked at this stuff, they would realize that there’s nothing there. People in Europe have stayed intact. They’re intact now, they were intact 100 years ago and they were intact 1000 years ago. They’ve had no health issues related to having intact genitals. So, why is this provoking anxiety in Americans? Because Americans have been sold this bill of goods from American doctors, the American medical system, that goes back over 100 years in America.

[0:21:22] Ashley James: Can you walk us through the history of circumcision?

[0:21:26] Anthony Losquadro: It’s a bizarre history and I’d love to. Circumcision was uncommon in America up until around the 1890s. What happened back then is it was the Victorian age. It was an era of where they tried to have greater attention to morals and morality. America became obsessed with stopping masturbation. They thought masturbation was the root of so many mental and physical ills. That they had to take all resources and all actions necessary to try to restrain this behavior. First, doctors thought that they could circumcise men to get them to stop, but then they quickly realized that was a hard sell. Right? Because an adult knows how good that feels and they’re not cutting parts off their body especially on their genitals.

So then doctors then reasoned well Plan B let’s do it to babies and then we will just have to convince the parents that it’s going to be better for them. We had doctors of the time. Now, you’re going to recognize this name, John Harvey Kellogg. He was the inventor of Kellogg’s cornflakes. He thought masturbation was a serious issue. He was a celebrity doctor of his day. He wrote books. He ran a medical institution. He was one of those figures from back then that convinced parents that circumcision needed to be done.

Then we had another guy who’s by the name of Dr. Lewis Sayre. He was a doctor in New York City. He claimed that circumcision prevented all kinds of things. He claimed it cured epilepsy, mental illness and hernias. He said genital irritations and masturbation are deemed to be the causes of these issues. Lewis Sayre went on to become the president of the American Medical Association. So, this is what we had going against us. This is how it started in America. As time went on and as more and more babies became born in hospitals, actually around 1940 was the break-even point where more babies were born in hospitals as opposed to being born at home.

Doctors took over the birth process. Oftentimes, babies were circumcised without parents even having to be able to consent to it.

[0:24:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[0:24:09] Anthony Losquadro: Right. I mean back then the father couldn’t even be in the delivery room. So, they took over the birth process. Also, medical insurance became more commonplace. So, doctors could get paid to do it. Going into the late 40s and into the 1950s circumcision rates really started climbing. They probably peaked right around 1970. That’s kind of the history of circumcision in America. There’s some other things. There’s elements of racism and xenophobia. There’s always panic over illness and disease, which some in the medical industry are always happy to exploit. That’s what drove the rates up so high in America. It happened here for the most part. Europe never experienced this maybe with the exception of England.

[0:25:06] Ashley James: I’m confused. How did racism and xenophobia drive circumcision?

[0:25:11] Anthony Losquadro: Well, there was a doctor back in 1894. His name is Dr. Peter Raymond Eno. He said that circumcision of Negroes was a remedy in preventing their predisposition to raping people. When it comes to xenophobia you had the great immigration waves of the 1920s. People from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, upper-class white Americans were looking to differentiate themselves from the dirty unclean masses coming in. Circumcision became part of that. If you were able to circumcise your child that meant you could afford a hospital birth.

[0:25:55] Ashley James: Oh, they spun it. The media spun it so that it was a status symbol.

[0:26:02] Anthony Losquadro: It became a status symbol. Just like formula-feeding, that became the modern thing to do. If you had the money you could afford formula. You formula-fed your baby as opposed to breastfeeding. That’s for the peasants out in the countryside. We don’t do that.

[0:26:18] Ashley James: Meanwhile, they were damaging their children. They’re damaging their children’s health and they’re damaging their children’s bodies not knowing that it was the so-called peasants that probably their children were healthier as a result of being breastfed and intact. So, what about circumcision around the world? Is America kind of an oddity? Is this the country that has the most circumcision? What about around the world?

[0:26:48] Anthony Losquadro: In the current day with some isolated pockets if you take out people of the Muslim faith and the Judaic faith, you take them out, 99% of the men in the world are intact. So, there are some pockets here and there like for instance in the Philippines, they practice circumcision even though they’re Catholic. South Korea practiced circumcision. They still do, although it’s starting to back off. That was American influence from the Korean War when American medics were providing free health care, they kind of spread it there. Places that were doing it like for instance Australia and the UK had high circumcision rates also up until about World War II. Then as their national health services took over, they decided they’re not paying for this anymore. They cut it out of their insurance and rates plummeted, whim. Again, circumcision rates in England are very very low, Australia very very low.

[0:27:50] Ashley James: I’m from Canada and growing up I knew people who were and who were not. I had discussions actually with my friends’ moms about it because I thought it was kind of interesting. They said that they had the choice. That in the hospital it was not pressured. The pressure wasn’t put upon them but that they could choose. They could elect to have it or not to have it because Canada being a one-payer medical system. So, the government doesn’t want to pay for something it doesn’t have to, luckily. It’s still a common practice there because the United States influences these other countries. Interesting though, in the latest statistics, does the United States have the highest rates of circumcision compared to all other countries?

[0:28:51] Anthony Losquadro: I would say amongst developed countries, you have different countries in Africa that circumcise depending on their tribe and the culture. Again, the Muslim world almost universally circumcise as boys. So, you mention Canada. Also in 2015, the Canadian pediatric society came out. They do not recommend circumcision policy statement.

[0:29:19] Ashley James: Interesting.

[0:29:20] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. They’re distancing themselves even further from their past.

[0:29:23] Ashley James: Well, it’s interesting that the Canadian pediatric society is saying don’t do it and the American pediatric society, or whatever the American version, is saying to do it. It’s always look at the money. Look at the money. That’s very sad that the pediatricians in the United States are going after the money and not after the health of the child.

[0:29:50] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, it’s vague and it’s conflicting. There are parts of it that seems to say that it recommends it. Then other parts they say, “Well, it’s not a recommendation but we’ll leave it up to the parents.” So, they kind of vaguely word it. So, it’s kind of like reading tea leaves. You can interpret into what you want. They do say that if parents want it, insurance should pay for it.

[0:30:23] Ashley James: Let’s talk about foreskin. What purpose does foreskin have? What does it do for the body? Again, we’ve grown up thinking foreskin is something you could throw into the trash the second you’re born. Like God created us as these amazing beings and His image, but definitely the second you’re born you should cut off this little extra piece that he accidentally left on you if you’re a boy. It’s just kind of crazy to think that God made a mistake when he created us so you should cut off this little part. So, what purpose does foreskin serve?

[0:31:02] Anthony Losquadro: It serves a lot of purpose. It’s a wonderful anatomical adaptation that males are born with. Incidentally, women also have foreskin in the form of the clitoral hood, but the male foreskin has what we call the four powers. That is pleasure, protection, lubrication and connection. The foreskin offers 20,000 specialized nerve endings known as Meissner’s corpuscles that are fine touch neural sensors. The foreskin protects the end of the penis. It keeps it covered and it keeps the skin moist and supple underneath. It provides its own lubrication. It’s better overall. Guys that are intact say they have a terrific overall experience because of what they’re sensing through their foreskin and with their partner. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. It put this on our body for a reason. The skin slides back and forth. That’s where most of the sensitivity is.

The head of the penis is relatively insensitive. It may come to a shock for some people. I’ll even give – for the guys out there that are listening to this, they can try this. The head of the penis can’t feel hot and cold. A lot of people may not realize. It doesn’t have heat and cold receptors. You could prove this to yourself if you were to go into a guy, not you personally, but if you were to go into a shower with an ice cube. You put warm or hot water on just the head of your penis without getting anything else, not the shaft area, just the head. You put an ice cube on and you go back and forth. You can’t feel any difference. You can feel the pressure, but a guy can’t feel hot and cold.

Most of the sensation, all the different types of nerve receptors are in the foreskin. There’s a structure in the foreskin. People always ask me, “Well, you’re cut so how do you know?” I know because I can study anatomy and I can study histological studies by researchers like Taylor. They studied the foreskin and they found the structure, Taylor found the structure, in the foreskin called the ridged band. That’s like this wrinkled section of skin that goes around the foreskin. That’s where all those Meissner’s corpuscles reside in.

The studies Taylor did, he found that that rich band and the frenulum band underneath, the frenulum band is that piece of skin. It’s almost like a rubber band. It helps the foreskin go back forward when it’s not in use. Those are the most sensitive parts of the penis. Those are all cut off during circumcision. So the most sensitive part of a guy that’s been circumcised, cut is around the circumcision scar of the penis. That’s what he’s got left. That’s where the nerve endings stop. It’s called neurotmesis. Its death of the nerve endings there. That’s where they can feel.

[0:34:14] Ashley James: So, the argument is that doesn’t having a foreskin mean you have a really dirty penis that is more prone to infection? Doesn’t not having a foreskin make it easier to keep a penis clean?

[0:34:32] Anthony Losquadro: I always like to say a joke when somebody tells me that. I think guys that say that, they have an over-exaggerated sense of how well-endowed they are. They think that their penis is so big it might take an hour to clean it. I mean, seriously, if you take a shower once in a while or a bath or maybe some guys just use baby wipes, I don’t know. It’s not that hard to keep it clean. Once you clean it it stays clean for quite a while. I have other parts on my body, which we don’t have to get into, they get a lot more dirtier a lot quicker. All right.

Anyhow, we expect guys to brush their teeth. So, if they can brush their teeth they can’t wash their foreskin, which takes like two swipes in the shower. It’s not a big deal.

[0:35:28] Ashley James: I know. It’s a funny argument for, “Well, we should remove the skin because clearly you won’t be able to keep it clean.” It’s just so weird.

[0:35:35] Anthony Losquadro: I mean, yeah. Maybe if your life goal was to be homeless or something where you had no access to taking a bath, maybe then you should be circumcised. By then your teeth are probably falling out and who knows what other problems you have. So, I think the hygiene is just a red herring. It’s laundry list persuasion. Laundry list persuasion is when somebody’s trying to convince you of something and they throw so many different things at you that individually they have no merit behind them but they hope that the sum of all of zeroes adds up to something.

[0:36:22] Ashley James: Sounds like a pediatrician trying to make a profit, make a boat payment or something. So you said there’s four powers of the foreskin. One being pleasure. We just talked about that. That by removing foreskin. You’re removing 20,000 nerve endings and most of the sensation of a penis we’re basically removing the ability to fully feel. That’s really really sad. I imagine that’s something very similar to happens to female children when there’s female circumcision. That many of their, if not most of the nerve endings, are removed. Again, both situations I feel are barbaric. So, we’re removing the ability to fully feel and have pleasure, which we know in today’s age it’s 2020. We know that having fully feeling pleasure with our partner is not sinful. It’s beautiful. It helps to create a wonderful intimate loving relationship. It’s part of that. It’s part of a healthy relationship with our partner.

So, that’s pleasure has been severely stunted. Now, protection is the next one. How is protection removed when we remove the foreskin?

[0:37:43] Anthony Losquadro: Well, the foreskin keeps, it’s like the eyelid protects the eye. The foreskin is a cover over the end of the penis that keeps it protected, it keeps the skin underneath moist and supple. There is also some antibacterial properties that the foreskin contains. There are cells called Langerhans cells. They emit a substance that is antibacterial. Again, that’s nature kind of programming this all into the mix there.

[0:38:16] Ashley James: Wow. So, we’re removing part of the immune system that protects the penis?

[0:38:23] Anthony Losquadro: Unfortunately, yeah. Langerhans cells in the foreskin that have an immune function. They’re like sentries. They’re early alert sentries. If an invader, a pathogen comes in and presents itself to that area that it alerts the immune system to respond.

[0:38:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Are there any studies or any data where we’re seeing that men who are intact with their foreskin have less occurrences of UTIs or penile cancer or any kind of infections versus those who have had their foreskin removed?

[0:39:02] Anthony Losquadro: I think when we look at European studies, we don’t see any difference intact men and men that have been cut. When you’ve been circumcised that mucosa tissue becomes keratinized and dried out. So that thick layer, that thick leathery skin that forms it’s more like skin on the rest of your body instead of being sensitive mucosa tissue. That forms a more denser barrier to infections perhaps. The foreskin in it of itself, we don’t see much difference. I don’t think that men that are intact have lower rates of STDs, but I don’t think they have higher rates either.

[0:39:45] Ashley James: Okay. So, that’s not even a point for anyone to bring up because I know that some doctors say that those who are circumcised have slightly less chance of getting HIV. Has that come up for in your research?

[0:40:03] Anthony Losquadro: It comes up all the time because the press has hyped it and the researchers that did the studies have hyped it. Yeah. Those studies, there’s only three of them that were done. There was one done in Rakai, Uganda; Kisumu, Kenya and Orange Farm, South Africa. There’s only three studies. These things have gone on and on since they were done around 2009-2010. They’re highly highly disputed by a number of academics and a number of doctors. You have to understand, these researchers who did this, they got millions and millions and millions of dollars for themselves and the institutions they work for in terms of grants from the Gates Foundation and from US government. Back then, this is before the advent really of antiretroviral drugs that is really bringing HIV under control. Before that they didn’t have that. They gave them all this money to do something. They concocted these studies. If you read their press releases they’ll say they’re gold-standard studies.

When you look into their data and you look into their methodology it’s so flawed that the only reason why they got away with this is most people don’t understand it and I’ll give you an example. In one mistake, take one study so let’s say the study participants were 3000 men. So, you have 1500 that we’re going to be intact and you had 1500 that were going to be circumcised. Well, first of all you have to convince 1500 men to get circumcised, right? Because you have to tell them upfront they’re going to have a benefit. What are you going to them if the study showed no benefit? “Sorry, we took your foreskin off for no reason.” So, you take these circumcised men. Now, the intact man they said okay go back home and live your life and do whatever. Then the circumcised men they couldn’t have sex for the first month, two months, three months maybe even because they’re healing.

Then the study is supposed to go say a year and a half. I don’t have the original time frame of the study but they stopped the study short. They stopped the study like after six months. So, the guy had surgery they were only exposed for a very short period of time. What makes these studies so fraudulent is that all three studies they stopped. They cut them. They stopped the study in half the amount of time it was supposed to be. They claimed it was due to ethical reasons that they had to offer circumcision to the intact group before they caught HIV.

[0:42:48] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so – I can’t believe it.

[0:42:55] Anthony Losquadro: They pre-baked the outcome of the study. Then what they did is they press release, big press releases. “Circumcision we reduced it by 60%. Wow, isn’t that amazing? The millions of dollars you gave us wasn’t that so well spent.” They don’t even tell you the 60% number is actually an absolute reduction from 2% to 1.2%, but they couldn’t say that because that’s not a great press release. So they say, “We reduced it by 50% – 60%. It’s amazing. It’s like a vaccine. We should be doing this. Give us more money. We need to set up clinics to do it now.” Unfortunately, these poor Africans are being pressured into doing this and it still goes on to this day. The US government continues to fund these programs. They actually pay people in the community to go out and be like recruiters to get men to come to the clinics to get circumcised. They’ll set up soccer teams. You can’t participate on the soccer team unless you get circumcised.

Now, they just realize that the botched rate is like becoming off the chart. Many young African babies are being botched for life from this program. So, now they may even be moving away from doing it to the babies. All this stuff’s going on in Africa. There are some groups, intactivists in Africa, that are starting to get organized and fight back against this. If American parents are thinking that’s a reason to circumcise their son they really need to learn more about this.

[0:44:39] Ashley James: Well, just wear a condom. If you’re worried about HIV wear a condom. Only have intimacy with your partner after you’ve both been tested. I mean, just take precautions. Take a few steps but don’t cut off your son’s half of his genital because you think it might prevent him from catching HIV one day. That’s planning for bad parenting right there.

[0:45:08] Anthony Losquadro: It’s sad. If somebody is in a high-risk group then they should take antiretroviral drugs like PrEP. That will give them much much more protection than circumcision ever possibly could.

[0:45:22] Ashley James: Wow. Okay. So, you look into the studies and you see that it’s totally botched studies and just made-up exacerbated numbers so they can make money. It’s all about the money. It’s really really sad.

[0:45:39] Anthony Losquadro: If you’re a professor in an academic institution, your career is based on how many grants you can bring into that institution. Professors and these academics need to constantly be publishing and they constantly need to be trying to get grants. They found a nice juicy target with circumcising Africans.

[0:46:03] Ashley James: This is just sick and sad. All right. So, by removing foreskin we remove pleasure, 20,000 nerve endings, most of the sensation of the penis. We are removing the protection. There is a whole immune system that we are removing. Talk about lubrication. I never knew. So, it’s actually a like a mucosa like you said it’s almost like an eyelid where it’s like a kind of mucosa tissue?

[0:46:34] Anthony Losquadro: It’s a mucosa tissue. It’s naturally moist. The technical name is exudate. There’s a liquid that kind of leaks out from the skin and it provides zone emollients and moisture to both the head of the penis and to the foreskin itself to keep the skin moist and supple.

[0:46:57] Ashley James: And clean. Isn’t that also kind of like a self-cleaning mechanism like females have?

[0:47:05] Anthony Losquadro: Well, it sheds dead skin cells and the individual has to clean it. Just like all parts of your skin, you’re constantly shedding skin cells. If you don’t wash it for a long time, many many days maybe as long as a week, you would produce a substance, again I use you figuratively I don’t mean you personally. I’m from New York and that’s just the way I talk. Everybody’s a you.

[0:47:37] Ashley James: Yeah. A you.

[0:47:40] Anthony Losquadro: It would produce a substance called smegma, which is the thing everybody jokes about. That’s the emollients and the substances after they go rancid if you’ve never washed it for a very long period of time. That could get a little gross, but hey, you don’t brush your teeth you’re going to get gingivitis and your teeth will fall out too. So, it’s just a normal function of the body, which is a very easy thing to clean.

[0:48:07] Ashley James: All right. So, it keeps it moist and lubricated. So, removing that makes the skin, like you said, it becomes scar tissue, becomes hard and dense almost like leather. That’s just wrong. Okay, connection. You talk about connection. Why does removing the foreskin remove connection?

[0:48:29] Anthony Losquadro: Well, this is kind of an intangible part of having this anatomical function, a feature. It’s being connected with your partner, intact body to intact body. All that sensation. You’re both connected that way. It’s the way nature intended us to be. Circumcision interferes with that. Somebody said, “You can’t change form without changing function.” This is the way the penis was designed to function and go together with the vagina. This is the way everything works together. That’s the connection that two people can have.

[0:49:15] Ashley James: I wonder, I mean this would be kind of an interesting study to look at the numbers, but I wonder if men who are circumcised have higher rates of rape or violence or just there’s something missing. There’s something missing from their body and from their experience and maybe they’re unable to get over that frustration of not having what their bodies meant to have. I just wonder if there’s a, I don’t want to say correlation, but just statistically if men who are intact or more at peace with their body than men who aren’t?

[0:49:57] Anthony Losquadro: Well, I’m not a psychologist so just speaking on a speculative basis. I think when you look at sexual abusers or predators, I think one of the things that’s in their background is they were in turn abused in their past and they were repeating that. When you take a baby or you take a young child and you cut off part of their body, you tell them that you don’t respect their body, their integrity, their autonomy. We’re in this “me too” era now. One of the questions that comes up is how do we expect young men or men in general to respect a woman’s body, to respect a woman’s space and a woman’s dignity when they themselves weren’t respected or their own bodies were altered. Their genitals no less. In a sense really, although it’s not an intentional abuse, it’s a form of abuse. It’s happened to them.

[0:51:05] Ashley James: If you were to take that exact same statement though and talk about a female genital mutilation, if you were to say that, we would say 100%, every listener would say, “Yeah. Female genital mutilation is abuse.” It is barbaric and it’s abusive. I don’t care if it’s part of someone’s culture. Things got to change. So, we need to look that yeah, if that same procedure is happening to a boy, to a girl it’s just the same. You’re doing it to a newborn baby. It’s eight-pound baby. We’re cutting, we’re mutilating their genitals. What are we thinking? What are we doing? We need to start questioning the status quo because if we just go through the baby mill of going to a hospital and just doing what everything our doctor wants us to do, they’re doing a lot of for-profit stuff to our newborn babies that are not helping them. Removing part of their genitals is one of them.

So, we need to, as parents, ask questions and stand up for ourselves and demand more from our society, demand a better look at what we’re doing to newborn babies. I just think this is just crazy.

[0:52:40] Anthony Losquadro: It is. It’s insane.

[0:52:42] Ashley James: You talk about botched jobs. This is where it gets kind of sad, really sad. But I was just reading on Facebook. I was just reading actually a friend of a friend was posting about how she’s a great mom and she regrets so heavily. She regrets the day that she circumcised her son. They botched it. He will never have use of his penis. That blew my mind. He’s like five years old. They botched it to the point where he’ll never be able to have sex. I couldn’t believe that that that actually happens right now, in this day and age, here in the United States. So, can you tell us a bit about statistics and the risks that go into having a circumcision?

[0:53:42] Anthony Losquadro: There unfortunately happens more often than people realize. Often times it gets swept under the carpet. The parents that are party, they’ve been also victims of this because what happened to their son. They want to kind of put it onto the carpet. The hospitals, they’ll just pay off some malpractice settlement deal in court just to make it go away, but it happens quite frequently. I can tell you, there was a study done in Utah using the all claims database, which is an insurance database. If you do study off the all claims database that’s considered one of the best sources of data. Researchers there found an 11.5% serious complication rate from circumcision. If you’re a pediatric urologist, the biggest job you have is repairing circumcision complications.

[0:54:42] Ashley James: 11.5% of boys, of baby boys, newborn baby boys have some form of complication. What do these complications look like? I mean, disfigurement. Are they actually slicing off, accidentally slicing off half the penis? What is the complication?

[0:55:04] Anthony Losquadro: Complications run the gamut. It could be excessive hemorrhaging or bleeding during the procedure. It could be removal of too much skin. It could be misapplication of the circumcision clamp that causes gouges or actually amputates some or all of the penis because obviously a baby is so small. If the doctor is off even a millimeter or so with this clamping device which crushes the foreskin. He can crush not only the foreskin but part of the penis.

[0:55:37] Ashley James: So, 20,000 nerve endings are being crushed in a newborn baby?

[0:55:41] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Yeah. They’re removing the whole foreskin. So, these complications can also be infection. There could be complications that develop later on in life called meatal stenosis. Stenosis is a medical term meaning narrowing of a particular part. What happens is the urethra, which is the part that you urinate through, because of the scar tissue can tend to increase with time. You can have difficulty having urination baby or the male or the older male, mature male can have. They have to go in and kind of roto-rooter that out somehow.

So, not only did the baby have to go through all this pain and trauma to begin with, now he’s got to have to go through corrections and revisions and sutures. He’s not going to have a penis that looked like the one that nature gave them. He’s going to have one that doctors had to do reconstructive surgery on. You’re talking as much as like over 100,000 botchers a year. Botchers complications a varying degree. There’s a case going on in New York right now that I was initially consulted on. One doctor did severe damage to babies’, two different babies, penises using a type of circumcision clamp called a Mogen clamp, which is still widely in use. This has the highest malpractice rate of all the circumcision devices yet hospitals continue to use it. This doctor botched two babies in a row, severe that part of the head of their penis is missing.

There was a baby down in Georgia where they amputated the whole entire penis with that device and they didn’t tell the mother. Get this. The doctor wrapped the baby up and said, “Okay. Take him home.” The mother took the baby home. This was a baby of color so I guess they felt that they could take advantage of this situation, maybe she wouldn’t realize it. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. The mother took the baby to the emergency room and part of the penis was missing. The doctors put it in their refrigerator.

[0:58:09] Ashley James: What?

[0:58:12] Anthony Losquadro: So, this is one of the most egregious cases of current history. This was Stacey Willis. You can google it. This was highly reported. She ended up with a huge insurance judgment, huge court judgment. But money is never going to replace what this child has to go through, what kind of life is he going to have with his genitals missing.

[0:58:40] Ashley James: Yeah. I keep coming back to compare it to a woman. We wouldn’t do this to a woman. Why are we doing this to men? Both men and women should have equal rights when it comes to choosing. They should be able to choose. I’m so happy you’re doing the work you’re doing because these babies, these newborn babies, do not have a voice. The parents are being pressured because the doctors and the hospitals want to make money. That is sick and wrong. I know more and more parents are waking up and learning about this. So, I’m happy you’re doing the work you’re doing to allow people to know.

My husband gave me permission right before this interview. I think it’s a sensitive topic. I told him I’ll tell the story without mentioning him. He said, “No, it’s okay.” Because he said it would kind of be weird if I told the story with saying a friend of mine. He goes, “It’s fine. You could tell them my story.” So, he has had issues his whole life. He’s 51 now. He has had issues his whole life and not known that it was because his foreskin was removed. Then about five or six years ago, I discovered medium.com. I think it was kind of newish or new to me. So, we were looking at medium.com as a place for me to write some health articles. My husband was looking over my shoulder and we’re both looking at the computer screen. He says, “Check this website out. It’s really cool. Medium.com. It’s a place where you can go and publish articles.”

So, I went to it and of course the first thing I click on is the health section. I’m like, “Let’s look to see what the top health article is.” We click on it and the top article was not only about circumcision but about regrowing your foreskin. I thought it was a joke because that just sounds like, “What do you mean regrowing? Why would you even? Why would you want foreskin? Wasn’t it a good thing to have it removed?” So, we click on it and start reading. It was a very detailed article about how men, when you have your foreskin removed, you’ve lost the 20,000 nerve endings. You’ve lost pretty much all the sensation, but you’ve also lost this protection. Always having the organ, the head of the penis, touching things like touching your underwear, just touching stuff all the time is making it less and less sensitive. It’s sort of desensitizing it.

Part of the function of the foreskin is to protect it so it doesn’t become desensitized. Even though you said most of the nerve endings are in the foreskin, but still there’s something that happens when the head is constantly touching things. So, it says that by regrowing your foreskin you can regain some of that. It kind of happened right around the same time that we saw those men who were protesting in San Diego. That helped us look into it further and look into the negatives of having your foreskin removed. He kind of got angry. He said, “I was never asked.” He started to process the emotions about it. It was really interesting to watch him talk about it and process it. He was so upset that he never had a choice and he’s had this lifelong problem with having it removed. It’s affected the quality of his life. Not our relationship because he’s done a lot of emotional work, but in his past, his past marriage, it caused a lot of stress. He ended up internalizing it and he ended up feeling shame and guilt. He ended up feeling less than and insufficient as a person.

So, having your foreskin removed can severely affect, because I’ve seen it happen in him, can severely affect your identity and who you are as a person. I thought that was really interesting. So, he did a lot of therapeutic work around it. He’s really wonderful. His process has been wonderful. He ended up going through with this device that you can actually regrow or try to grow some more foreskin basically. So he’s got partially the way there and it significantly changed having regrown some. He’ll never have those nerve endings like you said but he actually did, he did grow some with this device that you wear that kind of stretches the skin and protects the penis. He noticed a really big difference in the sensation and in his problem. His problem started to become a less of a problem. The function, the functionality of it. So, I thought that was really interesting. Have you looked at the movement to regrow foreskin?

[1:04:20] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. I mean, that’s admirable that your husband was first of all able to acknowledge that there was an issue and then respond to it in a positive manner. There are many men that are doing foreskin restorations. It’s the term that it’s called. There are a number of devices available online that can assist guys who want to do this. Foreskin restoration is the means of or the process of placing gentle tension on the skin of the penis to make the skin grow back again. One of the amazing things about skin is if you put tension on it like as if a lady is pregnant, she’s going to get more skin around her belly to accommodate that growing baby inside.

So, the same thing happens. Doctors or surgeons will call that skin expansion. When they have to do reconstructive surgery they will also do that. So, it’s a proven process as crazy as it sounds. It is a proven process. Men can regrow their foreskin. It does take time, it does take patience and it does take perseverance, but it can be done. Guys have done it. There’s also stages of restoration. For some guys just doing a little bit so they can get a little more slack sliding skin when they have an erection instead of for a man that had a circumcision and too much skin was removed so when he has in erections it’s like an overt taut, overblown balloon. It’s very uncomfortable. By regrowing some of the skin you can regain some of that, remove some of the tension on the skin during erection and it can have more comfortable sex.

So, for some guys that’s enough. Then some guys want to continue all the way because they want the head of the penis covered all the time. They want more sliding skin. I think psychologically, they want to kind of take back what was taken from them. So, even though they don’t have all the nerve endings at least – some guys that do this successfully, doctors can’t even tell that they were circumcised before. That’s how authentic-looking it is. They grow the skin too back. It hugs the head of the penis just like an intact guy and it would fool anybody. But that’s a longer process to do that. So, there’s a range, a whole host of devices and extent that somebody wants to purchase. People or guys may pursue foreskin restoration, but it is done. I think, from what I read online, more and more guys are getting into it. It’s fortunate that these things were developed because there are millions and millions of cut men out there that are having issues. This is something that can help them.

[1:07:18] Ashley James: Right. Well, I mean it doesn’t give them back the tens of thousands of nerves. It doesn’t give them back the mucosa protection. It doesn’t give them back everything, but it does give them back something. My husband has grown about 25% of it back. He had a huge, I mean it just really made a big difference for him. He just wore this device on and off for the last few years. I was really happy to see that it made such a difference for him but not only for him in performing in the bedroom. It wasn’t even about that, although that increased for him. It was actually I noticed something in him all the time. That something about having it feeling intact, feeling more intact like you said it was about reclaiming what was taken.

So, it really, it affected him outside of the bedroom. It gave him a sense of completion. I mean you’d have to talk to him but it was just absolutely there is a shift that happened for him when he started to do foreskin restoration. This shouldn’t have to be. Foreskin restoration shouldn’t even have to exist because we shouldn’t be taking it away from men in the first place or women. Circumcision is harmful and barbaric. It is killing babies both female and male causing things like excessive bleeding, lifetime disfigurement. I mean that is just sick and wrong. The fact that over 100,000 babies in the United States have these complications. That’s incredible. It’s being swept under the rug because it’s all about the profits.

So, we have to look where the money is look, look where the money’s going and look at the actual information and make up our minds. Anthony, tell us about your organization. Tell us what is it you guys do besides getting on podcasts and sharing this information, what does the organization do?

[1:09:33] Anthony Losquadro: What we do is educational advocacy. We need to get all of this information that we found and that we’ve become excited about learning and try to impart that information and that knowledge and that excitement into other people. So, what interaction, one of the biggest things we do is we do public events where we have a mobile unit and we have exhibits. We have an exhibit on the bizarre history of American circumcision that we discussed and we touched on and how it got started in America with Kellogg and Sayre and all these people. We have these public exhibits out like that. We have in a 3D diorama that’s interactive that people can see what doctors actually do to babies in a hospital when they circumcise them and they put the baby in this contraption that the babies spread-eagle in. It’s really like baby waterboarding. They have the baby’s arms and legs tied down spread-eagle. Then we show them the clamps that are used. All the various equipment identical as if it was happening in a hospital procedure room. So, we have exhibits like that.

We have all kinds of literature that we give out. Some literature for parents of intact children that they can give to their son. It’s age-appropriate. We do it actually as like a comic strip. It helps give young men that are intact confidence about their own natural body. That they have all these natural advantages and features that guys that are cut don’t have and that their parents were really – they should be thankful to their parents for keeping them intact. So, we have this type of literature that we give out.

The biggest thing we do is we talk to people face-to-face. We just don’t sit behind computers and social media. We like to get out into the public and talk to people face-to-face, listen to their questions. I consider it like a big ongoing focus group. We hear about all these different stories. We hear from people from all walks of life, all different types of religions and faiths and cultures and what they do in their home country or what happened to them in America. We hear all these different stories. We have a great interactions with the public. Most of the time it’s very rewarding in what people come and tell us. People could thank us for being out there or glad somebody’s doing this. They support us. They give us donations. They help fund.

We run a vehicle so we have to pay gas and insurance and all those kind of things. We have to print our materials. We’re all volunteers. I’m a volunteer. I’m an unpaid volunteer. Even though I’m the founder and director this isn’t a business for me. This is a passion. Passion that I want to help the next generation of people. All of the directors on our board, same situation. They want to protect the next generation of children so what happened to them doesn’t happen to someone else. So we get all this. We know that we’re saving thousands of kids and they’ll never know who we are and we’ll never know who they are. It’s happening. Circumcision rates are dropping and we’re just out there spreading the word.

[1:13:09] Ashley James: The next time you see the, what did you call those men that protest that travel around the world or travel around the United States protesting?

[1:13:16] Anthony Losquadro: They are the blood-stained men. They’re a great group.

[1:13:19] Ashley James: The next time you see the blood-stained men, tell them that back in 2014, it was either early 2015 or late 2014, in San Diego. I could still see him in my mind holding that sign. So, just thank them for me. It sparked this conversation. That’s actually another reason why my husband wanted to do foreskin restoration. When we decided to not circumcise our son, which was a very easy choice to make to not circumcise once we spent only a short time looking at this information. It just made so much sense to let a baby keep all the body parts it was born with. One of the reasons why he wanted to do foreskin restoration was so that by the time our son was old enough to ask questions, he wouldn’t say, “Why do I look different from you? Why do we look so different? So, I thought that was interesting.”

My husband asked his mom, our son’s grandmother, “Why did you get me circumcised?” She said, “It was so that you would look the same as your father.” I thought that was really interesting. I mean back then, like you said, they took the babies away. There was not really a choice back then, but now we do. Now we can advocate and we do have a choice now. So, for those who choose to not circumcise their children and if the husbands are worried that they look so much different because they’re cut and they’re circumcised and their son isn’t, the foreskin restoration might be an avenue for them so that they end up both looking the same. If that was a cause for concern. So, it’s going in on the other direction.

I’d like you to thank those men for me for sparking this whole path for our family. I can’t imagine the amount of guilt that I’d feel as a mother if I had circumcised. I can’t imagine the guilt that parents feel who circumcised and then discovered all this information afterward. It’s so hard as a parent. I mean I’m constantly struggling with the guilt of you try to do something like oh they act up and you put them in a timeout or you yell or something and then you’re like, “Did I do that right? Am I a good parent?” We’re constantly questioning whether we’re doing things right or not. I just want to say to all the parents that did circumcise, you are doing the best you can with all the resources you have. You did the best. You could with all the resources you had at the time. This isn’t about guilt and this isn’t about shaming you are guilting you. Hopefully though, you can take this information and move forward with it. Your future children or your grandchildren or your nieces and nephews and cousins and hopefully you can help spread this information and help protect future babies.

Anthony, how did you deal with the guilt after you learned about it? Did you not circumcise? Did you know all this information before you had your children?

[1:16:38] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Absolutely. My son is intact. I had the fortunate opportunity of having this information ahead of time and knowing about people that great intactivists like a lady by the name of Marilyn Milos from California, who is an early early pioneering advocate on this issue. So, what we find is that just people, parents whether it’s myself, anybody, they just need a little bit of information, just a shred just to get them thinking about it. Once you do that, they realize, “Why would I cut off part of my son’s body? It’s the most insane thing.” That’s all they need. Just like you saw the blood-stained man in San Diego. You just needed that a little bit of a push to say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Then you realize, “Hey, there’s no reason to be doing this.” That’s all we need to do. If any of your listeners, anybody out there, if you’re having a baby, you know someone’s having a baby or a friend, family member just say, “Hey, you should look into the circumcision issue.” That way when they’re in that delivery room or wherever they’re having their baby, they’ll have the information, they’ll have the knowledge and they’ll be able to resist the pressure if it’s from doctors or they’ll just know more. If you know more you can do better.

[1:17:56] Ashley James: If you know more you can do better. Now, when our son was a newborn I realized quickly that I had no idea how to keep his penis clean being a woman, first of all, but my husband didn’t know how to keep it clean because he didn’t have a foreskin. So, the two of us were like worried like how do you keep this thing clean? Instead of me telling the listeners, is there any advice you’d like to give or let people know how can you help a baby, who is intact, who has not been circumcised, how do you keep a baby boy clean? Because we have to obviously change diapers like 12 times a day. So, how do you keep it clean? How do you make sure – you don’t pull the skin back. You don’t like wash it. How do you keep it clean?

[1:18:51] Anthony Losquadro: This is a really important thing. I’m glad you brought it up because we almost missed it. You don’t do anything. That’s the most important thing to remember. You just wipe the outside with a baby wipe or whatever you’re using. Do not by any means pull back the foreskin. Do not allow any caregivers or doctors or nurses to pull it back because on a young infant or a young child, if that is pulled back it will tear the skin underneath. There is a sealed membrane under there. Nature sealed it up so nothing can get in there. If somebody pulls it back it’s going to tear, it’s going to bleed and it’s going to be causation of scar tissue potentially and then later on in life that guy may get a condition known as phimosis, which is a foreskin that doesn’t retract because the scar tissue is not stretchy, it’s not flexible.

So, the thing to do with the baby is nothing. You don’t pull it back. You just leave it alone. You clean the outside. That’s all that it needs.

[1:20:04] Ashley James: I remember finding an article. I remember lying in bed, exhausted. Having given birth and just thinking, “How am I going to clean this? What do I do? How do I change a diaper?” I found this great article explaining exactly step-by-step what to do, what not to do. It said, treat it like it’s a finger. Clean it like it’s a finger. Obviously, you’re not going to pull the cuticle back and pull your skin off your finger to clean it. You don’t want to harm the cuticle of the finger. You just wash it or just clean it. That’s it. Then leave it alone.

So, I remember having to tell, like at one point we had a babysitter. I had to tell her because she didn’t know that either. So, yeah. Not only do you need to know this but you have to actually tell everyone that’s going to change your son’s diaper to not pull it back because I think the instinct is well we’re supposed to clean this part but you actually would be incredibly damaging the organ as if you were peeling the skin off of a finger. It would be very very damaging. So, it’s actually easier to take care of then than a circumcised baby. It’s easier to take care of. You just wipe it and that’s it, just leave it alone. There’s no chance of a botched or anything like from circumcision. So, it’s actually less maintenance. There’s no concern.

I remember when our son was maybe six months old he said it hurt. Oh no, he was a little bit older because he was able to talk. Let’s see. Maybe he was a year old. He expressed that it hurt to pee and I looked at his penis and it was red. So, we got him in a warm salt bath because I talked with a midwife about it who also had a son who was not cut. She said, “Yeah. That can happen sometimes. There can be a little bit of a irritation or maybe a little bit of a beginning of an infection.” So, I got him in a warm saltwater bath once and that’s all he needed and then it went away. I’ve heard that it could happen. Have you heard of this? When a young boy, if it gets irritated or infected, have you heard about doing a salt bath?

[1:22:37] Anthony Losquadro: You could treat it that way. It could be two things. It could be bacterial or it could be yeast or it could just be irritation. So, if it’s a yeast type infection just some antifungal cream would clear it up. If it is a true UTI, then an antibiotic would be given by a pediatrician. It could be that. It’s uncommon, but it can happen. It can happen with cut boys too. It’s just one of the things who stay on wet diapers and they’re constantly going. So, we try to stay on top of it and keep them clean, but sometimes the yeast, the bacteria wins.

[1:23:20] Ashley James: Right. Right. So, just like you said it could happen with a cut boy just like with a not cut boy. I guess there’s fear there for parents who have never been around an uncircumcised penis. That they’re doing it wrong or that there’s a more of a chance that it could become infected. So, you’re saying just keep it clean. You don’t need to pull the foreskin back and you’re good. Those are the two things to know.

[1:23:44] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. You absolutely don’t want to pull it back. That’s called forced retraction. The only one who should be pulling it back would be the boy when he matures and becomes a certain age where he’s going to naturally notice that, “Hey look, it goes back.” That may happen at five years old. It may happen at eight years old. It may happen during puberty. Everybody’s different, but it will naturally start to retract on its own.

[1:24:07] Ashley James: It’s his right and it’s his body to choose when he does that. That’s between him and himself. No one else.

[1:24:17] Anthony Losquadro: Yeah. Yeah. One day he’ll just notice, “Hey. It goes back.” Then he’ll just normally wash it when he bathes. He can pull it back himself and wash it and then everything will be fine. But before that it’s like a sealed up unit. There’s a membrane in there that’s all sealed. Keeps all the dirt and everything out of there.

[1:24:35] Ashley James: That’s cool. So, we don’t have to worry about it as parents because by the time it comes back, he’s old enough to do it himself. We got to tell him like, “Hey, once it comes back you got to clean it.”

[1:24:47] Anthony Losquadro: Right.

[1:24:48] Ashley James: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you really love to make sure you cover?

[1:24:55] Anthony Losquadro: No. I think we had a good discussion here.

[1:25:06] Ashley James: We got it all? Okay. Awesome.

[1:25:17] Anthony Losquadro: I’m going to say your last name again. I’m going to write this down this time. I’ll edit this part out. Is it Losquadro?

[1:25:18] Ashley James: Losquadro. Okay. Anthony Losquadro, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I feel like we covered a really important topic. The fact that you’re spreading this information, educating parents is wonderful. I really encourage listeners to donate if they can, to spread your information, to go to your website intaction.org. That’s intaction.org. Check out everything that Anthony’s doing. Can they follow you? Are you big on social media? How do people stay connected or learn more?

[1:25:59] Anthony Losquadro: We’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter and we have a pretty good YouTube channel and that’s growing. We’re getting more and more into YouTube videos. So, become a subscriber to our YouTube channel. Come to our website. Join up as a member, get on our mailing list. We don’t spam you. We won’t spam you. We don’t send a lot of emails out, but you keep up to date what’s going on with us, what’s going on with the issues. We have good resources available there.

[1:26:30] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony, for coming on the show today and spreading this information. Hopefully we’ve touched some lives and there’ll be babies born with their skin intact and they’ll keep it intact and they will never know that maybe this conversation is what helped spark that. But it’ll be wonderful to know that there’s a ripple going out right now. A ripple that is going to affect thousands and thousands of future boys to be able to live a full life with all their body parts.

[1:27:02] Anthony Losquadro: Ashley, it’s a great feeling. As we like to say, “It’s foreskin for the win.”

[1:27:07] Ashley James: “Foreskin for the win.”

[1:27:10] Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? How we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program. And it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information.

We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctors’ offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There are so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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407 Transcending the Human Drama, Heal Your Relationship with Yourself, Letting Go of The Unconscious Belief That You Are Broken or Less Than, Learn To Quiet The Mind Chatter, Truly Love Yourself, Connect to Source, and Be in the Flow, Kerri Hummingbird 0

Jan 24, 2020

407 Transcending the Human Drama, Heal Your Relationship with Yourself, Letting Go of The Unconscious Negative Belief That You Are Broken or Less Than, Learn To Quiet The Mind Chatter, Truly Love Yourself, Connect to Source, and Be in the Flow with Kerri Hummingbird

"Your thumbprint is a reminder that you have a unique life journey, and only you can explore it. If you don't discover yourself, no one ever will." Kerri Hummingbird

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

Free gift from Kerri: Love Mastery Game http://www.kerrihummingbird.com/play

Heal Your Relationship With Yourself

https://www.learntruehealth.com/heal-your-relationship-with-yourself

Highlights:

How to heal your relationship with yourself
How to let go of the mind chatter and negative self-talk
How to shift the mindset
What the listening piece is
How important support is
How to practice self-mastery, emotional mastery and spiritual mastery
What the Skills Not Pills movement is

In this episode, Kerri Hummingbird shares with us how she healed her relationship with herself, how switching from judgment to curiosity opened up new possibilities in her life. She also shares with us that staying away from the negative environment and surrounding yourself with positive people that believes your story helps in healing yourself.

[0:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. It’s so beautiful. We get into some beautiful healing of the heart and the mind and the spirit. It’s very motivational, uplifting and deep. I just think it’s so so beautiful. I’m really excited to bring you this interview today.

I really have some exciting news for those who love the magnesium soak. If you have never heard of this and you’re like, “What magnesium soak? What are you talking about?” Go back and listen to my interviews with Kristen Bowen. You can search them easily by going to LearnTrueHealth.com and searching magnesium or searching magnesium soak or searching Kristen Bowen. I have a little search bar at the top of my website and you can find all my podcasts easily that way. Since this is episode 407, there’s 406 other episodes that you can search through and find.

My interviews with Kristen Bowen are totally mind-blowing. Just to give you a little snapshot, she was I think it was 87 pounds or 97 pounds in a wheelchair having 30 seizures a day, unable to really talk her advocate for herself. That was her lowest point. I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t heard her story. It’s really rad. You have to listen to it. It’s pretty crazy. I love how she shares it. So go back and listen to our first interview.

One of her biggest tools was soaking in undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea. Now, we absorb 20 grams of magnesium through our skin when it is delivered this way. You can put it in a foot basin or put it in your bathtub and people notice such great results. In fact, there’s over 2,000 listeners who have purchased the jugs and have used them over the last year. I’ve shared, there’s hundreds of testimonials in the Learn True Health Facebook group about the magnesium soak. It’s really amazing.

Magnesium is the most important mineral in our body, 1800 processes, enzymatic processes, require magnesium. It’s the first mineral we become deficient in. So, things begin to break weird symptoms headaches, fatigue, hormone disruption, inability to fully metabolize toxins. The list goes on and on. Sleep disruption and muscle aches and pains and also restless legs, twitching of your eyelid, twitching of your muscles. These are all symptoms of magnesium deficiency, but there are over 200 symptoms of magnesium deficiency. So, I’m not going to list all of them but you can definitely listen to my interviews with Kristen Bowen to learn more.

Now, she offers the Learn True Health listeners 10% off of her magnesium soak, which is really generous of her to always give us a bit of a discount. Once in a while, she throws a big special, which is what she’s doing right now. From today until January 30^th, Kristen Bowen is giving us a jar of her muscle cream, her magnesium muscle cream, which is highly concentrated magnesium in the cream. It is all-natural ingredients, it’s very safe, it’s a non-toxic and it is my favorite cream. I’ve used all kinds of natural pain creams. This one’s my favorite. You rub it on your neck if you ever have tension and the tension melts away. If you ever get a headache it is so soothing. It really really really works. She’s giving it. It’s a $36 jar and she’s giving it for free as a gift when you buy a jug of the magnesium soak.

You go to LearnTrueHealth.com/freecream, that’s LearnTrueHealth.com/freecream from now until January 30^th. Then once you hit “Add to Cart,” make sure that you use coupon code LTH, that’s really important because that makes sure that you get this special and the discount of 10% off. So go to that special link. That’s only going to work from now until January 30^th. If you’re a listener who’s listening to this after January 30^th, stay tuned because Kristen does specials a few times a year for us. You can get on my email list by going to LearnTrueHealth.com. When there’s a big pop up put your email in. I promise not to spam you I send out a few emails a month usually telling listeners about really awesome specials like the ones that Kristen provides for us.

You could also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because anytime Kristen gives us a special, I announce it in the Facebook group as well. So that’s a great place to go to stay on top of these great deals. There’s other health companies that let me know about specials. So I always let you guys know because I love these products.

So, if you’ve been a listener for a while you’ve heard of the products that I use and that have helped me get to the next level in my health. I want to make sure that you guys save as much money as possible. So, anytime I love these products I usually reach out to the company and see if I can get a discount. Usually, they do the coupon code as LTH as in Learn True Health.

Speaking of the coupon code LTH, if you’ve been a listener for a while you’ve heard but if you’re new listener welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here. You should totally join our community by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/group or search Learn True Health on Facebook. It’d be great to have you join our community. I believe we’re up to 3600 members now. It’s a very active and supportive Facebook group that loves to talk about holistic medicine. We’d love to have you there if you’re not already there.

The coupon code LTH can be used to save a huge huge percentage when you join the new Learn True Health membership. This is something I’ve been working on for the last four months. Something that I’ve been thinking about for years actually and kind of planning it. Then I finally stepped into action and we’ve spent the last four months filming these wonderful videos. Every week, I release new lessons. Going to keep growing and growing. The Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership, I designed it with the intention to show you how to cook healthier food and how to increase the amount of nutrition you get from your food. So, if you want to save time and save money and save your health and eat food that’s healing and delicious and nutrient-packed then join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen.

You don’t have to give up your meat, if you want to stay paleo, if you want to stay whatever you’re doing, my goal is to teach you how to eat more whole foods and more plants. Now, if you want to go 100% whole food plant-based and eat this very nutrient-dense cleansing diet, I give you the tools for how to do that. If you just want to add more wonderful fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and whole grains and legumes into your life, you’re going to learn how to do that as well. We are dairy-free, gluten-free and we do teach how to avoid allergens.

We also teach how to make healthy food for kids because I have a small child and Naomi, who’s my friend who we’ve been filming all these wonderful videos with, she has three boys. We also have husbands and so we have many palates that we have to figure out how to provide delicious but healthy foods for. We do that and they’re whole foods so there’s no processed food, there’s no chemicals. You know what? It’s pretty amazing that even the pickiest of children are loving these recipes. So, we teach you how to feed the masses, feed your children, feed your families and feed yourself healthy whole foods and also learn how to cook more efficiently so you’re saving time, you’re saving money.

I can’t believe how much money I’ve saved actually since I started cooking all my meals at home and then packing and taking meals out with me instead of buying food when I’m out. I’m saving a ton of money but I’m also saving a lot of time because I figured out how to cook in a way that saves time because I’m busy like you. Wouldn’t we like to all eat three really healthy meals a day that are delicious that didn’t take us a lot of time to cook? Then notice that the health results come that you have more energy, that you have more mental clarity that you jump out of bed, that you notice aches and pains have gone. Naomi’s mom shares a great story in one of our videos. Her arthritis is gone after eating this way for, I believe she started – it was like she ate this way for six or seven weeks and then was like, “Wow. My arthritis is totally gone. All my pains are gone. My aches and pains are gone.” That’s the kind of wonderful thing that happens when people add more plants to their life. It’s detoxifying, its nutrifiying, it’s anti-inflammatory. So there’s wonderful things you can learn.

Please go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. Use coupon code LTH to get the big listener discount. You could just go to LearnTrueHealth.com and right there at the top of the menu it says “Home Kitchen” and click there. Awesome. If you have any questions at all please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me in Facebook in the Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group or you can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with your friends. I know you’re going to share today’s interview because it really touched my heart and I know it’ll touch yours as well. Enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 407.

[0:09:47] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Kerri Hummingbird on the show. Her website’s KeriHummingbird.com. That’s easy to remember. Kerri with an I. Of course, links to everything that Kerri does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Kerri, I know my listeners are going to love today’s interview. This is going to be one of those really positive, uplifting, inspiring interviews. We’ve had some pretty heavy ones lately so this is going to be a really nice break to help us, to motivate us and release the guilt and the shame and all the negative emotions. Just let it go. You have so many beautiful things to teach us today. I’m just so excited to get started. Welcome to the show.

[0:10:33] Kerri Hummingbird: Thank you so much, Ashley, for having me on. I’m really looking forward to providing as much as I can in service to your listeners.

[0:10:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Before we get started, because we talked a little bit before we hit record, you’re going to teach us so many beautiful things about opening to being present to the flow where your brilliance is, where connection is made and letting go of that mind chatter the negative self-talk. Also discussing the idea of your identity around your diagnosis. We really do take on this idea that we are broken. Letting that go and reinventing what our identity is to see that we are whole, complete and perfect. There’s so many studies showing that your mindset is directly related to your ability to heal or your ability to hold on to illness. So, I love that you’re going to help us to shift our mindset into a healing and really just beautiful peaceful joyful place.

Before we get started though, learning about that, I’m really curious what happened in your life that led you to become an expert in this area teaching us how to transcend the human drama?

[0:11:56] Kerri Hummingbird: Absolutely. Well, I actually find it ironic because I guide people now in their journeys through their psychology, through their consciousness. I do it in an alternative way. I do it in a spiritual way, but that’s not how I started the journey. I actually began the journey through exploring my own psychology, sitting on the couch in weekly psychotherapy sessions. I did that for decades trying to fix myself from this idea that I was broken, that there was something wrong with me that was making me unacceptable to the people that were closest to me, that was making me need to work on myself to be better around them. While some of that was true, there was definitely some self-mastery to learn around how to handle emotional energy, for example.

There was also just a lot of misunderstanding that I experienced in the psychology field around different personal types, different types of people and how they process life experience and maybe even the tools and practices that would support people in better processing their life experience so that they don’t have the sort of behavior that would then get characterized or diagnosed in the various ways that are out there. So, at the beginning of the 20 years, was when I was 15, I had been acting out as I don’t know most teenagers do. In this case, my mom got really scared because I did well what many teenagers today are doing is that I was doing some self-harm. The self-harm that I was doing was dating a lot of boys and I’m really not respecting or honoring myself. That was leading me to feel pretty bad about myself. I’m sure you’ve got some listeners who understand that process. Budding sexuality and this culture and trying to figure out who you are.

My experience was also triggered by my early childhood. So, I think you probably talk about in this show a lot as well. Early childhood experience and how that affects your mental paradigm and your mental conditioning and the kinds of things that come up and surface in your life. I believe now they come up for healing. So, I had an early experience at 15 of that where I felt so low about myself when my dad walked in and caught me at home with a boy that I was being sexual with. I had such an incredible shame about that not only just in the moment but it triggered a lot of other things from my history. I ended up feeling so bad about myself and my dad not wanting to talk to me and wanting me to kind of stay in my room while he processed what happened. That I ended up taking a whole bottle of Tylenol-Codeine.

I ended up going to the hospital, had my stomach pumped. The result of that was my first entry into the psychology field where I had a really excellent psychiatrist actually, which back in the day psychiatrists spoke to you and tried to help you understand yourself. It wasn’t about medicine and medication. He was the first person who started to help me to understand my psychology and the emotional energy that I was processing and what I was doing with it that wasn’t in service of myself.

So there was a long journey of that. As helpful as it was to see this man, it also planted a seed that there was something wrong with me because he gave me a diagnosis. He said, “We’re going to call you manic-depressive. I would call you bipolar but I don’t want to put that on your record.” Now, I’m almost like, “Uh oh.” Like you’re really broken inside. It gave me that idea. It triggered a lot of fear in my mom. So that began a set of stories about me. That there was something really really wrong with me. My mom could instantly see that there were things from my early childhood that were very traumatic that could be responsible for making me broken.

So, it started this whole path. While I am very gifted by everything I’ve learned on that journey thoroughly deeply exploring thought tunnels and self-shame and guilt and all of those things, at the end of the day, what I clearly see now is that labeling people with a diagnosis gives them some temporary sense that they understand what’s happening to them but it also can trap them like a spider traps a fly in a web. It can be very damaging to a person’s psychology to have those kinds of things happen. So, the long story short is after decades of psychotherapy, it wasn’t getting better. Because what am I doing? I’m going into the office and I’m telling my story. I’m just telling the latest version of how I’m broken because the universe keeps sending me more of that, right?

[0:17:30] Ashley James: Because that’s your filter. That’s your belief system about yourself.

[0:17:34] Kerri Hummingbird: That’s my belief system and it’s being reinforced at home with my mom who has a lot of fear and guilt over the early childhood trauma. So, it’s just a story that gets perpetuated. Then I self-perpetuate. Then I chose a partner who shared a lot of the same, I don’t know, personality traits as my mother. So, I just brought more of the same to me for 20 years in that relationship and with these weekly psychotherapy sessions basically saying I’m responsible for all the problems in the family. It’s all me. It’s me. I’m causing all the problems. That is not sustainable for a person. No person can carry the weight of that their entire life and feel good about themselves. Those two you don’t go together.

So, the culmination of that story is that at the very end of all of that paradigm, the diagnosis was I was borderline personality disorder. I can tell you when I looked it up on Wikipedia back in circa 2009 or something, it wasn’t a very friendly description. It’s sort of like you’re like Glenn Close in that movie. Boiling a rabbit in her boyfriend’s home. It was not very kind and it wasn’t true either, but I couldn’t see it then. I didn’t have the self-awareness or the belief in myself because the story was so strong that I was broken and I was the problem in my family that I didn’t see it.

So, it really took me deciding, ironically enough, to be bad to say, “Well, then I guess I’m just bad if after all this time I’m still broken and you can’t fix me and this is the only method you have to fix me. Then I guess I’m just going to be bad.” I left my marriage and I walked out. That first night in my new house I felt instantly better. It was like relief. I’m not going to try that anymore. I’m just done with that.

So, really really quickly what happened, this is the turning point that I really hope the listeners hear. What happened was I stopped believing the authorities about me. I started opening to something bigger that was inside of me. I switched from judgment to curiosity. When I got into curiosity, like I wonder my life might be like without all this judgment? I ended up getting some spiritual teachers that help me guide along that path. I started finding out about all kinds of alternative healing, which I also know you explore in this show which is so exciting. Alternative healing, spiritual healing, energy healing. These were things that I had no concept of before and yet that was exactly the pathway that I got to feeling love within myself, which has been about an eight-year journey now. From the end of my marriage and the rock bottom and I guess I’ll just you know go off in a corner and die to hear where I’m on your show and I’m serving as an inspiration to people.

[0:20:44] Ashley James: I love it. So, when did you first move into your house? Your new house after leaving your husband and walking away – the stories that it’s like you’re walking out of this Jell-O that you’re living in where everything was reinforcing this old belief about you and you walk out of it. Now you’re in your new life switching from judgment to curiosity. When was that? How many years ago was that?

[0:21:15] Kerri Hummingbird: That was 2011 in the summer.

[0:21:20] Ashley James: Since then you have been on this journey of curiosity. I love that you said from judgment to curiosity because it’s in the question. It’s staying in the questions that allow us to stay open and gather more information and go deeper. It’s when we stop asking the questions that we really shut ourselves off from possibility. So, you were like, “What would happen if…” Can you give me some examples of some of the first thoughts that you had that allowed you to dive into curiosity? Some of the first questions.

[0:21:54] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, I think I’ll just go to a metaphor of dieting because I’m sure that a lot of listeners can relate to the idea of dieting. So, in my experience of dieting, if you restrict yourself and you continue to restrict yourself in a punitive way, what ends up happening is sooner or later you bust open the cookie bag and you eat them. You just can’t do it anymore. You just can’t force yourself anymore to punish yourself into compliance with some goal that you have.

So, in the same way, just expand that metaphor into all aspects of your life and that’s what I was experiencing. I had so restricted myself through punishment in this belief that I was broken and I was the problem. I was walking on so many eggshells inside of myself that I was apologizing for my existence at every turn. That led to a place where I just felt so bad about myself that any little bit of attention I got from anybody I would just go for it.

So, at the end of my marriage I was cheating on my husband because men were looking at me and they were attracted and it felt good and it was the only thing that felt good and so I went for it because I’m starving. I’m starving for love. I’m just absolutely starving for love and I need to fill my cup. So, when I decided to be bad, I filled my cup for a while. I had a lot of men on text and getting really full on the attention and like, “Okay. Yeah. This feels really good.” But it wasn’t very long. It was about six months until I got connected with yoga and I went to my first yoga class. My yoga teacher was really cool, of course because I needed it to be cool. He had hair down to his hips. He played Led Zeppelin for vinyasa. I was like, “Now, this is my style. I can do this.” Pretty soon, I got curious about him. I thought, “Huh. He’s his website says he’s a spiritual counselor. Well, I wonder if that’s different than psychology because I’m not going back to a psychotherapist.” So, not to blame psychotherapists because I know the field has changed a lot but the ones that I had been seeing were keeping me and my story, they weren’t breaking me out of it and I knew I needed something but I knew I didn’t need that.

So, he met with me and we had a session together. I said, “Can you help me?” And he said, “Yeah. I think I can.” So, the first session we had together I went in like I had gone into every other psychotherapy session in my life. I went in and I started complaining about the person that wasn’t giving me what I needed and then I felt bad about myself and it was all their fault. I went into that story and he stopped me. He interrupted the pattern and he said, “That’s you.” I, “What?” I felt so insulted at first, but I knew it was true. It was like he was speaking truth and it hurt but it went right to my heart and it made me wake up. I said, “Oh my God. How do I stop doing that?” That’s where the journey really began. The question, “How do I stop doing that? Because I don’t want to do that anymore. What is that? Why am I doing that? Where does that come from?” All these questions started in my consciousness. Pretty soon I got led to the next teacher and the next teacher.

Then I had a shamanic spiritual healing. That woke me up big time because I thought I was one thing. I thought I was this solid thing called Kerri like there was just one thing. When I was in the middle of this healing session, I realized, “Oh my gosh. There’s multiple aspects of me. There’s energy that can be taken out. I can feel it being removed. I can feel it go over there in the burning sage and it disappears and I’m here. This is more true. So what is all that stuff in me that’s cluttering up me? That’s not me. What is that stuff?” It’s like I instantly had this awareness that I was filled up with a bunch of gunk that was not my true self, that it was a bunch of stuff. I didn’t know what it was but it was gunk and it was cluttering me. I had that instant knowing of that. I felt different after 45 minutes. He took this energy out of my heart that had been there since my whole life, that always felt like the only way I can describe it really is a menstrual cramp but like around my heart. It would ache anytime I thought somebody hated me or didn’t like me or they looked at me funny or I felt inadequate or I was like reviewing my past performance of something at work, my heart would ache. He took it out. It’s gone. I never had that feeling since. He just removed it. I mean I thought, “Wow. 45 minutes and that can happen? I’m doing that. I don’t care what that is. I’m learning how to do that.” That’s what started me really on my path to becoming what I am today.

[0:26:53] Ashley James: Oh. So cool. I’ve had that experience before. My first time doing an NLP session with someone back in 2004-2005. I did a NLP breakthrough sessions about eight hours long. We did timeline therapy. She also did some huna work, which is the Hawaiian spiritual practice. So, she does the energy work but it was NLP timeline therapy hypnosis. We did this whole session and I walked out of there. I felt weight lifted off my shoulders that I had carried most of my life. I walked around with this weight, this heaviness pushing down on me physically. Physically I could feel it. After the session I physically felt it removed. It was just taken off my shoulders. That was also when I completed my grieving. I was in depression and grief from losing my mother two years before.

So, I went all kinds of therapists because I was seeking how to grieve healthfully. What I really saw in the therapy field, at the time every therapist I went to it was either you are broken or you’re normal. You’re either abnormal or you’re normal. There was no focus on let’s strive for excellence because I wanted to grieve in the healthiest way possible. I wanted to achieve like excellence around grieving. There was no like, “All right. Let’s make you like the most excellent human griever. Let’s do it in the most healthy way.” No it was like you’re either broken up and abnormal or you’re normal and you don’t have to come here anymore. I thought that was really interesting.

So, when I learn more about NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, that they designed it. That Richard Bandler and John Grinder back in the 60s and 70s originally designed it out of this exact same observation that they saw that in the therapy field in the United States, which culturally the people in the United States are always striving to be the best. That’s part of the American Dream. Strive for absolute excellence. Achieve the maximum. Be the best basketball player you can be. Be the best trader on Wall Street you could be. Whatever it is, be the best cyclist you can be or the runner. In those fields, that’s considered normal to want to be the best that you can and go and find a coach to help you be the best you can. But when it came to mental health, that wasn’t the perception back in the 60s and 70s. It was either you’re normal or you’re abnormal. There was zero focus on excellence, on achieving excellence around emotional and mental health. It wasn’t a thing.

So, they created neuro-linguistic programming to bring about a toolset that had people just throw out that old system of you’re either broken or you’re normal. We don’t need to put ourselves in that box. We don’t need to live in that story. Instead, we’re all human beings and let’s create the most excellent experience we can, excellent emotional and mental health we can. It’s a bunch of tools basically that you can learn to help you be in your excellence.

So, I dove into that. Actually then out of that experience, my first night walking out feeling like that weight was lifted off me that was taken out of me and off me I said, “I have to learn how to do this.” So, I went and took all the trainings and became a master practitioner and trainer of NLP and timeline therapy and hypnosis. I thought that was just, I mean that was like a whole world opened up. I couldn’t believe that just like you, this whole world opens up and you’re like I’ve been in therapy for 20 years and now it’s like, “Why didn’t someone tell me about this. That there’s a spiritual healing and mental healing on a whole new level.”

So you broke free from this old system. I love that you had the really solid experience of both systems because I am sure that therapy is very effective for people. You have to sort of find the right tool for you, find the right tool for the job. Some people really thrive in seeking out Freudian therapy. 200 hours on the couch and that’s what they needed. Other people need behavioral psychology or cognitive therapy. Then you get to that point where you want to break free from the stories and you want to transform how you relate to yourself, how you relate to the world and switch over from judgment to curiosity. I love that. I love that you had that very clear transition. It’s really beautiful. So now you have broken free. How do you go back though? There’s the people in your life who still relate to you as the old Kerri? How do you transform how people relate to you?

[0:32:04] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, so that’s a very good question. The answer is that everyone is sovereign. Every person is sovereign. As such, every person’s really responsible for their own perceptions and the stories they choose to tell. Sometimes those stories they choose to tell they like to hold on to for a lot of reasons. So, let’s just explore that topic for a second.

So, in my case the story that my closest people liked to tell was that I was responsible for all the problems in the family.

[0:32:44] Ashley James: That’s convenient.

[0:32:45] Kerri Hummingbird: So, that’s pretty convenient. So, nobody wants to change that story but me. Okay. So, that’s been one of the major hurdles in my life is that I’ve gotten the opportunity to heal myself all the way down to the core identity. If you think about it, your parents, your mother gives you your core identity because that’s the one whose body you were birthed in. That’s the one who is nurturing you and caring for you. That’s the person whose opinion you really care about the most as a little child. You really want your mommy to love you. All of us do. When that isn’t possible in the way that you need it, then the opportunity is to learn how to give that to yourself.

The body of work that I’m working on right now is called Love is Fierce: Healing the Mother Wound. So the work I’ve been doing in private with clients is healing that last vestige of doubt inside. That you’re worthy of love. That comes from a lot of ideas in our heads, a lot of information that comes in the form of not necessarily words but just feelings and sensations and perceptions and even psychic knowings about how our mother feels about us and about herself. That really impacts our psychology especially as a woman. I know that boys are also affected by that because I am a mother and I had a mother wound and I passed it on to my sons. As soon as I’ve become aware of this, I’ve been doing everything I can to help them to assert their own identity and have a really strong knowing that their mom’s okay.

There’s just so many psychological uncertainties that get kicked up when you as a child perceive a number of things. Like if you perceive that your mom’s irritated by you. If you perceive that you’re not really wanted. If you perceive that you’re a nuisance. If you perceive that your mom’s not okay, that she’s got emotional problems or she doesn’t seem to be able to show up for you. There’s a lot of ways that this presents itself, but all of that stuff it gets in a way of you knowing that you’re okay inside of you. You actually don’t feel okay because of it. Sometimes, like you said like how do you deal with your family who wants to keep telling the same story about you? There are family systems that get constructed around this entire dynamic to hold it in place.

So, when you start rocking the boat and trying to change it what happens is push back. Because if you change, everybody else in the ocean has to change. If you change the story, they either have to clutch their story tighter or they have to meet you partway and start seeing something new. A lot of people, if you change that means something in the dynamic has changed and now they own some piece of it.

[0:36:04] Ashley James: It’s like enforcing healthy boundaries.

[0:36:08] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. Healthy boundaries. Like you don’t tell me who I am. Here was the crux of my issue. My whole life and I’m only now breaking free because it’s a really deep wound. It’s like there is a splinter that gets placed inside your consciousness. Really young if you’re having this kind of situation like I experienced. Then a whole bunch of layers and stories and stuff authenticates it. Then it gets bigger and bigger and the crust around it grows. Pretty soon you know you can’t even decide, “Should I choose option A or B? I’m not sure about myself. I don’t know which one to pick.” Yeah. We don’t even know what we want or how to direct our way through life. We’re so out of touch with ourselves that we just don’t know what to do.

So, this is about identity. It’s about identity and about reclaiming identity and deciding that nobody can tell you who you are, not even your mother. Nobody can tell you who you are. That you are safe in becoming curious and exploring who you really are and letting yourself do that. Along the path of doing that, I faced all kinds of things like mysterious feelings of being choked, like body sensations. I mean just old memories in my body. All kinds of fears that came up about speaking. When I started speaking on podcasts all these fears came up. I would start having really unconscious self-sabotaging behavior because I knew I was telling on mom and that was really dangerous.

There was just a lot of things that came up for me that were true for me as a little child but are totally not true for me as an adult. So, this is really the process of becoming a mature person and owning the psychology inside of you and taking ownership of becoming your own mother, taking ownership of becoming your own father and really guiding your own life and giving yourself permission to be who you are and who you choose to be no matter what anybody else says about you. Even if they’re your closest people and they’re your family. It’s that deep.

[0:38:27] Ashley James: You said that no one else can determine or can say who you are. I would take it one step further and say even your belief systems don’t have the right to tell you who you are because –

[0:38:41] Kerri Hummingbird: The conditioning.

[0:38:42] Ashley James: The old belief systems. Yeah. The old conditioning comes from the decisions that we made as children. Something happened like we got spanked and we decided that we’re not loved or we got yelled at because we did something as a child and we decided we’re not good enough, we’re not worthy, we’re not smart, we’re not beautiful, we’re fat we’re ugly, we’re unwanted. All these unconscious limiting decisions that we built as our identity and that become our filters in life that don’t let us see. That’s how the unconscious mind works. It’s how the brain works in forming our reality.

Our unconscious limiting decisions are the filters that will negate positive information. It’s called the reticular activating system. It’s a filter in the unconscious near the brainstem. It won’t let us see things that go against our belief system. So, if I believe I’m not loved and Kerri says, “Ashley, I love you.” My brain won’t accept it. I will make a decision. Either I’ll ignore it, I won’t hear it. We delete, distort and generalize. I’ll delete it entirely. We won’t even hear the person say it. Or in my brain I’ll go, “Oh. She’s just saying that because she wants something,” or “She’s just saying that because she because she thinks she’s being nice,” or whatever. My brain will negate it because we won’t allow for positive information to come into our conscious and form our reality when we have these filters.

We often then believe that that is reality when it’s not. It is a distorted, it’s like looking through a kaleidoscope but the kaleidoscope is made up of all the negative emotions and living decisions from our childhood that we’ve been filtering our life through. So, when you said no one has a right to tell you who your identity is. What I got heavily is and neither does your belief system.

[0:41:02] Kerri Hummingbird: Neither. Yeah. You have to become aware of it, which is why it’s so important to have presence. Because in presence things quiet down and we get out of the story. A lot of people are addicted to the story and I completely understand that. Remember, I spent 20 years telling my story on a couch so I get it. That doesn’t serve us. Well, let’s just say it doesn’t serve us if we want to transform and evolve. If we want to stay where we are it serves us quite well because that’s what it does. It keeps us where we are. If we want things to change, then we need to stop believing our story and start becoming curious about it. Also curious like, “Is that my story or is that something else?” I’ll give an example.

I had a first stepfather who was very violent and didn’t like children apparently. That’s the story I have about it. There was this feeling of not liking kids that got into me. Like not liking and being playful and boisterous got you in trouble. So, I experienced some of this and throughout my childhood. Well, so then recently I have my own sons, but since I woke up, I would say since I woke up since 2011, in the last four years I’ve been with my new husband who has two younger children. So, I got a chance to revisit some of this. What I noticed was that as the young children were being very boisterous, I would hear this voice in my head that said, “Damn kids.” I had enough presence of mind to go, “Wow. Where is that coming from?” Whereas before it might have just been part of the background noise and I wouldn’t even have heard it. I’m sure it was there when I was raising my children because it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Wow. Where did that come from? I was so unaware of it before but it was operating me. It was driving me. It was part of the conditioning that I had in my brain. So, now that I have presence, I heard that voice. I heard it distinctly. I asked myself, “Wow. Where is that coming from?” I sat with myself for a while until the answer bubbled up. It kind of bubbles up from inside when you sit with presence. It was that first stepfather who didn’t like kids and it has made a big impression on me. That somehow being a kid was wrong and it was bad and it was annoying and all of these things. So, I think that when we have presence, when we’re willing to stop telling the story and start listening to ourselves inside we can learn a lot about what’s driving the story we’re so emphatic to tell.

[0:44:02] Ashley James: Can you teach us how if we’ve never had the ability to have presence? How do you start to formulate presence so that we can slow down the self-talk in order to process it, in order to get curious and dive deeper?

[0:44:19] Kerri Hummingbird: Absolutely. Well, there’s a number of pathways that I experienced. Yoga was certainly one of them. Working with the breath. Putting breath into anything slows things down. You’re focusing on breathing, you’re focusing on the in-breath. The in-breath, the out-breath, the way it feels as it goes through your body. For me though I need a little bit more than that because I had a very chattery mind, really super chattery. I was not really able to sit and meditate. People kept saying, “Oh. Well, just sit and meditate and you’ll quiet down.” I thought, “Oh. I sit and meditate and it gets louder.” There’s a lot of noise in there. It’s uncomfortable. I can’t sit still. I don’t like being with all that.

So for me, what I ended up doing was learning about shamanic drumming. The interesting thing about drum journey music is that the ancient people always knew that certain beats of the drum actually stimulate your brain to go into a different state of mind, a trance if you will activates a different frequency in your brain. Instead of it being beta, which is super busy busy busy, it activates theta state and alpha state, which are more relaxed. The theta state is more of a dreaming state. You can even access gamma state, which is pretty cool. That’s where you have transcendent visions. But the drumbeat and working with the drum actually really helped me to ground myself in my body and to quiet my mind. I was able to start having visions even and information.

So, you build on what you have. So, any little tiny little wiggle space of quiet that you have, whatever worked to get that you just keep doing more of that and building out that space and sort of building that muscle of quiet within you where you can listen and receive. The more you work on that muscle the greater the muscle gets. All of my training in energy healing I got certified from the Four Winds Light Body School of Medicine. A lot of that training has to do with listening to the client, listening to their energy field and what messages are coming up? What are you feeling in your body empathically from their body and their experience? There’s a lot of listening.

After all of these training and all these working with clients and channeling information for them, I started channeling in groups. It opened up in front of a lot of people. Now I wrote a book last year that the whole book was channeled. I literally sat down, didn’t think at all. The words just came out and I just channeled it. That’s a flow. I found that that’s where that’s brilliant. My friends are like, “Oh. That book is brilliant.” and I am like, “Thank you.” It’s like I feel like I didn’t do it because I just channeled it but actually in a way I did it because I was able to get quiet. I was able to open myself up to let the flow come through. That flow that’s tapped into all that is.

So, I hope that answers your question but I feel like it’s a muscle. You’ve got to exercise it every day. The more you exercise it the better you get at it and then miraculous things can happen like I experienced.

[0:47:54] Ashley James: If you didn’t consciously write the book then who wrote the book?

[0:47:59] Kerri Hummingbird: I feel like it was my higher self, my guide. For that book I feel like – everyone has their own belief systems around this but I really believe that we are souls having a human experience. The human part, the ego part, can be really delicious in the fact that it gets to have all these experiences that feel really real and gets to feel pain and an excitement and suffering and also gets to have a lot of chattering mind and thoughts and gets to feel and create. There is another aspect of us though that is really timeless, eternal, wise, connected to all that is. I would call that the soul. When we can do a dance with the soul so that us the personality, the personality self and the soul self can be together in one consciousness, in one moment in the now, together in the now, then amazing things can happen. That as a personality self, there’s no way I could have done that.

The book I wrote, I just don’t see that happening in the timeframe that it happened. With the ease and grace that happened without the dance of my soul. The dance of my soul is what manifested that into being. It’s my willingness to listen.

It’s just amazing every time I let it out. I just did a weekend. I got the opportunity to do a weekend presentation at the Evolutionary Business Council. I decided to do that in the presentation, just let go. Don’t script it, just let go. So, I let go. I had written the speech. I’d written everything and I tossed it out. I just said, “Okay.” My soul I call white eagle. So I said, “Okay white eagle. Take it. Take it and run with it. Let’s do this.” It was amazing. It was like, “Whoa.” Everybody was engaged. Everybody took action. They all were like, “Yes. This is exactly right. Because when I step into that space, which I’ve been practicing in my healing sessions and with clients and groups, when I step into that space of the flow and of my soul like brilliance comes out. It’s pretty awesome to experience because that part of you is wise and eternal like they know everything. So, I don’t know. That’s just my experience out of it. It’s amazing. It’s profound.

[0:50:26] Ashley James: I know what you’re talking about but I don’t think everyone does. In the training that I’ve done with becoming an NLP trainer and even before that with Landmark Education, you get to a place where you create so much peace inside yourself. In NLP we call it generate. You just generate so you could stand there and just start talking. It’s coming from this very pure place inside you where you don’t have to think about it before you say it. You don’t have to plan. You don’t even necessarily know what you’re going to say until you start saying it. It’s so brilliant. The brilliance that comes out comes from this very beautiful authentic place inside you like it’s not ego. You definitely feel connected to God, you feel connected to spirit, your soul. You feel grounded. You feel very grounded but at the same time you just start to feel like you’re phasing. Your energy is vibrating on a little bit of a different wavelength like you’re not here, present. You feel a little bit like you’re high.

[0:51:45] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes.

[0:51:46] Ashley James: You know what I mean? You’re a little high. You’re going in a brain is in a different wavelength and it’s really beautiful. I love it. This is something that I don’t think about. I just do but I developed it over years and years and years working with Landmark and then in NLP and being an NLP trainer and then doing this podcast.

When I first started the podcast it was so funny. I was nervous I was writing. I was studying and writing down 20 questions and worrying, “Do I have enough questions to write down?” The first maybe 10 episodes I was scripted. I have my questions that I’d asked them, but I soon realized very quickly that I could not do these interviews with questions written down beforehand because the second they started talking like my brain would go, “What about this, what about that? Let’s explore this.” The interviews weren’t this wonderful flow. Their flow wasn’t there. It was totally cut off because I wanted to script it and ask these questions that were pre-created.

So, I had to let go. It was like walking a tightrope and saying, “Okay. You could take the safety net away now.” I went in blind to the interviews. I went in totally blind. Just knowing a little bit about the person and their background with no questions pre-created and it was brilliant. I was so nervous. The thought came to me. It was like, “What if I can’t think of anything to ask? The answer I got was you just start talking, just start having a conversation and be in the moment with them. Be present and generate and it’ll come to you. So I started to just talk to these people as I interviewed them with no questions written down. The flow was so different. The energy was so different. It was about being present with them and the questions would just come from my higher self, would come from somewhere.

So, I get it. When you’re at present in the moment and you’re listening and you’re tapped in, you generate. It’s beautiful creativity. Your identity kind of melts away. You’re not in that story anymore, are you?

[0:54:11] Kerri Hummingbird: No, you’re not. That’s really the secret if you want to change your life is you change this story you tell about yourself, you change your identity. I experienced this over the last eight years. I mean, eight years ago, think about it, I was a woman with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. I have been sleeping around on my husband with a lot of strangers at art shows when I was on the weekend doing my art shows. Anybody would look at me and say, “Yup. She’s crazy.” Pretty much. People might say that about me today but for a totally different reason and I’m okay with it.

So today, I’m on podcast with people like you who are really conscious, enlightened leaders trying to help people to see another way. I’ve got an international bestseller for you know 25 weeks now running. It’s kind of amazing. It’s blowing my mind. All of this stuff is amazing to me. It happened because I was willing to let go of my identity. I mean, I was thankful to let go of it to be quite honest. I think I got to the bottom of the pit and I said, “You know what, I don’t want to be whatever I’ve been being so far. Whatever that story is that’s creating that I don’t want that.” When my yogi said, “Hey. You’re creating this.” I looked at him and some deep part of me knew that I was. I said, “Yeah. You’re right and I’m going to stop doing that.”

I got fed up with my story. I think that you’ve got to get fed up with your story to the point where you’re willing to change everything in your life just to have a better story. That’s the place to be and then you can create magic. You can really reinvent yourself. I’ve really good friends who have had terminal cancer diagnosis. They’ve healed themselves through a lot of inner work, a lot of inner work, a lot of treatment options, various combinations of options but the end being that they did it because they decided they were fed up with the story that they had cancer and they weren’t going to go out that way. They made sure that they healed themselves. One of my friends, stage five cancer. That’s it, right? That’s the last stop. For the month that she was supposed to die, she only had like maybe four weeks to live or something, she imagined that she was traveling, which was her favorite thing to do. She made it real. She traveled. She could only go, she couldn’t actually go anywhere, but she pretended she was in France. She made it real for herself. She convinced her brain that she was traveling and enjoying herself in France and that tumor subsided. She actually lived. She’s alive today and she’s out speaking about it.

So, I know that people have had these experiences this isn’t like bunk, this is real. Our brains are so powerful. We have to open to that deep wise one within us in order to change our lives’ circumstances. To do that, we have to release the identity. We have to release the story about ourselves while we’re in the middle of the story, which is super challenging, to release the identity and the story of ourselves while we’re still experiencing the effects of the story we’ve been telling. That’s the challenging part, Ashley, isn’t it?

[0:57:26] Ashley James: I want to interview your friend. Can you hook me up with her information? I’m actually crying right now. In my 20s, I was at a point in my early 20s where was suffering emotionally. I’d lost my mom. I was suffering. I was in an abusive relationship in an emotionally and mentally abusive relationship, but I didn’t know it because you don’t know it when you’re in the relationship.

[0:57:56] Kerri Hummingbird: You don’t know it.

[0:57:57] Ashley James: Well, because they’re really good at making you think that you’re the problem when they’re clearly emotionally and mentally abusive. At my mom’s funeral, he pulled me aside and yelled at me for not paying enough attention to him. I apologized. I mean at my mother’s funeral, he made me feel guilty. I say the word made me feel because now I get that no one can make me feel anything. My language back then was he made me feel this way. I get now. I put myself in that position to be in that relationship and I got out of it. Then I went, “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe.” I started to look back at the whole five-six years with him and I realized that it was very emotionally manipulative, emotionally abusive and a very unhealthy relationship. But at the time, it was like you can’t see the air you’re breathing.

So, my early 20s, I was in a very bad place emotionally, mentally and physically. I had a lot of diseases. According to the doctors, I was told I’d be on these medications my whole life. I was told I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had type 2 diabetes. I had chronic adrenal fatigue. I had chronic infections for which I took monthly antibiotics for. I felt like a prisoner in my own body. I couldn’t wake up in the morning. I couldn’t actually understand human language in the morning. My brain could not process human language. I was so broken. I felt so broken.

Every morning I woke up with a hangover, although I did not drink alcohol because of my physical state was so sick. So, I’d wake up every morning with all the symptoms of a hangover. Feeling like I partied the entire night although I didn’t. I only started to feel normal in the evenings and that’s because my cortisol levels were so extremely low that they just started to creep up in the evenings. Then it was hard to get to bed at night because that’s when I actually started to have my brain back and start to have energy.

I was eating the standard American or standard Canadian diet. In a bad place emotionally, but I was trying to get out of it. I was living in the identity that I was diabetic. I was living in the identity that I am, I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, I am infertile or whatever the identity the doctors diagnosed me with. The diagnosis becomes an identity. At first, and you said this earlier, at first the diagnosis is a relief. There’s this feeling of relief that washes over you after months or years of suffering. You’re finally given this label because then it’s like, “Look. People are acknowledging my internal suffering. I’m not crazy. They see it. This label proves that my suffering is real and others can finally get that it’s real.” But then it becomes the cage that we live in.

[1:01:16] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes. It becomes a cage. It’s exactly right. I realized in my case, and I don’t know how you feel about yours, that I realized I was the spider spinning the web around myself. I was a spider, the web and the fly.

[1:01:35] Ashley James: You’re everything.

[1:01:37] Kerri Hummingbird: Like it’s a closed system. I’m doing it to myself. So, it took a long time to unweave and unwire that. But the first decision was no matter what it takes I don’t care. Whatever it takes I’m going to be what I really want to be. So I said, “What do I really want to be?” So, I picked the first thing that inspired me. So, this is another little tip. Pick the first thing that inspires you because that’s probably true. Inspiration is true. I believe inspiration is true. For me, it was a vision I had. It was my first mystical vision.

I was doing a drum journey, meditation with my drum in my little apartment I was renting. I was manifesting my home that I currently live in now. I wanted to buy this home. My real estate agent had said, “Well, they’re already under contract and they’ve been back and forth a couple times. Usually, almost always in that case, you’re not going to get the house. I said, “I know that’s my house.” So, I did this drum journey and I started visualizing, “Okay. I’m in my house. I’m in my house. I’m in my house.” I saw myself in there and I saw my grandparents who have deceased. I saw them come and visit in the house. We were talking about how beautiful it was. I was making the whole thing up in my brain, imagining it until the very end. When I’m standing in the house in my dream, in my vision looking in the kitchen, looking out the back window and all of a sudden a rainbow light hummingbird whoosh in the back window and hovers there and space expands. All I could do is just go, “Wow.” I’m not making that happen. That’s amazing. What is that? I love that. Oh my god. It’s a rainbow hummingbird. Wow.

As soon as I stopped the drum journey because I was just profound, the phone rang. It was my real-estate agent and she said, “Oh. The deal fell through so they went your offer. You can have the house.” So, that really inspired me, Ashley. I got to say, that was a mystical vision experience. I thought, “Okay. What does hummingbird mean?” So I looked it up in the animal guide, animal spirits what does that mean? I had learned about animal spirits. I didn’t know about it before, eight years ago. But I looked up this guide and I said, “Okay. Hummingbird.” Everything it said, anything is possible. Yes. I’ve always known that. I’ve always known inside of me that anything is possible. There’s this part of me that was so fiercely knowing that. That’s what got me through all this hellacious sitting in psychotherapy for 20 years. I knew that anything is possible. I knew that it didn’t have to be this way.

So, I kept looking for the answer to solve the problem because I knew that that wasn’t the way my life had to be. So, I thought, “Yes. That’s me, hummingbird [unintelligible] of spirit. Yes, I opened to that. Yes, I want that.” So, really shortly after that I started calling myself Kerri Hummingbird. I even changed it on social media, which at first was really awkward because my friends were saying, “What are you doing? What is that? But then people started saying, “You know what Kerri, that really is you. That is you. That’s more true. That’s actually more true than the last name you had. That’s true for you.

So, it became my truth. So, what I did was I created this vision board about Kerri Hummingbird. I put it on my wall and I just kept looking at that. Any time I had a challenge I would ask myself, “Well, what would Kerri Hummingbird do about that? How would Kerri Hummingbird respond to that?” It’s like I was tapping into this more true aspect of myself, this future self even. You could even think of it that way. Tapping into the future person I am today and saying, “Kerri Hummingbird, what would you do right now because I’m not quite you yet but I want to be you.”

[1:05:37] Ashley James: Oh, I love that.

[1:05:38] Kerri Hummingbird: What do I want to be? I want to be me. I was trying to be me the whole time but I had to find me underneath all that crap that got placed on me by all the conditioning and all the stories that I told and all the stories that everybody else told. All the story story story story story story story, which is why I say presence. Presence and inspiration, that’s the place to be.

[1:06:01] Ashley James: Oh, I love. I love that. I have this technique I learned from – who knows where I learned this from. One of my passions since I was a teenager has been personal growth and development so I picked this up somewhere. This idea that when you set a goal, so for me because I’m hitting the gym pretty hard this year with my husband, and I really dialed in my diet in the last two years. I’m really really happy with the nutrition, the quality of nutrition my body is getting. I decided I want to sculpt my body in a different way. In a really healthy way but I’ve finally figured out what I want to look like and what I want to feel like in my body.

So, we’re going to the gym with this very specific intention. I found some really great videos on YouTube. We’re following these exercises I’ve never seen before. It’s really cool. Actually, today at the gym, someone came up to us and said, he’s 76 years old he goes, “I’ve been were working out my whole life. I’ve never seen that exercise. It looks really neat. How did you figure that out?” So, we’re doing some fun things in the gym but. What I learned is you imagine your goal. So, let’s say Ashley a year from now. I’m imagining my goal and the person I create myself to be a year from now after spending 365 days in the gym, for example. I stand there in my mind in the future Ashley and then what I do is I look back to now. So, having achieved my goal I stand there in my body, my newly sculpted body, having achieved the goal looking back to now and I see all the steps I had to take to get here.

So, it’s similar to what you’re saying. It’s like talk to your future self. Talk to the person you are. What would future Ashley say? The Ashley that’s hit the gym and sculpted her body, what would she say? She’d be like, “Get out of bed. It’s 7:30. Let’s go. What are you doing?” When I am in doubt, what do I do? What do I do here? I start asking myself, what would rock-hard-ab Ashley say?

[1:08:28] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I love it. I mean, this is really cool because basically everybody can see that in any moment you have choice A or choice B and maybe even choice C, right? So, you could predict that there’s one Ashley in the future that didn’t do any of that stuff, but there’s another Ashley that totally did do all that stuff. So, you want to tap into the Ashley that did all the stuff in order to become the person you want to be, right? Then exactly, ask her. What were the choice points? What were the choice?

Part of manifestation is doing exactly what you did, imagining yourself in the future point as if it’s now, having accomplished exactly everything you want to accomplish, feeling what you’re going to feel, knowing it happened. How does it feel? Receiving all of that, how does it feel, that accomplishment feeling? What are the things going on in your brain? Who are you being in order to be that person? All of that is really real. It manifested it. It plants a seed, but we actually also you’ve got to take the actions. So, it’s not just about dreaming it, it’s about becoming it through action.

So, I love that you said you look back and say, “Okay. What were all the actions I took in order to get to that person I’m standing at now.”

[1:09:38] Ashley James: Right. Right. Because I think the New Age gets a bad rap because it’s like you can’t just imagine yourself into wealth or health, but that is the first step. You have to shift your belief system and that’s what I had to do. When I was suffering, there was this point there was this moment that occurred around 2004 for me. I was sitting at home suffering like I had every day emotionally, mentally, physically trapped on a prison of illness. There was a moment where I had this realization. It was actually watching What The Bleep Do We Know, which I think everyone needs to watch twice. So, I had the DVD. I watched What The Bleep Do We Know and tip hot tears were just constantly coming out of my eyes the entire time. I think it was around 11:00 PM I finished watching it and I immediately hit play again. I had to watch it twice. It was hitting me so hard. I was ready to receive that information.

So, I watched What The Bleep twice in a row. What I got because I felt so stuck, I felt so stuck in the broken identity of the diagnosis, of all the diagnosis that I had been given. I had taken that on as my identity. I had taken on this world of suffering as my only truth. By the time I was done watching What The Bleep Do We Know twice, I got that I can choose a different reality, different from the reality I was living in. So, that moment of shifting my mindset, the very next morning, everything began to fall into place.

I was applying for a loan, a loan that was going to help me to pay for the trainings to start this as a business, to become an NLP trainer. It was a no the day before. I shifted my mindset. That next morning I get a phone call it was a yes. It was like one piece after another. Everything. The housing because I had to move to the states over the summer to do all these trainings, that came into place. The transportation came to me. Everything just started clicking. Everything started clicking because my belief system was that it was 100% possible. But I went from this desperation in my mind that none of it’s possible to it 100% is possible.

So, that mindset thing. You have to have the mindset first. You have to envision yourself succeeding first and then take the actionable steps. I love that you talk about you got to be present and open to the flow. Takes breaths, slow things down so that you can begin to identify the negative self-talk that you might be believing is true but it’s not. Then you have to get that you’re not broken, that you are not your diagnosis and that you can break free from that. Because I got that my mindset, I all of a sudden shifted and went, “Wow. I am not these things. This is not my box anymore.” That I was able to then take the actionable steps to heal my body and now I no longer have any of those issues. But I wouldn’t have even taken the actual steps had I not started with my mindset.

[1:13:08] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I agree with you. The mindset is key. It continues to be key because it is a self-mastery with your mindset. There is a way of overemphasizing the mindset because it’s not the only thing. You can have an excellent mindset and then it still doesn’t shift. Then you’re like, “Well, what’s wrong with my mindset? How come it’s not shifting?” It’s because there’s stuff in your subconscious that needs listening to. So, there is a listening piece is really important. So, I just wanted to raise that up, the listening piece. Because sometimes the stuff that’s getting in your way is stuff that you inherited from your ancestry that you might not have even known those people. It’s in your ancestry. It’s a repeating pattern. We all know that we have repeating patterns in our own lives, but they also go across ancestry, across generations. So, some of this stuff is beyond you. So, that’s why it’s important to get really good at listening inside and discerning and opening up to the possibilities of all the things it could be that’s keeping you where you are so that you can shift it, really shift it, like absolutely to stop the pattern. Like you said, what you did that day that was enough for you. There wasn’t anything else in the way. So, your clear decision, your very clear decision stopped the pattern for you in that day and bam it was one moment and then you started recovering and going on your way. That can happen with everything.

So, we just have to realize that this is the puzzle. So, it’s like you slipped into a thumbprint suit that had all these little hidden gems and things like a video game and you have to find it all. Well, some of it’s going to be easy to find. Some of its going to be really hard to find depending on your level of mastery. So, don’t give up the game. Keep playing the game and realize that the object of the game is to get up the pyramid. So, Maslow’s hierarchy of need. Hanging out on the bottom row on, on survival, that’s not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to climb the mountain. The goal of the game is to get all the way at the top of the pyramid of self-actualization. That’s the goal of the game.

It’s possible for everybody on the planet. What you need is support. It’s really helpful to have the help of people like Ashley that’s why it’s great you guys are listening to the show. Every week you’re getting filled up with beautiful insights that help you on your journey up the mountain, up the pyramid. Keep doing that. Keep taking the steps. You got to keep taking the steps and solving the puzzle. If you get a little discouraged, it’s fine to have a time-out when you get frustrated and have temper tantrum. That’s all good. We’re human. We’re going to get frustrated, but then practice the self-mastery, practice your mental mastery, practice your emotional mastery, practice your spiritual mastery. Practice all these things and pull yourself up the mountain and give yourself support. We are the sum of the five people we hang out with the most, right? So, hang out with different people. Hang out with people that have gotten up further up the mountain than you. Their collective energy is going to lift you up. That’s going to bring you up.

So, circling back to that conversation around what do you do with your family? Well, what do you do with your family if they want to keep you stuck in the old pattern? If the only way your family will love you is if you go along with being the one who’s broken and wrong, well, I think you need a new family for now. You need to find your home in community of people that can see the beauty that you are because when you feel like you’ve got this diagnosis and your life is stuck and everything’s going wrong and nobody in your current environment is supporting you, they’re all kind of keeping you stuck in that story of you, you’ve got to put yourself outside of your condition. You’ve got to change fish tanks. Get out of that stinky water fish tank and hop on over to the next one where the water is clean and start hanging out with different people that can show you different aspects of yourself. Then when you’re really strong in your new identity and I would like to say when you’re really strong in your soul eventually, it takes a little while to get there, but when you’re really self-actualized, you can be around anybody and it won’t matter. You can really flex that muscle of being you, being authentically you around everybody and just letting everybody have their own opinion. It doesn’t matter what they think. It won’t matter to you anymore. You can love them anyway. You can love them no matter what they say or think or do about you. You can get to that place.

Along the journey you need to give yourself spaces for incubation, incubation space where you can really percolate in the new energy and get strong in the new energy so that you can find your voice and find your truth inside of you without all those old stories. If you get retriggered into old stories, if you keep putting yourself in the old environment, it’s really hard to break free of it. It’s hard to get in the new energy when you keep putting yourself in the old energy. So, for a little while it’s helpful to incubate someplace positive to get filled up with good energy. Then it’s good to go back and flex the muscle because when you’re stronger and you know who you are more then you can make it even stronger by putting yourself in the challenge again so you get strong again there. Then you know where you got to do your work.

So, I call it plugging up the holes. Once you get your cup full enough you can start to see where are the leaks in my ship If you could start plugging them up.

[1:18:38] Ashley James: So, take yourself out of the bad environment, put yourself in a really positive environment, surround yourself with a new community that’s very positive that sees you as the person you really are inside without all the story. Then once you’ve really strengthened this resolve within you that you have shed, you’ve healed and shed a lot of the old that you’ve become the person you know you are deep inside, you’re more authentically you, then go back to the old environment in order to see what gets triggered, in order to see what you can heal. Because you go back when you’re strong enough to be able to be unshakable and then start as you then look, “Oh. Wow. They triggered me here. I got to work on this.” Not a point of blaming them like they did it to me but a point of, “Oh. Wow. That was a button for me. I need to work on that.” While you’re doing that, you can also transmute. Begin to work on and see if you can start to create new healthy relationships with those people in your life. Maybe they’ll be ready. Maybe they’ll be ready to see, to relate to you as the authentic person you are instead of your old story. It does take enforcing boundaries.

[1:19:57] Kerri Hummingbird: It does. It takes boundaries. Also, there’s a guilty little secret that we end up having to admit to ourselves, which is that we’re also holding them in a story about who they are to you.

[1:20:06] Ashley James: Yes. Yes.

[1:20:08] Kerri Hummingbird: We have to let go of that too.

[1:20:11] Ashley James: Yes. I’m so glad you brought that up. When I heard that Carl Jung and this is an abbreviation of one of his quotes but that we marry our unconscious mind and project onto them all of our unconscious unresolved material. When I got that, I had to repeat it over and over and over. It hit me so deeply that all the while I’ve been pointing my finger at everyone else going, “You don’t get me. You don’t get me. You don’t see the authentic me.” I’m like, “Holy crow. I don’t see the authentic them.” We’ll never actually know who our husband is or who our mom is or her sister is. We never will actually know because we are projecting onto them all of our stuff and our beliefs about them.

[1:20:57] Kerri Hummingbird: Our memories. Our stories.

[1:21:00] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to forgive. Right. All of our memories and the stories. Right. So, we can be forgiving in that aspect. We can go, “Okay. Maybe I can be a bit more gentle with the people in my life that have been triggering me.” I’ve been upset with people in my life because they’re not seeing who I really am but at the same time I haven’t been seeing who they really are. So, it is a two-way street.

[1:21:29] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. I like the thumbprint suit analogy that I got from my higher intelligence because it really does explain a lot. I mean, if you’re inside a thumbprint suit that has its own perspectives and perceptual windows through which you experience life and ancestral patterns and all this information about your soul. It’s unique, right? The thumbprint, there’s no two thumbprints alike. So, we might have a little overlap in our Venn diagrams but we’re really never going to understand each other ever. We will understand overlapping pieces and feel really good about that.

Then we have like, “Yay. Somebody understands me,” for like 10 minutes. Then they say something that is totally not aligned with us. Then we go all upset like, “Oh no. You’re one of them.” I mean, we’re all unique. That’s the thing is we’re built that way. We’re all pieces of the rainbow. If you think about the rainbow, look how many dots like infinite numbers of dots are available on the rainbow on the spectrum. Like infinite number of dots. So, maybe dots on the opposite sides of the spectrum, they don’t get along very well because they don’t share a whole lot in common, but they’re all part of the same rainbow. So, I love that too. So, think about your thumbprint. Think about, “Well, they’re not inside my thumbprint suit. They totally don’t understand so how can they tell me a story about me that’s more accurate than my story about me because I’m the one that’s in here all the time listening to everything. So, I think I know what’s true for me. I’m the only one in here as far as I know.”

[1:22:59] Ashley James: Are there any steps that you can give us around really seeing? When you’re in it it’s hard to see it but then all of a sudden you get it. All of a sudden you go, “Wow. I see it.” So, are there any steps or advice or homework you can give us so that we can start to see the limiting story that we’ve come up with ourselves? That this is this box that we’ve created like the idea that we’re broken. Be able to see it and go, “Oh. Wow. This isn’t actually my entire reality, it’s made-up. I made it up in my head. It’s not it’s not real. I’m not actually broken. I do have a chance to be someone who is healthy, someone who is whole.”

[1:23:54] Kerri Hummingbird: Yeah. So, what I like to do is I do think journaling is really helpful because you get to see it in print. Thoughts in your mind, they drift by really fast. The sneaky ones slide under the surface before you can hook them back. The ones that are really damaging are the ones that hide in the dark waters. So, whenever you grab a hold of one immediately write it down. Then that way you can explore it with your conscious mind because that’s really the goal. We want to explore with our conscious mind.

If you’ve ever driven someplace that you often go and then you end up there. Then you’re wondering, “How did I get here? Oh my goodness. I don’t remember even driving here.” That’s because your unconscious mind took over for you. Well, your unconscious mind takes over for you in a lot of things. Your unconscious mind takes over for you in a story you tell about yourself. When you meet somebody new the story you tell or on these broadcasts it’s a great experience because I get asked the same questions a lot of times. “What’s your history? What’s your story in a nutshell?”

So, what I like to do now is I like to play around and tell it different every time. So, I have this little task for myself or a little game or a challenge I give myself to tell the story different. So, you could try that. You could say, “Well, I notice I’m telling that same story,” and right in the middle of the sentence you could say, “Um, excuse me. I’d like to start over. I could tell a different story.” Right then and there you tell a different story. You tell it differently. So, it’s a process. It takes a lot of self-mastery and self-awareness and it takes time. But you can whittle down these pieces and become aware of what’s in the background. Like Ashley and I, I really recommend doing some alternative practices like working with energy if you’ve never tried that. Branch outside and see if you can shift it in a different way that you never expected.

So, try like a lot of different things. Say yes. There’s actually a challenge where you say yes to everything. Somebody invites you something you say yes. I think that’s a great one because it gets you outside of your box of what will work and what won’t work? It’s like you’ll just say yes to everything and you’ll find out. Think about it like an experiment. I think what’s really challenging with things like diets is that we say, “Well, Forever. Forever I am going to have no more dessert.” Well, that doesn’t work very well. So, it’s easier to say I’m going to run an experiment. For one week I’m not going to have dessert. I’m going to see what it feels like. How does my body feel? How does my mind feel? I’m going to do an honest assessment of myself before and after. I’m going to see what the results are. If I get a beneficial result, I will contemplate if I want to run the experiment longer.

So, it’s just a way of liberating yourself from too rigid of a structure with your goals and plans on what you want to achieve in your life. Be a little more playful with it. Give yourself some space and graze.

[1:26:57] Ashley James: Beautiful. Brilliant. Now, you’re the founder of Skills Not Pills movement. What is that?

[1:27:06] Kerri Hummingbird: Well, it’s a movement that I started because I had experienced psychotherapy, psychotropic pills in order to make me not feel, which then we’re supposed to fix me, but actually all the emotions that I was feeling in my life were stuffed under there it’s just that I was unaware of them. So, it just sort of suppressed the emotional experience underneath my awareness. When I finally came out of that fog, I had a lot of backed-up, pent-up emotional energy to process and I still had a diagnosis, all right. So, I thought, “Well, this doesn’t really work.” For me anyway. Everyone has to decide for themselves. Of course, you’re encouraged to consult with the doctor. But my idea was, why can’t we share with people alternatives to traditional Western medicine? Why can’t we share with people that energy healing is a thing? That you could shift the energy of something and it might actually just go away. I mean, why can’t we share with people NLP? Why can’t we share all these alternative modalities with people so that their first solution isn’t getting a pill? Maybe their last solution is to get a pill. Maybe there’s a whole other range of options before you get the pill. Maybe that’s not number one. Maybe it’s number 100 thing you try.

So, I’m just suggesting we flip it and we stop going to the pill first because it’s easy and convenient. Because in the long run it really isn’t. Just like littering seems easy and convenient, but in the long run we have to clean up the mess on our planet. So, I think that the whole goal with Skills Not Pills is to inspire people that there’s a whole lot of other ways of going about your life challenges than just taking a pill.

[1:28:45] Ashley James: Right. There’s times when we want them to temporarily take it like if there’s a difference between being suicidal or going off the you know. If a pill can help someone just get stable, we want that. It’s not that we’re saying never, no pills. There’s times when medication can be life-saving. We always want people to be healthy. The problem is 90 something percent of the time medication is just overprescribed. It’s given for everything. I remember my friend had a panic attack. Went to the hospital because she doesn’t know what was wrong with her. They sent her home with an anti-anxiety medication. They didn’t do any tests. She didn’t even know it was a panic attack. She’s like, “My heart’s pounding. I feel like I’m going to faint. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She was very healthy, very healthy girl. We were maybe 19 at the time. She goes to hospital thinking she’s having a heart attack and they just send her home with anti-anxiety meds. Is that really helpful? Is that really helpful to just, “Here, take some meds. You’ll be fine. Just numb those feelings you’ll be fine.”

So, you’re saying that a lot of the time, and I’ve actually done a lot of interviews. Listeners can go to LearnTrueHealth.com and search ADHD. There’s some interviews I’ve done where the guests have shared that ADHD meds just made it much worse. They gave a lot of symptoms. The side-effects and they didn’t get to heal it. They didn’t get to work on it. They actually chose to get off of them and then work on it and figure out how to heal.

So, I love that you bring this up. I love that you’re an advocate for helping people to gain more skills, more life skills emotionally, mentally and spiritually so they can really actualize the beings that they are inside and let go of the stories and the limitations that have been imposed upon them or self-imposed I should say.

Kerri Hummingbird, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is kerrihummingbird.com and you have a free gift, Love Mastery Game that you’re giving us. Listeners can go to kerrihummingbird.com/play for that. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:31:09] Kerri Hummingbird: Yes. I really encourage everybody to take a look at your thumbprint every day and remind yourself that you are living in a unique puzzle that was built just for you. If you don’t get curious about it and start discovering all about it inside of you, it’ll never go discovered. It’ll be just the lost puzzle that never got solved. So, it’s really up to each one of us to solve that puzzle that we are, that life plan, that thumbprint suit and figure out everything about it. Look at Ashley’s life, so amazing. You went through all that journey and my life. I mean, on the other side of what you think is horrible is actually an incredible journey of discovery. So, I just welcome everybody to take that journey for themselves.

[1:31:54] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Kerri.

[1:31:56] Kerri Hummingbird: Thank you.

[1:31:57] Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? How we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

Get Connected With Kerri Hummingbird!

Website

Click to get a free gift!

Reinvent Yourself Training, Butterfly Circle

Book by Kerri Hummingbird

The Second Wave: Transcending the Human Drama

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406 Whistleblower Exposes Coverup in the CDC; Informed Consent, Gastroenterologist Uncovers Link Between MMR Vaccine and Increase in Crohn's Disease, Autoimmune, and Other Digestive Disorders, with Dr. Andy Wakefield 0

Jan 23, 2020

The mainstream media is owned by the pharmaceutical industry. So when you search for this information, you will never find the truth. You will only find what the pharmaceutical companies pay the media to portray.

Andy shared that we can find his podcast on this platform where info cannot be censored:
https://www.sphir.io

Andy's Documentary: vaxxedthemovie.com

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

Download this Episode

405 Using Food as Medicine, How Naomi Murphy Healed Her Body, Created Effortless Weight Loss, Overcame Epstein-Barr virus, EBV, Heart Palpitations, and Heart Disease, Whole Food Plant-Based Diet and Recipes 0

Jan 17, 2020

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

How To Reverse Diseases Through Whole Food Plant-based Diet

https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-reverse-diseases-through-whole-food-plant-based-diet

Highlights:

What are the benefits of going whole food plant-based, no oil, no salt and no sugar
Glowing skin from eating whole food plant-based
How to reverse diabetes
How to reverse heart disease
How to reverse plantar fasciitis
How to reverse other illnesses

In this episode, Naomi Murphy shared with us the benefits of eating a whole food plant-based diet. She shares different stories that support how whole food plant-based diet has helped various people in reversing illnesses. She also shares the benefits of eating a whole food plant-based diet.

[0:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 405.

[0:00:13] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show a dear friend of mine, Naomi Murphy, who has been a listener of the show. She’s been my stalker. What I love about Naomi is she’s been a health warrior. She has reversed some health issues and I’ve really been honored to be her friend and be part of her health journey. Watching her recover from Epstein Barr virus and from several other issues. It’s just watching you transform has been amazing. In this last year, her and I have really joined forces together in the way we cook, the way we eat and the way we use food as medicine.

When we’re all alone and were making health changes, it’s really, I felt very isolated in my past when I’m switching to a new diet or when I’m getting on a new detox protocol and there’s no one else to do it with me. That’s why I love the Learn True Health Facebook group is that at least there’s some sense of community. People can come in feel supported, feel some sense of community.

So when Naomi decided to go whole food, plant-based, no salt, sugar, oil for her heart to heal her heart, my husband and I were already eating this way. So it was so great to have a friend join me. We started texting each other almost daily pictures and recipes. We’d bring each other food. So to have that camaraderie was so amazing. So I’ve watched you transform your health and it’s been wonderful. I keep saying I got to have you on the show because you’re really inspiring and you’ve done so many things. You’re so disciplined and so focused on making sure that health is first. I know that you are just chock-full of wonderful information to help the listeners today.

So I’m really really excited that you’re finally here on the show.

[0:02:27] Naomi Murphy: Thank you, Ashley. I have to say it’s a little surreal to be on this side of the podcast because I’ve been a listener for so long. When I met you you told me about your podcast. I think it took a year before I even checked it out. Then my life started to change and expand because of everything I learned. I was like, “Oh my God. This podcast is amazing.” I started recommending to everyone and talking to your more because I already knew you and yes, stalked you and asked every question I could think of. Lucky for me we have become friends.

I agree about eating a diet that’s kind of outside the mainstream way of eating. It is so great that others that do that. That’s really how I’ve eaten different ways before like been surrounded by acupuncture students or MD students working at colleges. Getting into fun cleanses and things like that. Now I’m a suburban mom. I’m not in that holistic community as much as I used to be. So it was great to have you to talk to. I think it was imperative almost that I had someone to talk to because I was even going against my family culture a little bit. Even if my husband wants to be healthier, not everyone’s ready at the same time to start eating. It was eating whole food, plant-based, no salt, oil or sugar.

[0:04:12] Ashley James: Which sounds really boring and hard and expensive and not delicious. When I first heard that, my thought was I can’t do that which is really funny. When I first heard about these very specific parameters like whole food, plant-based meaning there’s no animal products. No dairy, no cheese, no eggs, no meat, no fish. Lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and beans. That and whole greens and no oil, and no salt and sugar. I just thought, “That food sounds so bland and so complicated.”

But then I started hearing the health benefits and the studies. I kept hearing these doctors who are reversing major diseases. It kept just etching ion my brain this every meal, this every single meal that I eat with oil and salt and sugar and animal fat or whatever. It kept, because at the time I was doing keto because I was sold this idea that keto is the absolute number one healthiest way to eat but my health was getting worse on keto not better even though I was working with a naturopath.

We go weekly to the naturopath and show them everything we ate. They’re like, “Keep at it. Add more fats, add more eggs, add more cheese,” whatever I was. We were getting, just we were deteriorating. Our health was getting worse and worse and worse. I want to eat in a way that heals me. I’ve been frustrated that I’ve done over 30 diets, several of them led by doctors. I’ve looked into science because you can find a study to say that the Oreo diet is healthy for you because there’s a lot of paid study out there. So there’s a lot of misinformation.

I was looking and searching for a food, a way to heal my body with food and the keto was not doing it for me. When I kept hearing over and over and over again because all the guests that I’d interviewed, I wasn’t going out looking for whole food, plant-based doctors. They found me a lot of times. I kept interviewing them and interviewing them. I just kept hearing like cancer reversed, type 2 diabetes reversed, type 1 diabetes significantly improved to the point where they cut insulin in half easily.

I heard one guy, he cut his insulin by 70%. He’s a type 1 diabetic. Because his body became so efficient, weight loss happens as a by-product of this just achieving a healthy weight. Immune health like crazy. You’re living 30 years longer and really healthy in your senior years. So I kept hearing it over and over and over again. That’s when I started to go, “Okay.” Then chef AJ, she tries to make it be delicious so I started to look at it. When I interviewed her, I started to look into maybe I could do this. Let’s try it. Let’s just do 30 days.

So I decided to do a 3-day challenge. Actually, at the time, a friend was visiting from Canada. Kat Hernandez, visiting from Canada. This was two years ago. Yeah. We did the 30-day challenge. By the end of the three days I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This food is delicious. This food is easier to make.” It’s easier to make because there’s no meat I have to think about, which I didn’t realize was kind of you know, like food poisoning. You got to really make sure that things are cleaner whereas when you’re just cooking vegetables and greens, that’s not part of the equation. After one month of just trying the challenge, I was on board because I could not believe how good I felt. I always thought I’d eat meat but after three days of eating no meat just as an experiment and eating a whole food plant-based diet with no processed foods, my body was buzzing with energy. I wake up in the morning, jump out of bed and just be ready to go. Whereas before, I just had that low-level fog follow me. It took me a few hours to shake it off. Whereas now, it’s just on I’m on. In the morning I’m on.

[0:08:36] Naomi Murphy: I think many of us are functioning under a misunderstanding, which is promoted by our government because the government subsidizes the foods that are actually not good for us. The meat industry and the dairy industry are subsidized and so they want to promote those foods. There’s science that supports eating plants or health that is available to everyone.

I was just listening to T. Colin Campbell in the book Whole. He was saying when he wrote The China Study, which shows that eating a whole food plant-based diet is the best for health. It’s the optimal diet for health and it’s backed up The China Study. He said that he was really naïve. He thought that he would bring that information to people and it would change everything. It would change legislation around food and nutrition. It would change medicine, it would change everything but instead, he met a lot of resistance in his own community, in the academic community, which is why he started writing books for people to read and to have access to the information.

So, I think The China Study was written in 1976 and when he wrote Whole he was 79 years old, when he read it anyway, hearing him on audible. So there’s a lot of resistance to changing our way of eating away from animal products. It’s in our language. We have to get to the meat of the matter. I always thought that the most satisfying part of my meal that really stuck to my ribs, that made me feel satisfied and full was the protein from an animal product and the fat. I thought the protein and the fat were the satisfying parts and that I needed to add some fiber and some color for healthy. My mind was blown when I cut out all animal products and I did it cold turkey.

[0:11:11] Ashley James: Yeah. We’re going to get into that story though.

[0:11:13] Naomi Murphy: Okay. I was blown away and I continue to be actually, that eating a high fiber diet in the form of fruits and vegetables, is way more satisfying than eating meat and fats ever was and I have the added benefit of never ever feeling like I’m having a food coma or I’m getting kind of ill from eating. I like to eat so I don’t eat tiny portions. I eat a big amount of good food that I make. I just feel like the pressure of being full, I don’t feel disgusting or tired or fatigued or anything. I don’t feel any and there’s definitely no hangover the next day.

[0:12:07] Ashley James: The food comas and the food hangovers.

[0:12:09] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We can spend holidays with great delight, interesting, flavorful food that makes you lose weight instead of gain weight if you need to lose weight, which I do and without trying. Just by cooking the whole food plant-based food.

[0:12:38] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. You did Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s all eating the whole food plant-based diet, your whole family including your parents, which we’ll get into your story. But you guys had a successful whole holiday season and no one felt deprived and everyone got to eat amazing, delicious foods. We filmed some of it and put it in the membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. Yeah. It’s delicious. You’re right. I’m sitting here and I’m feeling my body and we just about half an hour ago ate your amazing, made from scratch whole food plant-based side paneer, which is delicious Indian food. I feel so satisfied right now like I do not need to eat for the next five hours. I feel so satisfied and there was no meat in it.

[0:13:30] Naomi Murphy: There’s no oil in it. There’s not even an oil added to sort of make you feel satisfied and full. So it is amazing. It is amazing to me. I think it will be amazing for a long time.

[0:13:42] Ashley James: The Ashley three years ago would not believe the Ashley now. That’s how much my world has changed in the last few years. I did what your husband is doing which is I slowly adapted to the whole food plant-based whereas you went –

[0:14:03] Naomi Murphy: You went whole hog but not cold turkey?

[0:14:04] Ashley James: Right. I am now whole hog but I didn’t go cold turkey. All the meat talk. Whereas you went totally cold turkey just like my husband, right? He just woke up January 1^st –

[0:14:17] Naomi Murphy: Well, I have some strong motivation. I have some strong motivation. When you guys were eating whole food plant-based, no oil, I just thought, “Well, that’s a bit fussy. That’s a bit extreme but I could accommodate that. I could cook something for you.” But I didn’t imagine that I would want to do that. It just didn’t occur to me that that would be a good solution for me because of all the ether health information I’ve been following. The way that I’d been using whole foods.

I remember about a decade ago, there was a number of books kind of about using the whole food. People talked about, “Eat the chicken skin. Eat the whole thing because there’s benefits to all parts.” But what they don’t mention is you can get many more nutrients in plant foods than you can in a chicken skin. It’s just that if you have to be eating chicken, which turns out to have a lot of problems if you read Proteinaholic and if you read How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. You can learn that there’s some significant problems associated with eating poultry that I never imagined possible actually because poultry has been considered healthier version of meat.

[0:15:45] Ashley James: Well, what’s funny in the Proteinaholic he cites a study where they showed that eating poultry is associated with weight gain. On all the diets where I gained weight and not lost weight, I was just beating my head against the wall desperately trying to lose weight, I was eating chicken.

[0:16:05] Naomi Murphy: Think of all the people eating chicken breasts.

[0:16:08] Ashley James: Thinking that they’re doing something really really healthy but of all the animals you could eat, chicken, which we associate with low fat and weight loss, is actually the one that causes the most amount of weight gain, unhealthy weight gain.

[0:16:21] Naomi Murphy: It’s also associated with prostate cancer, developing prostate cancer and I don’t remember what else. It’s very strongly associated with some serious illness. Now that my husband and I are in our mid-late 40s you know it’s just becoming a time where we’re really paying attention to health changes and really wanting to live healthfully. When you’re a teenager in your 20s you can abuse your body and you don’t necessarily feel the impact.

[0:17:00] Ashley James: Right. Now we feel everything.

[0:17:02] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So it’s interesting. I wish I would’ve had all these information when I was younger.

[0:17:09] Ashley James: I do too. I know I’m ready to hear it, which is funny because we were talking about that before we heat record, that I owned the Colin T. Campbell’s book, The China Study, in the early 2000s. I was reading it. I didn’t finish it obviously. I remember being on an airplane reading it flying somewhere. I think I was flying to Florida for Christmas and then I left it there, lost it or something. Imagine how different my life would’ve been if I had actually taken that book seriously in my early 20s. I mean, my life would’ve been very different. But I’m really really happy with where I am now.

I think regret and guilt and shame are very toxic emotions. I’ve heard some people compare it to every time you feel guilt or shame it’s kind of like smoking a cigarette. If we think about, it is toxic for the body. First to stay in that level of vibration of holding on to regret, shame and guilt; and I could totally go there. I could totally feel the amount of regret of my past, right? We are the people we are right now because of our past. So let’s just transform it into a positive. I appreciate the person I am now and I’m still growing, I’m still on a journey as are you, as are we all. I can appreciate my past.

If I had taken it seriously, oh my gosh, my life would be so different now. So, it’s pretty amazing that I had the cognitive dissonance to just shut it down and not listen.

[0:18:43] Naomi Murphy: Yes. I recall actively dismissing that book. Sean and I, we were talking about it when we were dating. So let’s say 17 years ago, he had a friend who ate whole food plant-based, no sugar. I don’t know about the oil and salt. It was based on reading T. Colin Campbell’s book The China Study that scientifically shows that way of eating is the healthiest. I remember saying, “Well, I’m going to pretend that you never said that.” Because it just was not workable in my mind at that time.

[0:19:28] Ashley James: We have to be ready to hear it because you were facing some health challenges. I know that listeners want to take their health to the next level. Some of them are in an acute situation facing health challenges while others are just really interesting in achieving those health goals.

Let’s talk about your story and paint that picture. What have you gone through in your life? Because I know you have really healed some stuff. So, what have you gone through in your life? Tell us your story.

[0:19:57] Naomi Murphy: When I think about my relationship with food, a key memory was when I was in high school and I just wanted to be thinner. I remember depriving my body of food and then standing next to a refrigerator and eating ice cream and that’s it.

[0:20:18] Ashley James: It’s like anorexia and then binging. You weren’t throwing up?

[0:20:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t eat that much but my food choices were obviously bizarre and not healthful. I didn’t have a concept of a health-promoting. Though my mom was a good home cook. She was often on Weight Watchers. We ate chicken and white meat but still with plenty of oils and plenty of animal products. We did some healthy things back then.

So it was that experience of being anorexic I think that made me think like I don’t really want to diet for weight loss. Any diet that I have should be about health primarily. Of course, weight loss can happen when you have a healthy diet. But I just realize that I needed to have a boundary around that.

[0:21:30] Ashley James: You mean you wanted to make sure that your diet was never about restricting portions because you saw that you could become extreme and start eating really unhealthful?

[0:21:44] Naomi Murphy: I had to be careful with it. Later, maybe about 10 years ago, my husband and I did do Weight Watchers for a short period. Or we’ve done My Fitness Pal when you track what you eat. I think that really helps with portion control. So that really didn’t trigger extreme behavior. That was good for showing me that I was eating more than I needed to eat.

[0:22:12] Ashley James: That’s good because, well like in Weight Watchers, you don’t want to only eat five points a day, right? If you have the anorexic mindset you might try to say, “I want to get under five points.” Whereas you’re supposed to be eating 23 points a day. So Weight Watchers is like, “We want to get you to this goal. We want you to eat 20 points a day.” Maybe not 23 or whatever. SO they try to keep you within parameters. Also My Fitness Pal, you may be staying 1800 calories but you wouldn’t want to be like, “I only want to eat 300 calories a day.”

[0:22:51] Naomi Murphy: But neither of those things. Those were like a short-term experience to be informative of how I could eat better. That level of calculation and also their food recommendations didn’t help me feel better. So it was not sustainable. It didn’t engage me. It didn’t feel healthy but it was helpful for portion control at that time. So in my 20s, I worked at Bastyr University.

[0:23:22] Ashley James: Which is the naturopathic clinic here.

[0:23:24] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s a college. I worked at the clinic for the college. So I was surrounded by health nuts. That was awesome and fun like the people who worked in the admin roles and also the students that we knew. So, there was always a way to learn about the different elimination diet or a cleanse. I had some depression and I just happened to mention it to one of the docs. She said, “You should come in and do an elimination diet because you have dark circles under your eyes, which indicates you have a food sensitivity or food allergy.”

So I did that. Instead of having my blood tested, I did an elimination diet and slowly tested the foods. I think it was a few weeks that I did not eat any allergens and then you slowly test them. If you have a reaction you don’t eat for like three or four days any of the other foods and then you add another so you can see what response is. So that became a really long drawn out process that lasted about six months. I did find some things that I really responded to so it made me really afraid of food. So that affected my eating for a long time.

I did eat such a clean diet that I did. I lost like 25 pounds. I did feel a lot better. It didn’t help me achieve a healthier diet in the long run. I mean, I did eliminate some things but I was not counseled, which I think is really interesting now about how to address gut health, which was sort like, “Why can’t I eat gluten? Why do I respond to these things?” The answer was that it may be just a problem with my gut. But then no one pushed me to continue seeing somebody to address gut health, which I know so much more about that now. So it seems obvious that they would’ve helped me heal my gut back then. But it didn’t happen for whatever reason. I didn’t pursue the appointment and the supervising doc didn’t recommend it. So I don’t know. It’s a question I have about that.

[0:25:46] Ashley James: Yeah. This is where we have to advocate for ourselves as patients. I have had that experience with a doctor kind of just say something in passing. What they really should’ve done was made the entire appointment be about that, you know. The, “Oh. You should just heal your gut.” Then like, “Goodbye.” Well, okay. How? What? Yeah. We need to advocate for ourselves. Knowing what you know now, those doctors that you were surround with every day because you work in the clinic, those doctors should’ve been screaming, “Everyone needs to heal their gut. The gut is the first thing. If we don’t have a healthy gut we don’t have a healthy anything. Everyone, everyone quick. Come over here. Eat this fermented food.”

[0:26:30] Naomi Murphy: And it is a teaching clinic so perhaps they wanted to keep more people coming in that didn’t work there or something. Maybe just have to do with being an employee and using their clinic. I wish I would’ve started addressing my gut health back then because it would’ve change everything.

[0:26:52] Ashley James: Well, you’re addressing it now.

[0:26:55] Naomi Murphy: Yes. So I have three children. I had my last child when I was 40. I became very fatigued and tired and had some brain fog. All of these things I attributed to being a mom of three children that were five and under. I don’t think that anyone would dispute that that’s a possibility. So it didn’t occur to me until my youngest child went to kindergarten and I was like, “Great. I’m ready to kick butt now.” Then I noticed that I actually felt worse. I didn’t have energy to do all the things that I’ve been waiting to do while I was a stay at home mom. That was a big wakeup call for me.

I ended up being diagnosed with Epstein Barr virus. Starting on protocol with an MD, I had a little improvement but not a lot. I was overweight. So I thought, “Well, maybe if I just lose weight I will have more energy and doing this Epstein Barr protocol will be more effective if I could just lighten the load of my body.” With the permission of my doctor I started doing keto. I did keto. I followed Facebook groups and there are people that I knew at the time that were keto. I ate probably the most unhealthy version of keto whether it involves eating bacon and cheese.

[0:28:41] Ashley James: Bacon wrapped cheese and cheese covered bacon.

[0:28:45] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t last long with that. I did feel a little bit more energy from eating keto at first. Then the lack of fiber in my diet was impactful. I just felt funny like making a tofu stir fry for my family and then I ate a piece of cheese and a piece of bacon and a small serving of cauliflower or something. It just didn’t feel right. So that didn’t work for me long term.

I got a better protocol that involved eating the foods recommended by Anthony Williams, the medical medium.

[0:29:32] Ashley James: Okay. Who’s the medical medium?

[0:29:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. My doctor also recommended his foods for treating EBV.

[0:29:41] Ashley James: So you stopped keto.

[0:29:43] Naomi Murphy: Stopped keto. So at that point I started EBV with food and it was whole food but it involved spoonful of coconut oil sometimes, plenty of meat. Anthony Williams doesn’t promote meat but I did. I did eat healthy meat.

[0:30:09] Ashley James: Well the meat your family gets, just to paint the picture, there’s a farm up in Camano Island and this beefalo which I never knew what they were until I met you. But it’s a hybrid of a buffalo and a cow.

[0:30:23] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. They are entirely grass-fed, no pesticide.

[0:30:26] Ashley James: They live a wonderful life out on the pasture.

[0:30:29] Naomi Murphy: Very small farm.

[0:30:31] Ashley James: Then your family buys like have of one and puts it in the freezer.

[0:30:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We fry it and no fat comes out. It’s really lean.

[0:30:39] Ashley James: Your family was looking for high-quality protein. It wasn’t really a standard American diet, although you were eating the same amount of protein, same amount of meat as everyone else. Just high quality. Here you were, you were very tired every morning. You really were fatigued. You could hardly function, could hardly leave the house.

[0:31:05] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I started having some neurological symptoms like dizziness and fatigue is considered a neurological symptoms as well. I had numbness and tingling as well in my legs sometimes in my hands. At one point like my whole right side of my body got tingly and numb.

[0:31:30] Ashley James: There were several times you thought you got a stroke because you were –

[0:31:33] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I used to constantly ask that kind of question to myself like, “Do I need to go to the ER or what do I need to do?” So that was a stressful time.

[0:31:48] Ashley James: You also had some cardiac symptom too, right?

[0:31:51] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I had some heart palpitations and some arrhythmia, I guess.

[0:31:59] Ashley James: Weren’t you having shortness of breath also?

[0:32:01] Naomi Murphy: That was later. That was later. But that’s not what I started out with. So I treated my Epstein Barr using foods that are anti-viral and herbs that are anti-viral. I did some detoxes. I did the parasite cleanse, which I’m on again from Dr. Jay Davidson.

[0:32:26] Ashley James: That’s a great episode to listen to.

[0:32:27] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I love that one.

[0:32:29] Ashley James: You got a sauna. I remember that.

[0:32:30] Naomi Murphy: I got a sauna.

[0:32:32] Ashley James: You do regular coffee enemas. You would drink the smoothie green giant like 60 oz. green smoothies.

[0:32:43] Naomi Murphy: That’s when I started with whole food plant-based.

[0:32:46] Ashley James: Oh really? But before that you were doing the juicing of-

[0:32:49] Naomi Murphy: I did juicing. Juicing.

[0:32:51] Ashley James: Anthony Williams recommends juicing lots of celery so you were doing lots of celery juice.

[0:32:55] Naomi Murphy: Right. For over two years, every morning I had a pint of celery juice. My husband was very supportive in helping make that happen. I bought celery by the case.

[0:33:06] Ashley James: Organic?

[0:33:07] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Organic celery by the case. I did heal my gut. That was amazing. I’ve since learned that you can heal your gut using all kinds of vegetables. It doesn’t have to be celery juice but that was the protocol that I was using at that time. The consistency of my application of that I think help. Yeah. Things really changed.

[0:33:39] Ashley James: So you were on this healing EBV protocol for how many years were you working on EBV?

[0:33:47] Naomi Murphy: Well, over two years but it was two years that I think I was on the whole food mostly plant-based but with plenty of oil.

[0:33:58] Ashley James: And beefalo, right?

[0:34:01] Naomi Murphy: And also eating meat. That was for a couple of years. So I did have some health improvement. But there was also some slippage eventually because I’m a mom and I cook for others. I wanted to talk about when I did have my chronic illness but didn’t really realize it was a chronic illness. I relied heavily on dairy products to feed my family. Cottage cheese, melted cheese, kefir. I made kefir that felt good using good milk with probiotic. That was something I felt really good about. I felt that protein was the most important thing to feed my kids and I no longer think that. I’m no longer worried about that. I think that if there’s any health benefit to that way of eating was at least we were eating whole foods. We were eating whole foods all along.

[0:35:04] Ashley James: As opposed to eating a bunch of cereal in front of them.

[0:35:06] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We were trying. We try. We weren’t perfect. Whole food was our –

[0:35:15] Ashley James: Unprocessed. As much unprocessed food.

[0:35:16] Naomi Murphy: As much unprocessed food. But of course, listening to those people who were saying, “Eat the chicken skin. Use everything. Get the benefit.” Maybe even back then drink the red wine because of the benefit of the –

[0:35:35] Ashley James: Resveratrol in red wine which is like just eat the grapes dude. Just eat the grapes. You don’t need to get alcohol into your system. I mean, I get it.

[0:35:46] Naomi Murphy: When my health kind of tanked, there was no alcohol involved in my diet anymore.

[0:35:52] Ashley James: Right. You’ve been very strict.

[0:35:53] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So when you and Duffy were eating whole food plant-based, no salt, oil or sugar, I remember thinking it was a little bit extreme and not something I would choose but fine for you. That’s great that you were doing it. I was supportive of you.

[0:36:12] Ashley James: Didn’t we have you over for dinner? Didn’t we have you guys for dinner and we cooked that way or did you cook for us?

[0:36:21] Naomi Murphy: I think I tried to cook for you when you came over and I made something that fit like a coconut milk soup. Like a soup with coconut. Like a Thai thing.

[0:36:32] Ashley James: Your Thai coconut soup is oh my gosh, it’s amazing. We’re going to have to film that by the way and put it in the Learn True Health Home Kitchen because it is memorable. I’m actually like I could actually taste it in my mouth right now. It’s really good, your Thai soup and it’s full of vegetables. It’s so delicious.

[0:36:46] Naomi Murphy: Well, you’re lucky because I have some on the refrigerator right now.

[0:36:50] Ashley James: I’m going to have to take some home with me.

[0:36:53] Naomi Murphy: So, my motivation for going whole food plant-based was I saw a practitioner and was told that I had heart disease. Because of the location of the heart disease that it might be affecting my breathing.

[0:37:08] Ashley James: Was this back in June?

[0:37:09] Naomi Murphy: This was July 15^th, 2019.

[0:37:10] Ashley James: July 15^th, 2019.

[0:37:14] Naomi Murphy: I was completely flummoxed because I have been focusing about EBV, not worried about calories, not worried about my weight, focusing on just eating high-quality food that was anti-viral. Really wanting to focus on that and then I heard heart disease, which never occurred to me as a possible problem though it should because it’s the number one –

[0:37:43] Ashley James: It’s the number one killer.

[0:37:44] Naomi Murphy: It’s the number one killer of our country.

[0:37:46] Ashley James: Statistically, if you’ve been eating the standard American diet, you are statistically more likely to die of heart disease than anything else. So this conversation is the most important conversation for everyone to have because this is the diet proven to reverse heart disease. Now, at the time you saw the practitioner six months ago, can you believe it’s been six months? You were noticing, because you go on weekly walks around your neighborhood with a walking partner with a neighbor, and you notice that you were having shortness of breath along with all your other heart symptoms.

[0:38:18] Naomi Murphy: Yep. With all my other heart symptoms and the poor circulation, which is causing the numbness and tingling. It all was attributed to me, in my mind, as part of EBV and EBV attacking different parts of my body. But this practitioner said, “You don’t have EBV. You have heart disease.” So I was like the break squealed and I changed my direction entirely. He said whole food plant-based. I went home.

[0:38:48] Ashley James: Well, first you came over to our house.

[0:38:50] Naomi Murphy: I went over to your house to talk to you about it.

[0:38:52] Ashley James: I made fresh rolls.

[0:38:53] Naomi Murphy: You fed me fresh rolls. I’m like, “This is delicious. Okay. This is a good start.” So that was strongly motivating for me to hear the word heart disease because it never occurred to me as something that I should be looking at because of my focus on the anti-viral lifestyle.

So I immersed myself in information about eating whole food plant-based. Dr. Esselstyn, because he wrote the book prevent and reverse heart disease, was kind of my gateway educator which I found his interview that you did. I don’t remember in what order but I checked out the iThrive documentary. I bought the iThrive documentary because Sean’s mom has diabetes.

[0:39:45] Ashley James: Sean being your husband.

[0:39:46] Naomi Murphy: Sean is my husband. Yes.

[0:39:51] Ashley James: Just a little plug, LearnTrueHealth.com/iThrive. For people that don’t want to check out that docu-series. It’s really good. It really helped you, right?

[0:39:59] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Yes. It was great information. I learned so much about diabetes too which is important for everyone to learn about because it’s so prevalent in our society right now.

[0:40:12] Ashley James: Well, Type 2 diabetes is a byproduct of eating a high processed fat and high meat diet, which is it blew my mind. It took me a really long time to get that even though they kept saying it because in my mind, I have been indoctrinated that sugar is the cause of diabetes and it’s not. I really like how Dr. Garth Davis lays this out in his book Proteinaholic. He really does a good job laying out the studies that prove that people who are on a whole food plant-based diet, even if they eat a tremendous amount of carbohydrates they have amazing insulin sensitivity so they do not have insulin resistance. The more someone eats animal products, which is high fat, even if you eat a chicken breast there’s still a lot of fat in it. The more fat we eat, the more insulin resistance we create. That blew my mind because I had too type 2 diabetes and I reversed it with food.

Now that I am eating this way, my insulin sensitivity is the best it’s ever been. My glucose is the best it’s even been, which is really exciting because I’m eating like 300 grams of carbs a da. Whereas when I was eating really low carb, I wouldn’t allow myself to more than 50 grams a carbs a day which is very restrictive. But that just goes to show because people who are type 2 diabetic who eat, let’s say they eat a potato and their blood sugar shoots up because they’re eating a potato with animal products with oil or butter or whatever. They’re like, “See, I can’t eat those carbs because my blood sugar goes up. Sugar’s the problem. Sugar’s the problem.” No. The insulin resistance is the problem.

We need to heal the insulin resistance just as we need to heal the gut first. When it comes to blood sugar regulation, carbs are not the devil. We need to heal the insulin resistance and then you can eat carbs and you’re body uses and utilizes it in a healthy way. That blew my mind. That whole docu-series, iThrive docu-series really lays that out in a beautiful way. So you watched the docu-series.

[0:42:32] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. And I think one of the main things that I learn from that is that diabetes is it’s not just an epidemic, it’s a pandemic. The level of illness from diabetes that we have in our country from diabetes is so high and so serious that that’s what we’re dealing with. It’s reversible with changing the diet. It’s sort of like going back to the days of the black plague and people not realizing the cause of it so not being able to stop it. That’s how we’re acting like there is no solution and there is.

So if you think at the level of dysfunction that’s going on that we can solve it but it’s sort of like an outlier information. I no longer feel that way because I’ve immersed myself in the doctors and other people that write about this and speak about it. Go back a year ago, I thought that taking medication, managing blood sugar prolongs life. I thought that my husband’s mom was doing well. She’s managing her blood sugar eating lots of dairy and meat and vegetables too and taking the medication. I think that’s she’s doing really well. But people who are managing their blood sugars with medication and a high protein diet are not prolonging their life. This is a statistical reality. So that blew my mind. That there is a way to reverse it and it’s not what all the diabetics are talking about or being taught or being told by their doctors.

[0:44:34] Ashley James: No. It actually really angers me. So I’ve helped people for the last eight years now coming up on nine years. I’ve helped people reverse diabetes and there’s countless. Like countless people who have gone to their doctor 20 years being kept on Metformin or insulin and Metformin or other drugs. Then they go to their doctor after working with me for under three months. They go to their doctor and they no longer have type 2 diabetes. No longer have it. The doctor doesn’t even ask a question. They go, “I want to go off this med. Here’s my blood work. My blood work shows I can get it off this medication.” The doctor takes them off the medication.

The doctors been prescribing the medication for 20 years and they go, “Don’t you want to know what I did?” Like 99% of the time the doctors do not want to know. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what diet and lifestyle changes cause their patient to no longer need medication for the rest of their life. That is the definition of health. Symptom-free on no medications. That is the goal post. That is the goal for all of us to be on zero medications because we are so healthy we don’t need it.

[0:45:50] Naomi Murphy: Well. Yeah. I think it’s something that you keep showing us through your interviews is that our medical system is not centered around health.

[0:45:59] Ashley James: It’s not centered around achieving health. It’s maintaining disease.

[0:46:03] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Right. It’s managing disease, which is different. It’s different than achieving health.

[0:46:10] Ashley James: So we have to be outliers. I love to use that word. But we do. We have to be the salmon. We have to swim upstream to not be a statistic. So eating, like you said, this is kind of extreme. I get it. The Ashley from three years ago would not think that this was an easy way to eat. But now, the Ashley today is like, “This is the only way I want to eat for the rest of my life. It’s delicious and I feel amazing.”

[0:46:34] Naomi Murphy: Right. But even if people choose to eat meat, they can get tremendous health benefits just from increasing their vegetable consumption.

[0:46:43] Ashley James: Yeah. Tell them about Sean.

[0:46:44] Naomi Murphy: Especially like variety of vegetable consumption. So you don’t just add one vegetable. So yeah, I want to talk about my husband Sean. He said about ten years ago, so he would’ve been in his mid-30s. He’s a first-grade teacher. He used to teach the kids how to embroider self-portraits. So using a needle, threading a needle for 24 kids because they weren’t able to do that. They’re not able to do that in first grade. So he had to help everyone. Then all of a sudden he needed glasses, he needed readers to do that. He had heard or read somewhere about improving your eyesight by eating a lot of vegetables.

So he had just increased his vegetable content, reverse that problem. We were still –

[0:47:34] Ashley James: He was still eating meat.

[0:47:36] Naomi Murphy: We were still in the whole foods of all kinds. So he just

[0:47:38] Ashley James: Eating dairy and eggs. He was still eating all that.

[0:47:40] Naomi Murphy: He just amped up his vegetables.

[0:47:41] Ashley James: Just add with more vegetables.

[0:47:43] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So he reversed that.

[0:47:47] Ashley James: I love it. Yeah. Think about it. It’s all the antioxidants you’re getting, the vitamins and the minerals and all the nutrients our bodies need.

[0:47:54] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I think Dr. Fuhrman is a big, you interviewed him, right?

[0:47:59] Ashley James: Yes. Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

[0:48:00] Naomi Murphy: Dr. Joel Fuhrman. He’s a whole food plant-based doctor. I think he recommends or says that eating up to 7% meat is healthy. I just think that for some people it’s easier to calculate 7% of your diet being meat but I think that kind of opens the door to if you don’t want to be extreme, you could just say, “Sure. I can eat meat sometimes.” It just have to be under 7% and then I can get all the health benefits of eating this way without restricting myself. I can eat whatever it is at a certain holiday, your birthday or anniversary or something if you need to.

[0:48:42] Ashley James: Yeah. I think it’s something like a one or two meals a week would contain fish or meat. Joel Fuhrman, his whole food plant-based diet, he calls it the nutritarian diet and I’ve adapted so much from him because he talks about for example onions and mushrooms. You want to eat a half a cup of mushrooms a day. He shows the studies. He correlate, he brings all the information beautifully together.

He shows if you eat half a cup of mushrooms a day, even just the plain white ones, doesn’t have to be the fancy ones. Make sure it’s organic. Cooked and with half a cup of onions every day, I can’t remember the exact percentage but it was a significant reduction of breast cancer, significant reduction of all cancers. It’s a huge huge support system to the immune system. It actually has a chemical, mushrooms a very healthy chemical that stops new vasculature growing to a tumor. So if you currently have a little bit of cancer, everyone has cancer cells in their body that the immune system is cleaning out. But if you are actually, if you’re body’s developing a tumor right now because you won’t know for another few years. Because tumor takes years to really get to the point where we notice them.

Most tumors grow slowly. So the body’s creating new vasculature to the tumors. Just something as simple as eating half a cup of mushrooms, which almost nothing. You can hide it. If you don’t like the taste of mushrooms, you can probably hide that in a soup. You could probably hide it somewhere. But just using it as medicine, it’s just one example that it reduces the ability of the body, it almost shuts it off, the body’s ability to create new vasculature to a tumor. So you’re just cutting it off before the tumor ever gets to grow.

I mean I’d rather half a cup of mushrooms for the rest of my life than be put on chemo. It’s like that makes total sense to me.

[0:50:33] Naomi Murphy: You think?

[0:50:34] Ashley James: Yeah. I’d rather pay for it now than pay for it later. So when he, many actually of the experts that we follow, do kinds of great things where they say, “You eat broccoli because of this. You want to eat cabbage because of that. You’re healing this part of the body with beets.” Beets are wonderful for the liver and amazing actually for the cardiovascular system. They increase the nitric oxide and heal the endothelial lining of the heart and of all the arteries.

So it’s like every single food we go through it. We do this in the Learn True Health Kitchen membership. You can go through. When you’re eating a food and you’re like, “I’m healing my liver right now and I am healing my eyes by eating this. I’m healing my brain right no by eating that.” You’re eating with a purpose and it’s delicious food. You know you’re healing your body. I love that a lot of these experts that we’ve been following do that.

Joel Fuhrman says, I think I’ve heard 10% you’ve heard 7% but he basically says you’re significantly reducing. It’s not meat added every meal it’s maybe once a week. So some people can have that flexibility. I had to really ease into this because I was a huge believer that meat was the most important food in the entire world because I really bought the Atkins. Oh yeah, I bought it. Hook, line and sinker because people that I really really looked up to, mentors of mine, said it’s the most important part of the world. I had several mentors say that it was most. I mean I really bought, I feel like I drank the Kool-Aid big time on that.

So I had to like eat one meatless meal and I kind of freaked out about before. Even just preparing a meatless meal I’m like, “I don’t know how this is going to go.” Then I was like, “Okay. That was doable.” So I really like had to ease into this whereas my husband just woke up and said, two years ago he woke up and said, “Never again will I eat meat.” Which helped reduce my meat intake because I stopped buying it for the household. So we only ate it when we went to other places outside the house. But yeah. It constantly surprised me how good I felt not eating meat. It’s okay to ease into it. It’s okay to go meatless Mondays or I’m only going to eat meat at dinner. You can ease into it.

[0:52:53] Naomi Murphy: All the whole food plant-based recipes or the way that I just eat it, it didn’t taste delicious right away but it really only took a matter of days for me. I mean, maybe a week, maybe ten days

[0:53:05] Ashley James: Well you’re an amazing cook too so I have to give you props. My husband is waving at you and giving you a thumbs up.

[0:53:11] Naomi Murphy: Isn’t that why we decided to make the website though?

[0:53:15] Ashley James: Yes. We decided to do the membership because we’re both really good cooks.

[0:53:19] Naomi Murphy: I love your cooking.

[0:53:20] Ashley James: I love your cooking. We should just hire each other to cook for each other.

[0:53:26] Naomi Murphy: I know. I know. I wish we lived closer like next door.

[0:53:30] Ashley James: Well, you never know what the future brings. Maybe we’ll be neighbors one day.

[0:53:35] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That’d be great.

[0:53:36] Ashley James: That’d be great. We live like 40 minutes away from each other, but it’s worth the drive to come eat your food. So, that’s why we did the membership. So that we could share with you guys our recipes, which I’m still thinking about the lunch I just had because it’s so delicious.

[0:53:50] Naomi Murphy: I don’t think, like I was saying, I don’t think I could have done so well eating whole food, transitioning into whole food plant-based without Ashley as a friend. The experience that she had and the pointers. So, that’s what we want to be for everyone who joins the membership. We just want to be – if you don’t have someone in your community or in your family that’s up for it yet like you may find them, but you know in the meantime like we could all be that for each other. We could be your friend that eats whole food plant-based.

[0:54:21] Ashley James: Naomi and I are your friend. I’m here to support you in eating more whole foods in your life, eating more plants in your life.

[0:54:29] Naomi Murphy: So, I have a couple of favorite stories –

[0:54:32] Ashley James: I want to hear them.

[0:54:33] Naomi Murphy: – about healing with whole food plant-based. Okay. So these aren’t my stories, but one is someone who has been on your show and I don’t think he’d mind if I told his story, Eric Thornton.

[0:54:41] Ashley James: Yes.

[0:54:42] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Okay. So, he told me about his experience of going whole food plant-based. So, seven years ago, maybe a little bit longer now, but seven years ago he had a really serious heart attack. It’s a kind of heart attack that kills many people and it didn’t kill him. So, that’s great. So, after his heart attack he became a vegetarian and he ate an egg white omelet every morning with a teaspoon of coconut oil. He ate lots of vegetables the rest of the day and he had like a piece of cheese like an ounce of cheese every couple of weeks that would be added into his diet. Vegetarian, ate egg in the morning probably cooked in oil, other things cooked in oil but used coconut oil, obviously was –

[0:55:35] Ashley James: But no fish, no meat, no fried food.

[0:55:37] Naomi Murphy: Nope. Nope. Three years after his heart attack his cardiologist said that he needed emergency surgery.

[0:55:46] Ashley James: Because his clogs got so bad in his heart.

[0:55:48] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So he had heard of eating whole food plant-based to reverse heart disease. I don’t remember his pathway for learning about that but I know he did end up working with doctors at True North. He spoke to Dr. Esselstyn. I guess Dr. Esselstyn will talk to anyone who wants to talk to him eventually.

[0:56:07] Ashley James: Yeah. Dr. Esselstyn called him. It was actually really neat. Eric was, and I haven’t heard the whole story but Eric told me this that when he was walking into his cardiologist’s appointment to talk about the surgery, the emergency surgery, Dr. Esselstyn called him back and Dr. Esselstyn talked to him and laid it out and said, “Stop eating that one egg a day or whatever. Stop doing the oil. And stop doing the cheese.” Those three things, if he had just had stopped doing those three years before, he would have already had reversed his heart disease.

[0:56:45] Naomi Murphy: Right. Dr. Esselstyn will say things like if people who are like basically at death’s door, have tried everything he will just say, “Give me 16 days.” So this way of eating can actually arrest and start to reverse problems very quickly. So if you’re considering experimenting with whole food plant-based eating, you don’t have to change your life. You could just do a cleanse like a whole food plant-based cleanse and see what happens. Because people have reversed very serious conditions.

So I’ll get back to Eric’s story. So he had angina so bad –

[0:57:27] Ashley James: Which is chest pain.

[0:57:27] Naomi Murphy: Chest pain. He had bad chest pains and he needed help walking. He needed to be pulled up out of his chair to walk. He was breathless when walking. He was weak.

[0:57:44] Ashley James: He was in his 40s.

[0:57:45] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I wasn’t sure of his age.

[0:57:47] Ashley James: I’m pretty sure he was in his 40s and also he was kind of fit because before he’d gotten to the work he does now, he was a contractor. He’s always worked with his hands. So it wasn’t like he was out of shape.

[0:58:00] Naomi Murphy: So he cut out the oil and the egg and the piece of cheese every two weeks. Just cut out those things, cut out all oils. Within three days his angina was gone and within three months he was off seven of his medications including high blood pressure medication doctor’s orders because his blood pressure was getting too low and he didn’t need surgery.

[0:58:29] Ashley James: Yes. So he decided not to do the emergency surgery and instead try the diet and the diet worked.

[0:58:36] Naomi Murphy: Now, he’s a healthy guy, walks his dogs, looks fit.

[0:58:44] Ashley James: Doesn’t have any heart issues, any heart clogs. Yeah. I mean just think about it, when you hear that the medical system, “The cost of heart disease is whatever billions of dollars.” Replace the word cost with profit. Diabetic, and I’ve heard that the diabetic costs $12,000 a year, right? I think it’s more now but to manage diabetes cost $12,000 a year. That isn’t a cost that’s a profit. There’s a lot of companies that want to protect their profits and that would not want people empowered and healing their diseases. There are scores of people out there that want you to be sick because it profits them. Not so sick you die because they want to keep making a profit. Just sick enough to be on medication and need surgeries and need stints and need their procedures. They don’t want you healthy.

So, that’s another motivator for me because I want to completely blow all the statistics out of the water. I don’t want to be any of those statistics. I don’t want to you know die of any of those. I want to blow everything. Everything out of the water. I want to live to be a hundred and totally healthy and running marathons at 100. That’s a goalpost for me. So we have to navigate our lives knowing that all the marketing, all the information out there in the mainstream is designed to keep us in that box called sick and on medications. It’s our job to be the outliers and the mavericks.

[1:00:29] Naomi Murphy: Even the most well-intentioned doctor, if surgery and medications are what they have in their toolbox they don’t they’re not informed in how to keep you healthy. So it’s not that the individuals involved in the system are all but they’re just using what they’ve been taught. If our medical schools are supported by big business making money then they’re going to make sure that what doctors learn are to use their product.

[1:01:01] Ashley James: Yeah. The thing is, if a surgery can save someone’s life do it, if a medication can save someone’s life do it. Absolutely. Preventive medicine is about catching it before you need that. I’m not saying that the surgery shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that when you go to most doctors that’s the only option they’ll give you. This is my problem when you look at naturopathic medicine versus MD like going to a medical doctor. They will both look at the same blood work and drive completely different things. An MD will wait until you’re sick enough to give you a medication. An ND will say, “Okay. You’re starting to go in the wrong direction. Let’s change some things now so you won’t need to go on medication.” So prevention is what 100% of listeners can do right now. We can all prevent things by shifting little things in our diet and our lifestyle if we want to get really gung-ho about it, dive into the whole food plant-based diet because it can significantly reduce your chances of dying of a heart attack.

[1:02:06] Naomi Murphy: Right. Yeah. It’s just interesting to see what kind of results a healthy person can get. If you think you’re doing well, just give it a try. Just do it as an experiment and see if you notice any differences. But people have gotten very dramatic results and extended life. They get to live by changing their diet.

So, another one of my favorite stories, again it’s not my story but it’s Dr. Greger’s story, I think what led him to a lifelong job to educate people about nutrition. His website nutritionfacts.org is an incredible resource. He does that all without any payment or any advertising because he never wants people to think that there’s profit associated with him sharing information about health.

[1:03:13] Ashley James: What was the website again?

[1:03:14] Naomi Murphy: Nutritionfacts.org.

[1:03:16] Ashley James: Nutritionfacts.org.

[1:03:17] Naomi Murphy: It’s a great resource. It’s a great resource.

[1:03:19] Ashley James: I actually really like it. I like those videos he makes.

[1:03:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Some are videos and some are articles. I have actually started using it because I was listening to his book How Not To Die and he would say something like some statistical information about eating chicken and prostate cancer. I think like, “Whoa. I want to share that.” So, rather than taking a picture of the book and sharing the picture, I go to his website. Everything that I’ve looked for from the book there’s either an article or a video about it that I could share with whoever it is that I’m thinking of.

He has a great story. So when he was a young child, he was five or six, his grandmother was in her 60s and she had heart disease. She had had all the interventions that they were able to do. She had had bypass surgeries and I don’t know what else. She had debilitating chest pain and was in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk. She was sent home from the hospital basically to die given a couple more months to live. The family was devastated. That’s just like everything had been done possible to help her.

[1:04:40] Ashley James: Being in your 60s is so young.

[1:04:42] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. So the family was devastated. She checked herself into a Pritikin Center and I don’t know the details of Pritikin diet but is a whole food plant-based diet I don’t know specifically what else is entailed. Within a short period, she was not just walking but she started walking 10 miles a day. Then she lived 30 more years and saw her grandchild graduate from medical school.

[1:05:16] Ashley James: So, that’s why he was excited to become a doctor because he saw her heal herself.

[1:05:22] Naomi Murphy: Yes. He wanted to become a doctor to help heal people the way his grandmother was healed. So he was accepted to 17 different medical schools and he decided to choose which school to attend based on which had the most nutrition training. So he chose Tufts University which offered 21 hours of nutrition in their medical program.

[1:05:53] Ashley James: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of hours. Most MDS get maybe one or one to five hours worth of nutrition training.

[1:06:04] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So, every day while I’m cooking or eating or living my life, I ponder the fact that we have a tool to reverse or prevent disease and doctors are not being taught that tool. All of the doctors that I’ve mentioned and Ashley has interviewed, they are all outliers. They’ve all gone rogue against their profession.

[1:06:34] Ashley James: How dare they use food to kill people instead of medication. How dare they. I bet the AMA is just frothing at the bit. How dare they heal people.

[1:06:42] Naomi Murphy: I’m sure they are. They have resisted. Yeah. They’ve done.

[1:06:45] Ashley James: Yeah. We’re the resistance aren’t we? We’re going to rise up. Got my carrot in one hand and my kale in the other. So, six months ago, I can’t believe it’s only been six months. Six months ago you become totally whole food plant-based overnight. Jump on board and three days later your shortness of breath, your heart issues go away, right?

[1:07:09] Naomi Murphy: Well, I don’t know if my shortness of breath improved that quickly, but it definitely improved. So that was summer. So I was walking a lot for exercise.

[1:07:18] Ashley James: Well, within the first week you texted me and said that you’re walking partner was like, “Wow. You’re going really fast.”

[1:07:27] Naomi Murphy: Was it only a week?

[1:07:28] Ashley James: It was like a week after. Let’s go back in our text messages because I’m pretty sure you’re like, “Seven days on. I’m eating this for seven days.” Then you kind of didn’t believe you’re walking partner. You’re like maybe they’re just tired, but you’re like, “I’m not walking different. They’re just tired.” So then you started walking with your kids and your kids were trying to keep up to you whereas you normally are the one behind them. That’s when you’re like, “Oh. I am walking faster.”

[1:07:54] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I was downtown with my, he was nine at that time. He is used to walking in front of me and waiting for me and kind of commenting that I’m kind of slow. We were walking together and he looked over at me and said, “I’m trying to keep up with you.”

[1:08:13] Ashley James: He’s athletic.

[1:08:14] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Oh gosh, I’m going to cry. That was very moving for me because I do like to walk quickly. I’ve always liked to walk and hike and things like that. So, to have restrictions in my movement was something that I become accustomed to but it also was very uncomfortable.

[1:08:39] Ashley James: You don’t want to feel like a prisoner in your own body. You’re so young. No matter what age you are, you’re so young. Whoever is listening, whatever age you are you are young because there are a 100-year-old women running marathons. So you can run. We can live at it. We can have youth in our body no matter what age. Here you are, a young mother and you were feeling so restricted in your body. You were exhausted, you couldn’t walk fast, you were fatigued.

[1:09:08] Naomi Murphy: So first of all, I don’t think you should call me a young mother. I think that’s misleading. I’m already 48. I’m almost 50 years old

[1:09:14] Ashley James: But in the last few years, you started out as a mother in your 30s. I’m about to be 40. So 40 now is my mind has to be young. Okay. You could be like, “I’m a young 70-year-old.” Whoever’s listening, just say the word young in front of your age and then make it so. I am a young 99-year-old. Make it so. We need to tell ourselves. In order to be a maverick, in order to pull ourselves out of that matrix where we’re driving through fast-food joints eating fried food, on medications. We have to pull ourselves out of the belief system that age = illness and disease and debilitation because it doesn’t. It doesn’t. So you are youthful. You still have youth in you, lady. You’re a wonderful mother and you were trapped. You were trapped in a prison.

[1:10:14] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I have active children especially my younger two. I want to be involved in their life. So, I do have to be able to keep up with them and be playful and be energetic and be able to get out there and do things because otherwise like I don’t get to partake.

[1:10:32] Ashley James: Right. So the whole summer you kept saying, “How am I going to get my parents on this? How am I going to get my parents to do this?” They’re in their 70s. Your dad recently had a heart surgery from something he was born with but that it manifests later. It happens because of wear and tear on the heart. So we can decrease wear and tear.

[1:10:51] Naomi Murphy: Exacerbated. Exacerbated by wear and tear.

[1:10:54] Ashley James: Right. We can decrease wear and tear with diet, which Dr. Esselstyn points out and teaches. There’s certain foods that really helped to heal the heart and there’s foods that hurt the heart.

[1:11:03] Naomi Murphy: Right. My parents actually lost a substantial amount of weight. My mom plateaued but my dad is down to his like age 25 weight, I don’t know.

[1:11:15] Ashley James: You skipped ahead. So, you all summer long wanted to get them on it. They were kind of like, “Low carb and keto’s the way to go.”

[1:11:25] Naomi Murphy: Right. Which made me worry as I had more education around the longevity of people eating keto. Keto is good for some short-term things, which is why I wanted to mention that they did lose weight using keto. But I was worried about them and using keto in an ongoing way. So, my parents are very traditional eaters. My mom’s a great cook but very traditional in the sense that my dad has always liked meat in the dinner. Meats in the meal.

[1:11:56] Ashley James: There’s a bit of old-school rigidity. You were worried that they would not take well to this diet.

[1:12:03] Naomi Murphy: Worried? I didn’t have any idea that they would ever take to it. But I started talking to my mom at a time a very vulnerable time when my dad was having open-heart surgery. I was reading one of my books. I think it was Dr. Fuhrman. I don’t remember which one, but I was just telling her tidbits. I might have been reading Dr. Esselstyn’s book even but anyway. She heard what I had to say and she believed what I said. Instantly, sort of negative messages came up to her like what will we eat on Christmas? What will we eat for Thanksgiving? What will we eat? If you’ve transitioned to eating a different way you just simply think like, “Well, you eat delicious food that you enjoy.” We don’t have to eat the foods that we’ve always eaten if they’re made of eggs and flour and butter. We don’t have to.

[1:13:07] Ashley James: She was worried about calcium. Because we’ve been taught that you get your calcium from dairy, which is a complete marketing lie actually. The cultures that eat the most dairy products are actually the ones with the most osteoporosis and the ones that are most plant-based have the stronger bones because we’re getting our calcium from plants. She was worried about certain things.

[1:13:35] Naomi Murphy: She has some concerns that I might be irresponsible in raising my kids and not giving them adequate nutrition. Well, I can experiment however I want. I’m an adult.

[1:13:44] Ashley James: Don’t experiment on kids.

[1:13:46] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That I shouldn’t. So she really worried about them. Then they watched Forks Over Knives and The Game Changers and I talked to –

[1:13:58] Ashley James: Which are on Netflix. I don’t know Forks Over Knives is on anymore, but Forks Over Knives is really good as an introduction. A good one. Game Changers is very entertaining.

[1:14:08] Naomi Murphy: It’s very inspiring. Yeah. It’s inspiring and entertaining. Yeah. So they watched both of those and then apparently they were sold and started eating whole food plant-based and they’re just going getting better and better. Even my dad doesn’t want to go back. He’s been great. He’s a master at smoking turkey. We always wanted papas smoked turkey for our birthday. We could choose whatever we wanted. Most of the members of my family choose smoked turkey and my dad made that for Thanksgiving as well. This year at Thanksgiving we had a whole food plant-based feast, which was bowls. We filled the table with different things like different toppings to put on grains or potatoes. It was phenomenal and delicious and colorful and wonderful. My dad just mentioned, he said, “I sort of miss making the turkey.” He likes it. He likes contributing in that way. They didn’t go whole food plant-based until fall. Already by Thanksgiving he wasn’t wishing he was eating the smoked turkey, which he is renowned for in our family. He just kind of missed being the one that made the smoked turkey.

[1:15:28] Ashley James: Well, tell him he can smoke vegetables if he wants to because I have smoked some vegetables in a trigger and it was really good. So, that’s a fun thing. He could smoke some tofu if he wanted to. Smoked mushrooms are really delicious.

So, your mom though and her testimonials in our membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, she had her arthritis go away.

[1:15:54] Naomi Murphy: Yes. Yes. So she has blood clots. She had blood clots after a surgery and then ended up having a blood clot and had to go to the hospital. So she’s on blood thinners and she would like to be off blood thinners. So, she is motivated to eat whole food plant-based and specifically eat some foods that are better for your circulatory system like beets and I don’t remember what else right now. But she’s trying to eat those every day. But a side effect of her trying to get to her goal of getting off her medication is that her arthritis went away.

[1:16:39] Ashley James: Being in the whole food plant-based diet her pain is gone, her arthritis is gone, they both lost weight. Your dad who has been doing –

[1:16:45] Naomi Murphy: They feel better.

[1:16:47] Ashley James: He goes to a, he does some kind of rehab gym because of the heart surgery he had.

[1:16:53] Naomi Murphy: He was the best in the gym.

[1:16:54] Ashley James: He was beating everyone else. In The Game Changers the movie they talk about how your endurance immediately goes. So athletes notice right away when they go whole food plant-based, no salt, sugar, oil that their endurance goes up immediately.

[1:17:09] Naomi Murphy: Also, so for the type of surgery that he had, the valve replacement surgery, it’s my understanding that everyone who gets that surgery is on statins for the rest of their life and is on high blood pressure medicine for the rest of their life. The last visit when he was at the doctor, the doctors are experimentally letting him off of statins. So, that’s wonderful.

I think after listening to Dr. Greger there’s hibiscus and flax and I don’t remember what else. But hibiscus is as good as one of the regular high blood pressure meds, functions identically. So I think there are ways that you can by not only improving your blood pressure by eating a whole food plant-based but there are foods that you can eat or drink to control your high blood pressure so you don’t need to be on the high blood pressure medication.

So, I’m proud of my parents for advocating for that and for making it happen. I’m very relieved. It’s like a dream come true when you hear about something that is so preventative of harder health conditions and your parents voluntarily do it. My mom’s even become a contributor helping us with the recipes, trying recipes, creating recipes.

[1:18:40] Ashley James: She’s really a good cook also.

[1:18:42] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She’s fantastic.

[1:18:43] Ashley James: Yeah. Your kids, you’re allowing them the flexibility. You’re not restricting them. If they want to go eat meat when they’re out they still do what they want to do, but at home that they actually have embraced this a lot more than you thought they would. Even your oldest. You want to talk about that?

[1:19:03] Naomi Murphy: My oldest son is a foodie. He’s 13. He just turned 13. I think he’s getting to an age where he’s able to intellectualize and understand the things that I’m saying that Ashley says and things he may he overhear on podcast that I have playing in the kitchen. So, when I changed my diet he was up for changing his diet too at home and was good about getting some exercise. Walking home from school before it started raining or being cold. He lost 11 pounds. Anecdotally, I would say that his emotions were much easier for him to manage. That was a positive thing for the whole family when you have a tween now a teen who manages their emotions better wherever you are. Then there’s an improvement, a big noticeable improvement. That was great for all of us.

[1:20:03] Ashley James: Duffy, my husband, also shared with me that he felt more even keel, that he felt more comfortable in his own skin after eating this way, after transitioning. So, there is an emotional component.

[1:20:16] Naomi Murphy: I want to one-up that because I’m going to be competitive with Duffy right now and say that I actually feel happy. That’s something I’ve struggled with depression. Obviously when you have fatigue and a chronic illness that involves fatigue and different health problems and anxiety. Heart changes that the cardiologist attributed to anxiety, which I think is just a physical manifestation of a problem in my case.

[1:20:51] Ashley James: Emotional manifestation of a physical problem.

[1:20:53] Naomi Murphy: Yeah.

[1:20:54] Ashley James: You were feeling in a state. You’re feeling a state that your body was in but it was a reflection of the state of health that you were in.

[1:21:02] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s triggered by a physical situation. So, but not the other way around. I guess I just don’t think the heart problem is caused by anxiety. I think that there’s a health problem that causes the anxiety.

[1:21:17] Ashley James: We’ve talked about this and you identify your anxiety as a reflection of your current health.

[1:21:23] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I’ve experienced both kinds of anxiety, but I would like a doctor to dig deeper if their solution is or if their diagnosis is, “Well, you have a heart arrhythmia which we associate with anxiety.” That’s to me attributing it to like a mental condition that I have rather than a health problem triggering anxiety.

[1:21:48] Ashley James: Anxiety. Yeah. Exactly. Like you feel a heart palpitation.

[1:21:52] Naomi Murphy: Why do you have the anxiety? Yeah. Why do you have the anxiety? Because there’s disharmony of some kind in your body.

[1:22:00] Ashley James: You weren’t sick enough for them to do something about it.

[1:22:03] Naomi Murphy: Right. I’m thinking back. I haven’t been back to a cardiologist and I’m going to try to see a local ND cardiologist who you recommended. I don’t think he’s been on your show yet.

[1:22:15] Ashley James: He has not been on my show yet but I’ll give a shout-out to Dr. Pournadeali, who is basically a cardiologist naturopath. He’s a naturopath but he has got the status in the naturopathic community as a cardiologist.

[1:22:28] Naomi Murphy: He was the cardiology instructor at Bastyr.

[1:22:29] Ashley James: Right. He’s pretty great. I mean, he’s not specifically like whole food plant-based. He agrees that this diet is great, but he’s also really really great. He helps patients get off of meds. He likes to work with natural remedies and he’s fine with working with meds if the person needs to get on that.

[1:22:49] Naomi Murphy: But he’s also interested in healing. So I want to see him because when I saw a cardiologist I think the cardiologist just checked on my complaint, which was arrhythmia and said, “That’s the type of arrhythmia we normally see associated with anxiety.” I didn’t need medicated. Conversation over. It wasn’t from that cardiologist that I learned about my developing heart disease. I would have to go back and say, “Could you look at the test and tell me if you see anything of concern? Is there a developing heart disease?” I would assume that there would be. That didn’t all –

[1:23:24] Ashley James: It wasn’t enough.

[1:23:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. That didn’t manifest in one year. That it was building up from –

[1:23:32] Ashley James: Well, you talked to cardiologists and they’ll say, because I’ve had people say this, “You look good for your age.”

[1:23:39] Naomi Murphy: Right. You fit the profile.

[1:23:41] Ashley James: Your heart looks good for your age. You only have 40% blockage. I mean, they’re not going to put in a stint until it or get you on some meds but that you have to get sick enough for them to do something. That’s the really frustrating part or they’ll put you on whatever their heart-healthy diet is, which does not reverse or prevent heart disease. This is the infuriating thing. That’s why I love the interview with Dr. Esselstyn because has the world’s longest study on reversing heart disease with diet.

[1:24:16] Naomi Murphy: Any interview with Dr. Esselstyn is great because he has a single message and it’s consistent. He thoroughly knows it. He’s been touting the same diet. I think he made a little some changes involving gluten or something recently.

[1:24:35] Ashley James: Really?

[1:24:36] Naomi Murphy: No. Maybe not. He’s made some changes along the way at some point but I don’t remember what they were.

[1:24:43] Ashley James: He recently, like in the last few years, he added more balsamic vinegar because of the nitric oxide.

[1:24:52] Naomi Murphy: That wasn’t part of the original?

[1:24:54] Ashley James: He said on our interview that he’s had this new thing, which is he gets a cardiology patient to do –

[1:25:00] Naomi Murphy: That is six cups of greens.

[1:25:01] Ashley James: Yeah. Every two hours you’re eating a steamed greens with like you’re dripping it into your body. So get a bowl of steamed green vegetables, rotate between he gives you like 15 different vegetables to choose from. Steam them, put some balsamic vinegar on it and chew it and swallow.

[1:25:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So no smoothies. Yeah. No smoothies. That’s how I like them.

[1:25:25] Ashley James: I don’t think he would have a problem if it’s just like – I really like the quote in Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis. He says the nearly perfect diet you follow is better than the perfect diet you don’t follow. So, you know what, if you have to do one of your servings of vegetables has to be a smoothie in order for you to get it in you then do it. I know some experts are like, “Never do smoothies because you should chew your food.”

[1:25:55] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I could never eat a blender full of kale if I had to chew it all. I literally fill my Vitamix with kale with a little bit of fruit on top and I like that now. Like I didn’t start out liking that. It was a slow –

[1:26:08] Ashley James: You’re hardcore, dude.

[1:26:10] Naomi Murphy: Yeah.

[1:26:12] Ashley James: Well, you’ve healed yourself. You don’t have EBV, you’ve lost weight as a by-product. You’re even trying to.

[1:26:20] Naomi Murphy: Yes. I lost 40 pounds. I lost 25 pounds just like a lot of the docs say. Just the anti-inflammatory, eliminating dairy and sugar for a month. A lot of people who are overweight can lose about around 25 pounds in a month. That happened for me. I’ve lost 40 pounds. I can assure you that I am not trying because I am making carrot cakes. My husband wants to go whole food plant-based but he needs to really ease in. I’m trying to please my family. I’m trying to impress kids. So, I am making cream cheese out of cashews, which I wouldn’t eat if I were serious about weight loss. I’m eating carrot cake. Sometimes I eat pudding made of tofu.

[1:27:07] Ashley James: This carrot cake is a whole food plant-based carrot cake and you’ve got a pudding you just mentioned. The pudding’s made of tofu. So all these foods are still very healthy but they’re not conducive to rapid weight loss.

[1:27:19] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Also, I eat plenty of food. I never deprive myself. If I like what I’ve made for dinner I will have a couple of servings. I continue to lose and I just got below a weight that I haven’t been for a long time, 210. I’m below 210 for the first time. I have an eight-year-old child. So, I can’t remember. It was probably after my pregnancy with him I actually gained weight. That was when EBV became a problem. I actually gained weight after my third child, which was the first time that it happened. I went up from around 200 to like almost 250 eventually.

[1:28:09] Ashley James: So, the weight you are now is before your last child. So, that was eight-nine years ago.

[1:28:20] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. And I continue to lose ounces. I’m not focused on the weight loss but I continue to lose. I’m really looking forward to being below 200.

[1:28:31] Ashley James: You’re going to get there. You’re just eating super healthy food every day. You’re not feeling deprived. There’s some recipes that we put in the membership that taste amazing. Your cream cheese, which blows my mind. Your kids fight over it. I’s so delicious. The carrot cake is super super healthy carrot cake. So delicious.

[1:28:49] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It doesn’t have any maple syrup. It’s sweetened with all fruit, blended fruit.

[1:28:54] Ashley James: Yeah. But all the fibers in there.

[1:28:56] Naomi Murphy: Yes. All the fibers in there.

[1:28:57] Ashley James: I’ve actually lost just over 80 pounds. I noticed that my weight loss is consistent because my problems always been my liver. My liver gets really angry and inflamed in my past whenever I tried to lose weight since my 20s. So I’ve had this problem where I go to lose weight because my liver can’t metabolize it. It would become a distended. It would stick out of my body beyond my ribs and be very swollen. My blood work would show that my liver enzymes were through the roof. I would get an ultrasound and show that it was a very angry liver. So my problem’s always been detox around weight loss. So, I’d lose a little bit and then get really sick and then gain more. Then try a different diet.

A lot of diets are focused on weight loss but not nutrifying the body and not healing the body. Whereas this one is all about nutrifying and healing the body and weight loss could be a byproduct. So, I’m finding that weight loss is the easiest with this because you’re full, you’re satisfied, you’re nutrifying every cell in your body. My liver is the healthiest it’s been in a very very long time. I’m just like everything’s getting better and better and better. Coming to your house today, we haven’t seen you in about a week, and I just noticed like your skin is glowing. Like you are, you look so vibrant. The energy coming off you.

[1:30:24] Naomi Murphy: That is an important side effect of this diet to discuss especially. As people, as we get older, you don’t even notice your skin kind of getting rougher. My skin is so soft now and continues to get even softer. I have been using a sauna so that’s probably helping. But just changing my diet, just eliminating sugar, oils and animal products has changed my skin so much. Yeah. It’s amazing.

[1:30:52] Ashley James: That’s awesome. I love it. So, your husband is slowly transitioning. Anything he noticed when he started to just eat more this way? He’s still eating meat occasionally. Still, he’s not 100% but he is transitioning more and more into this way. Just seeing how it feels, anything that he’s noticed that he’s liked that’s improved in his health?

[1:31:13] Naomi Murphy: Well, he’s had great bowel movements.

[1:31:16] Ashley James: Which is perfect. All of us by the way. That’s a side effect. Everyone has perfect bowel movement.

[1:31:21] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We talk about that all the time. We won’t go into detail here.

[1:31:25] Ashley James: Well, I have a whole episode on how to have the perfect poop. It does include a lot of whole fiber. But yes, bowel movements we should be having at least three a day, well-formed. They’re so good for detoxifying the body. If you’re not pooping three times a day and well-formed poops that you don’t have to strain at all, then you are constipated and that is damaging to your body.

It has actually the potential to create cancer in the body. It also helps to regulate hormones. It’s pretty amazing that by having good bowel movements we are helping our hormones balance, we’re helping prevent cancer, we’re helping to detoxify, get rid of the toxins, we’re ensuring that our gut flora is in balance. So many good things. Has he noticed anything with energy or mood?

[1:32:15] Naomi Murphy: Nothing that he’s commented on yet because like I said, he’s easing into it. So, if he eats whole food plant-based for three days in a row that’s like a record. He’s always loved vegetables and actually that used to be kind of a concern that he brought to me like, “Can we have more vegetables in our diet?” I was telling you earlier, I don’t think I’ve said yet in this interview, that it was just so easy for me to fall back on dairy products and just trying to make foods that appeal to the kids that were –

[1:32:55] Ashley James: Here, have some mac and cheese. Here, have some hotdogs.

[1:32:58] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Moderately healthy, homemade home cooking but I just didn’t have energy to –

[1:33:05] Ashley James: Yeah. You were sick.

[1:33:06] Naomi Murphy: So, I’ve obviously done a 180 on that. Now, it’s all vegetables so he’s happy. He’s always asked for that and wanted that. So that’s a part of his diet. He just is not ready to be 100%.

[1:33:24] Ashley James: That’s fine. Wherever someone is. I just want everyone to get more vegetables. Also try it as an experiment. That 30-day challenge that I took on two years ago, it was over the summer so it might have been two and a half years ago, really was an eye-opener.

[1:33:44] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Thirty days is impressive, but like I said, Dr. Esselstyn will ask for 16 days of people on their deathbed. So you don’t need – and Eric’s angina went away after three days. So, you don’t need 30 days to kind of have a little snapshot of how you might feel different eating whole food plant-based foods you can have a week.

[1:34:10] Ashley James: Yeah. Soon after I did the 30-day challenge, Duffy and I went downtown Seattle. There was a vegetarian festival like Veggie Fest I think they call it. We were sampling all the food, all the vegetarian food. So, I’d eaten. Then they had a booth that was taking people’s blood pressure and blood sugar. That’s like a health booth. I thought, “Why not. Let’s see.” My blood pressure was the lowest I’d ever seen. I mean, in super healthy ranges but then I burst into tears and I just completely had this meltdown when they took my blood sugar because it was the lowest I had ever seen it. Low in the good ranges. I never had problem. I was always hyperglycemic. I was never hypo. So, to see my blood sugar, my glucose levels that low after he’s basically eating nothing but carbs for the entire morning.

We were sampling tons of stuff, eating tons of stuff. We had eaten two hours before. I think we had breakfast or something. So, it was I did not expect it to be good, but I thought “Why not. They’re doing free glucose tests.” It was nurses that were administering it just to raise awareness. My blood sugar was so good I burst into tears seeing that number because I’d never seen it. So I wasn’t diabetic anymore but I still had not seen the healthiest ranges possible. It wasn’t achievable until I completely cut out all animal products and embraced whole food plant-based. We’ve been oil-free for a long time because one of the naturopaths we follow says oil is really not great. Although we had added back for keto added back coconut oil thinking that was great.

[1:36:12] Naomi Murphy: Dr. Wallach, he says that it’s bad because of the free radicals.

[1:36:17] Ashley James: Yes. Dr. Wallach says don’t do oil because of the free radicals.

[1:36:22] Naomi Murphy: But I think it was Dr. Garth Davis in Proteinaholic talked about how the oil coats gut biome and makes it so you can’t absorb nutrients as well.

[1:36:32] Ashley James: It starves the gut biome. There’s a few things. They’re speculating that it does, but one thing is when we eat oil it causes an anaerobic environment for the gut bacteria meaning it just coats it and it suffocates the good gut bacteria. So the anaerobic bacteria, which are the bad bacteria, thrive. So we’re creating a playground for all the bad bacteria to thrive and we’re killing, like mass-murdering, billions of cultures of good bacteria in our gut every time we eat oil. So they’re seeing –

[1:37:03] Naomi Murphy: I think this is an important piece because many people think that healthy oils are part of a healthy diet. I think knowing that just maybe not eliminating anything else besides the oils can really help your gut biome. So, I think that’s why I feel happier. I didn’t notice there’s much of improvement after having celery juice every day for two years.

[1:37:27] Ashley James: You mean you’ve gotten more of a difference out of cutting out oil than did out of drinking celery juice for two years?

[1:37:31] Naomi Murphy: Definitely. I mean all I noticed after having the celery juice for two years was that I could tolerate foods that I was sensitive to before. I had a sensitivity to salicylates found in foods.

[1:37:46] Ashley James: A ton of foods. You were so restrictive.

[1:37:49] Naomi Murphy: Especially in healthy foods and spices and things that are very healing. So, I didn’t eat those things or I ate a low-value of those things for over a decade.

[1:38:03] Ashley James: I remember when you came over like three years ago I couldn’t put any seasoning it all into the food I made because it would cause a huge allergic reaction for you.

[1:38:12] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s terrible. So, all of a sudden I could tolerate gluten, though I chose not to eat it, but I didn’t have a reaction anymore. So I thought that was cool. That felt like a superpower after being gluten-free since 1997. Just to be able to eat it and not feel like I’d taken a sleeping pill. To be able to use herbs and spices for health without any reaction, that opened up so many doors. That’s why cooking and eating is so much more exciting than it was. Though I think I did well as a whole food cook without the spices and herbs.

[1:38:51] Ashley James: You figured out how to do well with a limited amount of things to make it taste good. After you cut out oil how quickly did you notice a difference?

[1:39:00] Naomi Murphy: Well, I just felt better. I mean if before I felt this way of eating was extreme, any concern about that has gone out the window because I feel so much better. It doesn’t matter. It’s not inconvenient because eating this way is delicious, easy and totally worth it. So, I think that’s important about this diet. Some diets are so picky and you have to count your carbs, you have to write things down, you have to know about the nutrition content of everything. I just try to eat the most colorful foods in their whole form. It’s very simple. Is it a whole food? Is it come from plants? Then I can eat it. Then when I want to cheat I eat flour. I bake something with flour that’s a whole grain. So it’s not as good as eating the whole thing but that’s when I get naughty. Eat the refined version of a whole food but still I don’t have to I don’t need sophisticated tools to figure out how much of everything I should be eating. I try to eat some non-starchy vegetables like I used Chef AJ’s red line. I think everyone can check out her –

[1:40:30] Ashley James: Eat to the left of the red line.

[1:40:31] Naomi Murphy: Eat to the left of the red line.

[1:40:42] Ashley James: Dr. Greger calls them green light, yellow light, red light foods. They pretty much match up with her. Yeah. Absolutely. The last thing I want to talk about is addiction. That’s something that has been sort of a passionate topic of yours. You, for me, it’s such a pleasure being your friend. You’re so intellectual. It comes naturally to you I feel is psychology. That really, like in a former life, you were a psychologist. You have helped me so many times to perceive events in a different way that helped me heal. You have a way of making things cathartic because you can gain a really healthy perspective on human behavior. One thing that you’ve always been interested in is looking at the human behavior in psychology around addiction and noticing the addictive tendencies in yourself and in others and how these interpersonal relationships play out when our addictions come out. I think that everyone on the planet has some addictive behaviors. I think it’s part of our neurology. It’s being hijacked and being triggered by being awoken by the food industry. A good book is –

[1:41:55] Naomi Murphy: Pleasure Trap.

[1:41:56] Ashley James: The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhamer. We talked about that in episode 230 with Dr. Goldhamer.

[1:42:02] Naomi Murphy: Wow. What a memory.

[1:42:04] Ashley James: The reason why I remember is because it’s my husband’s joke. What’s a good time to go to the dentist? 230, get it? 230. So I always remember episode 230. I should memorize the other episodes that – the number like with Esselstyn.

But with Dr. Goldhamer he talks about this. The book is wonderful. If you listen to the audio version of the book it’s done by chef AJ. She’s the narrator. So if you like her voice you should definitely listen to it instead of read it. So, the idea that the addictive parts of our neurology are being awoken and exacerbated by food because of the food industry. Also in society –

[1:42:49] Naomi Murphy: Dairy products and cheese have a streamlined relationship with your –

[1:42:56] Ashley James: The dopamine response.

[1:42:57] Naomi Murphy: The dopamine receptors. So it’s such a relief to remove those things. It’s such a relief. It is such a relief. So, I have noticed, and chef AJ described it perfectly, that eating whole food plant-based diet turns down the volume on compulsive behavior. So, whatever is your thing like that agitates you –

[1:43:27] Ashley James: Gambling, alcohol…

[1:43:28] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Right. Eating this way turns down the volume. I have described my experience as just merely feeling happier. I just feel lighter. I’m more amused by problems that used to really drag me down. It’s noticeable. My mom in the testimonial, one of the reasons she was willing to give whole food plant-based to try she told you, she hadn’t told me that, was that she noticed how much more even-keeled I was. So she’s known me my whole life. I can be an intense person. I’ve had strong emotional reactions to things. I had addictive relationships to different things and people. So, what a relief to have a way to turn down that volume. You don’t have to have a sophisticated understanding of nutrition to do well with that. You can eat plants. Eat plants.

It’s okay to eat. It’s okay to eat brown rice. It’s okay to eat grains. It’s okay to eat those things. But just eat the plant foods and try to get some quantity of the non-starchy in there.

[1:44:47] Ashley James: Yes. Non-starchy vegetables.

[1:44:49] Naomi Murphy: There’s so much variety. There’s so many different ways to do that effectively.

[1:44:57] Ashley James: Yeah. I love in our membership because we’re making all these videos and there’s over three hours’ worth of content right now we just launched the membership yesterday. So far all the members who have joined love it and it’s exciting and I want you to join it. I want everyone who’s listening to join because it’s fun what we’re doing. Every week we’re adding new lessons. Every week we’re adding new videos and new content, new recipes. The point is, we’re creating these recipes that are delicious. Not everyone loves everything, right?

So, you have three kids with three different palates. If you get and there’s some recipes in there that all three kids love. We say this, is like a home run. We haven’t found someone who doesn’t love this. So there’s certain foods that are like so –

[1:45:47] Naomi Murphy: I have one kid that has an aversion to vegetables. He has a vegetable barometer. If he sees green or if he sees anything he is turned off. So, yeah. There are healthy things that he has just embraced entirely and loved and wanted more of and that’s awesome.

[1:46:07] Ashley James: Yeah. That’s exciting. Your husband I think at one point in a video I called him picky and he didn’t like that. So I’m not going to say he’s picky because I figured out what he is. He has really high standards for food. So instead of calling him picky he has high high standards. He’s really brutally honest. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll say he doesn’t like it.

[1:46:31] Naomi Murphy: Also. Yes.

[1:46:34] Ashley James: This is a compliment by the way. So, it’s good because here we are having to cook for people who have high standards and have a very particular tastes. We’re coming up with recipes that are whole food plant-based, super healing for the body and are pleasurable and can be adaptable also for different palates.

[1:46:55] Naomi Murphy: Well, he’s also into health. So there are plenty of people that have promoted a healthful diet that involves organ meats, that involves some things. I think you’re going to have Terry Walls on your show. He really was impressed by his study of Terry Walls work. So, I think he’s a little bit like my mom worried about the calcium. Well, what if you eliminate your opportunity for healing by taking out some of the healthy foods?

[1:47:40] Ashley James: He’s saying, “Well our kidneys and eating kidneys and eating liver are healthy for you. What if I don’t eat them?”

[1:47:45] Naomi Murphy: He’s like us and many people. He loves food. So, sometimes we might hold on to some of the less than healthy parts because there are some good things. Like people who want to drink wine for health or hear that olive oil is the part of the Mediterranean diet that is most health-promoting when it’s not. Just sort of things that you might have gotten attached to and just want to keep that.

[1:48:16] Ashley James: Well, wherever you are is fine. I think it’s good though to be open-minded enough, not have the cognitive dissonance to shut down, but to be open-minded enough to look at new information that comes our way because like Dr. Garth Davis, he was fully on board with Hugh. He’s a weight loss surgeon, gastrointestinal surgeon who for a living helped people lose weight by cutting out half their stomach and telling them to eat protein. Eat more protein and he basically put them on something very close to an Atkins diet.

So he was very invested. He had a TV show that ran for two years. He wrote a book. His reputation was on the line. He had to completely have a bruised ego in a sense that he had to put his ego aside and he has now come out saying everything he’s promoted for like twenty years as a doctor was wrong because he has looked at the science. He did a whole 180. Now his latest book Proteinaholic is that 180 where he figured out. He had to heal his body because he had in his 30s had cholesterol deposits in his eyes. He was losing his vision. That’s what had him wake up and go, “I need to figure out a diet that’s going to heal me.” Then he dug through the research. I listened to the audio, which is great, but I also bought the book. In the book in the back, something like 50 pages of scientific references. So it’s heavily referenced to a lot of studies.

We all have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. We all have a certain amount of we hear something we want to hold on to that like, “Oh, but dairies good for me. I was told it was good since I was a kid.” If we can just challenge our own belief system and be open-minded enough.

[1:50:15] Naomi Murphy: I would say you’ve read a book about the dairy industry like Sean has and knows that raw milk has so much more to offer than pasteurized milk. So, therefore wouldn’t it be nice if raw milk was a superfood? Because yum like it’s creamy. I mean, I’m not interested anymore but that used to be like easy to like that data, right? Because we wanted to eat that food.

[1:50:49] Ashley James: Right. So, you can hold on to studies that say this is good and that’s good or I heard this is good or even I was raised or I was raised to believe this is good. The problem is, if we hold on to our old belief systems and not be willing to be flexible, we might be going down the wrong path. The best thing to do is to ask yourself, are you getting the results you want with your current diet? With the current way of eating are you nutrifiying your body in a way that’s fully healing yourself? If you’re not then be willing to be open-minded enough to just try it.

[1:51:24] Naomi Murphy: I’m completely open to accepting but at some point in my future I may need some kind of animal product to heal something.

[1:51:36] Ashley James: If that comes up.

[1:51:38] Naomi Murphy: What I am feeling now is that every day is a stair-step up you. So, it’s easy to continue on this journey. I think this way of eating, it doesn’t feel like a diet. I think I have said several times that I don’t restrict myself that I end up making some treats. I know I’m always trying to feed you guys treats.

[1:52:02] Ashley James: Your version of treats are very very healthy.

[1:52:05] Naomi Murphy: Okay. But still. That I eat plenty of food. That it’s just a sustainable way of eating. I am completely fine with eating this way for the rest of my life. It is less expensive if you buy whole foods and prepare them at home.

[1:52:28] Ashley James: It doesn’t take that long. So, I keep saying, the membership the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership, which can be found –

[1:52:34] Naomi Murphy: There are ways. I mean, a lot of the cooking is time-consuming. Let’s be honest about that, but that there are plenty of ways that we do things efficiently like lentils.

[1:52:46] Ashley James: So fast.

[1:52:47] Naomi Murphy: Sprouted lentils. Rinsed them three times a day and then you top it with some kind of sauce and you have some fresh spouted protein.

[1:52:55] Ashley James: You’ll never ever need to buy protein powder again. It’s a whole food form of protein that also has contained youth building enzymes. My thing is that this way of eating, we are saving a ton of money. We’re actually noticing that we have more money in the bank at the end of the month. Going, “Wow. We really are saving money eating this way.” There are ways to do it incredibly fast, ways to cook. We show some nice hacks in the kitchen to speed up the ability to get dinner on the table. So there are ways to make it fast. There are some recipes that are more time consuming, but there’s a lot of ways to do it that are quick.

[1:53:41] Naomi Murphy: Well, I think just because of having to chop many things.

[1:53:45] Ashley James: Which you can do in a food processor. There’s ways to speed things up. Plenty of times I’ve gotten out of an interview and been like, “Okay. Got to make dinner on the table. Like 15-20 minutes later we’re all eating. So it’s like, “Okay. This isn’t that bad.” So we’re saving time, we’re saving a ton of money, we’re saving our health and it tastes delicious. So there’s four points. Four points. LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. There’s a coupon code for listeners. This saves you a nice chunk of money. It is very affordable by the way for everyone to join, but go join. LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. The coupon code is LTH. You can get a free tour.

[1:54:27] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. We want it to be affordable for people who are raising their families and need some help.

[1:54:36] Ashley James: Yes and want to just dive in and learn this and whether you want to do it 100% or whether you want to put your toe in the water and be like Sean and just eat more vegetables. Either way is very healing for the body. I think it also depends on the severity. If you’re someone who wants to reverse a major issue then jumping in and doing this at 100%, you’re going to get faster results. When you go to LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen, you can watch the tour. Some people just buy, jump in and start learning, start lesson one. But if you’d like a tour there’s a video that gives you a tour so you get to understand what it comes with. Every week there’s new modules added. So it’s going to be this ever-evolving, ongoing thing which is really cool.

If you love our aprons I talked about it in the membership. There’s a way that you’ll earn an apron. You get to earn an apron or win an apron, Learn True Health apron. They’re really cool. So, I’d love to see all you guys wearing the Learn True Health aprons in the kitchen while you’re making food that’s medicine and healing your body.

My last question for you, Naomi, is if I could put you in a room with the Naomi from one year ago, what would it look like to have a conversation with her? What advice would you want to give her?

[1:55:57] Naomi Murphy: Well, I think I would just tell her to be on the path that I am right now. To try whole food plant-based eating and also to educate herself about it. I have to say that the education part is what’s given me a lot of inspiration and a lot of fire. It was it was very quickly after I started eating this way that I had a strong desire to spend my life promoting this way of eating.

[1:56:37] Ashley James: I remember. I remember you message me.

[1:56:38] Naomi Murphy: I was wondering how I could find that kind of role.

[1:56:45] Ashley James: You’re like, “Am I going to become a health coach? Do I need to go back to school and be a nutritionist?” I remember having that conversation with you.

[1:56:51] Naomi Murphy: How can I help spread the word about this way of eating because just talking to my husband about it constantly that wasn’t very appreciated.

[1:57:07] Ashley James: She’d message me and be like, “I can’t talk about health stuff anymore in the house. My husband is not allowing it. I am talking too much about health now.”

[1:57:16] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s a little bit stressful to hear about it all the time. He is enjoying. He did say this weekend I think I just said that he’s whole hog but not cold turkey. He’s all for it and he really enjoys it. It’s just hard to go all the way. That’s fine. I was highly motivated to do the 180 that I did and it’s easy for me, but I’m all or nothing kind of person. So, it would be harder for me to integrate animal products into my healthy lifestyle because I wouldn’t know how many and when.

[1:57:57] Ashley James: I think it would’ve been easier for me if I had just said, “Okay. From now on it’s just this way.” I think that would have been easier. I made the transition harder on myself by saying I’m going to do this slowly. I was really working on my mindset and I was working on a lot of old belief systems about food. That’s where education comes into play because the more we dive into the books and the interviews and the summits by these different doctors who are on a regular basis healing people with major health issues like cancer gone, diabetes gone, healing many many many people. Many many diseases across the board. Autoimmune gone. Unbelievable stories of just people. So many people healing so many different things from this one way of eating. So for me if I had just said, “Okay. Jump on board 100%.” Instead I dragged it out. My transition I dragged it out a little bit. I just ate less and less and less and less meat. That’s where I was.

[1:58:59] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. So to answer your question, I think the advice I would have given myself is to not be afraid, to just be experimental, give it a try and not be intimidated. I wish I would have had curiosity about this 17 years ago when I heard about it. Because I just chose to not. I chose to not. So, I wish I would have had the courage and the curiosity to dive in. Like when I heard the term heart disease then it was a no-brainer, but before then I was like –

[1:59:38] Ashley James: You were ready to hear it then.

[1:59:39] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I just wanted to say one more thing and that is I had plantar fasciitis before. That’s just gone away completely.

[1:59:47] Ashley James: It’s gone? You hurt to walk and now it doesn’t?

[1:59:51] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It was terrible.

[1:59:53] Ashley James: That’s really cool because Dr. Wallach says it’s a calcium deficiency that causes plantar fasciitis. You’re getting way more minerals now, way more calcium now through eating a ton of vegetables. So it’s interesting plus antioxidants, the decrease inflammation in the body. But it’s interesting that your body’s reversing something that many experts would say is not reversible without therapy, like physical therapy and procedures done to the foot.

[2:00:25] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It was one of those things that I just thought of recently actually. Because if you’re starting to feel better if you don’t write in everything down you sometimes don’t remember what’s gotten better. Then I remembered, “Hey, yeah. I used to have plantar fasciitis remember?” It was such a problem but it just gradually went away. I haven’t even thought about it in months.

[2:00:43] Ashley James: I love it. Naomi, this is so exciting. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story. I can’t wait to see what our lives are like a year from now or even six months from now. It’s been six months you’ve been fully on board and you’re healing your body with the whole food plant-based diet.

[2:01:03] Naomi Murphy: Well, I just have to thank you because I have so much gratitude because I am a home cook and you are sharing your platform with me for helping get out the word of cooking whole food plant-based. I wouldn’t be able to have access to people that want that information without you. So thanks for inviting me.

[2:01:31] Ashley James: I can’t wait for all the listeners to learn from you. All the listeners need to learn from you because you’ve got so amazing. The recipes are great but also you do these cool things. You make your own teas, you make your own spice blends, you make your own seasonings, you drink a ton of healing herbs throughout the day. I want to do a video on that. You have lots of little health habits that you do that you’ve integrated into your day effortlessly that you don’t even think about. You just kind of take for granted all these wonderful things you do but other people need to learn about it.

[2:01:32] Naomi Murphy: A lot of those do make a difference. If I don’t drink the anti-inflammatory tea that I drink every day it does make a difference. So, even eating so many vegetable foods still the teas is really helpful.

[2:02:16] Ashley James: Yeah. So we’ll a whole video on hat.

[2:02:18] Naomi Murphy: I learned some tricks along the road to better health. Not tricks, I mean –

[2:02:27] Ashley James: Tools, solutions.

[2:02:28] Naomi Murphy: Some good tools.

[2:02:29] Ashley James: Right. Well, if you think about it, a few hundred years ago we would have all learned from our grandmother’s, right? These things would have been passed down. A few hundred years ago our grandmothers would go into the woods with us and pick herbs out of the woods and made different remedies with them. Few hundred years ago, our ancestors used food more as medicine, right? We lost this. We just lost this over the last hundred years. We’ve lost this connection with the earth and the ability to incorporate plants to heal on a regular basis.

One of my guests, I think he might have been Dr. JJ Davidson, talked about how if you talk to old school farmers they would say that it’s been passed down from farming generation to generation. It was passed down that everyone in the family that are farmers along with their animals twice a year will deworm, will go through and do certain herbs with the animals to remove parasites from their bodies and that we knew this. As a society we knew this a few hundred years ago but we’ve lost it now because we’ve all bought into the allopathic medical system. So we’ve lost this connection with the earth.

So you’re doing things on a regular basis. You’re kind of like, I’m not calling you a grandma because you’re young, but you’re like the grandma we need. This very young, youthful woman who could help us be like a surrogate grandmother. Teach us these techniques like the herbs that you use to heal in your regular every day.

[2:04:09] Naomi Murphy: Well, I’ve been a groupie. I’ve been a groupie around holistic medical providers. I worked with students and then I worked for doctors and acupuncturist. So, I like to learn.

[2:04:26] Ashley James: Now you get to teach us. Teach us everything you’ve learned. That’s wonderful. Awesome.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you wanted to say to the listeners to wrap up today’s interview?

[2:04:40] Naomi Murphy: I hope you check out the membership. Bowls, I think bowls is something we showed in the listener community Facebook group. If you’re interested in one whole food plant-based recipe, check out bowls.

[2:04:59] Ashley James: Bowls is lesson seven I think it is. I think it’s lesson seven module one. We did a little mini-lesson for free in the Facebook group. So check out the video section of the Facebook group for the bowls video. When you become a member, go to one module one and look up bowls.

[2:05:22] Naomi Murphy: We’ll be constantly adding to the bowl items the things that you can use in bowls. I’m excited. There are some recipes in there that are staples in providing those mushrooms. Like having some meaty mushroom.

[2:05:38] Ashley James: The meaty mushrooms.

[2:05:39] Naomi Murphy: Having meaty mushrooms stuff. When we were talking about mushrooms before I’m getting a half cup. It’s effortless really if you make a big batch of the meaty mushroom stuffing do you call it?

[2:05:47] Ashley James: Yeah. We couldn’t figure out what the name of it.

[2:05:50] Naomi Murphy: I just call it mushroom stuffed.

[2:05:51] Ashley James: Mushroom stuffed? The meaty mushroom stuffed.

[2:05:53] Naomi Murphy: So, if I have that in refrigerator I can mix that into lots of different dishes or if I’m using the beefalo that my kids are still eating because we have a freezer full of that I may put in there meatballs along with some other grated carrots or something like that.

That helps us get those key nutrients that you can only get in mushrooms. You should have that and just have a scoop here and there on top of what you’re eating or in your salad. So, anyway.

[2:06:24] Ashley James: There’s a way to make –

[2:06:25] Naomi Murphy: Bowls and mushroom stuff. Top of my head right now is –

[2:06:28] Ashley James: Meaty mushrooms, meaty mushroom stuffing. It’s in the I heart vegetable section the module of the membership. It is so freaking delicious. I remember when we were making the recipe, we’re filming making the recipe. You hadn’t had any yet because I was teaching you how to make it. You’re kind of like –

[2:06:47] Naomi Murphy: This is not, it wasn’t scripted.

[2:06:48] Ashley James: No, nothing is scripted. You’re kind of like, “Okay. Yeah. I get it. It’s nice.”

[2:06:52] Naomi Murphy: It’s not a reality show.

[2:06:53] Ashley James: Then I made it. So I made it on camera showing you how to make it, showing everyone how to make it. Then you taste it. You’re like, “Wow.” Then Duffy turns the camera off and you go, “I didn’t believe you. When you said it was this good I thought you were exaggerating.”

[2:07:13] Naomi Murphy: You have lots of natural enthusiasm. So I heard that it was good. I believe that, but then it was kind of –

[2:07:22] Ashley James: “Dang girl. That’s good.”

[2:07:26] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. I call it the Campbell soup of whole food plant-based cooking. That’s just maybe my personal history growing up with a suburban working-class family.

[2:07:45] Ashley James: Yeah. Get the cream of mushroom soup.

[2:07:47] Naomi Murphy: It was the cream of mushroom soup with different things. I felt like a chef with that when I was a kid. So meaty mushroom, it’s like that. It has multiple applications and it has more flavor and more health-promoting properties than the Campbell’s version. Yeah. It’s super fantastic.

[2:08:06] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Well, I’m excited for listeners to check it out. I’m really glad that we created this platform. We spent the last four months working on it.

[2:08:16] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. It’s fun. It’s been so fun.

[2:08:18] Ashley James: It’s just going to uphill from here or it’s just going to get better and better and better. I’m just really looking forward to – I’m imagining myself a year from now. The health that I’m building now and the hope that you’re building now. I think we could all take a minute just to think about the body we want and the body we want to live in a year from now. Like we renovate our house, we prepare our car, right? We do things to upgrade where we live. We need to think about our bodies like our house we live in. We need to like you know we need to like put on a new roof or build a new foundation.

[2:08:59] Naomi Murphy: If you’re younger than my age, 48, you don’t have to wait until like things start to break down. It’s okay to experiment and be curious and brave about your health before someone says a devastating diagnosis.

[2:09:18] Ashley James: I love that even your parents in their 70s got such quick results. So, any age. Any age is going to get great results. We can use food as our medicine and that’s the message.

[2:09:26] Naomi Murphy: My mom’s not 70 yet.

[2:09:27] Ashley James: Don’t let her listen this episode. I just assumed I guess. Okay. I’m sorry. A woman in her 60s. Well, it still works for people in their 70s though.

[2:09:39] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. Of course. Yes they’ve been great. They’ve been having great benefit and really loving it and that is just the most amazing thing ever to me.

[2:09:51] Ashley James: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you and everyone’s going to see us in Facebook lives in the Facebook group.

[2:09:59] Naomi Murphy: Wait, one more testimonial. I finally got my mother-in-law with diet with type 2 diabetes to watch the iThrive documentary and then she started fasting and is going plant-based. She’s replaced all the foods in her house with – she was eating basically keto and she’s eliminated all the dairy products and animal products from her home. She has plant-based foods lined up to make big batches. She’s already off the metformin.

[2:10:29] Ashley James: She’s been fasting on and off for the last two weeks now?

[2:10:33] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She fasted for a week then ate a small lunch that was plant-based with no grains. Then she fasted for another week and then a standard American diet for some reason. She had guests so she –

[2:10:50] Ashley James: Decided to eat whatever they brought.

[2:10:52] Naomi Murphy: They brought over some stuff. Yeah. They brought over some –

[2:10:55] Ashley James: Did not feel good about it?

[2:10:56] Naomi Murphy: Then she ate plant-based for a few days and now she’s back to fasting.

[2:11:01] Ashley James: So after two weeks of fasting and almost solely plant-based, she is now off of metformin?

[2:11:08] Naomi Murphy: Yeah. She lost 37 pounds.

[2:11:09] Ashley James: I love it. I’m really excited for her. I’m excited for when she stops fasting and dives 100% into the diet. Although, fasting is a wonderful way to reset the neurology so that you become more neural adapted to the food.

[2:11:25] Naomi Murphy: Yep. That’s her desire because when I told her about this she really scoffed because she doesn’t enjoy vegetables. She’s getting a lot of health benefits from the fasting, but her real motivation is to enjoy plants more.

[2:11:44] Ashley James: So, if you don’t like the taste of vegetables do some water only fasting to reset your neurology. That’s discussed in episode 230 as well, which is with Dr. Goldhamer. So, yeah. I love it. Well, we’ll have to keep everyone updated with your mother-in-law and also your parents and how they’re all doing and LearnTrueHealth.com/homekitchen. Use coupon code LTH. Thank you so much. I’m really excited to see where this goes.

[2:12:17] Naomi Murphy: Thank you, Ashley. This was fun. It was fun. I can’t believe I’m going to be in a podcast.

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404 Nine Things You Can Do Now To Have Fantastic Hormone Health In The Second Half of Your Life, Perimenopause Redefined and Preparing For A Healthy Menopause with Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner Jill Chmielewski 0

Jan 10, 2020

"As a registered nurse, certified functional medicine practitioner, and mom of four, I bring together a unique blend of clinical, holistic, and personal experience to guide midlife mamas to greater wellbeing, one tiny edit at a time.
Even the subtlest of symptoms are your body's way of telling you that something needs attention. I'm on a mission to help you get to know your body, balance your hormones, and to address the root cause of your symptoms so that you can master the wild ride from peri to menopause with greater ease."

Get your free module from IIN learntruehealth.com/coach
Jill's Website - https://www.jillchmielewski.com

Perimenopause and Menopause

https://www.learntruehealth.com/perimenopause-and-menopause

Highlights:

Perimenopause and menopause
Addressing hormone issues would make the symptoms go away
Food and lifestyle perspective are going to shift our hormones in different ways
Detoxification is a huge part of hormones and hormone balance
Good circadian rhythm help with hormonal rhythm
Direct correlation between lack of sleep and hormone imbalances
Hormone building happens at night when we sleep
Stress has a domino effect on every other hormone in our body
There is no quick fix for health and hormone balance issues
Periods are now considered the fifth vital sign
Hormonal decline with your period is normal
Estrogen and progesterone need to be balanced in order for women to feel good
Balanced hormones are just as critical in midlife and late life as they were in reproductive years
Hormones are needed in every cell of the body
There’s a direct link between healthy hormones and longevity and also degenerative disease
Perimenopause begins in the mid to late 30s

In this episode, we will talk about hormones and hormonal changes in the body (perimenopause and menopause). Know how stress and sleep affects the hormone levels in our body.

[00:00:00] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. And welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast.

Oh, my gosh. This was such a good interview. I’m really excited for you to hear it today. Jill is phenomenal. I’m not going to give too much away. But basically, every woman needs to listen to this. And men who are very interested in women’s health. But you know what? All the advice she gives, which is incredible for women’s health, it also applies to men. So just so you know, this is a wonderful podcast for everyone even though the topic is specifically on perimenopause and menopause. These lessons are applicable to creating health at any part in our lives. But even more important, the older we get.

I want to let you know about IIN. Jill and I discussed it briefly. This is one of the trainings that she took. She’s a nurse and she has her master’s. And then she did IIN to become a health coach., the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. This is the same online school that I went to, to become a health coach. And then she went on to do other programs because she wanted to dive deeper specifically into hormone health and functional medicine and functional nutrition. If you are interested in deeply exploring food as medicine, and emotional, mental, and physical health, and balancing your life, then take IIN’s course. You know half the people that take it -and I think it’s over 10,000 people a year take their course. Half the people that take it do it for their own personal growth. And I would have done it for my own personal growth as well. But I also did it to deepen my career and my ability to do these interviews. And also, work with clients and help them. But I see that. I see that I would have just done it for my own personal growth. So if you want to really dive into something to get your health to the next level, emotionally and mentally, and also physically, consider doing IIN. It’s a wonderful year of your life. It’s about 20 minutes a day, basically. So it’s totally doable even for busy people, about 20 minutes a day. You can listen to the lectures. You don’t have to watch them. You can listen to them while you’re driving, while you’re exercising, while you’re doing laundry, or cooking. And you can absorb all that wonderful information and apply it to your life. It’s an entire year to transform your life.

So I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. My listeners get $1,500 dollars off. That’s a huge chunk of the tuition. And you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach to get a free module and see if it’s right for you. You can also Google IIN and give them a call. All the people you talked to on the phone are graduates. That’s been my experience. Many of their staff are graduates. I’ve interviewed their CEO. And I’ve interviewed several of their staff members. All have wonderful stories. So if you’re interested in becoming a health coach, you should absolutely do IIN.

But if you’re not interested in becoming a health coach and you just really are focusing on your health and your family’s health, IIN is also great for that. It’s a wonderful way to really deepen your knowledge and apply it to your life. So check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and get your free module. See if it’s right for you. See if it’s something that would enrich your life. It enriched mine. That’s why I love sharing it with my listeners. There’s been over a hundred listeners who have gone through IIN and have shared with me the amazing changes in their life. Some of them went on to become health coaches. Or some of them were already in the health field and they added this like a tool to their tool belt. And others used it to help themselves and their family. So it’s wonderful. And it’s not only food. Although they do teach a hundred dietary theories and show you how to use food as medicine. But it’s also learning, emotional, mental, spiritual health, and figuring out how to get that balance in your life so that you can increase the joy in your life. Decrease the stress. And feel happy about every aspect of your life. Feel satisfied and fulfilled and passionate about every aspect of your life. So if you feel like that’s missing in your life right now, then consider checking it out. It’s a wonderful personal growth and health program.

IIN, Google it or go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast. Please share it with everyone, all your girlfriends, especially those in their 30s and beyond, 30s and 40s and beyond. Because we want to do everything that Jill teaches us today right now. Even if you’re in your 20s, this is going to help you. Start doing all the steps. She teaches nine points today. And if you do these nine points, you absolutely will see a positive shift in your hormone health and in the golden years of your life. We want to have high, high quality of life for the second half of our life. But we have to prepare for it now. And build a strong foundation of health now. That’s what you’re going to learn today in today’s interview. So enjoy and have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your day

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 404.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Jill Chmielewski. Her website is jillchmielewski.com. Don’t worry, the correct spelling of that will be in the show notes of today’s podcasts at learntruehealth.com.

Jill I’m so excited for today’s interview. You have some amazing credentials. Your focus is on helping women to prepare for menopause and to have the healthiest perimenopause possible. And really looking at that later life. I’m about to be 40. So this is, like, definitely on my mind. But looking at starting in our late 30s preparing for how to have a really healthy hormone balance for the rest of our life. And that you teach us how to do that. I know you’re launching a new digital course providing support for a whole community of women to help them with all the steps they need to achieve the healthiest hormone balance possible for the second half of their life. And I think that’s brilliant. This is a topic that really, really, really needs to get out there.

Especially, because so many doctors, when you go to them, will tell you, “Oh, your symptoms are normal.” Dry vagina or weird PMS symptoms, or weight gain even though you’re exercising like crazy, headaches, just the list goes on and on and on. And doctors will just say, “Oh, this is normal.” Or, “Here, take the pill.” And just they’ll kind of sweep it under the rug or try to give you a drug instead of really – because they’re not truly educated on how to support us in achieving optimal health. They’re good at handling infections, they’re good at handling emergency medicine. But they’re really, really not good at helping us to achieve optimal health.

And you are a specialized in helping women to balance hormones and have absolutely optimal hormone levels their entire lives. So, Jill, welcome to the show. And I’m so excited. You’re here today to teach us how to be super duper healthy women.

[00:07:46] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Thank you for that awesome introduction. I’m so excited to be here as well. And I think you said everything. I mean, you nailed it. It’s not that doctors don’t care. It’s just that they don’t know. I think that in their medical training. they’re focusing, especially our OBGYNs, are focusing on the reproductive years and helping women have babies or helping them with postpartum. But when it comes to that sort of second half, for most of us it’s probably about a third of our lives, that will spend in perimenopause or menopause. They just don’t have the education or the expertise to, maybe, help walk women through that period of life or prepare them for that period of life. So I think everything you said is right on point.

[00:08:25] Ashley James: But even though it’s like the last third of our life – and you know what? If we ate super healthy, we have the genetic potential to live to be 120. So it could be like more than half. But think about it, I love that your message and your approach is to prepare. Like preparing our 30s for things like the foundations of health, eating healthy, making sure we are fully nutrified, making sure we’re checking in on our emotional and mental health, getting enough sleep. Just these everyday little tiny things will prepare us for better health in the second half of our life. And in our 30s is when we tend to really throw our body under the bus and not listen to the symptoms of our body. And just self medicate with caffeine and alcohol and over the counter medication. Because we want to go, go, go, go, go. And we’re robbing ourselves of the quality of life in the second half of our life by neglecting ourselves now.

And so I love that your message is there’s lots we can do now. Even if we’re in our 20s and 30s and 40s, there’s lots we can do now to ensure that we have amazing hormone health later on.

[00:09:37] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, that’s so true. And that’s something that I don’t think even as a nurse – and I’ve been a nurse for almost 27 years. And I’ve you know worked primarily in women’s health. And this notion that we can do something to actually help support our hormones really never came up in any of my training until I went into the functional medicine realm. And you and I were talking before the show, I mean food has a huge impact. Our lifestyle choices have a huge impact. But I think with physicians, oftentimes, we’re looking to our physician for education about what’s next. And we kind of see the reproductive years as one segment of life. And then menopause as the next phase. And that doesn’t come until we’re, you know, 50 or 60.

Well, for most of us, the hormonal changes start to happen in our mid to late 30s. We may be even still getting pregnant in our mid to late 30s. But the hormone changes are starting then that start to kick off perimenopause. And so yeah, there’s a whole lot that we can do that we need to start paying attention to much, much earlier than when actual menopause, the point at which we no longer get periods happen. So we’ll talk about, I think, a lot of it today during the show.

[00:10:47] Ashley James: Yay. Now, you were a nurse for many years. And then I really want to get into your story. Just before we get into the education part, I want to understand a bit more about your background. And what happened to have you want to become an expert in balancing hormones? So there you were a nurse for so many years. And I know you also have your masters as well. Walk us through your professional life. What happened that had you want to go into health coaching and functional nutrition coaching?

[00:11:22] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. Thanks. So I think early on, I mean, I can remember even way back in my 20s when I was working in medicine. I was working as a neonatal ICU nurse. And then I sort of transitioned into women’s health and infertility, reproductive endocrinology and infertility. And I can remember thinking at the time, that there was just such a huge disconnect. I mean, I felt the disconnect that there was, on one hand, we were just treating women who had infertility with medication. And behind the scenes, we didn’t talk about nutrition. We didn’t talk about lifestyle. We didn’t talk about any of the other things that kind of come into play with hormones. I think that was the first moment where I started to have some of those aha moments about that this was an area that I knew that prevention, and education, and looking at things beyond traditional medicine might be helpful.

And I went on to have four kids really close together. I stayed home for a few years. And then I went back to work and went back into nursing for a while for several years. And what really kicked me off into going into this realm sort of alternative medicine or integrative medicine is my oldest daughter, who’s now going to be 20 this year. Struggled her whole life with asthma, and allergies, and digestive issues. And when I was pursuing conventional medicine physicians to get some help for her, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help her. I think they didn’t know how to help her. They ran a test for celiac disease and said, “Well, you know, she doesn’t have celiac.” So kind of like sent us on our way. “She has digestive issues. We’ll just kind of send you on your way.” And so I think the mama bear in me started doing some research. And it sort of opened Pandora’s box where I knew I needed to know more and learn more to help her.

And once I did and was able to help her, I started wanting to get deeper and deeper into integrative medicine. And so I started actually took my training to a formal venue. And so I went back to school. And I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. And when I was there, I would say about halfway through my training there, I had a lecture by Dr. Robin Berzin. And I don’t know if you know her, but she’s a functional medicine practitioner. She’s the founder of Parsley Health, which is an amazing medical practice. And she was the one that really connected the dots for me in terms of what functional medicine was. Which is I know you’ve had guests on your podcast before that have talked about functional medicine. But for listeners that don’t know, it’s really just looking at the root cause of symptoms as opposed to just treating symptom by symptom. It’s sort of looking at like, what is really causing symptoms in the body. And so she turned me on to functional medicine. And I started down that path and sort of couldn’t get enough. And I think just by default, because I was working with clients and I tended to attract women as clients, I started to see over and over and over again that when I was doing their intakes and we would sit and talk through symptoms and health histories, hormones were really at the core of the bulk of their problems and symptoms. And most of these women happen to be in that 35, 40, 45, 50 kind of that perimenopausal-menopausal range. And I started to really, I guess, just get really excited about the fact that, well, just addressing hormone issues would make these symptoms go away.

And so I sort of started to, I want to say, kind of put myself in that hormone specialist bucket. But it’s something that I just love. And I think that physicians don’t always see the connection when women are being seen. They’re often looking at symptoms in a different way. Rather than looking at how a deficiency in one hormone can affect all different systems in the body. And so for me, it just sort of, I think, when I talk about hormones or think about hormones, for me, it sort of brings everything together. And you can see how hormones work so deeply in the body. And so I’ve really – this is where I feel I where I work with clients and I think that this is where I’ll probably hang my hat is really in the hormone world.

[00:15:26] Ashley James: So went to IIN. I went to IIN.

[00:15:30] Jill Chmielewski: I know you went to IIN. That’s awesome.

[00:15:32] Ashley James: Yeah. So that was that was your first. Now, you’ve done other – you have other training that you’ve taken since IIN. I think IIN is a wonderful school like as a launching pad for people who want to become health coaches. I feel like it’s the first thing people should do. And then go specialize in something. So I love that that’s what you did. So halfway through the first six weeks in IIN, like halfway through it, that’s when you saw this lecture. Was it was it a lecture in IIN or was it something you stumbled upon?

[00:16:08] Jill Chmielewski: It was. It was in IIN. I don’t know if you remembered, you probably had the same lecture, I think. It’s Dr. Robin Berzin. I think there were multiple practitioners at IIN who presented who talked about functional medicine. But for some reason, something about her and maybe because she had been more of a mainstream physician first. I don’t know, everything she talked about really resonate. All of a sudden I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” It was like all the stars aligned. And I feel like the last 20 years, 20 plus years of conventional medicine all made sense or just the body. Just it all came together.

[00:16:40] Ashley James: Yes. I feel like when I did IIN, that’s what happened to me too. So much stuff. So many of these separate pieces in my mind just came together and started making sense in a whole new way. It was really cool. I jumped into IIN because of an interview I did. It was within the first few months of launching the podcast. I was interviewing at a health coach. And it’s so funny because I never really heard of health coaches. And I’m like. “Who is this guy? He wants to be on the show. He calls himself a health coach.” And I thought that was so hokey. I thought this was something made up. Like, you just call yourself a health coach. And he was great. It was a really, really good interview. And then I said,” Well, how did you become one?” During the interview, I said, “How do you become one?” And he started talking about IIN.

And by the end of it after we got off Skype, I called up IIN. I went to the website. I was really impressed by all the teachers that they listed. And then I called them and after talking to my husband, he’s like, “Go for it. Go for it.” I signed him that same day. I was like, “Dang.” I signed up that same day. And I immediately jumped into sort of watching the foundation, like the pre-course that they give you. And I was bawling my eyes out. I felt so inspired. In every single video, I felt like I had found my people. I felt like “Oh my gosh. I belong. This is so great.” So it pulled together a lot of pieces for me.

And what’s really neat is during it, because every week you want to try a different diet because you’re learning about all these different diets. Food as medicine. But during it, my husband was listening kind of in the background. And he chose to go 100 percent whole food plant based vegan. He was a carnivore. He would only eat meat pretty much. And somewhere during my journey through IIN, he said to me, “I’m no longer eating meat.”

[00:18:30] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

[00:18:31] Ashley James: So our lives have really changed. That was two years ago. And so our lives have really changed since IIN. Ad I’ve interviewed a lot of people -a lot of the lectures. So I’m going to have to get Robin on the show now that you say that,

[00:18:43] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. She’s wonderful. Oh, my gosh. She’s wonderful.

[00:18:46] Ashley James: So there you were. You watched Robin. And all the pieces came together for you. And then you went on to take some more courses in functional medicine – or functional nutrition specifically. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:19:06] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. And you probably – this probably resonates with you having gone through IIN. Once you know sort of this other side of the world and the side of learning the body and all these things, you just want to know more. I mean, it’s almost like you can’t stop. And I think a lot of health coaches would say, “It’s almost hard to put the brakes on learning.” Even though it’s so fun to be a lifelong learner, sometimes you just want to stop and digest and sit with it for a little while. But I think at the point I was at, I was so excited about what I had learned with IIN that I went on. Do you know Andrea Nakayama? I can never say her name quite right.

[00:19:39] Ashley James: Gosh. That sounds really familiar.

[00:19:41] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. So she has a functional nutrition program. And I did her program almost right after IIN. And I really enjoyed it. I think it was very nutrition focused. Definitely, very, obviously, a lot of biology, physiology, all that stuff. But I had heard about the School of Applied Functional Medicine somewhere in the midst of all this. And so I took just sort of like IIN, a little sample class at the School of Applied Functional Medicine. And that’s where I felt like, “Okay. This is it.” Because I think having been a nurse for as long as I have been, I have a pretty – I’ve been in the medical world for a long time. So I wanted a deeper understanding. Where I think there are people that take these courses who do not have a medical background. But it would be difficult. It’s a really big learning curve if you don’t have a medical background.

[00:20:27] Ashley James: Right. Whereas IIN, you don’t need a medical background at all. But when you get into functional nutrition, definitely you want a medical background or it would help.

[00:20:38] Jill Chmielewski: It helps. That’s right. It helps. I think if you’re a really dedicated learner, you can do it. But you’re listening to lectures over and over and over. And even I have to say, I still go back to lectures that I learned when I was at the School of Applied Functional Medicine just to get one more nugget or piece of information to kind of help me maybe solidify some of my learnings So yeah, I’ve sort of halted it now. I’m certified in functional medicine from the School of Applied Functional Medicine. And now I’m just taking it and really – I do some hormone – I definitely have done some specialty hormone courses there. And I’ve done sort of one off hormone trainings. And will continue to do that. But as they say, I think when you are trying to teach other people or educate other people, you just have to be a few steps ahead of them to hold the lantern. I meant that sort of I know a lot. I don’t know everything. But I know enough to definitely help women prepare for this time of life and to start to understand what they need to do. It’s sort of like what to expect what you’re expecting. But we don’t think about it that way.

It’s like, we’ll do everything to prepare for a baby that’s coming. Or even a puppy, if we’re going to get a new puppy. But when it comes to this period of life, I don’t think we think about what we need to do to prepare for this next phase in life. So that’s sort of where I step in is really trying to help women understand the changes that are coming so that they can prepare for them. And then helping them to understand what can they do from a food and lifestyle perspective, from a hormone perspective, maybe a hormone replacement perspective. Although I’m not an expert in it but I definitely know quite a bit about hormone replacement. And also, how to find a practitioner that can help guide you through this next chapter of life.

[00:22:22] Ashley James: Do you do any lab tests?

[00:22:26] Jill Chmielewski: I kind of walk a fine line with that because it’s a scope of practice issue, where clients will bring me labs and we’ll talk about them. I can educate them on generally what labs mean. You know, “Hey, if your white blood count is this, sometimes it can be this.” Or, “If your fasting glucose is elevated, it’s probably time to start making some changes in your diet.” So I can do some – I know the information. It’s sort of like I need to practice within my scope of practice as a health coach and also as a nurse. So nurses, part of our job is to really educate patients on what’s happening in their body. And so I’m very well versed in working with labs. But again, I try to sort of keep the deep lab work to the physicians because I think that’s just – from a liability perspective, it’s just a better place to be.

[00:23:18] Ashley James: Got it. I’m in the middle of taking this course from Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. I have a feeling this might be the next one you’re going to take.

[00:23:25] Jill Chmielewski: Uh-huh. I know that program. I mean, I haven’t taken it but I know what you’re talking about.

[00:23:28] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah. I just paused. I was doing it for a few months and then I paused it to launch the Learn True Health Home Kitchen that I was telling you about. Because we’ve been filming all these great cooking videos and we’re going to be launching it really soon. And then I’ll go back to complete the FDN. I like that it’s student led. But yeah, they teach you how to read labs. Functional labs, like not the regular ones but the hormones and stuff like that. But there’s so much you can do without labs. Because you’re looking at the lifestyle of the person and you’re helping them to fill in those gaps and help them find what’s missing.

So let’s get into that. Because you got nine steps, the nine different points that we want to make sure we get to that really, really will help set us up for better health. So no matter who’s listening – the men that are still here, I love you. I have to say that. The men that are still listening are really awesome because they’re probably listening because they’re just curious. But they’re also probably listening because they want to help the women in their life, which I think is just really admirable and I love you for it. And all the women that are listening, no matter what age you are, you’re going to take some great information away. So maybe even if you’re postmenopausal or you’re 17, it doesn’t matter because the stuff that Jill teaches really is applicable to all women. But specifically, it’s really going to help women prepare for perimenopause and menopause. So take it away. What things should we make sure that we do or know to best prepare ourselves to have healthy hormones?

[00:25:16] Jill Chmielewski: Well, I think the first thing is just kind of pausing for a second and for women to understand that they are going to have to be advocates for themselves. I mean, healthcare has changed so much since I started as a nurse. And it had already sort of started its transition even back then. But long gone are the days where you sit with your doctor for 45 minutes and have conversations about your health and your mental health and your wellbeing and other things. Unless, you’re working with a functional medicine physician and they do design their visits that way. But I think these days the visits are very limited with physicians. It’s really not their fault. It’s like a ten minute slot. And I have a lot of Physician friends who are, you know, they’re burnt out. And they know that they are not able to provide their patients with the care that they need because they’re so limited by insurance and other things that dictate care.

But I think women need to know, you have to be an advocate for yourself. And that means you have to start educating yourself. And you don’t have to get – it can be confusing. And I think that’s the hard part of this time in life that we’re so fortunate to have so many resources health-wise and wellness-wise. But there’s a lot of wellness noise. And so you get a little bit like, “Okay. Which diet? You know, which -” there’s so much going on. You really don’t know which way to go. So I think find, I guess, somebody who resonates with you. It could be me, it could be somebody else, who really is geared toward women. And start to learn about what’s going to happen in this next phase of life. And to your point, you can start doing this in your 20s, in your teens, just to kind of get prepared for the next step.

But I think women when they feel – women are very intuitive, as you know. And so if you go to your doctor and you feel like something isn’t quite right and they tell you, “You know what? Hey, it’s part of aging.” And I hear that all the time from my clients who say, “I went to my doctor. I told them I was tired. I told them that my hair was falling out.” Or, “I’m gaining weight.” Or whatever it might be. And they’re just told, “You know what? Hey, it’s part of aging.” And I think if you understand what potentially could be happening in your body at this period of life, you’ll be a much better advocate for yourself. You’ll feel more confident standing up for yourself. And you’ll feel more confidence saying to your doctor, “You know what? I know there’s something else going on. Can you help me with this?” So I would say number one is just having women be strong advocates for themselves.

[00:27:38] Ashley James: I love that you bring up to advocate for ourselves and to build our team. I think we were raised to put doctors on a pedestal and to genuflect to them, to to bow down, and to give over our power. And especially as women, we have to look at where do we lose our power? Where do we give over our bodies to medical professionals? And where do we feel helpless? Because I think in our society, we’ve been trained to feel helpless. And that’s something that we’re breaking now. We’re breaking through that. It’s still left. Like, it’s still – there’s just a little bit of residual. So we need to look at like, are there ever any times with medical professionals where we feel helpless or we feel like we’re children again? I think it’s why we feel so warm and fuzzy about hospitals, like they’ll just take care of me. Because there’s like a child inside us that just wants our parents to take care of us. And I think that’s what we do is we project onto doctors this parental role. Like, “Just take my temperature and just give me the medicine, Mommy, Daddy. And just tell me what to do and I’ll be fine.”

And this giving up of our power is something that’s reinforced in society because of media, because of the way the AMA wants it. They want – the way the marketing is they want – and this is very setup. This has been set up for over a hundred years, if you look at the history of the AMA and modern medicine in all of their marketing, they want us to put doctors and hospitals on a pedestal. Do not question them. Even if you watch mainstream media and you watch TV shows, they’ll make fun of patients who question, patients who step outside the box. And they’re just little jabs because they want to continue this narrative that people who advocate for themselves are bad, disagreeable patients. That’s actually what they’ll put on your chart. You’re a disagreeable patient.

You want to be a disagreeable patient and here’s why. If you look at the statistics of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, they are ridiculous. They’re on the rise. One in three people has diabetes or pre-diabetes. One in three people will have a diagnosis of cancer in their lifetime. I mean, it’s astronomical the amount of disease. The number one killer is heart disease. If you want to be a statistic, keep doing what everyone’s doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic, you have to swim upstream, you have to be a salmon. And that means you have to advocate for yourself. And that doesn’t mean we have to be rude. Because I think that we’re really afraid as women to be – there’s a B word. We’re afraid of that. And again, that’s society. That’s the narrative to keep women in their place. And you do not have to be rude to be assertive. You can be kind, and gentle, and loving, and stand up for yourself, and be firm because you’re worth it.

And you’re allowed to fire your doctor and go find another one. You are allowed to. And you’re allowed to find a team and build the team of experts that are in alignment with your values. And that practice informed consent. And what that means i,s the doctor does not pressure you into a therapy or a medicine. If you ever feel guilted or shamed or pressured into anything by a doctor, then you need to leave that doctor and go find one that actually practices informed consent. Which means, they inform you of the positives and the negatives of the treatment, or of the procedure, or drug, or whatever avenue you’re choosing to take. They give you the entire story and they let you make the decision for you. And building a team of holistic health professionals and your MD, the whole team together and your OBGYN, building the team that empowers you and that they get that they’re not on a pedestal, then you are empowered the entire time. And then that way, you’ll also be informed the entire time. Because you can go to them and ask them questions and get them to inform you. And you can bring information to them that you hear on podcasts, or books, or read,studies and things like that. And you bring that information to them. And then if you’ve chosen your team well, they’ll be receptive to that information. Because they’re science minded, they’ll look at it and help you to decipher whether that’s a good approach for you or not based on the science.

So it does take an effort to build our team. But once you have, it’s just so wonderful. It feels so great to have these health care professionals who are empowering you towards better health than just giving up your power I’ve seen so many people put on the wrong medications and they suffered for it because they gave up their power and they didn’t advocate for themselves. So I love that this is your first point.

[00:33:10] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, you said it so well. And I think it’s a partnership. So I think, thinking about it that way that it really isn’t meant to be, like you said, somebody is on a pedestal and somebody is sort of down here. We’re equal trying to – I mean the goal at the end of the day is always that this person can be healthier and can be their best self. And if you have a Physician who is open and willing, they’re going to be working with you in partnership as opposed to trying to strong arm you or tell you what to do. So I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think that was great.

[00:33:44] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, I love it’s your first step. So now step number two.

[00:33:48] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So step number two is probably the one that is, I think women are the most resistant to, and that is lifestyle. And I mean, I kind of will buck it. Lifestyle, food, all of that stuff, kind of into one. I think that women have this very unrealistic expectation that we can skip on sleep, we can eat crappy food, we’re going to keep, exposing ourselves to toxins, we’re going to over schedule ourselves, we’re going to be 24/7 on our devices, we’re going to eat inner minivans on the go, we’re going to be stressed all the time. And at the same time, we’re going to be thin, we’re going to have great se, we’re going to beautiful hair, we’re going to have great relationships, we’re going to have this really smooth transition into perimenopause and menopause, and everything’s going to be great.

You can’t have both. And I think you were talking earlier about kind of that giving somebody a pill to fix something. That we’re looking a lot of times women are saying, “What pill can I take for something?” And I think this is where lifestyle comes into play deeply. Because hormones, even if you give someone, let’s say, hormone replacement or something that may help to boost hormones. At the end of the day, biochemically in the body, the body is always trying to find a balance in hormones. So it’s going to shift hormones in the direction that it thinks it should go, regardless of what you give somebody. So sugar causes women oftentimes to make more testosterone. So different things that we do from a food and lifestyle perspective are going to shift our hormones in different ways. So we can’t just take a pill. We can’t just take supplements. We can’t just say, “I’m going to ignore the natural rhythm of my body.” Especially at this point in life and I think this is really that key point in life where everything comes to a head. If you’ve been ignoring these signs and symptoms along the way – and women often say to me, “Well, I just didn’t really pay attention.” And the thing is if you were to stop and listen, our body is constantly communicating with us. And it’s constantly sort of tapping us on the shoulder, giving us little whispers. Maybe not saying it outright but it is telling us in different forms. Like when we gained weight and we’ve changed nothing else, that’s telling us that something is happening in the body. When we’re fatigued, that’s telling us that something needs attention. If our hair is falling out, if we have really irregular periods, if we have really cloudy periods, heavy periods, terrible PMS, whatever it may be, that’s a sign that something is happening. And that’s how our body communicates with us. And it’s trying to say, “Hey, listen, I need help.” And if we keep ignoring it, which is what women often do.

And I think you said that in sort of your opening remarks that, we’re running around and we just kind of ignore ourselves. We ignore it. We put everybody else first. The kids come first. The kid’s schedules. We’ll sign the kids up for a million different things. But we won’t take time for ourselves. We won’t pay attention to our symptoms. We won’t actually make – we don’t have time for those lifestyle changes. And, unfortunately, we’re going to have to make time for those lifestyle changes if we want to feel good in perimenopause and menopause. It’s truly a must. I mean, there’s no way to actually make it through perimenopause and menopause well-unscathed to the other side and feel good and actually remain with our health intact without making some lifestyle changes. So that’s a big one. And I’m sure that’s probably a hard one for, maybe, your listeners to hear. But it’s something I think we’re – perimenopause is a five to 15 year transition. And I think that’s nature’s way of giving us a very generous window of time to kind of get our act together, slow it down, start to really think about what we need to prepare for this next phase in life.

[00:37:28] Ashley James: Yeah. What we need versus what we want. I want to stay up late but what I need is to go to bed.

[00:37:36] Jill Chmielewski: Exactly. And we all do it, right? We all do it at certain times. We just have to not do it daily.

[00:37:40] Ashley James: Totally. Totally. Like, you know what? The binging Netflix or Hulu, keep it to once a month or something. The staying up until 2:00 in the morning, maybe keep it to like – you know, limit that. I think it’s really easy to put the kids to bed and then be like, “Oh, now It’s me time.” And I’m totally guilty a bit. But I see so many of my mom friends up at midnight because this is the time when it’s like, “The house is quiet, we can do things.” Or just stay awake not doing anything but just have fun. And I know that on the days that I go to bed even with my son, if we go to bed early, even go to bed like at 9:00 or at 7:00, we go to bed really early, we are so much more productive and then so much happier the next day.

And I think that when we tend to stay up late and binge TV or whatever, that that shows that there’s – and I’m talking totally from personal experience – that shows that we feel like there’s a deficiency in joy in our life. You know what I mean? Because I think – what I would I do is I go, “Oh, this is my me time.” Or, “I’m going to have some fun now.” Or I’ll stay up like I did last night I stayed up working on this membership site that we’re launching really soon. And it’s temporary because we’re going to get it launched and then I don’t have to stay up really late working on it. And I’ll be able to work on it on normal business hours. So there’s times when we do it. But just this idea in my head I had to figure out, “Why am I staying up late every night?” I had to ask myself this. Like, “Why is it that I’m not going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00?” We really want to be asleep by 10:00.

They show that if you can be asleep by 10:00, you get the most amount of healing done, like the lungs. I think it’s between 10:00 and 1:00 or midnight where the lungs heal. And then other parts of the body are healing. And the brain really needs to go through two full sleep cycles. And if we go to bed at like midnight, we’re not getting those two sleep cycles. And I don’t I don’t set an alarm clock anymore because my son is our alarm clock. So I don’t get to sleep in. So a lot of families don’t get to sleep in. So really, if you go to bed early – and I did this with one of my clients who would stay up late working on her business after she put the kids to bed and then be exhausted the next day. And then it was really hard for her to make healthy choices or have enough energy to cook healthy food. And it compounded and it all started with making one change. And I said, “What if you went to bed with your kids.” Because, obviously as adults, we’ll wake up before the kids. And then you did all this work. Although the busy work like the emails and stuff you were going to do late at night. You do them at 5:00 in the morning with your tea or your coffee in the morning when you’re waking up. And she did that one change. And it was the domino effect that put everything in place in her life. She had more energy. She had more mental clarity. She actually began to lose weight. And of course, inflammation. She lost all that brain fog. She found that she was more productive in the morning. Like all the work that would take her two hours to do at night, actually took over a half-an-hour In the morning. Because she was fresh.

And so there’s so much to say about when you say that changing your lifestyle, like just these little changes. Like, what if you went to bed like two hours earlier and did everything you wanted to do. Just rearrange it and really put your sleep as priority. What if you just did this one change this month and just made sleep your priority? And then you could see what’s the ripple effect for the rest of your life. Because if you have the energy, then you might eat a little bit better, then you might exercise a little bit more, then you might be a little happier. And it can just compound from there. So I think that just saying something as simple as making sleep a priority, step one. So great.

And then like you said, not eat crap food. But you know what? When we’re tired, it’s really hard – it’s harder – I should say, it’s harder to make better health food choices when we’re walking zombies. So I really do think it starts with the sleep. And then after you’ve got sleep under control, then it’s the eating healthier. And then you said, limit exposure to toxins. And then don’t over schedule yourself. So ask yourself, what do you what do you need instead of what do you want. And then and then don’t stay connected 24/7. Put the phone down. And go for a walk in the forest with your kids. Do that on a regular basis. Like, get disconnected. So I love that you talked about that. Because that chronic stress – stress isn’t an emotion. But that chronic stress we’re putting on our body, we don’t feel it as an emotion. But we’ll feel it when our body is at its breaking point. So we have to address the stressors. Knowing that we actually don’t feel it. We don’t feel it necessarily. But you know what we do? We do feel it when it’s gone. Like when you’re on vacation, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. This is so amazing.” You just feel so good. That’s because the stressors aren’t there. So we can feel it when it’s not there. But when we’re habituated, were adapted to constant chronic stress, that’s our new norm. So then we’re like – I’ve had so many people say to me, “I’m not stressed. I don’t feel stressed.” But they make these changes and then they’re like, “Wow. I can’t believe how much stress I was under. I didn’t know that.”

So I love that you pointed that out that this makes a big difference. Can you talk a little bit about why – biochemically, why does sleep and toxins and food and stress, why does that affect hormones and hormone health specifically?

[00:43:40] Jill Chmielewski: Well, I mean I love that you brought up sleep is that kind of first step. Because typically, when I work with clients, that’s always the first step. And I should say to that it can take – there’s no commitment. I think sometimes when you say to somebody lifestyle is something – we need to kind of work at lifestyle. They get like, “Oh, my gosh. She’s going to ask me to make a million changes at once.” And I think,like you said, slow, simple changes are really the best way to start. Because they sort of get themselves. You start one and then you do the other. I think sleep is one of the number one factors. Because sleep is when we do our critical metabolic waste cleanup of the day. We build hormones at nighttime while we’re sleeping. I mean, we’re making hormones, we’re detoxifying, we’re getting rid of things. And detoxification is a huge part of hormones and hormone balance. We need to have really efficient detoxification to have really good hormone balance. And we need sleep – really adequate deep sleep. Really that sort of, I mean – ideally, we are – you know, this doesn’t happen. But ideally, we’re really sort of mimicking this – have a really good circadian rhythm where we are rising with the sun and sort of going to bed with sunset. Now, we don’t do that anymore. But the closer we can get to that, that’s going to definitely help with hormonal rhythm.

So the women that you were just alluding to – and I have a lot of friends too, where I’ll all get emails from them. I’ll look and it’s like 1:30 in the morning, “What is she doing up?” And it’s the same – I always get emails from her at 1:30. Every night to be cutting into sleep like that, you’re really just sort of wrecking the hormonal rhythm of the day. Cortisol – there’s a lot of different hormones that are involved. And they follow that sort of circadian rhythms. So when you’re cutting into sleep, that’s a big reason why sleep in and of itself, I mean, studies – there’s probably now hundreds, if not thousands, of studies that show a direct correlation between lack of sleep and hormone imbalances. There’s so many different reasons. But I would say, just the fact that we’re detoxifying and that we’ve got just so much going on with our circadian rhythm during the day and at night has a huge impact on our hormonal balance.

[00:45:59] Ashley James: You said that we make hormones at night. Do we make more hormones when we’re sleeping? I mean, if someone were to pull an all nighter, do they make less hormones?

[00:46:08] Jill Chmielewski: They make less hormones. We make hormones at all different times, obviously, throughout the day. I mean, it’s a 24/7 type of situation. But a lot of the building happens at night when we sleep. Because our bodies are at rest. And so our body can focus on more important things. During the day, we’re running around like fools. And so nighttime is when our body can actually sort of – it’s like this workshop that’s kind of happening behind the scenes where we’re able to actually work on building hormones. A lot of our appetite hormones. Like you alluded to earlier, the appetite hormones, ghrelin and leptin, are critical that we get sleep at night. Otherwise, you do end up the next day with this sort of – we’ve all experienced that we’re up all night and you walk to the fridge every hour or the pantry looking for something to eat because those hormones are not in balance. So it’s sort of the signaling is off. So we need to sleep because the signaling is off as well. So we probably would need hours to get into all of the biochemical reactions behind it all. But I would just say sleep in and of itself is huge for building hormones, and for balancing hormones, and for ensuring that communication with hormones among hormones with each other, with different tissues of the body is happening and happening well.

[00:47:27] Ashley James: I think we could do an entire episode just on this number two – this section two. Because you mentioned toxins, toxic exposure and there’s like an entire episode right there. And I’ve had other guests talk about it. But the toxins like Bisphenol A, for example, or endocrine disruptors. And now there’s obesogens and there’s microplastics in water. Like, don’t drink bottled water that’s in plastic because there’s microplastics that are obesogens. And there’s estrogen mimicking plastics and toxins. There’s over 80,000 toxins in our food and water and air. And many of them are endocrine disruptors. And it’s scary because it could be your mattress could be off gassing obesogens. Your carpet could. Your furniture, if it has the flame retardants. And all cosmetics that are in plastic bottles, artificial fragrances and household cleaners, if they’re in plastic bottles, off gas and get into our air. The air quality in our home is ten times worse than the air quality out on the streets. And we’re breathing in these chemicals that are toxic to the body. And we don’t feel it on a regular basis. But it’s slowly disrupting our hormones and increasing our chances of cancer and hurting the thyroid. There’s so many things.

So really, like you said, lifestyle is huge. And as part of that sleep, eat healthier, don’t eat crap food, and reduce your toxic exposure. Don’t over schedule yourself. But each one of these points could be like a whole episode. But it’s so critical. So I love that you addressed this. And that this is something that takes seriously. And again, it’s that shifting our mindset as women who – I’m totally guilty of this – shifting our mindset from putting ourselves last and dragging ourselves through the mud because we have kids, because we have a husband, because we have a career, putting everyone else first because we can. And this is also what we’re taught to do in society. We don’t celebrate taking time off to nurture ourselves. In society, it’s celebrated to burn the candles at both ends. And that’s because if you look at it, women are trying to – and this is over the last, you know, 30,40 years. Women are trying to make sure that we can have a career, that we can have everything we want, and we also want to have a family. And that means the we’re still kind of like holding on to this like 1950’s idea of what being a mom is. And this like 1980’s idea of like what being a career woman is. And try to do both at the same time and it just doesn’t work. So we have to lean – what we need is we need like the 1800’s idea of what it is to be a woman where we know that we’re not an island. We’re not doing this alone. We have to do this in a village. And we need to lean on each other.

And maybe that means that all of all of your girlfriends get together and you guys take turns carpooling and you take turns cooking dinners. Maybe you get five girlfriends together and each one of you cooks for the whole group. Or you get together once a week. My friend does this. She gets together with a girlfriend and they do meal prep. They do one day of cooking together and they cook all the meals. And they prep all the meals for both their families. So there’s ways that we can do it. But we have to do it together as a community. And find the girlfriends in your life that want to get healthy together and see how you can lean on – you know, lean on family and friends but don’t do this alone. Because that’s going to help you to reduce the stress is to not do this alone.

[00:51:32] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a great point. And I think the supporting – women with other women – and I find this and you, too, as a mom probably have seen this. I think really when a woman says, “No. I can’t do this.” Like let’s just say, of course at school, they’re always looking for volunteers or whatever it may be or signing kids up for things. When women say no, we need to respect that they just have enough on their plate. And I hear this from women all the time that there’s just this guilt that they should be doing this, and they should be doing that, and they shouldn’t be doing this, and all these things. And I think at some point it’s not selfish to think about yourself. It’s actually selfless. Because if you’re not here in good health, your whole family’s going to suffer. So you need to worry about yourself. So I think giving each other permission – because I hear it all the time where women ask another woman, “Be on this board with me. Or can you be on this committee or coach or this?” And somebody says no, and they’re like, “Can you believe she said no?” And it’s like, you know what? We, as women, need to support each other and respect that. That might just be one too many things for her right now. And that’s okay. And so taking that pressure off of each other will help a lot of us to feel less guilt about saying yes to things that we know are really outside of our bandwidth.

[00:52:49] Ashley James: Guilt and shame are as unhealthy as smoking. We have to get that to look at what we need versus what we want. I love that you said that. Because what we want is clean the entire house and do 25 things on our to do list. That’s what we want. But by the end of the day, if we’ve only done four, then we feel kind of defeated and we feel guilty or shame. And that is like we just sat down and started smoking cigarettes. It’s shame and guilt are really unhealthy. And they actually will hurt our hormones.

Can you explain why being in stress mode, and guilt, and shame – these are emotions. They’re not tangible. They’re not like this is a desk This is real. So we often don’t think that emotions can affect something physical like hormones .But can you explain why there’s a real link between staying in an emotionally stressed state and having poor hormone health?

[00:53:47] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. So I think when you think about stress or when I talk with women about stress, I think they automatically think it’s just the stress of everyday living. Stress from your body’s perspective, I think there’s just one stress response and that is the fight or flight mode, which most of us have heard of. And all that is, there’s a huge surge of adrenaline when something stressful happens. You’re walking across the street with your three year old, a car comes out of nowhere, luckily, we have the stress mode in our body so that we can very quickly get our child out of the way and everybody is safe. And so that’s kind of that short term stress mode. When we’re in long term stress, which is the case for most of us. I mean, our bodies are designed to be in short term stress. Quick bouts of stress and then we go back to a more relaxed state. And I don’t mean relaxed, like you’re kicking your feet up. But you’re not in constant, constant stress mode. When we’re constantly stressed, which we are, we have to think about stress in a different way. It’s the same fight or flight response.

So we get this huge surge of adrenaline. We get tons and tons of cortisol, which is our long term stress hormone. And cortisol affects all of the other hormones of our body. It affects progesterone, which is one of the hormones we make when we ovulate. It affects estrogen. It affects our thyroid hormone. It really has this huge effect. Our blood sugar hormone. So it really – stress in and of itself kind of throws us into a tailspin and we don’t even know it. And I think we often think of just those kind of overt stresses, like walking in front of a car coming out of nowhere. Or, “Hey, I got a really stressful email from my boss.” But emotional stress of maybe something that you can’t let go of from, maybe a friendship, something happened and there’s this thing kind of lingering or family member. Or it could be the stress of something physical. Maybe you have a food sensitivity or, you and I, were talking about dairy before the show, maybe dairy in your body creates an immune response and inflammatory response in the body. That’s actually stressful in the body and will also produce the stress response. So there’s a multitude of things that are constantly producing the stress response in our body. And every time we release these stress hormones, it’s like a domino effect. I mean, I think of it is like, you know, if you think of a symphony playing beautifully together, all of these different instruments. If one plays out of tune, it kind of ruins the whole piece. That’s how hormones work. If cortisol is up, up, up all the time, the rest of the hormones are going to be all over the place. And they’re going to be out of whack and out of balance. That’s why when we’re working with women, when I work with women, to help balance hormones, we can’t ignore stress or sleep. But stress is such a big factor because it literally has a domino effect on every other hormone in our body. So we have to address that.

[00:56:34] Ashley James: I love it. And it starts by doing little things. I think we could like get stressed out about stress.

[00:56:40] Jill Chmielewski: Yes. Very good. That is true. That is true. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.

[00:56:44] Ashley James: Yeah. No. It takes little changes. Like I said, try to go to bed an hour earlier or two hours early and just see what happens. Or just make those little changes. But I think starting – you’re right. Starting with sleep is the best because then we’ll have a little bit more energy and mental clarity to start making better food choices. And then we can start looking at the cleaning products in our house. And then we could just go down the list. So I know that you’re giving us this sort of checklist of things to do. Okay. What’s the point number three?

[00:57:14] Jill Chmielewski: So point three is, I think just the notion that there is no quick fix for health and hormone balance issues. And that you’re probably going to have to do some investigative work if you have had long standing hormone issues. And what I mean by that is, one of the best ways to know if you’ve had hormone issues coming into perimenopause is have you had irregular periods, funky periods, heavy periods, cloudy periods, skipped periods. I mean, periods, they’re now considered the fifth vital sign. So they are literally a reflection of what’s happening on the inside of our body.

So during the reproductive years, in general, if you’re having a period pretty regularly, we’re going to assume you’re ovulating. Some people aren’t ovulating. That’s a different conversation. But in general, if you’re getting a period, let’s say, with a lot of regularity it’s pretty manageable. If you’re not getting a lot of PMS, there’s nothing really crazy and symptomatic about it. Your hormones are probably pretty balanced. Because when you come into perimenopause, your hormones are going to start changing and periods may change. And that’s actually a normal part of perimenopause. But if you are coming into it and you’ve had period issues for years and years and years and years, it’s something that requires some attention. I would say to your listeners, if you’re in your 20s, early 30s, mid-30s, and you’re having period issues and you’ve had them for a long time, you probably want to start doing some investigative work now. Because those issues are only going to get worse. In perimenopause, you can expect hormone imbalances. And again, there is no quick fix in that moment. There are things that we can do to help support hormones. It’s going to be a little tumultuous and it’s going to be a little bit rocky just like puberty was. Because we think about perimenopause as sort of like reverse puberty. It’s like in puberty, your hormones are going on the up and up. In perimenopause, they’re on this kind of slow decline. And sometimes it’s a quick decline. But in most cases, it’s a little bit of a slower decline.

But I think this is that period in life where you’re going to want it sort of investigate anything that has been going on. Understand that there are no quick fixes. And that once you’ll want to probably – I think this is where building your team even before you hit perimenopause is really important. Because you want to address things that are happening now so they don’t get worse in perimenopause. And then as perimenopausal issues arise, and they will, I think there’s – I can’t imagine there’s a woman out there that has not had some type of a symptom during perimenopause. Some women go through rather unscathed. But most women are definitely dealing with hormonal issues at certain times. Sometimes worse than others. I mean, sometimes it’s going to be worse than other times during that perimenopausal journey. But I think addressing those things when you can, and then building your team, and understanding that there isn’t a quick fix. I think that’s a really good mentality to walk into perimenopause with.

[01:00:01] Ashley James: I love it. Awesome. All right. Point four.

[01:00:04] Jill Chmielewski: Point four, so kind of along the same lines. Understand that change is inevitable. Like, this is coming and you do have to prepare. So like I talked about earlier, like the puppy or the baby that’s coming, you get car seats and you have showers. And you do all these things for this baby that’s going to come because it’s so important you read every baby book. And then once the baby comes, you’re reading sleep books. Or maybe it’s some discipline books when they’re little, how to handle temper tantrums, and things like that. We tend to really, when it comes to other people in our life, will read, read, read, read. Or if somebody is second or life, will help investigate and see. Google, anything we can about whatever diagnosis they just got. But when it comes to perimenopause, we don’t prepare. It’s back to that whole notion that everyone else comes first and we come last. And I think part of it is the inherent nature of the fact that, we really didn’t even have – I don’t know when the word perimenopause sort of came to be. But I think, traditionally, when I was growing up and going through nursing school even, there was the reproductive years and then there was menopause. And there wasn’t perimenopause. So part of the issue is that, I don’t think women understand that there’s this period of time. It’s not like you’re a reproductive aged woman and all of a sudden one day you’re menopausal and hormones dropped off. But I wonder if that is how. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe that is the perception of some women.

So I think knowing that you have this period of time is coming and you need to start preparing for it. And I think when you’re prepared, like anything else, you’re just going to do better. Because one of the symptoms that comes up a lot, I’ve had clients that will just be in panic mode about irregular periods. “All of a sudden, I had really regular periods and then they’re irregular now.” And they tell their doctor and the doctor sends them for a vaginal ultrasound and then a biopsy. And then they put them on the birth control pill and all these things. And actually, irregular periods during perimenopause is normal. It’s a sign of hormones changing. So I think if we can take some of the panic out of the things that are coming and understand that some of these things are normal. Yes, you want to investigate if something seems like it’s really out of whack. But irregular periods, for instance, that is something we would expect in perimenopause. And if you know that, you can prepare. So when that starts to happen, you’re not freaking out and feeling like you need to have these really crazy tests done and all these other things. So I would say preparation is probably your next one.

[01:02:34] Ashley James: I like that you bring that up that it’s a window. Because you mentioned, when we prepare for a baby, we’re having a baby shower. And I would just imagine having this like menopause shower or perimenopause, shower. Like, what if we celebrated it? Like, “I got the news from the doctor already. I’m going to have a party with my girlfriends because I’m in perimenopause.” But it’s a slow transition. Your body slowly transitioning over.

When I was younger back in the 90s, Oprah, I guess she was going through menopause.

[1:03:06] Jill Chmielewski: I remember that. Yeah.

[01:03:07] Ashley James: And that was unheard of, to talk about menopause on TV. It was something that was shameful that you whisper it behind closed doors. It was not celebrated. And she brought it out into the open. I mean, she exposed a lot of stuff, hoarding, rape, incest, abuse. She exposed so much that’s in our culture as women and we felt ashamed to talk about it. And I love that. I love that she brought minute pause out into the open. I really feel that she single handedly brought it out into the open like Goddess out of the dark ages. And made it so we could freaking discuss it and not be some this point of shame. And that it is something that we can actually celebrate.

And when we look at ancient cultures, because I’ve studied ancient cultures and ancient religion, before Christianity – and I’m not bashing any religion at all. It’s just looking at the history. But before like the Crusades, before Christianity, women in many cultures were the – I don’t want to say rulers – but the older women were the healers. The grandmothers were looked to, were the elders, were the leaders, they were looked to as women who were in their power. And when a woman went into menopause or was beyond the childbearing years, in certain cultures, they were actually revered and looked at that they stepped into their power. That something happened to women when they went through menopause and post menopause where they had access to universal energy and access to healing energies. And they had stronger intuition. Stronger ability to practice healing and to guide the tribe or guide the people. So there are cultures that saw that women stepped into their power. And that was the meme that menopause meant you stepped into your power.

And I’d love for us to now make that part of our idea. You’re not losing something by going into menopause. You’re gaining something. Because I think some women are afraid of going into menopause. It means we’re getting older. We’re frail. We’re going to lose our bones. We’re going to have osteoporosis. We’re just looking at the mainstream media version of it or that narrative that we just get old and weak and frail. Instead, how about we’re these super strong women that step into our power and step into our intuition. And like the light bulb goes on in our body and we become even stronger and healthier because we’re figuring out stuff. We’re taking the wisdom of our years and we’re applying it.

So I’d like for us to shift that, yes, it takes about 15 years, like you said, ten to 15 years to shift into it. And in that time we get to prepare. And that we can actually look forward to it. Because there’s so much that good that happens that so many ancient cultures saw that there’s good that happens within us as women when we step into menopause.

[01:06:21] Jill Chmielewski: I so agree. I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think a lot of it has to do with, obviously, our society that reveres youth is beautiful. And aging is sort of like, “You’re kind of washed up and over the hill.” And tossing women to the side. When I think, like you said, a lot of these cultures have really always put aging women at the forefront and really valued all that their life experience can now be bestowed on the next generation and share it. And it would be really nice if we could see that shift here.

[01:06:50] Ashley James: Now, you have mentioned earlier that watching your periods as a vital sign is important. Like the quality of the period, whether it’s heavy or light. What about PMS? What about even like a week before the period, if cravings get stronger? Or if their boobs are more tender than normal? Or if they’re way more irritable than normal? Or just like, are really, really exhausted in the morning? These symptoms leading up to their period, what about that? Is that a sign that something is off balance or off kilter or is that normal?

[01:07:27] Jill Chmielewski: You know, typically, I mean, in the ideal – optimally, we would have uneventful periods. I mean, aside from the fact that when you get your period itself, your uterine lining sheds because your hormones, progesterone and estrogen, have really fallen. And so when we don’t have our hormones, we feel it in terms of we feel more tired, we don’t feel as energetic. We want to maybe kind of sit on the couch day one and day two or maybe even day three of our period. That part of sort of the hormonal decline with your period is normal. I would say the period leading up to that, so that transition of time where women say, “Oh, my gosh. I am just like out of my mind the week before my period.” Typically, there is a hormonal imbalance. And more times than not, it usually means that there’s not enough progesterone to balance estrogen.

So I don’t know if your listeners have heard of estrogen dominance. That word is tossed around a lot these days when we’re talking about hormones. But estrogen and progesterone really need to be balanced in order for women to feel good. And for a really uneventful period, estrogen and progesterone, need to be balanced. And oftentimes, I think alluding back to a lot of the toxins, a lot of the hormone disrupting chemicals, a lot of those chemicals contain like estrogen mimicking chemicals. So there’s a lot more estrogen in the environment than there once was. And so women tend to have higher estrogen in relation to the amount of progesterone they have. And that’s typically – typically, again, why women would have sort of eventful periods, PMS, the bloating, the moods. All that stuff is typically more related to progesterone, maybe, being on the lower side or, maybe, not being enough to balance out estrogen.

[1:09:13] Ashley James: So if women have these symptoms and then they confirm that with bloodwork that their progesterone is low, what do you recommend they do to support the body in increasing its progesterone to normal levels?

[01:09:26] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, it depends. I mean, I think with hormones, usually if somebody has really not great PMS or they really noticed that, in general, we’re doing a hormone panel. A combination of serum testing, which is lab testing, and doing a urine test at home. Typically, we do like, what we call, a 24-hour urine, where we’re actually looking at hormones and their metabolites. It gives us a lot more information. So it’s hard to say specifically without knowing what someone’s results are. In general, I would say if somebody says, “Hey, if you were just kind of saying hey [inaudible] [01:10:00].” What would you say to somebody or group of women who have really, really significant PMS? I would say, number one, you definitely want to look at the toxins in your environment. I think a big source of estrogen coming in is going to be, obviously, in dairy. Because all dairy is coming from the milk of a lactating mammal. A lot of our [inaudible] [01:10:18] because a lot of them are injected with antibiotics and hormones. Definitely, pots and pans, plastics, the microplastics as we know, our beauty products, et cetera. I mean, they’re everywhere. They’re kind of everywhere.

So doing your best to kind of start decreasing estrogen coming in that way. Because our bodies are smart. Our bodies really probably know. They know how much hormone is needed and how much should be released. So if we have imbalanced hormones, oftentimes with estrogen. it’s coming from an outside source or it has more to do with detoxification, really sluggish detoxification. Because we’re not, maybe, breaking down estrogen properly. And so we’re holding on to some of it and recycling it. For women who are constipated and they’re going to the bathroom every three days, your livers breaking down estrogen. It has to get out of your body. And the only way can do that is for you to go to the bathroom. Well, that’s going to be a problem. You’re definitely going to be holding on and recirculating estrogen in the body.

So I always tell women, look at some of those kind of food factors. First, look at kind of your gut health, see what’s happening there. There are supplements that can be taken. But they’re very, very targeted to what’s happening once we see the hormone panel. From a progesterone side, you’re going to want to do things that are going to optimize isolation. And that would be things like there’s definitely herbs that will do that. But I think from a lifestyle perspective, stress is going to be huge for ovulating. I mean, our bodies are not going to want to bring a baby into this world if it’s stressed out. And even if you don’t want a baby, your body’s purpose of ovulation is to create a baby. I mean, that’s we’re primarily designed so that’s why we ovulate. So from your body’s perspective, it’s always thinking how to procreate and how am I going to bring a baby into this world. Well, if you’re stressed, it’s not going to do that very well. Hormones are going to be off. So anything you can do to decrease stress is going to improve progesterone. That includes things like exercise. Because I think we think of exercise is good. But I find with this kind of type A mentality we have and the go, go, go. And then we go to orange theory – and I’m not picking on orange theory. But we tend to be in this rush state all the time. And then we go in our workouts or like maniac workouts that actually stresses us more. We may feel relief when we leave. But from our bodies perspective, it’s just more stress. Too much exercise can definitely impede progesterone as well. So I always tell women, you definitely want to look at what you’re doing to support optimal progesterone, optimal ovulation, and things like that. And then there’s also, obviously, some herbs and nutrients. Getting the right vitamins and the right diet on board to make sure that you’re optimizing hormones will really go a long way to help with your period health.

[01:13:08] Ashley James: All right. Next point, number five.

[01:13:10] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So this is probably my biggest beef, I think, with practitioners. Sorry, practitioners. But balanced hormones are just as critical in midlife and late life as they were in reproductive years. So I think, this is where conventional medicine and functional medicine sort of part ways. And in fact, I just received my North American Menopause Society Clinicians Guide. The Menopause Practice Clinicians Guide this year. And still, I mean, it’s 2020 – and I guess, it was the 2019 release. They’re still talking about the advice to clinicians, you know, conventional clinicians, is hormone therapy is just for symptom relief during perimenopause and not to be considered. Essentially, we really don’t need it later in life. And I think, you know – and we won’t don’t have to get into the hormone replacement discussion today But I guess the point is, hormones are needed in every cell of the body. I mean, it’s sort of absurd to think that we only need hormones for making babies. And so that’s been this sort of the conventional way of thinking. Well, you don’t really need your hormones anymore. I mean, you probably had friends as well or you know people who’ve had a hysterectomy and they’re told, “Hey, you know what? It’s fine. Just take it out. You don’t need in any way.” Well, that’s absurd. That’s absolutely absurd. You’re like castrating someone when you take their ovaries out. So it’s that same notion that these hormones, we have hormones work like – hormones work with receptors. And so it’s sort of like a lock and key type of system. So within our body, hormones swim in our bloodstream to different receptors. And they kind of wiggle into receptor. And then that causes an action to happen in the body. Whether that is, maybe, it’s swimming into a uterine lining receptor and it’s building the uterine lining, maybe it’s estrogen that’s gone there to build the uterine lining, or maybe it’s swimming up to the breast and it’s growing breast cells, or to the brain and it’s helping the brain to think more clearly.

I mean, we have hormone receptors all over our body from head to toe, from our brain to our heart, to our skin, to our vagina, to our urinary tract, our blood vessels, our bones, everywhere. So the notion that once we hit this phase of life, we no longer need hormones so we’re just kind of ignore people that are having hormone imbalances is really insane when you think about the systemic effects that hormones have on the body. And we know from looking at hormones that having balanced hormones, they systemically protect our brain, our heart, our bones, our bladder, our skin, our gut, and I mean so much more in our body. So keeping that in mind, it’s not just about making babies. You knew that didn’t you?

[01:15:50] Ashley James: Well, I love that you’re saying this because we want to live as long as possible, as healthfully as possible. We want the golden years to be super healthy. Just as healthy as when we were 30. When I lived in Las Vegas with my husband back in 2009-ish, I had this functional doctor. She’s awesome. She was in her 70s and she did not look like she was in her 70s. She’s the doctor who diagnosed me with chronic adrenal fatigue. I had been feeling so guilty and so shame – like I felt so much shame for how exhausted I was. And I thought I was just lazy. Because if you looked at me, you’d think I was lazy. But really, my adrenal fatigue was so bad. And I did the saliva test with her, where you spit in a tube all day long – different tubes and then they send it off to the lab. And she had been in the Olympics twice in the summer – Winter Olympics. She had been in the Winter Olympics twice. And she said, “The only time I’ve ever seen cortisol levels this low was right after I finished the Olympics.” And she said, “You are walking dead.” And she showed me the chart – the graph where, normally, it’s supposed to start really high in the day and go down. I would start the day lower than when people are sleeping. My cortisol at the beginning of day was lower than people who are sleeping. And it would just sort of creep up and then just barely creep up to what you would have as normal levels at the most tired part of your day was my maximum amount of energy, basically. And she showed me that and she goes, “You know,no wonder you actually have some energy and some mental clarity about like 6:00 p.m. And then it’s hard for you to sleep at night because your body is just struggling all day long to make some cortisol. And you finally have some at night.”

But I was really messed up and she was the first one to show me and affirm that, “Yeah. You’re not lazy. Your hormones are way out of balance.” And what I loved about learning from her is that she became this example of health to me. She was like mid-70s. She would run – she did Iron Man’s in the desert. She would do triathlons in the 115 degree heat. She looked absolutely amazing. And she did not prescribe to the idea that when we’re older, we need to be frail. She’s in her 80s now and she just moved to Illinois to start a ranch. And she’s not ever going to stop. She’s super healthy. We’re friends on Facebook, still connected. And she believes that food is medicine. And take supplements when needed to fill in the gaps of nutrition, like minerals. And use your body in a way that builds health.

And so having an example, I think it’s really good to find someone – find an older woman who’s in their 70s or 80s that is an example of prime health. And then just model that and look at her and help you shift your belief system that you can be active and healthy. And not catching the flu, not at risk of dying of influenza because you’re a senior, not a risk of having your hip break. But really, that’s not – and shift our belief system. Look in your mind and go, “What do I look like in my mind’s eye? What is my belief system about being 85 years old?” And if you see yourself in like a home in a wheelchair, that thing need to change. If that’s your belief system, if that’s sort of this carrot you’ve dangled out in front of you, you want to be imagining yourself running marathons at age 99. Because there are women out there. Go on YouTube and look up 100 year old woman running marathons. There are women that do that. And I love these videos of these women in their 90s that run these marathons. And they say, “Oh yeah. When I was 75, I started running.” It’s just like they weren’t doing it their whole lives.

But shifting our mindset to have the idea that when we are 80, 90, and 100, that we are healthy and active and still using food as medicine and still getting out there. And that is the norm. That’s the idea we want in our mind to move towards. Because I think if we have a belief system that when we’re older, we become frail. Then we just kind of give in when your medical professional says, “Okay. Well, you’re in menopause so, you know, we don’t really have to look at this anymore. It doesn’t matter what kind of estrogen you have. You’re in menopause.” It’s ridiculous. Because estrogen and progesterone actually play a role in longevity. And if we have healthy hormones in our 50, 60, 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, we’ll live longer and not die of a degenerative disease. And women who have poor hormone levels will die of a degenerative diseases. You just look at the statistics and see. So there’s a direct link between healthy hormones and longevity and also degenerative disease.

I know a woman in her 70s who got her period back and actually got pregnant. What happened was, so this doctor – one of the doctors that trained me as a Naturopath. And he’s an old school Naturopath. I think he’s in his 80s now. But he’s an old school Naturopath. And he got this woman on supplements and changed her diet. And he said to her – she was 70. H said to her, “Now watch out.” What happened was she told him, “Hey, I had a period. That was weird.” And she said, “Watch out, you’re fertile now.” And she laughed at him. She’s like, “I’m 70. There’s no way”. And he said, “You got to start using protection with your husband.” Because he’d seen it before. Because some women, when they get so healthy, that you can actually reignite your hormones again. And it’s totally possible. And so she didn’t listen to him. She got pregnant and she had a completely healthy child.

[01:22:25] Jill Chmielewski: Wow.

[01:22:26] Ashley James: It is absolutely possible to, I guess, reverse to come out of menopause. So the thing is, I agree with you, it takes like 15 years or whatever. And we kind of go into and then we’re in menopause. But at the same time, I have this idea in the back of my head that we could – we’re seeing women get into menopause in their 40s now because they’re triggering it too early. So I’m not saying menopause is bad. But I think that menopause is bad when it’s too early.

[01:23:03] Jill Chmielewski: Yes.

[01:23:04] Ashley James: And it’s kind of like the body goes, “Oh, well. I’m kind of exhausted. I don’t have the nutrients. I’m stressed out. And now, I have to go into this phase because I’m depleted.” And so we kind of want to stave off menopause as long as possible and keep our hormones as healthy as possible so we could be in pre-menopause for longer. And maybe go into menopause in our 60s instead of our 40s. But more and more practitioners are seeing women in their 40s go into menopause, not because it’s not healthy menopause. It’s premature unhealthy menopause because they’re depleted.

And so I kind of want to have you talk a little bit about how can we support our health now to delay menopause until when it’s actually healthy to have it? Does that make sense?

[01:23:56] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it. I mean, it sort of sounds a little bit redundant but I think it comes down to, it’s really the food and lifestyle choices that we make. I mean, even food as we know, so much of our soil is depleted. And even if we’re eating the right foods, they may not have all the nutrients that they should have because of whatever, the farming, whatever it may be, whatever is happening. So oftentimes, we do need some targeted supplementation to help bridge that gap, like you alluded to earlier. So I think, balanced hormones are all about nutrients. Nutrients are the building block of hormones. So in theory, if we can get those building blocks of hormones in place, we will at least be able to build hormones for as long as possible.

And you talked about I know with adrenal – going into adrenal fatigue. I think that’s been a really big one even if it’s not a full blown adrenal fatigue diagnosis. A lot of women are having trouble with their adrenal glands because of all the stress that we’re under. And again, not just the stress of everyday life but the exposure to toxins which is seen as stressful from the body’s perspective. Or I think there’s a lot coming out now about electromagnetic fields in our cellphones, in our computers. And we have to kind of stand back and say, “Here’s how our body was designed.” It was really designed to, again, be in this sort of – we’re still kind of primarily designed, where we have not evolved as quickly as society is about, especially in the last – oh, my gosh – think about the last even 25 years or even the last ten years. I think it was 2007 when the iPhone came out . So that’s what not – my math is not very good right now, 12 years. Just knowing that our lives have changed so dramatically since the iPhone came out where we have 24/7 accessibility, and computers, and internet, and all these things. So I think a big part of it is going to come down to food and lifestyle is probably the best thing to help support hormones and perpetuate our own internal hormone production for as long as possible before our body kind of says, “Okay. You know what? Now, it’s sort of done.”

Genetics play a role, for sure. I mean, a lot of women will sort of follow suit with what happened to their mom. If their mom was 52 when she went through menopause, they may be 52. So we do see that genetics play a role there. But I think we’re seeing girls in their early 20s that have hormones of a 50 year old. I mean, it’s because of the way that we’re living. I think we’re seeing such drastic issues with hormones, probably early menopause, like you alluded to as well.

[1:26:36] Ashley James: Number six.

[01:26:38] Jill Chmielewski: So number six – we won’t go into great detail here because it’s kind of a very long topic. But I just want to myth bust the notion that estrogen is bad. I think we are – I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with the Women’s Health Initiative. But it’s a study that was done many, many years ago, that sort of put a really negative spin on estrogen. And it did not – the study did not – it was a long term study with thousands and thousands of women who were studied, really, probably for the first time. It’s one of the first studies that was done looking at hormone replacement therapy. And essentially, there was a really negative result as a result of this study. And in fact, the study was stopped early. And the women in this study had more heart disease, breast cancer, strokes, blood clots, et cetera. They were placed on estrogen but it was a synthetic form of estrogen. Not the estrogen that we make in our body, which we call bioidentical estrogen, which is available through compounding pharmacies. It was not that. It was an estrogen that’s made from the urine of pregnant horses. And it was combined –

[01:27:44] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt. But I just want to say one thing about that, about Premarin and any kind of hormone that comes from horses. If you knew the conditions – mostly it’s made in Canada. I’ve been told about the conditions because I was a practitioner who went and saw where it was made. But they keep these horses in a factory. They’re never allowed outside. They’re not allowed to move. They’re hooked up. And they’re constantly pregnant. And then they take their babies away from them and they’re not allowed to see their babies. And if their male horses, they just slaughter them right away. And they’re tortured for their urine. So they keep the horses pregnant for their urine so they can make hormones out of them for us. And it is disgusting and deplorable to know that these hormone drugs are coming from the suffering of these beautiful horses. So it’s really, really, really bad. And if everyone saw this, no one would buy this stuff. And there are other ways. So you’re saying there are other ways. I want to point that out because a lot of women go and get Premarin or Gambino, get hormone replacement stuff that comes from horse urine. And just know that if you actually knew the conditions that lead to making it, you would not want to take this. You wouldn’t even want it in your body.

[01:29:13] Jill Chmielewski: No. One hundred percent. It’s not even – I mean, the other thing is, aside from the terrible conditions of the horses, absolutely. And I’ve read a lot about that as well. It’s made from – again, it’s the horse’ss estrogen, not human estrogen. So it doesn’t – we’re always looking for – anytime we replace hormones in the body, we want to use something that is what we call bioidentical. And that just means that the chemical and molecular structure looks just like our own hormones and acts just like our own hormones, if they came in the body. So when you bring a bioidentical estrogen on board, it knows exactly what to do. It swims to that estrogen receptor. It knows exactly what to do. I kind of consider these – I don’t even call them hormones. They’re synthetic chemicals. It’s probably the best word for them. But this study, unfortunately, sort of it had some really, really poor results but it had nothing to do with bioidentical hormones whatsoever. And unfortunately, the publicity and the fallout of that was sort of like, estrogen is bad, estrogen is bad, estrogen is bad. And so practitioners, even still Physicians – not all. I’m not bucketing all physicians. But there are still Physicians where this has been perpetuated, and they still think estrogen replacement is bad. And they’re thinking about the Women’s Health Initiative that used this fake estrogen.

So kind of putting that aside, our bodies – we make estrogen and we make progesterone. So our bodies would never make something that was harmful, right? That’s part – so you just have to kind of think about it logically. So I just want to bust that myth just because I think women oftentimes will say, “Okay. I’m suffering deeply with symptoms in perimenopause.” And I can definitely relate to this because I’m 48. I’ll be 49 this year. I’ve been in perimenopause for a while. I’m kind of on the tail end. I saw a huge kind of decline last year. And my hormones are very normal for this period in time. And I chose to use bioidentical hormone replacement because I saw the numbers. I know my symptoms. I’m working with a functional medicine practitioner. Point being that, when these hormones decline, you’re going to feel it in your body. It’s not just about periods. It’s about your brain health, your bone health, everything else, bladder health, vaginal health, you name it, your blood vessels. So it’s okay to consider hormone replacement. I think there’s a lot of sort of this black cloud hanging over estrogen because of this study. And if estrogen replacement, bioidentical hormone replacement, estrogen replacement, which should never be used without progesterone. They’re always used together even if you don’t have a uterus. If they’re used properly and you are monitored properly, you can really reap the benefits. But I think a lot of women just don’t even want to go there with the conversation. They’ll just suffer through the symptoms even if they’ve made a lot of the food and lifestyle changes and nothing else has changed. And perhaps it’s time to consider hormone replacement, the word estrogen just makes them think cancer. And there’s a lot more that goes into cancer or other types of negative outcomes from estrogen or the wrong kind of estrogen than estrogen itself.

So I just want women to understand that we’re not – when we’re talking about hormone replacement, we’re talking about estrogen is not bad. Progesterone is not bad. You have huge amounts when you’re pregnant. Huge amounts during the reproductive years. So if they were bad, we would all have cancer when we were pregnant. You know what I mean? So keep that in mind.

[01:32:44] Ashley James: Well, one thing is the estrogen is a catch all. It’s a catch all for many different hormones. So we think estrogen is one thing. It’s actually not. It’s a bunch of different – like, there’s estradiol. There’s a bunch of different estrogens. I’m sure you know way more about that than I do. But I thought it was fascinating that there’s many estrogens. And that when the body wants to get – when the body is sort of like, “Okay. We’re going to clear out this estrogen.” It’s been used or whatever. The levels need to be cleared out. The liver takes the estrogen and then converts it into an inert form and puts it into the bile to be released into the poop. So we’re going to poop it out. Really interesting though. And I thought this was fascinating.

I learned this from one of the guests that I interviewed that when we have constipation – and most people in westernized nations who are eating the standard American diet have constipation and don’t know it. And when you have constipation, actually the gut reabsorbs and reactivate some of that estrogen and can lead to estrogen dominance. And it’s a type of estrogen that is unhealthy now. It’s become – it’s an imbalance of the estrogens, basically. It’s now not healthy version of the estrogens within us from doing that. And so we can get estrogen dominance in an unhealthy way. You know, tummy fat can lead to increased estrogen dominance, those other things, blood sugar dysregulation. But constipation, if we don’t poop two to three times a day, we’re not actually getting the hormones out of us. That they’re getting reabsorbed in an unhealthy way. And the toxins as well. So getting enough fiber to go to the bathroom two to three times a day – I’ve got a whole episode on how to have the perfect poop. It’s a big topic.

But just something as simple as making sure that we’re having healthy bowel movements will help us support balance hormones. So I thought that was really fascinating. But I love that you’re saying that estrogen is not unhealthy. Yes, you can have estrogen dominance. And that’s a different – that doesn’t mean estrogen is unhealthy. That means that there’s – it’s like the smoke, not the fire. Estrogen dominance isn’t the fire. It’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of a lot of stuff that’s out of balance.

[01:35:17] Jill Chmielewski: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. You said it perfectly. So I think just know – for women not to be scared of estrogen is probably just a huge factor right now. Because it’s important to, I think, consider and be open to all options when you’re going through perimenopause and menopause. And just get educated about it. And there’s a lot of good information out there that will help you to do that.

[01:35:40] Ashley James: I’ve had several listener – so we have a Facebook Group. There’s 3,500 listeners right now in the Facebook Group. And we have a lot more listeners that download the show. So I’m like, “What are you guys doing? Join the Facebook Group. Come on. Like, you guys are just listening. So the people who haven’t joined the group yet, join the group. It’s a lot of fun.” So there’s 3,500 very active and wonderful people in the Facebook Group. And several women have asked over the last year about hysterectomies. Several women have had either partial or full hysterectomy and they’re wondering if they should get on hormones. And I thought that I didn’t – I said I can’t offer advice about this but you should definitely find a functional medicine practitioner. And if you’re going to get on bioidentical – but people with full hysterectomies – women with full hysterectomies no matter what age, do you believe they should get on bioidentical hormones?

[01:36:29] Jill Chmielewski: I do. I do. Yeah.

[01:36:30] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that?

[01:36:32] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. We really we produce the bulk of our hormones before menopause in our ovaries. Once we hit menopause, that sort of shifts. So we go from ovarian production of hormones to adrenal production of hormones, which is why – and it probably gets a little bit too deep. But that’s why, especially when we’re hitting this time in life, when we’re stressed to the max and our adrenals are already tasked with producing stress hormones. Okay. Now they got to take over whatever sex hormone production they can. It gets a little dicey. Something is going to suffer. So that’s why it can be really, really dicey to have a lot of stress at this point in life. But my point being is our ovaries are really responsible for the bulk of our hormone production. So when they’re taken out – now, there are studies that show even if you just had your uterus taken out, and let’s say, you’re able to keep your ovaries, still you got to think about it. I mean, there’s still been a pretty big shift with your sex organs that, typically, hormone production goes down a little bit. By how much? I don’t know. And I can’t recall. I don’t have the studies offhand. I’ll have to maybe dig for those a little bit. But that’s something that, typically, if you’re going to have a full hysterectomy with your ovaries removed, absolutely. Even progesterone.

And a lot of practitioners will say, “Well, you don’t need progesterone anymore because you don’t have a uterus.” Well, again, if we go back to – if we understand that hormones have systemic effects in the body, just because you don’t have a uterus doesn’t mean you don’t want progesterone for your brain, and your blood vessels, and your bones, and for other places in the body. So I typically – I mean, I’m a fan of really doing hormone replacement for both estrogen and progesterone even if you don’t have a uterus. And, again, doing really good follow up. So it can take a while. I think, for your listeners to know, that when you start hormone replacement, it’s not a one and done kind of scenario. You build up – the ideal scenario is you go really slow hormones. You always want to go low and slow and build up over time. So you’ll probably need a few follow up visits. A few extra lab tests with your doctor and whatnot until you get to kind of the right level. So people kind of have to be patient and understand that it’s a little bit of a process to get hormones right. But yes, absolutely, especially in the case of a hysterectomy.

[01:38:48] Ashley James: Back when I lived in Vegas, so this is like ten -12 years ago, someone gave me a CD. It actually might have been that doctor I talked about. Gave me a CD of a lecture back when we had CDs, right? Gave me a CD of a lecture of a doctor who has since passed. And I think he was in his 80s. But he was kind of like the grandfather of hormone replacement therapy, Dr. John R. Lee.

[01:39:17] Jill Chmielewski: Oh, my gosh. Yes.

[01:39:18 ]Ashley James: So I highly recommend, like, YouTubing Dr. Lee and progesterone and see if you can find his lecture. It was like an hour long. And it was it was really interesting. I’d love to a hold a [inaudible] [01:39:32] or a time machine or something to interview this guy. Because he was really interesting. But what I loved about his story is he was a conventional doctor for, like – I think it was over 40 years. And he was the kind of old school doctor that would sit down with his patients and spend a lot of time with them. And he had this joke, because he graduated top of his class from Harvard. And he worked his butt off because his family was very poor. And he got scholarships and he worked his butt off. And he said, “What do you call the guy in medical school who came in last?” And you say, “What?” And he says, “A doctor.” He said, there’s so many doctors out there that are – even you think about it, the doctor that just barely passed who isn’t really smart versus the doctor who worked his butt off and is super smart, they’re both doctors, right? So you don’t know if you got the dud or the stud. Like, you just don’t know. And the reason why he was kind of bashing his own colleagues was that he was seeing that back then they were poopooing progesterone and putting women on estrogen only. And he actually did the opposite.

Because one of his patients came to him who was in amazing health and had reversed many of her symptoms and she was using progesterone cream. And he went, “Wait a second, what’s going on?” And so he started using progesterone cream and he poured through the research and the science. And he saw that it helped so much to do progesterone cream. And then he started talking in conferences. And all of the doctors were like, “You’re crazy. What you’re doing?” And it’s frustrating because when one of the doctors or scientists figure something out, their profession will pull them back like crab in the bucket. The profession marches slowly. This is a quote from a Naturopath I’ve learned from. He says, “The medical profession progresses slowly one death at a time.” It does not learn very easily from its mistakes. And it really progresses slowly.

So that’s why we have – going back to, I think, it was point one or point – yeah, point one. We have to advocate for ourselves because this profession is way behind and does not learn well from all of the information. A good example is the book Proteinaholic. I absolutely love it. I highly recommend downloading and listening to it on Audible. Proteinaholic is probably the best book I’ve ever listened to. And he cites over 50 pages – because I also bought the book. He has over 50 pages in the back in small print of references. Because he pulls together all the science about using food as medicine and why we’re actually eating too much protein. We’re actually toxic levels of protein and how it contributes to the diseases of today. So I thought it was really interesting that these doctors who are seeing the science, like Dr. Lee and Dr. Garth Davis, the one that wrote the Proteinaholic. They’re seeing the science. They’re pulling it together. And then their colleagues are poopooing it. Because they’re stuck to what they learned in school 20 years ago and what the textbook said. And they’re not actually spending time looking over the latest studies. Or even analyzing the studies to the point where it’s like, “Well, who funded the study? And what kind of study was it? What was the quality of the study?” So we really have to be careful about the cognitive dissonance that our health professionals may have, because we’re all human. And we all make mistakes.

But I love that I learned that from Dr. Lee. I love that he showed me that many doctors are stuck in some way. You know, we all have blinders, right? We’re all here. We all have blinders. But that when we give up our health over – we give our health and our body over to a medical professional, we assume that they know the latest information and the best information. And Dr. Lee taught me they don’t. That most don’t. And so that’s why we have to advocate. And then he also said that, progesterone cream is like God’s gift to women. And he thought it was the world’s best thing. So I just thought that was really interesting. But we don’t want to be allopathic, which is reductionistic. So he’s reductionistic. And he was like, “Okay. This one thing is the best thing in the world.” We can’t be reductionistic and think that one thing is going to solve our problems. But we want that tool in our tool belt. So I like that you brought that up that, estrogen is not dangerous. Progesterone is great too. But we want to do the hormone testing, the appropriate hormone testing, like you said. But we shouldn’t just do it willy nilly. Don’t just go to the store, buy a bunch of hormone creams, and start slathering yourself. Because too much is just as dangerous as too little.

[01:44:40] Jill Chmielewski: Yeah. And you know, hormones, I think people don’t realize that you can give somebody hormones but our body is smart. It’s going to always do what it can to regulate the hormones. So if you give somebody too many hormones, it’s going to shut down some of these receptors. It will find – there’s different proteins that can increase that kind of locks some of the hormone up. So more isn’t always better. That’s why I think it’s always – my approach is always the Goldilocks principle of hormones, which is not too much, not too little, just right. And it’s different for everyone. So it’s different for you than it is for your neighbor that it is for your best friend. Which is why you really want to work with someone who really, really understands hormones and understands the testing and the follow up and what’s really needed to kind of – and is willing to work with you to make sure that you get to a place where you feel really, really good.

[01:45:27] Ashley James: I’m really excited for point seven because so many, so many listeners in the Learn True Health Facebook Group have asked this question. So take it away, point seven.

[01:45:38] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So the point seven, I almost have to like take a deep breath before I say this.

[01:45:43] Ashley James: Everyone just take a deep breath.

[01:45:45] Jill Chmielewski: It’s kind of my contention points with my Physician. So the pill is not – and whenever I’m saying “the pill,” I’m talking about the birth control pill. It is not a good solution to worsening PMS or erratic periods during perimenopause. We’re going back to the pill in and of itself. Patients are always told, “Here’s the pill. It has estrogen, it has progesterone.” The pill has neither. The pill has synthetic chemicals in it that are nothing like the estrogen and progesterone in your body. And in fact, most sort of functional medicine folks would kind of characterize the pill as putting you into chemical menopause. It’s essentially shutting down your hormone production. And bringing in synthetic chemicals that do not have the same actions that your own hormones do in your body

So when I’m explaining hormones to people, I kind of explain – and I think I read this – I thought it was a good explanation from Dr. Lindsey Berkson, who I love. She’s a hormone scholar. She’s just awesome. And she always explains this hormone and receptor as, think about your hormone receptors as being very promiscuous. And they will kind of let anybody wiggle in on them including toxins, like estrogen mimicking chemicals. They look a little like estrogen so they can wiggle in. Those receptors are like, “Okay. You look okay.” And that’s how the pill is. They’re the same thing. It’s these chemicals that look a little bit like our hormones but they’re not our hormones. And so they wiggle in and they take an effect on ourselves, and our tissues, and our organs of our body. But not necessarily an effect that we want.

I think that conventional medicine physicians like the pill because, basically, it manages “a period.” It will regulate the period. They like the certainty and the predictability of this every 30 day cycle. But what we’re missing here and what women are missing is that, it’s not a real period. It’s a fake period. It’s not the real thing. It’s not the result of your hormones. It’s really a withdrawal bleed from hormones. That’s all it is. It has nothing to do with the uterine lining and the natural hormonal actions that are happening in your body. So I think the idea here is we want to perpetuate our own hormones or our own in internal hormone production as long as possible so that we can get systemic benefits for as long as possible before deciding what we want to do in terms of do we want hormone replacement? Do we not? Do we want to do food and lifestyle choices? What do we want to do? And the pill essentially puts you into chemical menopause. So you don’t get the benefits. You won’t get the systemic benefits of progesterone and estrogen like you would if they were your own.

And I think women to, back to kind of one of the earlier points, it’s like, we want this quick fix. We don’t want to deal with erratic periods. We don’t want to deal with a heavy period. It’s too cumbersome for us with our very busy life. When, again, the period is your fifth vital signs. So it’s telling you something’s up. And while it’s natural and normal in perimenopause to start having longer periods, or shorter periods, or skip periods, or heavier periods, or lighter periods because there’s hormonal fluctuations happening. It is smart to do a little bit of investigative work. And if you’re having really significant symptoms, you need to see somebody. A functional medicine practitioner who really gets it. There are ways to help, I want to say, control your period. But really help you get a better period, a less eventful period, even in perimenopause without going on the pill. So I think the pill is not the route to go.

And you know, people go on the pill – I don’t want to bash all pill users – you want to weigh the risks versus the benefits. For some people, it’s more about birth control than anything else. But if it’s about period – and there’s other much better, I think, birth control options out there if you’re trying not to muck with hormones. But we won’t get into that today. But I think if we’re talking about period management and just – it’s just this irritating period that I have and recursing our periods, the pill is not the way to go. And I think, but doctors kind of tell us it is so that’s what we do. And that’s definitely –

[01:49:45] Ashley James: And they don’t practice informed consent. They do not practice. So they just put you on the pill. Informed consent, they would actually tell you all of the side effects and all of the long term, very detrimental effects the pill has. I am not bashing anyone on the pill. But I am bashing the pill. I think it is a toxic and harmful thing to put women on. And most of the time, doctors will put 15 year olds on it because they have acne or they have out of control – they have got really bad PMS or whatever. And that is not – I don’t think the pill should be used in any event. And I understand the need for birth control. Like you said, there are many really good options for birth control.

And I’ve had other guests talk about this and there’s great books out there on all the different forms of birth control. The pill is probably the most toxic out of all of them. There is an IUD that has hormones that’s probably up there. But the pill has been proven to be incredibly toxic. It has heavy metals in it. So it’ll increase the heavy metals in your body. It changes the biochemistry of your brain. You become a different person. It actually changes your personality. And there have been people who got a divorce after they got off the pill. Because it actually changes your brain, people have gotten married – fallen in love and got married on the pill. Going off the pill, back to who they were before being on the pill. And realized that they married – they didn’t marry that person. Because the pill artificially makes you attracted to different things. Really. it hijacks your personality. It can send women into a different set of emotions and emotional responses. So people see complete personality changes. But when you’re the taker of the pill, you don’t notice it. The other people around you go, “She is not herself.” Because it hijacks the brain. It’s artificial. Its chemical. It’s like castration in a chemical castration in a sense. It’s very harmful to the body and very toxic. And taking it long term can increase cancer, blood clotting, you could die of a stroke. I mean, there’s a lot.

So if you could practice a different form of birth control that is non-toxic than the pill – oh, my gosh – please go for that. And please, I would just say for everyone listening who’s on the pill, look into true informed consent is seeing all of the side effects. Because most doctors are not practicing informed consent. And they are not even aware of all the negative effects. And then look at an alternative that can complement what you want to achieve. And whether it’s getting rid of acne, controlling your PMS, or actually not getting pregnant, there’s so many other options out there that are healthy. So I just hear over and over again how devastating pill is for people. And so many clients and also guests on the show have told me their horror stories that started with being on the pill. And that that actually led them to being unhealthy. And for me, I got on the pill as a teenager. And I can say that it’s one of the factors that triggered many of my health issues. So I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it in others. So I’m kind of warning – I want to warn people because I don’t feel like we’re being warned enough. And this is again, that point where we have to advocate and stand up for women. This is where I feel like I’m a feminist in a sense where I feel like – I never identified as a feminist at all but this is where I feel like women need a voice. And they need to be advocated for. And this is one of those points the birth control pill is toxic and damaging. And it’s being sold to us as this, like, wonderful thing.

And the morning after pill – that’s another one – is very, very harmful and detrimental to the body. And of course, there’s times when a woman needs to make their choice. And I don’t think that choice should be taken away from them. But I think that informed consent needs to be practiced where we need to know all of the very long term and harmful side effects that can occur. So we want to know everything up front. And so I think that when you’re messing with your hormones, you’re messing with your brain, you’re messing with your future, your chances of other diseases, you’re messing with your personality, your quality of life. It’s not as simple as just take a pill and not have a period or not ovulate. It’s not that simple. So thank you for advocating for us.

[01:54:43] Jill Chmielewski: Well, thanks for your chiming in. Because I think everything you said is really right on to. It is. It’s all about informed consent. And we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into so that we can make a really good decision.

[01:54:54] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s make really good decisions. Let’s inform ourselves. Okay. Point number eight.

[01:55:01] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. So just sort of as an FYI, perimenopausal symptoms hide in plain sight. I think that is something where, I think, a lot of women get missed. It’s little things. It’s going to come as soft whispers initially. It’ll be in the form of, “In my mid-30s, all of a sudden I’m not sleeping quite as well.” But it’s not something that necessarily you would make an appointment to go see your doctor for. But I want your listeners to kind of start taking note that hormones start to decline. Progesterone, in particular, starts its decline in our mid-30s. So that’s the hormone that’s going to go first, followed by estrogen. And estrogen will typically go on kind of a wild ride, soaring sky high one minute and then they rock bottom the next for a while before it starts to make it steady decline down. So you’re kind of dealing with a bunch of different sort of hormonal changes that are going to happen over a period of time. The period of time will be different for everyone. So the symptoms will start at different points for different people. And they will kind of pop up. And I think they have pop up ever so slowly where, like I said, it starts with a sleepless night or two. Then maybe it’s, “You know what? I can’t lose weight.” Or, “I’m gaining weight and I’m not doing anything differently.” Then maybe it’s fatigue. Maybe it’s a libido issue. Maybe your hair is thinning out a little bit. Maybe you feel a little bit more weepy or you have a little more anxiety or a little more depression. I mean, all of these things really point to changes in hormones.

But I think what we end up doing is, maybe we get to a point where we say, “You know, I’m really tired now. I’ll go see my doctor.” And we don’t even really mention the other stuff because we don’t think it’s related. Or maybe we feel like we have some anxiety so we go and we see somebody in the mental health group. And yes, there are treatments in that route. But I think if you look at hormones, they have a lot to do with our mental health state. So I think, just for your listeners to know that, these symptoms will start to creep up slowly and they matter. And so when you’re talking with your doctor, make sure you’re mentioning sort of the collective. Even if they don’t seem like they’re related, a lot of times, they are related. They may be in different body organs and different systems. And you might think, “Well, this one I should go to the orthopedic for. And this one, I should go to the endocrinologist for. And this one to the OB.” But really, functional medicine will look at you as a whole person. All of your systems are connected. And so these symptoms probably have a lot to do with hormonal decline or hormonal changes overall.

[01:57:27] Ashley James: All right. We’re in the homestretch.

[01:57:29] Jill Chmielewski: I know. We’re almost there. We’re at the final point.

[01:57:32] Ashley James: We’re almost there We’re almost there. Yes. I like it. And I like that you brought that up that it’s, again, reaffirming that we need to advocate for ourselves. And don’t just sweep these symptoms under the rug. Listen to your body. Listen to the changes in your body and don’t be afraid of them. But advocate for yourself. So I like that you – if you’re coming at it from different angles, to help us shift our mindset into a healthier mindset. I like it. Okay. Last point. Number nine.

[01:58:00] Jill Chmielewski: Okay. Number nine. Last point is, perimenopause begins in the mid to late 30s. I think that’s super critical to understand. And we talked about it earlier. But understand that even when it comes to hormone replacement, a lot of women will say, “No way.” But Dr. John Lee was probably one of the first ones to say, “You know what? Even women in their mid to late 30s would benefit from a little bit of progesterone.” A lot of doctors will say, “We’re not even going to address hormone replacement until you hit actual menopause.” Which means you haven’t had a period in a year. Well, by that time, you’ve been going through – you’ve been on this perimenopausal journey for a long time. Hormones have been declining, symptoms may be really heating up. So understand that even though you may be just getting pregnant at 35 or 37 or 38 or 40, you can be pregnant and still be going through perimenopause. You can be just going through perimenopause. For most women, it is those hormonal shifts will begin with, like, a couple of cycles where you don’t ovulate. That’s where it kicks things off. So you can still have a period very regularly and be in perimenopause.

So that’s why I really just want women to be aware that this period of life will kind of start. You almost think I just finished having babies or I’m just about to have a baby. But it does happen. It seems like it’s too soon. But the studies show that this is when hormones start to shift. So just know that so that you can start to kind of keep track of symptoms. See if you need something sooner. Maybe you need that functional practitioner sooner. I would recommend most women to start meeting with someone earlier rather than later so they can kind of help walk them through and guide them through this perimenopausal journey.

[01:59:43] Ashley James: I love it. Yes. Wherever you are, start now. Start building your health up with all these points that we brought up today. Start building your team of holistic and integrative practitioners today. Start advocating for yourself today. Start everything and little steps no matter where you are, you’re going to build up better hormone health. And hormones, like you said, I love that you pointed out, hormone receptors are on every part of your body. So estrogen levels affect your brain, affect your breasts, affect your calves. I mean affect every part of your body. Awesome.

So I want to ask you is – we’ve gone through so much and this is really jam packed. But is there a question that I haven’t asked that you would love to answer?

[02:00:40] Jill Chmielewski: I mean, I think that we hit – I really do think that we’ve hit most of it. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.

[02:00:46] Ashley James: Yeah, well, I got you to empty out. So I totally emptied out your brain. And I tapped you for all this great information. It’s been wonderful. I had you talk for almost two hours straight. This is fantastic. I know. So let’s make sure that listeners know how they can follow you. How they can keep learning from you.

[02:01:06] Jill Chmielewski: Sure. Yeah. So I know you mentioned the website. So I would say I’m very active on Instagram and my handle is just jill.chmielewski, so my last name. I do a lot of education. I really use Instagram as sort of those quick snippets of information. I do have a website. It’s just www.jillchmielewski.com. I used to do – I just really stopped seeing one-to-one clients as of just this past year. I’m shifting to – I’m going to be launching a course called Perimenopause Redefined later this year. I do on my website. I also have – I very frequently write blog articles. Very educational in nature. A lot of the stuff that we talked about today but I really try to address women’s biggest symptoms and biggest issues. I recently created a private Facebook Group that if people get on the mailing list, they’ll get that information. And that’s for just some more deep dive hormonal stuff. I kind of call it like, All Things Puzzle. We’re going to talk about everything that has to do with anything that’s puzzle related.

And then I have a shop tab on my site that has – I’ve got some downloadable freebies. I’ve got a couple of paid really pretty low entry types of paid things that people can get. But I also have links to products. I’m always looking for resources and things for women because I think when we talk about, especially, toxins, women don’t know where to go. So I have links to cleaner beauty, to better cleaning supplies, to laundry detergent, to different things. I’m always adding more resources in lab testing so that women know sort of where to go to get some products that are a little bit more trusted and are clean and aren’t going to be mucking with their hormones. So they can find all of that on the website. That’s probably the best place to go for sort of everything. And there’s a tab where they’ll see they can sign up to get on my email list. And I just do about one email a week. I try not to overload anyone’s inbox because I know how busy women are. But I do try to provide some really targeted important information about once a week to the people in my community.

[02:03:08] Ashley James: Great. And I’m going to have all those links in the show notes to today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. But I will spell it for those who have a pen right now. Get your pen. Get your pen. J-I-L-L-C-H-M-I-E-L-E-W-S-K-I.com.

[02:03:26] Jill Chmielewski: Awesome. Thank you. This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me.

[02:03:32] Ashley James: This was great. And you should totally come back. Come back and teach us more.

[02:03:34] Jill Chmielewski: I’d love to. I’d love to.

[02:03:36] Ashley James: Wonderful. Awesome. Well, I’m excited to move gracefully into my puzzle years. So thank you. I appreciate that.

[02:03:43] Jill Chmielewski: [Inaudible] [02:03:42] if you have any questions.

[02:03:45] Ashley James: I’m sure. I’m sure I will.

[02:03:47] Jill Chmielewski: We covered everything, right?

[02:03:49] Ashley James: Yeah. Okay. Well, you’ll come back on the show and we’ll go, like, part two. We’ll dive even deeper. That would be great. Awesome.

[02:03:56] Jill Chmielewski: That sounds great. Okay. Good. Thanks so much.

[02:04:01] Ashley James: Thanks.

Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Polly Tommey And Ashley James

https://www.learntruehealth.com/autism-activist-polly-tommey-gives-voice-parents

Highlights:

What regressive autism is
No eczema, allergy, asthma in the unvaccinated
Effects of getting Gardasil HPV vaccine on teenagers
Various effects of vaccine injury on the parents, siblings and those around them
Dangers of vitamin K shot
What Vaxxed movie is about
What informed consent is

In this episode, Polly Tommey shares with us her family’s story about vaccination and autism. She shares the benefits of not vaccinating and also the effects of vaccinating from hearing different stories of families who have either vaccinated or not vaccinated their child. Lastly, she also talks about the movies Vaxxed and Vaxxed 2.

[0:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 403.

[0:00:14] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Polly Tommey, who’s a mother and an activist and a producer of documentaries that have blown my mind. I am kind of pinching myself talking to you today because watching you in the Vaxxed documentary, I was crying most of the time — a lot of tears of inspiration. A lot of tears of shock and sorrow, but at the end of that emotional rollercoaster, I walked away thinking that the entire world needs to see the movies that you’ve produced and that everyone needs to have this information.

What I love about your message is you’re not fear-mongering, you’re shaming. You are empowering. So thank you so much, Polly, for the work that you do, and thank you for being here today to share your story with us.

[0:01:05] Polly Tommey: Thank you so much for having me.

[0:01:08] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’d love for you to start by sharing your story, your personal journey with autism and becoming an activist.

[0:01:16] Polly Tommey: Yes. Well, to start with, my husband and I were extremely pro-vaccine when we had our first child, Bella. We vaccinated her. Of course, you must remember this is 25 years ago. So we did not have the schedule that you have today. This was in England. We have an even less schedule, vaccine schedule than you do here. So, it was really almost one at a time because that was the schedule. So we were very pro-vaccine. We had our second child very close behind our first. So we didn’t think twice, of course about vaccinating. Now, in the morning that I took my son Billy at 13 months into the doctor’s surgery to have his MMR, just that vaccine. I went and had a coffee just so that I could be the first one to tick the box on the book to be the perfect mother, which is what I wanted to be. I wanted to do everything perfectly. So vaccinating was part of that for me.

My friend warned me. She said, “Did you know there’s been this odd thing on television about the MMR? There could be a problem with it.” I said to my friend, “There’s just no way this is true because the doctor would, of course, tell me if there was a problem. So I’m going to go with the doctor’s advice. He’s got a medical degree, and I’m going to go ahead and vaccinate my son.”

So we vaccinated Billy at 9:00 that morning. By 5:00 that evening – and after the vaccine, he was fine but just very very very sleepy. So I just let him sleep and gave him Tylenol and all those things that you’re told to give him. At 5:00, my husband when in to get him from his crib, and he was having a seizure. It was really bad. His eyes were rolling back. He was convulsing. His back was arched. So we rushed him into the emergency room in the hospital.

We told them, “What’s happening to our son?” They said, “What have you done today?” We said, “We gave him the MMR.” They said, “That’s it.” They told us. The medical professionals told us that it was the vaccine. So, they said he would be fine, give him some antibiotics. I mean, it all sounds crazy really back to you know, talking to you about it because I can’t believe how naïve I was.

Yes, we gave him some antibiotics and lots of Tylenol, and he never got better. He never woke up. He got more and more sick and ended up with an autism diagnosis at 18 months. So, that made me so angry, so furious and we started looking into why on earth would the doctors say these vaccines are safe and effective? Why didn’t they tell us that our son could have a seizure? It’s on the insert.

So we started our journey really telling other parents and going on the British television, media in England talking about the MMR vaccine, which was okay for a short amount of time and then suddenly the descend ship started. That’s when we knew we had a much much bigger problem.

[0:04:10] Ashley James: How were you censored?

[0:04:12] Polly Tommey: Well, they would come and interview us about our son’s story and autism because we were big autism advocates at that time and the MMR section would be cut out of the whole. So everything would be in the interview we got them on television but not the MMR bit. A South African film rages about the vaccine but when it aired, all of it were taken out. That’s when we thought, “Yes. Oh, gosh. There’s something much deeper.” Because the minute they start censoring you for something, there’s much bigger problem behind it.

[0:04:42] Ashley James: Why become an advocate around autism?

[0:04:46] Polly Tommey: Well it started because when we were told that Billy had autism, we didn’t know what that was. Billy is 24 now and he was diagnosed at 18 months 20 odd years ago. There was no internet like we have today. It was just big old computer things. We weren’t really good on that. So went to a library to look up the word autism and it says worse form of mental illness and your child will be institutionalized.

We couldn’t find anybody who has autism. Now of course everybody knows some that’s got autism or you see it down the street. Anyway, after doing an interview we got inundated with parents wanting answers to autism. How do you look after your child? How do you stop the tantrums? How do you stop from smashing their heads against the wall? How do you deal with the medical issues? Because I tell you this, autism that I live in, the world I live in and most of the parents that I meet, it’s no gift. It is no all these people that wear t-shirts saying, “Autism is a gift, embrace it,” “I love autism.”

I don’t love autism. I hate autism. My son is my gift and autism was some ghastly thing that happened to him following a vaccine, following a seizure. His brain swelled. His head swelled so much. He got encephalitis and he never recovered from that. So basically, he has brain damage. Autism is a word. Regressive autism is the word that medical professionals give our children after they are injured by vaccinates. That I know for sure. The confusing thing for all the people who believe, some parents both people I’ve met their child was born with autism. That’s fine but that’s not the same condition that my son has.

[0:06:25] Ashley James: That’s a really good point that you bring up. I’m about to be 40 and when I was a child it was 1 in 10,000 had autism. I had some cousins that were born with it and they were non-verbal. So I inquired to learn more about it just to understand what was going on whereas now it’s something like 1 in 40 or 1 in 30 children but it’s not the same. They’re saying it’s a spectrum. It’s kind of a blanket statement for some form of brain damage.

I interviewed a doctor, Dr. Klinghardt, who helps to “reverse autism” and help heal their brains. He says, all their symptoms are the same as autism once we detox the heavy metals and we do all these natural wonderful medicine and their symptoms gets better and better and better. Let’s say their symptoms completely go away. They’re no longer diagnosed with autism. Was that ever really autism or are we getting most of the people nowadays misdiagnosed?

What do you think? Do you think it’s now a misdiagnosis and that they’re using this terminology just because the symptoms are the same?

[0:07:37] Polly Tommey: I think that they didn’t know what to do. I mean my son was only ever diagnosed back then as autism-like symptoms because they really had never seen anything like it. The autism that’s described many many years ago started from birth. So when you get those parents – I’m a great believer in the parent knows best. The parent knows it child best so if the parent says, “This is not from vaccine,” or the parents say, “My son was born with it,” or “My daughter is born with it.” Then they know. We need to respect that.

The regressive autism was never around before. This is a new autism that has come from vaccines. I’ve interviewed over 8,000 parents not all about autism but from vaccine injury. I can tell you that every single one of those parents that has an autistic child all the same things as me. That their children were perfectly fine before that vaccine or that group of vaccines went in and brain-damaged them. Because that’s what it is. It’ brain damages.

[0:08:38] Ashley James: I watched one of my friends bring their one-year-old that was walking. He was walking at like nine months and he was so brilliant. Brought him in for his jabs, his one-year vaccines. He got a fever and he started to become limp and lethargic. Then he stopped walking for six months. By the time he was something like two and a half they diagnosed him with autism. She went to naturopaths and changed the diet, got him on supplements, did all kinds of things and he started to – it was like the fog started to lift. He was able to communicate again and connect again. He still has struggles. She sopped vaccinating after that. She saw that he was clearly vaccine injured.

I’ve interviewed a pediatrician in Portland, Paul Thomas, who talks about in his 30 years of practice, he has zero cases of SIDS and all these vaccine injuries because he attracts parents that don’t want to vaccinate. Half of his practice doesn’t vaccinate but the other half that does choose to follow his altered schedule. The second he sees that a child has any vaccine injury he sops immediately. He says, “This child is no longer a candidate for vaccines because they’re showing signs of vaccine injury by one vaccine.” He wrote a book I think it’s called Safe Vaccines, the idea that he proposes that everyone should follow an altered schedule if they’re going to choose to vaccinate.

Now I love the latest movie you’ve come out with, Vaxxed 2. Like I said, I cried. I couldn’t believe I was crying so much but tears of inspiration. It was really a beautiful movie. All the people that you interview traveling across the United States. I know you’ve traveled to many countries interviewing parents, showing what happens and what can happen and what has been happening. That these parents have been silenced. What’s so beautiful is you’ve given them a voice.

Can you take us back and share with us what happened to how did you create the first movie, the fist Vaxxed movie?

[0:11:01] Polly Tommey: Yes. So the first film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe was directed by Andrew Wakefield, produced by Del Bigtree and I’m also a producer on that. My passion has always been the parents because I am one and because I lived it. So, even in the first film I interviewed Sheila Ealey who’s the African American mom. We have a very powerful interview in there. I was always the person who really was the parents’ go-to. Now, following Vaxxed when Vaxxed was going out of Tribeca Film Festival if you remember that. That gave us a platform that we could never have dreamed of that money just can’t buy. Because what they did by censoring us, yeah, I mean they censored us so much that it actually started trending.

So suddenly we were on tour going to Q&As around the country. What happened really quickly is that there were huge lines of people wanting to talk to Andy, Del and myself tell us there story of what happened to them. So Andy and Del had to talk about the science. That was their thing and I ended up listening to the parents’ stories. Then I thought, “Well, this is pointless.” They’re all talking to me and that’s not going to get anywhere. So I found Periscope, a live platform to go and very very quickly it grew and grew and grew. Then we started going live on Facebook too and these stories has got shared. Now we have a huge community around the world that the minute I press the live button, they’re right there wherever I am listening to these stories.

The bus became the iconic thing. It wasn’t us the people who made the film, it wasn’t the people in the film. It was the bus. People would come up to the bus they would start crying. They’d want to tell the story whether they were a medical professional, whether they were a parent, a teacher, anybody. Everybody had a story. To this day, we’ve just come back from California. The bus is parked in California now ready to go on the 4^th of January. We’re going back out on tour. We’ll be going out all of next year because the demand for people to tell their stories is huge.

[0:13:07] Ashley James: How do people follow you on Periscope?

[0:13:10] Polly Tommey: So, if you go to Periscope you go to @TeamVaxxed. It will say PeepsTV, P-E-E-P-S TV, PeepsTV. You’ll see us there. You’ll see all the stories. Now there are a few fake ones. I ask you to be careful that you don’t get through on the wrong one but we are PeepsTV. Once you sign up, when I go out live, you will go out live with me when we hear every single story. It gives the person telling the story great comfort because I show them all the hearts and the love that they get around the world. It’s been a really very successful thing.

What we’ve uncovered on the bus has been more fascinating than anything else.

[0:13:52] Ashley James: When I saw – so watching Vaxxed 2 you show that. You show footage of you going live on Periscope and filming these parents sharing their stories. Time and time again you can see that they were so isolated. That they felt so alone. That they felt guilty, ashamed. They haven’t been listened to. They haven’t had a voice. They haven’t been heard. Then they got to go to the bus, the big Vaxxed bus that has what is it? Over 8,000 signatures.

[0:14:32] Polly Tommey: Nearly 9,000.

[0:14:34] Ashley James: Sorry.

[0:14:35] Polly Tommey: Well, we’re approaching 9,000.

[0:14:37] Ashley James: Each signature represents either a parent or a victim, someone who has been vaccine injured. Is that correct?

[0:14:45] Polly Tommey: Yeah, or has died. Yes. Vaccine injured or has died. There are many many people that contacted me saying, “Please put my name or my child’s name on the bus,” which we do not do. We listen to every single story between myself and the other hosts around the country that are trained up to do this. We all validate by listening to the stories. So they can’t accuse us of just randomly writing anything on there. We really do listen to all of them. We know there’s way more out there. Following Vaxxed 2, it’s just like gone crazy. Everybody wants to tell the story. It seems to me, I will tell you this, it seems to me that if you had a vaccine of any kind you now have an injury of some kind. Because I have never ever heard of eczema, allergy, asthma any of those in the unvaccinated, which is one of the biggest things that we have uncovered around the bus is the undeniable health of the unvaccinated. Including in that is the vitamin K. The vitamin K seems to be a bigger problem than any of us ever thought. I mean all my children had the vitamin K. I remember thanking their midwife thinking that she was just giving my new beautiful baby some vitamins but if you actually do your research on the vitamin K, and we’ve got people testing it right now, there is synthetic full of aluminum. It’s got a black-box warning on it. It’s a really dangerous thing to be giving our baby. I’m just a parent reporting to you from the people of the world who have severe injuries and death following just the vitamin K shot.

[0:16:16] Ashley James: So you said just the aluminum and for those in the United States it’s aluminum although I love the British saying of aluminum. Aluminum sounds so much more beautiful. So you’re saying that there are heavy metals in the vitamin K shot that they give to newborns that are between six and eight pounds. These tiny newborns that they’re injecting it right into their bloodstream aluminum?

[0:16:41] Polly Tommey: Aluminum and everybody can do this research themselves. You don’t need to be a scientist or a doctor to do this. You got to get hold of the insert. The real insert not the fake insert that they give you at the doctor’s surgery and at those pharmacies. Those really are not the real insert. You can actually get it on the CDC website. They have to put it up there. They’re very very big, very long. You will need to google a lot of those words. You will be horrified once you understand what is going into the body of yourself or your baby what it is it’s actually going. It makes sense. I can’t believe that none of us did that research.

I can’t actually believe that the pediatricians, the people on the front line that we trust so much do not know either about the ingredients in the vaccines. They don’t know. They had no training as what you saw in Vaxxed 2. Every single one including professor Dr. Moss and various other high high ranking doctors, they also say the same thing. Absolutely no training in vaccines other than they’re safe and effective. Here’s the schedule and they’re the saviors of mankind. That’s it.

[0:17:45] Ashley James: It’s so frustrating because like you said you felt like you’re such a good mother being the first in line, being early for the vaccines for your children wanting to make sure that you’re doing everything to help them and then trusting 100% that our healthcare providers all they need to know for our health. But they have also had information withheld from them. Who’s responsible? We got to hold some people accountable. There’s so many vaccine-injured children. Like you said, there’s even deaths. I really appreciated that you covered Gardasil. You covered the HPV vaccine in Vaxxed 2 that hundreds, hundreds of teenagers have died. That is unacceptable. Then many of them have been left paralyzed and you’ve interviewed several of them, many of them. Can you share some of those stories?

[0:18:48] Polly Tommey: Yeah. I mean absolutely tragic. When we set out on the road in 2016 on this bus, I didn’t even know what Gardasil HPV vaccine. I even never heard of it. Maybe briefly but I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t even know how to spell it. We went on road and by day two we had our first Gardasil story. After we went live with that we were inundated with people at the bus. I remember at one stop, I open the door 15 teenagers standing in front of me. I said, “Are you all here to support someone?” They said, “No. All of us have Gardasil injuries.”

So one of the things that you do not see in Vaxxed 2, I mean there’s a lot of that we saw on the road that weren’t in the film. That’s mainly because you can’t put everything in an hour and a half. But a lot of young young girls 15, 16 years old following the HPV vaccine gone through menopause, their ovaries have shut down, they will never have children as they could’ve done before. Lot of girls claiming that they got the HPV, a cervical cancer following they had pap smears before the vaccine absolutely clean. Following that nine months later, they’re showing up with cervical cancer and of course the paralysis.

The absolute brain on fire, the burning to their bodies. Many of these girls have committed suicide. One boy following this vaccine through the utter pain and being told that they’re psychologically ill. I just never seen anything like it. I really describe going out on that black bus around America is going into a war zone. It’s just a blood bath of vaccine injury. How people are living, it will just break your heart. These are people that work in good jobs. They get married. They want to be great parents. They want to start a life. They’re excited about life and they follow the system. They do as they’re old and then their life is ripped from them just because of one needle.

It doesn’t just affect those two parents. It affects the other siblings. It affects the grandparents deeply. You just see poverty from what was a family that was coping going into absolute poverty because the parents have to be carers. Then of course you get the parents and the family members who then hit the alcohol or hit the psychotropic drugs or whatever it is because they can’t cope with the pain. You’ve just lost a whole load of people that could’ve contributed to this amazing country all because of a vaccine one moment in time.

[0:21:16] Ashley James: My frustration lies in how polarizing this topic has become and I feel as though they’ve weaponized this topic so that we would just fight amongst ourselves and not rise up to demand change. If you look on Facebook, I have lost friends. I try to be neutral, no one is ever neutral but I try to just stand in the middle and say, “Listen. Can we at least have a discussion? Can we at least bring the information, look at both sides?” What I see is that there are people who, I’ve lost really good friends because of this because I’ll share something that just brings into question vaccine injury for example on Facebook. I’ve had friends and family members get very angry and feel like they need to defend the pharmaceutical industry. They need to defend vaccines. I am somehow a really bad person that wants children to die of polio. They’ll say these kinds of things, “Do you really want people to be an iron lungs? It’s so ignorant of you to question vaccines.”

Anytime I’m seeing this, anytime someone wants to just question it or go, “Hey. It’s not right that there are vaccine injuries. Why aren’t we addressing this? Why aren’t we talking about this more? That it becomes a very polarized topic and then they get attacked. One of my friends, Green Smoothie Girl Robyn Openshaw, who has a really large holistic following is now being attacked online by I guess it’s called pro-vaxers. That she is being harassed. I’m like, “Why can’t we just ask questions safely? Why can’t we have these open discussions?” I imagine you have been attacked since this is such a polarized topic now.

[0:23:24] Polly Tommey: You know, it’s really interesting. The people who attack me are the people online. I’m out on the bus right there in open view and then there’s no one around. Where are you? Where are all these people that threaten me and they’re all hiding behind computers.

Now, of course we get the odd family members and we get the odd really good friend. It’s so sad when they throw the iron lung thing at you. First of all, let’s address the iron lung thing. If you see Vaxxed 2, you’ll see Colton’s story in there. This is 2019 and we don’t have big iron lungs like we don’t have big old computers anymore. Things have advanced. They’re called ventilators, respirators.

If you look around you, what is polio? Polio is this so-called crippling disease where you’re in an iron lung or you’ll get somebody say, “My father had polio and his ankles were really skewed or his legs a bit not made or he had to wear braces for two years.” Look around at the children today. There’s never been so much disability, children in wheelchairs, children crippled over with legs that don’t work.

All these things parents claiming from vaccine injury. I’ve actually interviewed two people with polio, both of them said they got it following the polio vaccine. Now, of course if you do your research on that you will see that that’s probably where the majority of this has come in the first place. You really have to look down. It’s not even conspiracy theory anymore. It’s right there in front of your face.

I think this is why they’re panicking the other side. Also you’ve got to remember that those doctors, take the doctor that shout and scream at us and say everyone’s going to die because we’re not vaccinating.” They’re also living with immense guilt just like family members who have vaccinated are. If you’re telling me, Polly Tommey, if you’re telling me that vaccines are as dangerous then that means I, the doctor, have potentially harmed a great deal of people. That means I, the mother, as potentially harmed my children. I don’t want to hear that from you Polly Tommey so therefore I say, “Go away and I’m going to block you and I never want to speak to you again because you want polio to come back.”

That’s basically how the argument goes because no one can get their head around the fact that this is probably the biggest lie that I ever told. The doctors are being lied to. The parents are being lied to. So that’s why we have to do our research. We have to be brave and we have to tell the truth. The truth is that these vaccines are killing and hurting people. We know that not just from the parents’ stories. We know that when we look at the unvaccinated families or the families with the same parents who stopped vaccinating after the injury.

So you’ve got the same parents, same genetics. First child may be fully vaccinated and autistic or brain-damaged in some way, paralyzed. They partially vaccinate the second child who has asthma, allergies, eczema maybe a bit of ADD and then they stop. They report their following children, absolutely none of those whatsoever. But remember, minus the vitamin K. The ones that are vaccinated with the vitamin K at birth, they still have injury. You’ve got to have a clean child for no injury.

[0:26:27] Ashley James: You interviewed, was it thousands of unvaccinated families or unvaccinated children? It was a lot. That’s why I’d like to go with Vaxxed 2 is that you showed the first half of the movie is interviewing so many families with vaccine injury. Then you started meeting all the families that had no vaccine injury or like you painted the picture of like five or seven and some of them were vaccinated and then the rest weren‘t. The difference is outstanding. That the children never are sick, never have asthma, never have food allergies and have never needed to see a doctor other than a wellness visit but have never needed to go in for antibiotics or ear infections over and over and over again.

[0:27:15] Polly Tommey: Unbelievable. We have one unvaccinated child. On my travel I had antibiotic for an infected toe and that is it. It’s quite unbelievable and it’s things like I’m really shocked at the allergy things. Allergy is a huge problem in this country. We are not seeing any allergies in the unvaccinated families, again minus the vitamin K shot at birth which isn’t a vaccine so it’s not part of a vaccine. The ones without that, zero allergies, zero. Unbelievable what we have uncovered.

The reason why we knew the vitamin K was a problem is because I was reading the facts on Vaxxed studies, the ones that are actually out there that they refuse to publish or they published and then retract. Something wasn’t right. They were still reporting that the unvaccinated had allergies and that was not what we were seeing on the road. We looked into it more and we found the vitamin K being a huge problem.

As I said, we’re nearly days of looking into that with some scientists but we are thoroughly looking into that because again, those poor parents having their beautiful newborn overthinking the vitamin K is the most important thing that they can give their child from their first day of life. We’re seeing the opposite from the roads of America.

[0:28:27] Ashley James: So you have two movies Vaxxed and Vaxxed 2. For the listeners who haven’t seen either one of your movies, can you tell us a bit about the first one, Vaxxed? What would we take away from that? Maybe share some lessons from your first movie.

[0:28:43] Polly Tommey: It’s about William Thompson, the scientist at the CDC. It was really concentrated on the MMR and him being reported without his knowledge by Dr. William Hooker in California. Oh no, he went out of California, excuse me it’s very important so it’s all legal. It’s really the breaking news of William Thompson confessing to how there was a big cover-up at the CDC.

So that was the first film and of course some parents’ stories woven into that. Then a lot of parents coming in for a collage montage saying, “Hear us well. Please hear us well. My child was fine before I had this vaccine. My child has autism following vaccine.”

So that’s really the essence of the first film. I think the reason why the first film was so successful wasn’t the story itself, which is good but what happens since that is these parents coming forward. If it wasn’t Tribeca and the big drama they made over that it probably would’ve another little DVD that was made and people saw in a community but that’s what happened from that. Again, from that censorship the parents saying, “I’m here,” around the world.

I have traveled England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. I’ve traveled around those countries recording those families’ stories and I tell you they’re exactly the same as they are here in America just with different accents but the same outcome everywhere. It’s undeniable.

[0:30:08] Ashley James: In Vaxxed 2 you show clips near the beginning of the film interviews with Robert de Niro. I was laughing so hard because you’re saying at the beginning of Vaxxed 2, you and Andy Wakefield were saying, “That was it. They were pulling us a few weeks before we were supposed to have our big debut at the Tribeca Film Festival.” That Robert de Niro got so much pressure to pull it. I’m like, “Where’s the pressure coming from? Is big pharma really that scared of this information coming out? This little film at this little film festival that they had to put so much pressure on him. Then every time he was interviewed for the Tribeca Film Festival on local news or on the morning news or whatever news show he was on he would bring it up and he’d say, “I hope people see it. I wanted people to just get the information, decide for yourself. Just listen, see it, decide for yourself.”

The people who were interviewing him were saying, “Yeah. Yeah. You should watch it.” So I was just laughing because obviously it wasn’t him. He wanted people to see it. Have you ever talked to him or met him or heard what he thought about your films?

[0:31:35] Polly Tommey: Well, I’ve only seen the correspondence. He’s a friend of Andy Wakefield’s, I’ve only seen the correspondence between them. Andy was a director of that first film. Obviously Robert de Niro thought it was a good film otherwise he wouldn’t have allowed it to be in his film festival, Tribeca Film Festival. He says, Robert de Niro, that he just everyone to see it. Of course, he knows there’s a problem with these vaccines just like many many other celebrities and people know that there’s a problem with these vaccines.

Many that do speak out don’t work again or I mean, Rob Schneider. Take him the actor. He started speaking out about these vaccines and he lost loads of contracts and lost most of his work. So people are afraid but I say to you people, you cannot money before these people before mankind. You’ve got to stand up otherwise we’ve got no future if you don’t stand up and tell the truth. Because if you look around right now, there’s very few people that are really really really healthy. Most people are sick with something and there’s got to be a reason behind that.

What we’re saying is we’re not saying any of this. I interviewed a woman the other day on the Vaxxed bus with four generations of unvaccinated people in their family. She’s a chiropractor. Of course the chiropractor is one of the healthiest groups of people in the world. He told me of 200 of those members, only people have died of cancer both of them were very heavy smokers. They had no eczema and no allergies in the family. Everybody lived until they’re old aged and nobody of the 200 have been on antibiotics.

Don’t you think that needs to be looked into?

[0:33:15] Ashley James: It just boggles the mind because we’ve really been raised from birth to believe that vaccines are the reasons why we don’t have outbreaks of illnesses. That if it wasn’t for vaccines everyone would have had polio or measles or chickenpox which now we’re afraid of apparently because there’s a vaccine for it whereas when I was a kid we had chickenpox parties and it was no big deal. So it’s really frustrating because there’s so much disinformation. There’s so much emotions around it because people who are anti-vax and people who are pro-vax actually want the same thing. We all want healthy children and we all want our children to live a long life. We all don’t want our children to die of something horrible. We all actually want the same thing.

So we should stop fighting each other and we should start just looking at the information and looking at the positives and the negatives and weighing them and looking at what’s the best outcome. Because maybe the doctor that I talked about, the one I interviewed in Portland who wrote that book Safe Vaccines, maybe altered schedule is the best thing and his altered schedule. Maybe that after we do research maybe that is the best thing or maybe it isn’t. Maybe like your chiropractor showing that three generations without vaccine over 200 people, that that’s the best way to go.

Until we stop polarizing the subject and until we start asking to all work together to respect each other and to just let’s look at the science and let’s look at the results and let’s look at the safety for our children instead of bashing each other, instead of fighting each other, instead of calling each other names. Let’s come together, pro and anti-vaxers, let’s come together and go what can we do for the benefit of our children and the future generations?

It’s undeniable that these parents have seen vaccine injury. After watching your two documentaries, it’s undeniable that there is a problem. So I’m always confused when people are saying there isn’t a problem because that is taking away the voice from the parents who have seen that there’s a problem.

I love that you have given a voice to these parents who feel so isolated. Who day in and day out are taking a child who’s non-verbal, who’s beating their head against the wall, who has seizures, who is in a modern iron lung as you show in Vaxxed 2. You’ve given a voice to these parents who struggle every day and have been told time and time again that they’re wrong and that it wasn’t a vaccine injury when they saw hours after a vaccine that their child begin to have seizures, begin to turn blue. I mean just really scary things.

I feel for these parents. I also can get in the shoes of people who are very angry, the pro-vaxers who are very angry at the anti-vaxers because they feel threatened. I imagine they feel threatened. So, I wish we could all come together and instead of fighting each other we could actually all ask the same question, what can we do to create health for our children? Let’s look at the science.

Do you have any advice for us? What can we do as individuals to help?

[0:37:05] Polly Tommey: Well, I think first of all, I don’t see the parents all the people out there fighting. I don’t see that. I take most of them are pharmaceutical paid trolls. There’s adverts everywhere for them. I could go and be one for them tomorrow if I would pass the test of who I am. But most people can. You can just sign up. You would get paid really to fight online for the sake of herd immunity or whatever online. I mean, I just ignore these people, block them.

Look, the bottom line is we’re not here to fight. These parents aren’t here to fight. They’re here to warn. They’re here to say, “Look. This happened to us. We vaccinated our kids. We are pro-vaccine. You can’t call us anti-vaccine. We vaccinated ourselves and our children. We’re simply here to warn as a person standing in front of another person saying look, be careful because there’s nothing more heartbreaking if you go down the road I just went down.” Do your research. The best research you can do is go on the ground yourself and speak to those families that did vaccinate and didn’t vaccinate. Make that mind up yourself. That’s the best science you’re going to get.

Most of the science studies out there are funded by pharmaceuticals. Did you know that the medical schools that the medical doctors are funded by the pharmaceutical companies? You just have to work it out yourself. Okay, we know Google is taken by big pharma, we can see that. If you google any of our websites now you have to go through the World Health Organization all that kind of thing but you can still do it by talking. There’s no better expert on what’s happened to their child or to themselves than other human beings.

So go figure it out. Look at the ones that or pro-vaccine and said, “My children are fine,” and you look at them and they’re not. They’ve got eczema. They’ve got allergies. They’re carrying around inhalers. They’re on medication. That’s not okay. Go and talk to the families that didn’t. Are those children on medication? What is their family like? Which way do you want to go? Get on the ground and do your own research. You don’t even need to look at the scientific studies anymore. Scientific studies are the people that have lived it.

[0:39:10] Ashley James: Beautiful. Now, starting in January, you’re going back out on the road. For those listening who want to follow you or participate and meet-up with you, how can they do that? How can they follow the Vaxxed bus and potentially come and meet you?

[0:39:25] Polly Tommey: Okay. We’re starting off in California in Modesto. California lost a lot of its rights and can’t go to school unless you’re completely vaccinated. So we are going down to California to talk to the parents that have been injured and the unvaccinated who have been thrown out of school and to discover that. So we’re starting off in Modesto in the fourth of January.

If you go to Vaxxed 2 the number 2 so Vaxxed2.com, the bus tour will be put up on there. AMC theatres were showing our film Vaxxed 2 and have just pulled it under pressure, of course like everything else. So we will be putting the film online. So watch out for that. It will be going out on the Brighteon site Mike Adams health ranger. He will be screening Vaxxed 2. We don’t have a date for that right now but that will be early in the New Year. Of course DVDs for those that still have DVD players. You’ll be able to get those on February, I think.

So the world will be able to see this. They can’t stop it. They’re trying very very hard to stop it. They can’t. If you are on Facebook, we do go out live on We Are Vaxxed it’s called. That is our only official site. We go out live on there. We go out live on Periscope, PeepsTV. Periscope is where we go out live on more than anything else because it’s the most uncensored. We’re still shadow banned but you’re still be able to find us if you’re clever.

[0:40:49] Ashley James: Have you interviewed any parents who have fought this system or sued the pharmaceutical companies and won?

[0:40:57] Polly Tommey: Yes. Actually in Vaxxed 2 you remember that very tragic story of Christina Tarsell who had the Gardasil vaccine. She didn’t feel very well after the vaccine. She went back to school. She just did in her room on her own and they found her dead on her bed. We actually have that image that the police took of that girl when she was found by the police dead in bed. You will see that on Vaxxed 2. So be careful taking your children. I advise all parents to see that film first before they decide whether they want their children to see it because there is this girl that’s dead in the bed. The reason why we use that photograph and we allowed that to go out is because she won in court.

They said, “Yes. She is injured by the Gardasil. We’re very sorry. One in a billion chance.” Usual sort of stuff. She’s awarded $250,000 for her daughter. But if you look at that photograph of her, you can see that is a very toxic death. It looks like a noble death, foam coming out of her mouth. It’s really really – anyone who see that section, the Gardasil section of Vaxxed 2 movie will not want. As Bobby Kennedy says in the film, “You got to be insane to give that vaccine to yourself or anyone you love.” When you read the clinical lecture or spoken to the parents, it’s just a very dangerous vaccine. History will very soon I think be able to say, “Yes. I’m sorry. We made a mistake. That’s a bad vaccine.”

[0:42:23] Ashley James: Absolutely. When we look at the invention of x-ray machine, they used to have x-ray machine in shoe stores so we can get x-rays to see if our shoes fit correctly. Our feet fit in our shoes and then they soon found that was causing a lot of damage and they stopped doing that. They took lead out of the gasoline when they realized that was hurting us. They used to spray children with DDT, which actually caused polio-like symptoms. I had a chiropractor on the sow share this, Dr. Wolfson.

She shares that she believes that most of the polio was all of a sudden was eradicated back in the 40s, 50s, 60s was actually they are removing DDT. They stopped spraying that on the children. First they sprayed the children then they had this uprise in polio symptoms. They didn’t realize that it was actually DDT poisoning because it caused the same paralysis, the same issues. Then when they stopped, when they finally realized that they were causing a huge damage that they stopped it.

I’ve heard from a naturopathic physician who has been a midwife for 30 years that there’s a part of Washington state where I live where the miscarriages, late late pregnancy miscarriages and then also children having injuries at birth or being born with injuries rises like one hundredfold during the spraying season. That if a mother in a particular part of Washington State is near the farms. Doesn’t even have to live on a farm but near the farms. Whatever they are spraying now is causing huge injuries. It’s silent. They’re all able to cover it up but 50 years from now we’ll hear about it and it’ll be history. It’ll be history by then. The victims aren’t being heard now.

So I love that you are giving a voice to people and you’re also spreading this information. We should question everything. We should question absolutely everything. We should question at what’s – look at Flint, Michigan and now they’re testing water across the United States and finding that many municipalities have a really really poor quality water. That there’s a heavy metals in the water. We have to understand that we need to advocate for our own selves.

We have to test our own water. We need to understand that our food isn’t necessary, we can’t just trust our food is safe just because some company made it and packaged it. We have to do our own research, advocate for ourselves and we should absolutely advocate for ourselves. Whatever we put in our mouth whether it’s a supplement, a drug, food, water we have to be the quality control. We cannot go blindly through those world and trust that these companies have our best interest at heart.

There’s over 80,000 chemicals now, man-made chemicals that have been introduced into our food supply that many of them are banned in other countries and banned in the UK and in European Union and yet they’re still safe, apparently they’re safe here and also in our cosmetics. So we have to just advocate for ourselves, question everything and also support those who have a voice so that they can be heard.

So, Polly, you have such a beautiful mission because you just want to give parents a voice and let them be heard. I thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you want to make sure listeners know? Any websites or any resources that are really important for parents especially parents that have vaccine-injured children?

[0:46:27] Polly Tommey: Yeah. Actually there are. I would like to say something actually. The saddest thing really, most of the stories when the parents talk to me about the injury is that they and their gut knew something wasn’t right before the vaccine was going into their baby or themselves but they were bullied. You mustn’t, you can get off and walk out of that doctor’s surgery and say, “You know what? I’m going to go think about it. I’m going to do my research but I will be back to discuss this with you.”

So don’t let them bully you. Don’t let them tell you your baby will die if it doesn’t have the vaccine. Don’t let them say these things. You go and do that research yourself because that’s where all the trouble started from the bullying of the medical professionals to have you vaccinate your child or yourself. So please, you are in control yourself. You’re in control of your baby and your child. You’re the expert on yourself and the baby and the child.

So take control. We’ve got to all stand up and be much stronger than we’ve been and not allow these people to bully us. That’s what I would say.

[0:47:27] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much Polly. I really encourage listeners to watch your movie. Watch Vaxxed and watch Vaxxed 2 when it does come out soon. Follow you on Periscope. You just download the app Periscope and go to the PeepsTV@TeamVaxxed. Also, all the links to everything Polly does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Regardless of whether you consider yourself pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, or what I like to say is pro-kid, I think that your movies are empowering, Polly. I think that all my listeners want to become empowered. We want to absorb information and make the best decision for ourselves so I think that it’s in our best interest to educate ourselves.

The fact that big pharma doesn’t want us watching your stuff that’s kind of scary. The level of censorship is showing us that we have to watch it. Whatever the big corporations don’t want us to see is what we need to see. We need to be allowed to see everything. We have a right. We have a right to all these information and they want to take our rights away. We have a right to our health and making the best choices for ourselves. I believe in informed consent. The doctors I’ve had on the show believe in informed consent. Informed consent meaning knowing all the facts and then making a choice. Choose to vaccinate, choose to do altered schedule, choose not to vaccinate. It’s a choice that you should be allowed to make after you have received all the facts. That’s what informed consent is.

So I also encourage my other listeners to check out my other interviews that share more information about this. I’m going to be having Andy Wakefield and others on the show in the New Year to give more of the science. This interview, Polly, was so great because I know that parents out there needed to hear your story, needed to hear this information from another parent. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[0:49:40] Polly Tommey: Thank you so much.

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402 Dr. Stephen Sinatra, Cardiologist & Bioenergetic Psychotherapist, Epigenetic Gene Expression, Curing High Blood Pressure, Cholesterol, and Disease Using Grounding, Coenzyme Q10, Mediterranean Diet, and High Vibrational Living 0

Jan 6, 2020

Get a grounding mat for you and your pets! Learntruehealth.com/grounding

Join the Learn True Health Facebook Group! LearnTrueHealth.com/group

Dr. Sinatra's Sites:
heartmdinstitute.com
vervana.com
agelesspaws.com
drsinatra.com.

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401 This One Plant Is Doubling Healing Time of The Gut, Relieving Symptoms and Ending Acid Reflux, IBS, GERD, Crones, Type Two Diabetes, Acne, Eczema, and Psoriasis with Dr. Michael Haley 0

Dec 31, 2019

Check out the great offer Dr. Haley is giving Learn True Health Listeners: https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe
And be sure to use coupon code LTH for an additional discount!

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The Benefits of Taking Aloe Vera Gel

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-benefits-of-taking-aloe-vera-gel

Highlights:

Benefits of ingesting Aloe Vera gel
Elimination diet to determine the good and bad foods for you
Aloe’s outer leaf acts as a laxative
Filtered vs. Unfiltered Aloe Vera gel
Look at what’s in the food
Always ask: Did that food exist 100 years ago?
Grow your own food
What the GAPS diet is
Powdered foods vs. whole foods
Heal from the inside out with the help of Aloe
Aloe is not a magic bullet, sometimes medicine is needed but Aloe speeds up healing
Gut people: keep it simple on everything

Nowadays, Aloe Vera has become a popular hit because of the benefits it can give especially when it comes to beauty. But did you know that Aloe Vera also contains medicinal properties as it contains powerful antioxidants? In today’s episode, let us all listen as Dr. Michael Haley how to heal the body from the inside out with the help of Aloe.

[0:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast.

This interview blew my mind. I’ve really been looking forward to publishing this episode with Dr. Michael Haley who stumbled upon this one plant, this one plant that studies are showing doubles healing time, doubles healing time. Can you think of anything on the market, drug or natural that offers that kind of amazing support when it comes to healing? They’re seeing that it doubles the healing time of the digestive tract, that is also helping with skin and there are people with cancer for whom it is helping, acne, eczema, their type 2 diabetes that are seeing fantastic result. So you’re going to love learning more about this great plant from Dr. Michael Haley today.

I want to let you know that he is offering us a fantastic discount. I love asking my guests for great specials for you guys. I love you guys and I want you to get the best deal possible because we’re all going to be trying his amazing juice. I am absolutely sure of it. I love it. I was able to get some from him and it really does live up to its name. So enjoy today’s interview to get all this great information. Then when you’re ready to check out his offer, he’s actually giving us something for free as well. You can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. He’s giving us a free cream that is very healing as well as his particular juice and he explains the difference between his and others. I highly agree, everything he says has been my experience as well.

Use the coupon code LTH for an additional discount for the Learn True Health listeners. So go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use the coupon code LTH. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview and please, share it with those you love who want to heal their gut and no longer have heartburn.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 401.

[0:02:33] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show with us Dr. Michael Haley, who is an expert in many things, in healing the gut and in Aloe Vera. I am really intrigued about this topic. I actually use Aloe Vera in my early 20s to heal a persistent GERD. I had really bad heartburn. I couldn’t figure out how to heal and I healed it by drinking Aloe Vera juice every day. Ever since then I’ve been such a huge fan. So when I saw that there’s an expert out there in Aloe Vera I said, “Man, we have to get him on the show.” Welcome to the show.

[0:03:10] Dr. Michael Haley: Ashley James, thank you so much for having me. I am just finding this out for the first time that you had GERD.

[0:03:17] Ashley James: Yeah. Way back in my early 20s. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I just lost my mother to cancer. I was incredibly stressed out. I was eating the standard Canadian diet which is similar to the standard American diet. My health was just spinning out of control. I had tons of inflammation. I obviously was eating foods that my body was reacting to negatively. I was taking over the counter little purple pills to just make the heartburn go away then one day a naturopath was on the TV sharing ways to heal GERD, heal acid reflux naturally. I thought, “Oh my gosh. That makes so much sense.” I threw those little purple pills right into the trash and started chugging the Aloe Vera every day and apple cider vinegar, I did that a few times. Aloe Vera was really what did it for me. I was so impressed.

Obviously I needed to get out of the abusive relationship and heal the emotional stress that I was going through and also correct my diet. There were many steps along that journey. One of my first steps into holistic health in my 20s was the results I got from drinking Aloe Vera.

[0:04:41] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Wonderful. I’m glad to hear this from you because what you just described is probably one of the most common health conditions, not GERD specifically. That’s just part of the digestive tract that you experienced your symptoms in. But people make wrong choices. You’re not hiding that from your listeners. You’re open about that. You started out your life eating pretty well. You then kind of threw caution to the wind and enjoyed the pleasures of life when it comes to the foods that are available to us thinking they are foods because everyone else doing it and they’re still alive, right? It’s not killing them, right? It is.

You start realizing. It’s like, “Okay. I’m starting to look more and more like them as I’m making the same dietary decisions. Something’s not right here. My skin doesn’t look healthy anymore. My gut’s not healthy anymore.” More and more, as people are eating this, they call it food, it’s not food. It’s not. They think it’s food but it’s not. Real food is real food. It grows on trees and we pull them out of the ground. There’s real food and there’s things that people think are food but they’re filled with chemicals that are killing the digestive tract. Some people experience up on the front end and we call it acid reflux, GERD, heartburn as we start getting a little deeper, bacterial overgrowth as we getting to the back end we start calling it things like colitis or if it’s all systemic all over the place irritable bowel disease. There’s a hundred names for it. You called yours GERD because your symptoms was more on the front end.

[0:06:48] Ashley James: Right. The same damage if it’s experienced lower in the gut is going to just be called a different thing but you’re saying the location the damage determines the diagnosis but it’s all the same cause, the same damage, the same root cause.

[0:07:05] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly. It’s funny because what you just said, that right there, let’s lock in on that for a minute. We call it something different, why? Because we need a medical diagnosis so that we can treat it when we’re a physician, right? Then we have our treatment protocols. But if you think about it it’s all inflammatory, irritable bowels. It’s all inflamed intestines somewhere between the mouth and the anus. Now, the reality is we have all these different diagnosis depending on where it is and what we think caused it. For instance, if we think it was caused by gluten we might call it this name and if we think it was caused by eating too much Mexican food we might call it that. You eat you’re too much Mexican and you have this heartburn, right? We call it heartburn. You eat too much wheat and we call it, is that celiac with the wheat and the dairy? So all these different names but what is the one cure for all of them?

Well, the cure is in the prevention. First, don’t get it to begin with. It’s easier to prevent than it is to cure. But once you have these, it doesn’t matter if it’s acid reflux or Crohn’s. It doesn’t matter which end it’s on or what the cause was. The cure is the same. Stop eating the things that are killing you. Start eating the things that are good for you.

[0:08:41] Ashley James: That’s such a tricky wicket though because something that is good for you may not be good for you, cooked a certain way or not cooked a certain way when you have inflammation. So for example kale, such a great superfood but if someone with inflammation in the gut eats a raw kale salad that’s just going to tear right through them because it’s already inflamed. I was telling a client this just the other day that the gut when someone has all that inflammation, imagine you have sunburn or you’ve been burnt in a fire. If you put vinegar on that burn or salt in that wound basically it really hurts. When you’re arm, let’s say the skin in your arm is intact and it’s totally healthy and you put some vinegar on your skin or some salt in your skin, you don’t feel anything.

We can’t see our digestive tract and how angry it is but imagine we have a sunburn, a really really bad sunburn with blisters on our arm or on our skin, that’s how angry the digestive tract is when we’re constantly eating foods that are harming it. So then, when someone is transitioning to eating foods that heal the gut, they have to pick the foods that are healing for the gut now and then as their gut is healed then they can eat foods that are in a sense of prevention. Does that make sense?

[0:10:11] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. One of the greatest things that I learned along the same lines of what you’re just saying is from Dr. Natasha McBride. She has this concept that helping people identify the foods that are right for them because everybody is different. One of the things she’ll do is an elimination diet. Then you start with foods that are probably good for most people, adding them one at a time and seeing what happens.

Now, if you add one of those good foods that’s good for most people and it doesn’t work for you, well you take it back out. In this process, there’s this journal. Imagine three columns. On the first column is date and time stamp, the second column would be what you ate and the third column is how you feel. Now, you don’t always need a “what you ate in the” entry. You don’t always need a how you feel in the entry. You might just do an entry and this is just a how you feel entry. “I didn’t eat anything but for some reason, I’m just bubbling with energy. I’m thinking clearly. My thoughts are just firing like, the synapses are there.”

Well, if they’re not normally like that then maybe you’re eating things that are fogging you. What did you eat? What was your last meal? What have you been eating up to this point that’s giving you all this energy, making things fire properly? That’s probably a good food for you. “I feel strong. I feel weak. I’m fatigued.” What foods did you eat? The last time you ate that food, look back in the journal. When you follow it in the journal and you look at your symptoms do you see fatigue about those same number of hours after you ate it? We’re now developing a pattern when you eat this starchy food: the potatoes, the pasta or whatever it is and a couple of hours later or an hour later or a half-hour later, again everyone’s different, you crash. That’s probably not a good food for you.

[0:12:33] Ashley James: I love that you are teaching this in such a straightforward, succinct manner. The food-mood journal is one of the best tools that we can use. But how long should people wait before they start judging foods? Because my understanding is if let’s say someone is allergic to dairy and they’ve just recently eliminated it. Doesn’t it take like a month for the body to really recover from that inflammation before they can really start to decipher what foods are helping and what foods are not helping? Is there a certain period of time of an elimination diet that one must complete before the food mood journal is more accurate tool?

[0:13:15] Dr. Michael Haley: You know what, Dr. Natasha McBride, let’s go back to her. Since she’s the one that came up with this concept. I don’t know if she invented it but she sure is teaching it to thousands of practitioners around the world right now. Her concept of elimination diet is going to something so basic and simple that what most people can consume and meet most of their needs with one food. For her that would be bone stock soup. How long are you on that? Until your body stabilizes. Is it a day, is it three days, is it a week? I don’t know but conceptually there’s enough healthy fats and healthy amino acids and everything that you need to sustain you for that period of time until you figure that out. Then once you stabilize, now we’re going to start building on that diet and adding one thing at a time.

Working from her list she has groups of foods. This is the first food group that you’re going to play in as we build your diet and then we’re going to go to these foods, you can start working from this list after that but that first list is the things that most people can tolerate. I wouldn’t say it’s a time period because everybody is different. I do know this, there’s foods that will make me crash. They could be pretty healthy foods for most people. I’ll notice that I’ll crash maybe 45 minutes after eating them and then about an hour later I’ll be fine. So for me to get over that crash from that food that I ate, it’s about an hour.

[0:15:02] Ashley James: Have you gotten testing and saw that you have like an immunoglobulin response to those foods? I mean, is there something you can see in blood work to confirm, “Oh yeah. My body, my immune system is reacting in a negative way.” Is this something that no blood test can pick up and really it’s about listening to your body?

[0:15:20] Dr. Michael Haley: I did get the blood testing years ago and it wasn’t necessarily matching up with me symptomatically. This is one of the problems I have with it. I think it’s beneficial information but I don’t think it’s a 100. Think about allergy testing. Think about egg albumin as an example. Are eggs good for you? Forget about what you think from a diet perspective and the general health belief system that you have. That’s commonly tested as an allergen. Well, where did you get that albumin from? What kind of eggs did it come from? Was it grass and insect truly pastured hens or were they fed chicken meal from a bag of wheat and corn, which is inflammatory? I don’t know. So the material that you’re using for the allergy test that you’re testing it against, where did it come from? We don’t know. It’s just called albumin.

[0:16:32] Ashley James: So you’re saying that some people who have egg allergies may not react to eggs if they’re fresh off of a farm that’s pasture-raised but they will have allergy to eggs that are factory farmed?

[0:16:44] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m suggesting that it’s possible. That’s something that I just kind of made up as a possibility. The point being is that the eggs are definitely different. I remember the first time we ran out of eggs from our backyard and I did my best. I ran to the store and studied all the labels and came home with the best organic pastured eggs I could find. I remember cracking them in the pan in front of my kids. I remember their reactions because one of them especially went, “Eww,” based on sight, “what is that?” Because he never saw a pale yellow yolk before. When they were eating them they go, “Oh. These are disgusting.” Because it was this maybe similar texture but it had no flavor because the flavor comes from the nutrients and it was missing the nutrients.

So the eggs were definitely different than what they were used to. Our chickens, we did not feed them period, ever because if we did, they’d get lazy and they’d forget how to survive. They need to know how to survive and eat what they’re supposed to. So their eggs were absolutely amazing. What was their diet? Insects, grass, lizards. If they caught a lizard, it was on. It was a fight for that steak. Contrast that to what you see on the TV. You’ll see such and such farms, “Our hens are fed a vegan diet of corn, soy and marigold.” Well, let me tell you something. Chickens aren’t vegans.

[0:18:37] Ashley James: Also, even if they say the chickens are pasture-raised it actually means that they’re in a giant football stadium-sized indoor building with a tiny porch basically that’s only 50 chickens can fit out on the porch that’s all caged in. There’s 20,000 chickens inside this giant container and there’s no room for them or the regular factory-farmed chickens are born and raised in cages with no room to move. We’re not feeding them the nutrients they need but we’re also torturing them and giving them a horrible existence. All that energy, that suffering goes into their meat and goes into their egg versus if you eat something like you said you’re backyard eggs. Just even the energy, the vibration of that food is displayed in the happiness and the whole life that that animal’s been given. We have to look at the quality of everything that goes into our food.

Imagine all the people that touch our food. I’ve often thought about this. When I eat, I often think about the farmers, the pickers who are out there really early in the morning sometimes really bad weather. They spend their entire day bent over, picking that food for me so that I can eat it and thinking about the quality of all the lives of all the people that touch our food. I like to support farms that treat their workers well that all the people were happy who touched my food. If a farmer really really loves what they do like they’re doing biodynamic farming, organic farming, they’re putting so much of their energy into making sure that soil is healthy, that their animals are healthy, that the workers are happy and taken care of. Even that energy I feel goes into the food and I feel better for it versus going to a restaurant where you know that they’re cutting corners to save money and they’re going to buy ingredients that are the lowest quality possible so that they can make the biggest profit possible.

Getting back to talking about healing the gut. I love to know what happened along your journey as a doctor that made you really excited about healing the gut because you didn’t start off as wanting to be a gut expert. What happened?

[0:21:18] Dr. Michael Haley: Oh my goodness. My journey is not based on personal tragedy. I don’t say that to boast. Certainly it would’ve been a lot easier to learn it if I had to but I was forced into it. It’s a unique set of circumstances. You know, since we’re touching on this, can I talk about one thing real quick? Right now, we’re talking about eggs. I’ll be honest, half of the healthcare professionals will say eggs are a healthy food and half of them will say they’re not. There’s a difference in belief systems and if somebody’s hearing me talk about eggs right now and they’re uncomfortable with that, I do want to address this. Why do we have different belief systems about what a healthy diet looks like? You don’t have to have the right answer to this. I think I know what the answer is and I want to address that because it does lead into why I help people get well.

[0:22:17] Ashley James: Right. Let’s address it. Why is it that we have so many conflicting diet dogmas out there?

[0:22:26] Dr. Michael Haley: Let’s look at it from the dogma of someone who’s trying to help heal guts and contrast that with someone who’s trying to heal cancer. You see, in a gut-healing diet, I want growth and repair foods but in an anti-cancer diet, if I give you growth and repair I might actually be supporting your tumor. So these diets are going to be different.

If I was coaching someone to play the line in the NFL and I want them to have maximum power and strength, which is different than say being a safety that needs to be able to fly up and down the field like a gazelle just incredible speed and light on his feet and be able to jump up to stop a pass. The lineman might be more of a, well both of these would be a type of survival diet. Survival of the fittest out in the wild. You might have to fight off a lion. That’s different than a detoxing, cleansing diet to get well from cancer.

So, as we’re talking about gut-healing foods and to the raw vegan, don’t look at it like you’re raw vegan perspective is based on cleansing and detox. So understand there’s a place for those things and we’re not contrasting, we’re not saying that you don’t have a healthy diet. We’re just saying it’s a different purpose than what we’re talking about here.

[0:24:19] Ashley James: Right. Also healing the heart. If you have a patient with heart disease with clogged arteries in the heart you want them on a cleansing and detoxing diet to help the body heal the heart versus if you have someone with an inflamed and angry gut. You’re not going to put them on a raw vegan diet because raw vegan diet is really really really nutrient-packed but it’s really not appropriate for a gut that’s inflamed and angry.

So you’re really looking at food as medicine and what’s the medicine that person needs and understanding that through our life. We should change our diets based on our needs.

[0:24:59] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you said something interesting before and you were talking about sunburns. Aloe Vera is tremendous on sunburns. I like something like a friend of mine, Robert Scott Bell, talks about the tube, the digestive tube between the mouth and the anus. This epithelial tissue, which is the same kind of tissue that your skin is. As we’re formed in embryology, we start out as ball of cells. Essentially, it’s like it gets pushed in from two sides and it meets in the middle and there’s now a tube running through the ball of cells. It’s kind of the same tissue that’s originally on the outside of that ball of cells. It’s almost as if that’s really the same organ, the skin and the gut. When you’re in that gut, when you’re in that tube, you’re actually really in a protected environment inside the body but it’s really still outside of the body. Because when you eat stuff it actually has to pass through that later to really get inside the body where the body can use it.

You see, this epithelial tissue, the gut, eats and drinks just like the skin. People say, “Well, your skin doesn’t eat and drink.” Yeah. That’s why doctors will actually give drug patches, pain patches and hormone patches and help you quit smoking patches. They put these on your skin because your skin will absorb and it goes into the bloodstream and it actually eats and drinks through your skin and your skin excretes waste just like your gut.

So, we start thinking about this more of the same organ, which is important because as we talk about healing the gut, we actually do have a somewhat of a visual look at what your gut might look like. The gut’s much more mucosal and probably a lot more angry than what you actually see on your skin. So the changes might be subtle on the skin but they’re there. You just have to know to look for them and say, “How’s my skin doing? I think my gut’s actually getting better,” or “this doesn’t look good. I wonder what’s going on inside?”

Well, Rodney Stockton – ah, going back to the Aloe. Aloe helps heal the sunburn. You have a sunburn, you put it on there. If you put a handprint of Aloe and take your hand off, the next day you notice where your hand was it’s all of a sudden white while it’s still red around on the outside.

[0:27:40] Ashley James: That’s so cool.

[0:27:41] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, it heals things faster. It’s scientifically proven to cut the healing time of burns in half. Now, if it does that on the skin and the gut is the same organ, can that do it inside? We’ve never actually done that kind of science to know for sure but a lot of people will say, “Absolutely. I’ve had this problem. I drink Aloe. You said it and things did better.” Well, I hear it all the time.

I talked to someone on the phone earlier today, one of our customers, and GERD was her complaint. She placed her first order a month ago and went through two half gallons of our Aloe and she was calling to reorder because ever since she’s been drinking the Aloe she hasn’t had to take her, I forgot what’s the color of the pills were that she said but she said hasn’t had to take them anymore to control her GERD.

Well, this guy Rodney Stockton came into my office. I’m a chiropractor and he used to take this Aloe door-to-door in South Florida. He ships some to New York because he had friends there but it was kind of a small business and he insisted that I put all my patients on it, which I did not. But when I destroyed my hands as a chiropractor. Accidentally I got some bad burns on them by accident. He gave me this Aloe cream to on them and that’s when I said, “Oh my goodness. My hands look better now after three days of using this Aloe cream than they did before the injuries. What is this stuff?” That’s what got my attention.

Well, my family was using it. The topically and internally and at some point I had my first patient that had cancer drinking it. Rodney used to tell everyone, “Cancer. It’s like a common cold. Just drink three glasses of Aloe a day. A couple of weeks it will be gone.” It’s kind of funny. That’s how he actually really talked. I don’t talk like that. I think that it could be helpful and beneficial and part of an anti-cancer healing plan but and yes he did get some kind of results.

Well, I did have one of my patients on it that got well from a very serious cancer. To me it was like, “Wow, there’s something to this.” Well, Rodney had died and I realized how important his product was and all of a sudden my supply was going, it was going away. The company was crumbling without Rodney. So I stepped in and took over. Now, this is a long answer to a real short question.

The question was about gut-healing and where did this come from? I realized that people needed this Aloe Vera. My customer base of a company that stepped in to save was people that either have or once had cancer and swear that Aloe was the only thing that got them well. In my research I realized that it was accepted for people that have gut conditions medically, FDA. I’m not going to get in trouble talking about it for the gut. I knew that I had to save the product for the people that knew they needed it regardless of what their condition was. I just knew I couldn’t talk about this one condition but I could keep it alive by helping people that have another condition that needed it.

So, that’s kind of how I got so familiar with all of the digestive problems and what was causing them because if you have irritable bowel, Aloe Vera is not the cure. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s like a drug if you’re just taking it to get well because as soon as you stop, you’re problems going to come back if you haven’t made any changes.

[0:32:00] Ashley James: It’s like taking, like you said, drugs. Drugs were created 100 – 150 years ago. They were created at first out of a need to patent natural medicine. “Oh. See that plant over there in that field that helps XYZ problem? Well, how can we molecularly make a compound so that we can administer this as a pill? When we go back and we say, “Well, now we have to reverse engineer.” We go, “Okay. You want this pharmaceutical,” well, over the counter let’s say pharmaceutical. Well, what’s the natural alternative that it came from originally? So why don’t we go use that instead?

[0:32:47] Dr. Michael Haley: I agree. I completely agree. The nutrition, the medicine is in all the things that are growing around us but what I want and if anyone hears us and thinks, “Oh. I can get well by drinking Aloe.” If you have inflammatory bowel conditions, you could probably get symptom-free drinking the Aloe because what we’ve done is increase the speed of healing and now you’re healing faster than the new damage you’re creating. So it’s no different than a medical mindset because you’re taking it for a desired effect. The people have to really realize, if that’s their mindset, I’m sure your listeners have a different mindset but the people that have that mindset, what you really have to do is say, “Wait a second, how did I get this to begin with? Because I fix it but don’t change the cause it’s coming right back.”

[0:33:55] Ashley James: So how long have you been using Aloe Vera in your practice and with clients and also helping this company? How long have you been diving into the world of Aloe Vera?

[0:34:07] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, Rodney Stockton first came to me and I want to say it was 1996 as a patient. He brought a half-gallon of Aloe with him. He said, “You got to start drinking this. Recommend it to all your patients.” At first I thought he was crazy. I hadn’t quite evolved yet. I’m still evolving, we all still are but at that point in time, to me it seemed crazy. I was at that point in my life where I thought I could eat anything and just exercise into good health.

When I had that experience, the injury to my hands I realized the power of the Aloe and started recommending it and seeing it work in people’s lives. My family and I have been consuming it since about 2000 so about almost 20 years now. We use a lot of it. We really use a lot of it. I think it’s neat. I remember Rodney and he was so proud of how he looked in his 80s, “Can you believe I’m only 87 years old?”

[0:35:22] Ashley James: I’m really glad you say that because you said he died. I’m like, “Oh God. What if he died of a heart attack at 40 or something?” This doesn’t really play really well for a great health story like, “Hey. Drink this guy’s Aloe Vera. He dropped dead at age 40.” So he was like he lived a very long and healthy life, right?

[0:35:38] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, sort of. Yes. It’s interesting. I have a picture of him in the newspaper in 1958. The newspaper stamp 1958. This was shortly after he discovered Aloe and he’s in the Aloe field and he’s researching it and making it his life mission to make this available to everyone throughout the world. Well, I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, “Wow. You look old in 1958.” So he obviously didn’t do that well up to that point when he discovered Aloe. Now, here I am. He’s in my office in the later 90’s not looking much different than that newspaper.

Now, he still was TV dinners, fast food, French fries, cheeseburgers. He still did not eat healthy. He did drink one glass of Aloe Vera every day. Now, when he was in the, he did die of a heart attack. He was 96 years old and I remember going to see him in the hospital when he was in all the machines keeping his body alive but his brain was gone. I remember looking at his legs. I was squeezing kind of his lower you know where his shins are and stuff. No pitting edema, plump white skin. You know how most people of that age they have like black and blue at the further parts away from their hear down near the wrists and forearms and their ankles. He had this amazing plump, white, healthy skin that just blew me away. That’s one of those things that I’ll never forget. He did not live a healthy lifestyle. He did drink one glass of Aloe every day.

Our new customers say, “How much Aloe should I drink?” I say, “Well, our smallest order’s at two-pack. Get the two-pack. Make sure you drink that whole first bottle in the first week and then look in the mirror.” I told you about the woman I spoke to earlier who had GERD today. It’s funny, she was talking about skin conditions. I said, “Actually, you might see a difference in your skin.” She was only drinking three ounces a day for the last month.” She said, “It’s funny now that you say that people have been telling me I look really good lately. How can that be I’m so sick but yes, they keep telling me I look good.”

Aloe Vera as your gut gets better, she’s the one that hasn’t had any GERD problems hasn’t needed the medicine, when your gut is getting better, your skin looks better. It’s an external picture of the inside.

[0:38:33] Ashley James: Yeah. There’s a direct link between skin health and gut health. Absolutely. On so many levels and the fact that the microbiome which is keeping us alive is in there and that the inflammation, the leaky gut, the immune system is all around the gut. The gut converts 25% of our T3, it makes our serotonin but also if we’re not digesting and absorbing nutrition we’re going to see that on the skin. We’re just going to look pale. We’re not going to have that glow. Some people look grey in the skin or have dark circles into the eyes. We can really tell. I think unconsciously, we can pick up a lot by looking at someone’s face in terms of their health. It really does show. I love that you’re saying that within days of someone focusing on healing their gut that it starts to become noticeable in their face.

I have a friend who has been coming to me for some health advice. I kind of have that reputation with my friends as being the one to go to. After talking to her, I see in one of her children, I can see in his face he’s allergic to dairy. It’s just so obvious when I look at his face. It looks like he has lupus. His body is very inflamed and his cheeks are red like lupus red. I talked to her. I had a very gentle conversation about doing an elimination diet and eliminating wheat, sorry, gluten grains and dairy and just doing an experiment with her family.

They did it for one week and I didn’t know that they were choosing to do it that particular week. I saw her and I said, “What has changed? Your face looks something looks so good. Something looks so different.” I was like, “Did you get new glasses? Did you get a haircut?” I couldn’t figure it out but she looked so good. Then she finally said, “It’s because we tried going dairy and gluten-free for a week.” I could tell her her son also didn’t have any of that redness like they’re really really – the rosacea in his cheeks are completely gone. It’s interesting that quickly that within a week of cutting out barley, wheat, rye and cow dairy that you could see it on their face. But not only that, they could feel it. They were both having some success already in their physical symptoms.

So, yeah. You’ve been drinking Aloe Vera, you and your family, for 20 years now. You’re seeing it yourself. I want to dive into the science a bit and understand why is it that Aloe Vera has this ability to speed up healing and decrease inflammation? What is it about it? Also, I’d like you to differentiate between whole Aloe Vera and just the gel because I know there’s a big difference in the juice. Should one drink a whole Aloe Vera plant versus drinking just the gel of the plant?

[0:41:47] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. If I was to take a leaf and shove it in the blender and turn it on high and pour it into the glass, we would probably call that Aloe Vera juice but Aloe Vera juice is also if you buy a juice like a fruit juice with sugar in it that has Aloe in it. So, that term is used kind of loosely and be careful when you see Aloe Vera juice. It may or may not be beneficial for you. Whole leaf is generally considered juice. Now, I personally don’t like the outer leaf. Why is it used medicinally? Well, it has laxative properties.

[0:42:32] Ashley James: To put it nicely.

[0:42:35] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. And we are in a backed-up nation which because people are clogged, their intestine are clogged, I don’t think adding drain-all is the solution. What we need to do is get our diets right so our intestines work like they’re supposed to. But Aloe Vera has that bowel-loosening, the outer leaf part, the Aloe and the yellow, the bitter stuff, it’s absolutely disgusting. So what they’ve done medicinally is put in the capsules and people would take that as a laxative. Well, eventually the NIH and the FDA kind of teamed up and did a little research on Aloe Vera extract which is the outer leaf stuff and they gave it to rats until the rats got cancer, which is another interesting topic here because what’s cancer?

Well, in the case of the rats, the cells of the intestines that make mucus grew so that they could make more mucous because they were being fed this continuous flow of irritant because they got the extract without the gel which was the opposite, healing part of the plant. Well, in other words for the rats it was actually an adaptive protective change that we call cancer, which cancer’s often an adaptive change.

All right, rabbit trail here but those are the different parts of the plant and I don’t think we should be using the outer leaf. I think we should fix our diet. The inner leaf, that’s the part where if you put it on a sunburn it calms it down and heals it faster. We are confident based on all the clinical case studies where people get well. Anyone I’ve given it to where they had bleeding bowel movements within three days the bleeding has stopped regardless how many days, months or years they’ve been bleeding. That’s what I have seen. So somehow what it’s doing on the skin on burns it’s also doing on the inside and I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why that happens. I don’t know. I can’t tell you why it heals sunburns. I can’t tell you why it heals the intestines but we’ve definitely seen it happen.

[0:44:54] Ashley James: Well, I mean it’s known. It’s just absolutely known. Ever since I was a kid we’d be down at Mexico, I’d get a sunburn and there’d be this giant Aloe Vera plant. My mom would crack it open and squeeze out the gel and rub my body with it and the next day I was good to go. I mean, it’s just known that it heals the skin. Very interesting about the irritant that if someone were to drink the whole plant, the juice of the whole plant, that the rodents would eventually develop cancer. Like you said it is an irritant so it’s forcing the body to have diarrhea or it’s the laxative effects.

I remember doing that once buying the wrong kind of Aloe Vera at the store and suffering for it. It’s not a pleasant experience but if you drink the gel, the pure gel of Aloe Vera it is an enjoyable experience. What’s the difference between your company and the ones that are sold like at Whole Foods or at other health markets? I won’t name names but there’s a variety of them. Some of them, many of them have sugar. Many of them do but there are a few that don’t. So what’s the difference in quality between yours and those other brands out there?

[0:46:19] Dr. Michael Haley: Okay. I’m going to give you a short answer on this and then tells you a story that explains it. You can apply this, don’t just apply this to Aloe Vera. Take this in for anything that you might purchase that is like a juice beverage because this is what happens in the juice industry.

Imagine that I was to purchase orange juice and I went to the store and there’s all these different labels. Lots of those different labels actually all come from the same farm. It doesn’t mean that they’re all the same though because we have big companies in the United States that will purchase up big 55 gallon drums from main farms, from maybe one or two main farm sources. Then sell those barrels to the various companies throughout the United States that reprocess them.

There’s a good chance, well those barrels have been pasteurized and they probably have chemical preservatives in them. But the companies that buy the big drums then reprocess and they might add new preservatives. Those are the preservatives that you’re actually going to see on the label. They might add flavors, they might add water, they might add other juices. They do what they want to make it their own. They might add thickeners.

In the case of Aloe Vera, because it’s no longer Aloe Vera because it’s been filtered down so much and changed so much they actually might add thickeners to thicken it up like guar gum or something like that or a carrageenan so that you think that it’s actually Aloe Vera gel. If you read the labels you will see these things and it will say carrageenan as a thickening agent.

This is what happens in the industry. There’s various levels of filtering and there’s various levels of adding things in. Now, let’s focus just on Aloe for a second. Not just all juice products but in the case of Aloe Vera, there’s unfiltered which is what we are and there’s ultra-filtered which is what another brand is that tastes like water. I promise you, if you find a brand that you can pick up and shake and it splashes and it sounds like water and you drink it. If you give it to someone with a blindfold on, they will tell you it’s water. You cannot taste the difference between that and water. It’s very filtered. Is it Aloe? Yeah. 100% comes from the Aloe plant. But you can take something and filter it so much that the only thing you have, you can purify it to the point where it’s only water. I don’t know that that’s what’s happening in this case but it’s super filtered.

Everything else is somewhere between what we have and what that is. Our brand is the only one that I’m aware of that is not pasteurized. It’s not filtered. How do we do it? How do we not filter? People say, “How do you take the Aloe in? What’s the outer one? That’s the very bitter stuff.” Well, we never let it in to begin with. Our aloes are hand-cut, hand-filleted. We bleed out the Aloe in and then we skin it. Then that gel, that inner fillet runs through a grinder, runs through a chiller, goes into the containers that goes into the freezer. We freeze it. We don’t filter it. We don’t pasteurize it. We don’t add preservatives. We don’t add thickeners. We don’t do anything. The only thing that’s in there is the ground up fillet from the Aloe plant.

So that is kind of the difference. Now, you had a similar experience as one of my patients. This was actually an employee of mine. She came to me on her second day on the job, came in sad. I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “Well, I found out that I probably have breast cancer again.” I said, “Okay. Don’t freak out. We know how to fix this. We’re going to make a lot of changes but the first thing I want you to do is start drinking this.” I gave her two bottles of our Aloe gel and I said, “I want you to start drinking three full glasses every day.” I was going to continue to make other changes in her diet and take things away from her.

Well, the next day, she was literally in the bathroom half of the day. After I think it was the second day of being in the bathroom all day long she came to me and said, “Dr. Haley, is it possible the Aloe is running right through me?” I said, “Not a chance.” Well, I shouldn’t say that. I said, “If you got Aloe Vera from Whole Foods, yeah but not what I gave you.” She said, “Oh.” I said, “What do you mean oh?” She said, “Well, before drinking the Aloe that you gave me I thought I would drink Richard’s. He’s drinking it for his diabetes.” That is her husband. I said, “Oh no.” She said, “Yeah. I got it from Whole Foods.” “Oh no. How much were you drinking?” She said, “I couldn’t drink three glasses a day. I could only do two.” To which I respond, “Thank God. Three could have killed you.” Meaning, she was getting so much of that outer leaf.

See, that particular brand that she was drinking had so much outer leaf that the serving size is a tablespoon not a glassful. Its intention is to loosen the bowels when you have constipation, lower and stabilize blood sugar levels. Those kinds of things. It still has those properties but I wanted her to drink a whole bunch because I wanted her to have the extra anti-cancer benefits. It could’ve literally depleted her of all of her electrolyte minerals and dehydrated her. She was in the bathroom all that whole time because she was drinking another brand using this serving size recommendation based on ours.

I learned that people might do that. I’ve never made that mistake again. I never said, “Oh, yeah. Just go drink a glass of Aloe every day.” No. Only if it’s our brand. Every bottle is different. Every company has their own purpose for what they’re putting in their bottle.

Gut health is one thing I’m talking a little bit about anti-cancer. Can I do that? Can you talk about Aloe Vera and anti-cancer properties? Yeah. I’m not saying we’re curing cancer but I will tell you some science to why someone with cancer should have it. One of the neat things is – well, let me give you a whole bunch of them actually. I’ll build-up to the bigger ones.

There was a study done at Hippocrates Health Institute. They gave one group Aloe Vera with their supplements and the other group didn’t get the Aloe. When they tested their blood, the group that got the Aloe Vera with their supplements, their blood tested higher for every single nutrient that was tested. So, conclusion was, well, people that are using Aloe Vera they’re gut must work better and absorb more nutrients from the food. That’s a good thing.

We also know it helps make the gut healthy which is where the immune system is and helps heal guts. It also helps lower and stabilize blood sugar levels in people that have diabetes. Well, cancer is an obligatory glucose metabolizer and if you’re lowering blood sugar levels that could be a really good thing. Well, there’s also something in Aloe Vera called acemannan. This nutrient is known to cause the macrophages of the immune system to secrete three very important factors. I’m only going to talk about one. It’s my favorite just because of the name. It’s called tumor necrosis factor, TNF. What does that do?

Tumor necrosis factor, tumor = cancer, necrosis = death two. It’s the factor that causes death to cancer. What it actually does is helps the immune system to see the cancer cells so that it knows to kill them. But, there’s still an even more exciting thing in Aloe. Those slimy mucopolysaccharides. What’s a polysaccharides? Well, you have sugars. Join them together you have carbohydrates. Join those together you have complex carbohydrates. Join those together and make them really big and bulky we have mucopolysaccharides. The mucopolysaccharides in Aloe Vera is made up of a sugar molecule called mannose, which is the one sugar molecule that we know to be toxic to cancer cells.

It’s kind of like the cancer cell locks on to it because it wants to eat the sugar molecule but it can’t. So now, it can’t eat anything else because it’s like got its mouth stuck with mannose but it can’t eat the mannose. So it essentially starves itself by holding on to the mannose and not being able to eat it.

[0:56:08] Ashley James: Cool. That’s so cool. Tell us more. I love this stuff. I’m totally geeking out on this fun little science things. You said you’re only going to tell us one of the three but can you tell us more?

[0:56:24] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, that was a whole bunch of them right there meaning making the gut healthy which is where the immune system is, lowering the blood sugar levels, causing your got to absorb more nutrients. The tumor necrosis factor interferons and interleukins were the other factors that increase with the Aloe Vera. Then the fifth one was the mannose being that thing that the cancer cells can’t eat because it can lock on to them but it can’t actually consume them.

That research was actually done by a, if I understand it my impression of it was that it was done by a company that is manufacturing a chemotherapy because there conclusion was consume mannose with the chemotherapy. I think they said that the mannose stops the cancer from growing and the chemotherapy kills the cancer. That was their conclusion.

[0:57:27] Ashley James: What about helping people with dysbiosis or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth? Does it have any anti-parasitic properties or help to starve the candida or starve the bad bacteria or feed the good bacteria? Is there anything around those lines?

[0:57:50] Dr. Michael Haley: Good question. We’re going to go into some stuff that I don’t know all about but I’ll tell you what I do know that makes sense to me. Aloe Vera is a food and bacteria can grow in it but it’s not bacteriostatic. It doesn’t stop the growth of bacteria but they grow very slowly in it compared to other foods. Kind of like honey is a food. Honey can sit in your cabinet for a very long time. That’s more bacteriostatic compared to Aloe Vera versus table sugar that can ferment into alcohol very quickly.

So, different things are more of a food source for bacteria than others. In the case of Aloe Vera and I think that’s related to that mannose sugar molecule that some things just don’t really love. So, it can be a food item. I cannot tell you that it won’t feed candida. I don’t know that. What I do know is that there’s lots of good fiber in it that could be prebiotic in nature. I know that it helps heal the gut and people that have either too loose of bowels or too stiff of bowels it seems to normalize both ends to the more normal perspective.

I know that people who had bacterial overgrowth, some of them their bowels are moving too fast some are moving too slow. Probably more often too slow which kind of gives bacteria more time to multiply and overtake the intestines. It seems those slow-moving bowels, sometimes the bad bacteria can work its way up towards the front in a sense.

Now, why do I say all that? I don’t always think that the bacterial overgrowth is a diet problem. It could be a slow-moving gut which might be a neurological problem. Possibly you need chiropractic massage, yoga, acupuncture something to destress the spine where the nerves go to the intestines and get things functioning more like they’re supposed to. When we talk about a condition like that, Aloe Vera is not the cure, it might be part of the diet plan to help the plan get better but we have to step back and look at the big picture and say, “Okay. Let’s look at this from the nutrition, exercise, rest, mental well-being.” You know how the mind controls the chemistry of the body? You’ve alluded to that earlier with toxic relationships.

So you really have to step back and say, “Okay. Is Aloe going to help this?” I don’t know. It might but we got to really look at the big picture here.

[1:00:54] Ashley James: Can you tell us some stories in your last 20 years with experiencing the healing benefits of Aloe Vera that were just mind-blowing. You’ve mentioned some common things that Aloe helps with but what’s some really far out there like, “Wow. I never thought it would help with that,” kind of stories that you could share with us?

[1:01:14] Dr. Michael Haley: I hear that stuff all the time from healing people’s gums to headed for dialysis and God lead me to consume Aloe Vera and from 30% to now 68% kidney function and the only change I made was Aloe Vera. Well, that’s pretty cool. We’ve heard everything from decreased pain, which I think when people have less pain, I think it’s because their pain is probably auto-immune related. By healing the gut we’re calming down the immune system that’s causing the inflammatory response that causes the pain because other people with pain don’t notice any difference.

When you heal the gut, it can affect everything. So we’ve heard every condition under the sun people saying that they got well from it. I don’t think it’s a cure for every condition under the sun. I think it could help the gut get well and I think that it’s important for most people.

Ultimately, again, I always tell people that you got to look at the other side of the equation. You got to look at what’s in the food. The food is full of antibiotics and drugs if you’re eating animal foods and pesticides and preservatives and artificial flavors and colors and sweeteners and trans fats and they’re partially hydrogenated and they’re GMOs and we got chlorinated watering, there’s mercury in the fish. There is so much crap in the foods that’s killing us and we have to stop consuming it. You got to look at the other side of the equation.

I’ve seen a stage for pancreatic patients get well and stay well for ten years. How does that happen? We didn’t just give her Aloe. We said, “You can’t eat sugars anymore. We want you to juicing fruits and vegetables and growing sprouts.” We changed her lifestyle and she ended up losing weight and at first feeling she was going to die of starvation but eventually getting her energy back and feeling better than ever before. That was my first significant patient that I recommended three glasses of Aloe a day for. It just so happens that she got well from stage 4, worst kind of cancer you could have. Did the Aloe cure her? No. I think her lifestyle change cured her and I think Aloe Vera was one of her things in her lifestyle change.

[1:04:30] Ashley James: Well, you said that it’s been proven that Aloe speeds up healing by 50%. So if you could take anything to speed up healing while you’re on a healing protocol I mean that just makes sense.

[1:04:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. Yeah.

[1:04:46] Ashley James: I interviewed one of your mentors, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, episode 385. She has an amazing story. She helps to reverse autism. She’s made a link between the GAPS diet being the gut and the psychology diet linking that there is a direct link between gut health and psychology and to brain health and showing that if she can get children before the age of five on the GAPS diet who are on the autism spectrum or displaying symptoms of autism that they will no longer be autistic. She makes that bold claim based on her clinical experience over the last 24 years where she has seen thousands of children to reverse autism. She says if it’s caught after the age of five they still have some quirks but go from low-functioning to high-functioning basically.

That was a really interesting interview. So you stumbled upon her work in an effort to find tools in your tool belt to help people with healing the gut. What have you seen in terms of psychology, in terms of mental health and emotional health? How have you seen Aloe Vera help in that aspect?

[1:06:07] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m going to tell you about a friend’s child that has autism. He as an older teenager struggling to maintain his job because of his emotional outbursts, having meltdowns in the home and talking to the mother. I remember the conversation quite well because sometimes people can look at you like you’ve got three heads because of what you say. “Yeah. You shouldn’t be drinking Coca Cola.” Really? They look at you like you have three heads. “No. That’s not going to be good for someone that has autism.” It’s not going to be good for really anybody. The point being is I gave her a whole diet plan that included Aloe Vera and eliminated a lot of stuff. He had the absolute best week of his life with very normal functioning.

But he had a meltdown. I said, “What happened?” She said, “He couldn’t do it anymore. He had to have his sodas again.” He went back to his soda. Had a meltdown that day on the job, lost his job. It’s funny. He went from having the best week, most normal week of his life with normal functioning in society to “I can’t do this. I need my sugar fix, my caffeinated sugar fix.”

We’ve seen it with kids. You give the kids sugar and they get all crazy. What you eat changes the way you act, the way you feel. It changes you. I can give a grown adult a couple shots of whiskey and within minutes he had changed. What goes in your mouth affects the way your body works.

[1:08:23] Ashley James: I love that you’re bringing this up. I actually have a study, I have two studies right here printed out. Parasites, nutrition, immune responses and biology of metabolic tissues and the other one is Signaling in Parasitic Nematodes: Physicochemical Communication Between Host and Parasite and Endogenous Molecular Transduction Pathways Governing Worm Development and Survival. Basically these two and there’s a ton more studies about the connection between what is living in our gut and what our cravings. They’re showing that parasites and it doesn’t have to be like a giant tapeworm. Whenever someone says parasites that’s all I think about is these Dune like the giant worms from Dune. I’m just imagining them.

Most parasites are microscopic, one cell or a few cells, candida, yeast. This dysbiosis basically they’re finding now that let’s say you have a dysbiosis or you have these parasites, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or whatever it is that basically things are living in your gut that shouldn’t be there and the things that should be living in your gut are not in a healthy proportion. It’s kind of like the gangs have moved into the neighborhood and your gut.

These entities, these creatures, when you stop feeding them the sugary beverages for example that this person you’re talking about was craving, which is the food that they live on. So the donuts and the pizza or whatever it is. The food, the simple carbohydrates that they live on. If you stop eating the foods they live on, you start to starve them. When you start to starve them, they will actually produce a chemical. It’s been proven in these studies. They will produce a chemical that is absorbed into your bloodstream, go straight to your brain and takes over your brain and makes you crave the foods that feed them.

So how much of our cravings and our control over our own behavior and our mind is us versus the parasites? Who’s controlling this body? Is it the parasite controlling us? They’re showing now that there’s a direct link. So when you go on a detox, when you go on a cleansing diet or a cleansing protocol or a negative parasite killing protocol, you will have cravings and those cravings are not you. You’re body’s not saying, “I really want a brownie and I really need a brownie right now.” No. That is the bugs in your gut trying to hi-jack your brain. Luckily we have the ability to overcome those cravings. We can go for a walk, drink some water, do some deep breathing. We can overcome. It takes a few days to let it pass but just sharing what you’re sharing is that the Aloe Vera and the change in the diet helped him gain control over his psychology and then he gave in to those little worms or whatever, those little parasites were starving so they hi-jacked his brain.

We also know that sugar is addictive and we do go through a withdrawal from caffeine and from sugar. So it’s kind of a one-two punch. We’re sort of up against it when we’re looking to make changes like that and cut out sugar. It’s also helpful to know that this craving isn’t what my body actually needs even though my body is telling me it needs it. If you’re cravings foods that are full of sugar and full of chemicals and are highly processed or baked goods or whatever. If we’re craving something from a package or a can, it’s not in our highest interest. When we shift our diet and we start craving kale and carrots and zucchini, we start actually craving our apples, we start craving whole foods, that when we know that the good bacteria is replenishing itself because it’s starting to send signals to the brain., “Hey, give me more of that pineapple. Give me more of that leafy green salad you had the other day. That really fulfilled us. Give me more of that Aloe juice. I really love those polysaccharides in the Aloe juice. I want some more of that to feed us.”

So the good bacteria, the good microbiome can also communicate with us and help our body to feel really high in a good sense on those foods. I have a friend who gets high off of kale smoothies now. Her body just buzzes and she’s like, “It’s like my drug. I get high off of it.” So it’s fun when we shift our diet we could start to get really high off of these whole foods. That’s our bodies saying, “Yes. We’re feeding the good bacteria, everything’s healing. The nutrition is being absorbed and utilized. All the 37.2 trillion cells in the body are being bathed with this green, gorgeous nutrients and all the toxins are being pulled away. Everything is just running on the right path.”

That’s how we want to feel every day. If we’re not waking up in the morning and bouncing out of bed full of energy and full of life and then having good stamina throughout the day and never a dull moment. Never like we’re at 3 PM and we’re kind of like, “I need a coffee,” or “I need a whatever.” If we can just go all day feeling great, having mental clarity and then our body around 9 PM goes, “Okay. It’s time to wind down. All right. I feel like reading a book in bed. This is good.” That’s health right there.

So I just look at the quality of the day-to-day. What’s the body giving me? The day to day quality of how it feels. Instead of medicating, self-medicating with sugar and caffeine and stimulate that little pleasure response temporarily, right? Because those forms of self-medication mean that we’re really masking the body’s language which the body is telling us, “I’m sick. We’re going the wrong direction. You’re not feeding me the nutrient it needs.”

Did your friend’s son ever get back on track? I feel for him.

[1:14:55] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Not something that I followed too much. I know overall and it was a few years ago, overall he’s definitely doing better now so something’s different that I do know.

[1:15:10] Ashley James: I’ve seen that before. I have a friend with autistic twins. He went totally clean diet and then he went to a friend’s house and we watched him jump into a bag of Pringles and proceed to kick holes through the walls. Time and time again, if he eats what he’s allergic too there’s just almost an immediate violent, he just gets very violent. It’s hard though to tell a teenager, “Don’t eat the foods that your friends are eating.”

[1:15:42] Dr. Michael Haley: Or don’t eat the stuff that your friends are eating because it’s really not food.

[1:15:46] Ashley James: It’s not food. It’s not food. Don’t eat the chemical bag filled with crap. Yeah. Exactly.

[1:15:54] Dr. Michael Haley: The GMOs, do people really understand what GMOs are? Do they really understand how many chemicals are in that? The modifications really means round-up ready or pesticide manufacturing? I don’t think people have any clue how many chemicals. Do people realize, I love this, Ashley, what is, don’t answer though, what is the purpose of a preservative? I have asked this question so many times and the answer I always get is to make the food last longer. That is not true. The purpose of the preservative is to kill mold, yeast, fungus, and bacteria.

[1:16:50] Ashley James: Right.

[1:16:53] Dr. Michael Haley: When you eat it does it know to stop killing? When we manufacture products, we add preservatives, we add chemicals to it and we measure the logarithmic reduction of the bacteria so we can measure its killing potential because that’s its purpose. The foods are filled with chemicals that are designed to kill.

Why do they put chlorine in the water? To kill. That’s the purpose of it. We got to wake up and realize what’s really in the food. They give an antibiotics to animals. I’d like the way Jordan Rubin put it. He said – because we don’t take antibiotics. When we get sick we don’t take antibiotics. Do we eat conventional food? You’re eating antibiotics. Jordan Rubin said, “People think that they treat animals with antibiotics. He said they don’t treat them with antibiotics. They give them antibiotics so they can mistreat them.” Let’s just include it in their food to continuously try to kill off these infections. Guess what, that becomes a part of them.

Another thing he said that was wise, when it comes to animal foods he said, “You heard it well said that you are what you eat but I say when it comes to animal foods, you are what they ate.”

[1:18:28] Ashley James: And what drugs they were given.

[1:18:30] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly.

[1:18:32] Ashley James: I did an interview on GMOs with Jeffrey Smith.

[1:18:38] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I love Jeff.

[1:18:40] Ashley James: Yes. I recommend everyone listen and learn more from Jeffrey Smith. He has a course you can take on his website that teaches you how to become a GMO educator. It’s just fascinating. So great episode. It’s 133 of Learn True Health Podcast.

He would talk about how the Bt toxin, what they found is that in this GMOs, one of the GMOs are designed for the Bt toxin to be produced in the plant. But when we eat that plant the Bt toxin then actually the genes of it get into the bacteria. They hi-jack the bacteria in our gut and our bacteria in our gut starts producing the Bt toxin.

[1:19:23] Dr. Michael Haley: AKA the sharp protein because its purpose is to essentially explode the guts of the bacteria.

[1:19:32] Ashley James: Why is it that all of a sudden, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and now small intestinal fungal overgrowth is a thing? I had a doctor on the show who discovered small intestinal fungal overgrowth. He is a very allopathic mainstream doctor. He’s a PhD, he’s a professor, teaches at a teaching hospital. He is well-educated. Just the credentials are coming out of just like they’re a mile long. The thing is he’s now being rejected by the mainstream medical system, the same system that he comes from and he embraces. He’s not a holistic doctor whatsoever. But because he is saying, this is what he’s saying is that small intestinal fungal overgrowth is a thing. He has discovered it and he says it’s a 100% man-made because of the medical procedures we are now doing, because of the amount of antibiotics we’re giving people, because of the standard diet, because of everything basically. But he said 20 years ago this didn’t exist. And now it’s rampant and he’s seeing it everywhere.

I thought that was really interesting that he’s actually trying to make a change in the medical system and the medical system is trying to silence him, which is really interesting. They just don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear that there’s small intestinal fungal overgrowth that’s rampant in patients and that’s totally man-made because the system is broken.

[1:20:59] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, I think I misspoke on something. I think I said that the Bt toxin was exploding the guts of the bacteria. I mean the insects that ate the plant food that has the Bt toxin in it, which you got to think if it can damage those little insects guts what can it do to ours? If it’s exploding theirs, we’re thicker, it might not explode them but it’s got to be jabbing them. Is it possible that that’s why so many inflammatory bowel conditions are existing today? It’s not exploding the bacteria, it’s exploding the insects that eat the Bt toxin, the sharp protein.

[1:21:40] Ashley James: Yeah. Jeffrey talks about a study in Canada where they found that after eating GMO, the Bt toxin GMO plants, the bacteria in the person who ate it then their gut basically started to reproduce Bt toxin. So it hi-jacked the genes, the genes of the GMO hi-jacked the gut biome.

[1:22:05] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I would see it as now having this little tiny daggers that are continuously in you. You have this thick intestinal wall but a bunch of tiny little daggers just kind of jabbing at it, gradually irritating it more and more and more. It’s definitely a problem. That’s what’s happening and you got Bt toxin in your gut not only do you want to be consuming the Bt toxin but if you’re manufacturing it, we got to reprogram that gut flora quick.

[1:22:43] Ashley James: So, for those who are listening who decided to join us and listen to this because they have gut issues to heal. You mentioned IBS, Crohn’s, colitis, GERD. Can you imagine that we’re sitting there with you as your patient or in a lecture, you’re educating us on what we can do. What steps can we take to heal our gut?

[1:23:10] Dr. Michael Haley: Let’s throw a wind with that because we just named a bunch of gut conditions. Let’s throw in all of those skin conditions, auto-immune skin conditions from the psoriasis, eczema or whatever it is because it’s all the same. What actionable steps, acne, what actionable steps can we take to start healing the skin and the gut because we’re looking at that as one organ?

Obviously, number one stop eating the chemicals, the inflammatory foods. Inflammatory foods are one thing and then chemicals are another. Sometimes they are the same food, you’re getting a double whammy. The preservatives, the things that are killing your gut flora. The genetically modified foods. The unfiltered water filled with chlorine. The animal foods that have antibiotics in them or that are fed inflammatory foods. If you’re eating beef and it’s not grass-finished it’s going to be inflammatory. It’s different. It’s a different kind of meat. All the artificial flavors and sweeteners. You see in the ingredients red and yellow and blue number this and that, it’s not real. Partially hydrogenated foods or things that we know have been radiated and killed off. If it’s not food, let’s stir away from those things and get back to the real foods.

Then the other side is when we’re looking at real foods, what are the real foods that are real good for me? Now, we talked earlier about the diet log, the mood log or symptom log the what you eat and how you feel log. This is another one that I got from Dr. Natasha McBride. The skin test, back in the day they didn’t take blood and work from the blood. They would actually maybe scratch your back and then put an antigen on it and then if you got a little bump there we knew you were allergic to it. You can do that at home yourself. Whether or not you choose to scratch yourself, that’s up to you. You’d probably get a better response but you can actually take the foods that you’re eating and put it right on maybe the thin part of your wrist there and make a little paste out of it or whatever and leave it on there for an hour or so. Then wash it off if it leave you a red spot.

If it did, you probably have an allergy to it. It’s probably inflammatory for you. Maybe stay away from that food. Then we start consuming more gut-healing foods that make sense. Bone stock makes sense. Aloe Vera makes sense. Both of those make sense if you don’t have allergies to them. Fermented foods probably makes sense. It’s funny when you think fermented foods people say, “Yeah. I’ll just get a bottle of wine.” Rethink that one unless it’s natural wine, homemade wine. Did you buy raw grape juice and it fermented and it became effervescent by itself? Well, then it’s probably truly probiotic. But if it’s a bottle of wine where they fermented it and then they added sulfites as a preservative to stop that fermentation so they can stop the flavor where it is right there and then, it’s probably not really a live beverage. Maybe try something more simple like sauerkraut, homemade sauerkraut if you can find it or you can have a –

[1:27:19] Ashley James: Make it yourself.

[1:27:21] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. Or if you have a source at a farmers’ market where someone’s making it and it’s not pasteurized, does not have chemical preservatives but it’s actually a live culture. When it comes to dairy, we can get in trouble talking about this because some people think dairy is the devil, but there is different kinds of dairy. You can have cultured whey which is if you ever eat yogurt you don’t finish it all and then you go back the next day and you see that liquid there, that’s the whey where it’s separated. It could be very good, very probiotic and it could be well-fermented where a lot of the things that might cause problems that you have your allergies to are already consumed by the bacteria. Cultured dairy, especially if it’s from the right kind of cows or goat milk, can be very probiotic and very beneficial for some people, not for everybody. But it could work.

So, as we start getting back to our roots eating – I like this one question too. When you’re thinking, “What about this? Should I eat this?” Did that exist 100 years ago?

[1:28:53] Ashley James: Right or 500 years ago. I think they had Coca Cola I don’t know. They had something like that 100 years ago. It did have like cocaine in it so it was a little different.

[1:29:08] Dr. Michael Haley: It was probably better for you.

[1:29:14] Ashley James: That’s really funny.

[1:29:16] Dr. Michael Haley: That’s also a trick question too though. “Well, yeah. This is a hamburger. That existed 100 years ago.” Let’s dig in a little deeper. What did they feed the cows 100 years ago? Where did the cows live 100 years ago? In the fields eating grass. So you might have to dig a little deeper to understand if it really exists at 100 years ago.

How was it processed? Get as close to the real food as possible. Grow your own food for heaven’s sakes. If you really want to understand food, grow your own and start learning. “Oh. Wow. I treat my soil good and make it more nutritious and it becomes this wet, moist, microbiome of its own. I get some really good fruits and vegetables. Isn’t that amazing?”

[1:30:17] Ashley James: There’s a free documentary on YouTube I highly recommend watching that teaches you basically you can turn your backyard into a thriving garden. It’s called Back to Eden Gardening. It’s a man who moved here 30 years ago into Sequim, Washington on the banana belt. So we get a lot of sunshine, a lot of rain. He bought this big property. He basically want to make a homestead and live off a land and never go to a grocery store again. Dug a well and there is so low pressure that he just started crying and he said, “Why God? Why?” He spent his whole life savings to buy this beautiful property. He thought this was it. This is where he was going to live. He is a very religious man and a very spiritual man and he prayed. He got a message from God who said, “Go into the forest and see how the forest can be lush and beautiful after 60 days with no rain.” Because that’s often what happens here in the summer, we get 60 or 90 days with no rain. It’s sunny and hot every day. The forest looks beautiful. It’s pristine.

So he goes into the forest and he looks up and he sees all the trees with all their leaves are doing well and all the bushes are doing well. What’s going on? They didn’t need any water but certainly I need water to water my crops every day. I’m going to need that much and my well won’t provide it for me so what am I going to do? He starts digging in the mulch which is very dry. Two, three, four inches down, down to like nine inches down of mulch, it’s moist. It’s so moist it’s like it just rained.

Then the light bulb went on that he was going to recreate how nature grows in his garden. So there’s no-till. No upturning of the soil, no-till whatsoever which means that he’s not disrupting the microbiome. He uses wood chips, which you can get for free and he teaches you how to do that. So he covered a few acres, if you have a backyard whatever the size of your backyard you could do a 5×5 space, it doesn’t have to be acres. He covers it with inches of wood chips and then manure which he gets from farms nearby. Find some people with horses basically. Then he got some chickens and uses their chicken manure also.

Because he’s trying to mimic nature he planted a bunch of apple trees about 10 – 15 feet away from each other. His squash will actually grow because he plants everything really close together. Relatively you can still walk around little plants. There’s’ no weeds. So the squash will climb up the apple trees and it looks like he has a squash plant. Like butternut squashes are hanging down from the apple tree. He does free tours in the summer and you can come and spend two hours with him on a Saturday or Sunday and eat from his garden. He says he hasn’t been to a grocery store in 12 years. All he eats is what he grows and what he produces on his homestead.

He doesn’t have a computer or internet so I wrote him a letter old school and he called me back. We had a nice like 90-minute conversation. He’s really nice. People are recreating how he does it and how he teaches it. I did it in our backyard with a 50×25 foot pot. I couldn’t believe it. The food we grew, oh my gosh. You get a high off of gardening when you can just- you’re hungry you walk into your backyard, pick a few things, come into the kitchen and I didn’t have to drive anywhere. The food is so mineral-rich. The enzymes are still alive. I mean, eating live food, there’s nothing like it on the planet. You feel so good after eating something that’s live.

I love the advice that you’re giving. That’s really awesome. Now, in terms of healing the gut and the skin conditions, do you have any books you can recommend or resources you recommend? I know you like Jordan Rubin’s The Maker’s Diet and of course Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, her book The GAPS Diet. Are there any resources that you’d recommend beyond that?

[1:34:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Those are two of my favorite resources. Those are probably the two that had the largest impact on me personally. I also love YouTube. I love my friend Chris Wark at chrisbeatcancer.com. Wonderful resource when it comes to healing the gut and strengthening against cancer as well. You mentioned Jeff Smith. He’s got a lot of great content that helps you understand how we got in this problem to begin with. There’s guys like Sean Croxton who focuses on gut health. There’s so many resources. I loved a lot of the work that Ty Bollinger has been doing in – well, Truth About Cancer was a big start that really launched him into that health and healing. Again, he’s always a part of the big health how do we live to maximize our lives? That always involves gut health.

There’s just so many resources. When it comes to the books my favorite are Jordan Rubin’s who really has probably 30 books or more now. They all talk about gut health because that was his big issue. The GAPS diet is one of those things where it’s not the most exciting read but the further you get into the more it makes sense. It just really help shape my understanding. How about yourself? I bet you have a couple as well.

[1:36:48] Ashley James: When it comes to healing the gut, I’m such a believer in eliminating the foods that are harming it. I learned from Dr. Joel Wallach who’s a naturopathic physician. He’s been preaching for almost 20 years now going gluten-free: barley, wheat, rye and oats because oats contain gliadin. He thinks 100% of the population should be without because he says it’s not that it’s an immune issue it’s a mechanical issue. Mechanical you’re not designed to fully break down the proteins so they end up causing damage to the microvilli as they go through. Now some people have an immune component in addition to that and it’s more obvious but he sees that when he gets 100% of people off of barley, wheat, rye and oats that he sees improvement in digestion.

He believes in making sure that we are minerally rich. He thinks that all of our food supplies void of minerals because of the last 100 years of farming practices that have led to depleting the soil. It’s very rare that you can find foods that are grown in minerally rich soil. So he’s a big believer in making sure we’re taking supplements to fill in those gaps. I’ve seen a lot of results from following that. I mean, it’s undeniable the GAPS diet although it’s very strict and hard to follow, the results are undeniable, which is amazing, right?

Now, what about powders and stuff? This day and age people are – now we’re seeing everything’s powdered and packaged and you can buy bone broth powder versus the actual bone broth. I’m imagining someone’s invented Aloe Vera powder out there. What’s the difference? Is it one-to-one? Could you really get the same healing benefits from powdered bone broth versus making it yourself in the Instant Pot or on the stove? The same with Aloe Vera, once it’s powdered. Aren’t there some components removed, some of this components removed when it’s been powdered?

[1:39:18] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, oddly I’m going to give you the answer that you’re probably not expecting.

[1:39:22] Ashley James: I’m ready.

[1:39:23] Dr. Michael Haley: We’ve seen people get amazing results with powdered foods. To me, it’s not the best solution. Real food is real food. Powders are a convenience and sometimes they help us get well because it’s just more convenient and easier. If that’s what’s going to take to get you well, okay. If harvesting your own Aloe Vera and filleting your own leaves isn’t something you’re up for and ordering raw or frozen Aloe Vera is too expensive or you live in a part of the world that you don’t have access to it, well guess what? Powdered Aloe could definitely be a benefit to you. In the same way powdered greens. If you’re not getting your ten servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Is a scoop of powdered greens bad? No. It’s probably going to really help you get a lot of nutrients that you’re missing because you’re not getting ten servings of fruits and vegetables representing all the colors every day.

So these powdered foods can certainly be a lot more convenient and help you get the nutrition that you should be getting from your food.

[1:40:42] Ashley James: I like it. So it’s better than not doing it at all. If someone’s like, “I am too busy.” Or maybe they’re too tired or too sick or maybe they’re just starting off and really instead of juicing their own juices or making their own smoothies, if we could just have them throw some of these dehydrated vegetables and fruits into a blender then just have them drink it, that’s better than nothing. That’s better than not doing it at all. You are seeing good results. That’s good. I like it because you prefer whole foods in their unadulterated state but you’re saying that a powder is an option if it’s the difference is not doing it and doing it.

[1:41:25] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Absolutely. Juicing isn’t a whole food. Juicing has its benefits of being able to get a whole bunch of nutrients in your body quicker and faster which could be beneficial. When you juice your fruits and vegetables, you’re getting rid of the fiber that your gut can use for good health unless you’re not tolerating the fiber at the moment because you have an issue there. You’re also missing the beginning of digestion which is mastication which infuses the nutrients that you’re consuming with the digestive enzyme initiation, that whole process. It’s part of digestion and you’re skipping it because you’re running your fruits and vegetables through a juicer and you’re drinking it.

Now, I still juice. Is it a bad thing? Well, I eat a lot of really good food too and I chew my food 50 times like Jordan Rubin told me. Not always but we try to chew our food better and do things right. A lot of times, if we juice the fruits and vegetables we’ll actually take the pulp and make crackers out of them. So we’re still getting that benefit in an enjoyable way. But remember, the best thing is probably if you can do it a lifestyle that includes eating real food. Most of the time. Most of the time or all the time if possible.

[1:42:57] Ashley James: Let’s get into dosages of your, let’s just assume that everyone’s really excited and they want to try your frozen Aloe gel that’s been unadulterated and it’s the closest thing to them actually just being out in the Aloe field, cracking open an Aloe leaf and sucking out the gel themselves. That’s the closest thing they can get to that freshness. Tell us about the dosages and tell us how to take it because this is like a gel. So what am I, how am I drinking this?

[1:43:28] Dr. Michael Haley: Okay. Hold your nose, tilt your head back. No.

[1:43:34] Ashley James: Like an oyster? Just let it slide down your throat.

[1:43:39] Dr. Michael Haley: I actually can say that with a little humor because the reality is it could be like that for some people that aren’t used to the texture or the taste. Now, our Aloe Vera doesn’t have much taste to it because we’ve done a good job at eliminating the outer leaf. If you have ever made your own Aloe gel and you just got a little dab of that yellow sap on the tip of your tongue, it’s like eating a raw garlic clove and you just taste it on your tongue for the rest of the day. It doesn’t go away.

So that’s how Aloe Vera can be. Ours happens to do a really good job at eliminating more than 99% of that so you can barely taste it but it does have that little bit of a taste. Healthy people generally say, “Oh. This tastes good,” or “doesn’t taste like anything at all.” People that don’t have much concept of what healthy foods are say, “Oh. I could never drink that.” But the easiest way is to just drink it. You don’t have to mix it with anything. Just drink it.

As far as the serving size, I recommend all of our new customers drink a full 8-ounce glass every day for the first week and then look in the mirror. Pay attention and say, “what’s different?” Not everyone notices a difference. Most people seem to actually do notice a difference. It’s like, “Wow. I really really look different. My skin is really doing better. My heels aren’t as cracked and dry. My skin looks better. People are telling me I’m glowing and ask me what I’m doing.” Okay. Something’s changing on the inside then.

For some people, if you’re having real serious problems like bleeding bowel movements, I’m going to probably tell them drink three full glasses a day for a few days. Put the fire out. Front end load. How much can you drink a day? Don’t do that with other brands by the way because if it has the outer leaf in it you’re going to have problems.

How much of our brand can you drink? Ours is this thick, mucousy kind of, you know, it’s right from the plant. It is thick. How much of ours can you drink? When I’m in the Dominican Republic supervising the harvest, I have eight checkpoints. I drink eight ounces at each checkpoint. I’m drinking a half gallon a day. There’s a point of diminishing returns. If you drink twice as much, you’re not getting twice the benefit. But you’re not going to overdose on our brand. If you’re drinking one that has the outer leaf in it, yes you can. Be careful.

So, hope that makes sense and it depends on the problem why you’re drinking. Lower and stabilizing blood sugar levels. You know, have an ounce two or three times a day and measure your blood sugar for the next couple of weeks and see what happens.

[1:46:50] Ashley James: Can I add it to a smoothie or can I water it down? Can I add some lime or lemon juice to it? I mean are there any other ways of taking it?

[1:47:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. But it doesn’t seem to be the most pleasant thing for a lot of people. As you’re adding things to it you’re just increasing the amount of something you don’t like. No. Something like myself, I kind of like it now. I didn’t always like it. So if I juice my carrots and celery and maybe a little apple and lemon or whatever and pour a few ounces of Aloe in it, to me it just adds some texture and thickness. I like it because it makes it for me more satisfying.

[1:47:37] Ashley James: Yeah. I like the flavor. I especially like it with a little bit of lemon or lime. That’s me. I like it cool. Like I like it over ice or something if it isn’t – with yours it’s already frozen then we thaw it. Do we just put it in the fridge and let it thaw there or how long until we can drink it from frozen?

[1:48:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Just leave it out of the refrigerator for about six or seven hours. Give it a shake, pour your glass and then keep it in the refrigerator the rest of the time. I would say up to a couple of weeks in the refrigerator. If you’re not going to consume it within a couple of weeks, as soon as you melt that whole bottle pour some in the smaller containers and refreeze them.

[1:48:21] Ashley James: Got it. Got it. Very cool. There’s no diminishing of the health benefits because it was frozen?

[1:48:31] Dr. Michael Haley: The only thing I’ve ever measured was the acemannan content and we did not see a diminish in that. What we do know is it’s viscous and we know it’s not filtered. So it’s probably way more nutritious than those that have been filtered. Why do they filter? Because they have too much outer leaf and they have to take out the irritant. So how do you do that? You use diatomaceous earth and activated carbon. Stir it into this big slurry and then you push it through a filter and this clear, thin liquid comes out.

The question I have is, “Okay. Does carbon know what the difference is between the good nutrients and the sucker you’re trying to take out? Of course not. So what you’re getting is a diluted product. You’re getting less nutrients. If ours does diminish, I’m certain it’s better than having them filtered, pasteurized and preserved.

The ultimate would be hand-fillet a fresh Aloe leaf. What’s that? What’s a fresh Aloe leaf? It’s not one you buy at the grocery store. By the time you see it in the grocery store, there’s a video on my website actually. On my YouTube channel, rather, that shows that it’s probably already a month old. It gives three reasons why. How I came with that I think is pretty accurate.

A fresh Aloe leaf. Grow your own Aloe plant. Take one off, hand fillet it, run it through a grinder and drink it down. That would be the best. I think the next best option to that is raw frozen Aloe that someone else did that for you. The freezing is really the only way we know how to truly preserve it in its natural form.

[1:50:26] Ashley James: Very cool. Now, you’ve seen people reverse psoriasis and other skin conditions drinking Aloe. Of course making lifestyle changes, we’ve already discussed that. Let’s say they’ve already made the life choices, I know so many people who have these skin problems and the itching and the bleeding and the cracking. They’ve changed their diet but inflammation’s a tricky thing. It’s this domino effect. There needs to be a break state. There needs to be something that comes in because sometimes it can kind of be in a vicious loop. Even things like stress or no sleep can set it off so people might have already made lifestyle and diet changes and then they bring in your Aloe Vera gel. Now they’re speeding up the healing and decreasing inflammation and they start to see results.

They’re drinking it. They’re not applying it on their skin directly or are they doing both?

[1:51:20] Dr. Michael Haley: No. Well, some people would definitely use Aloe Vera externally but it’s so much better if it works from the inside out. Yeah. You got a burn and you want some relief, go ahead put some Aloe on it. You got a cut or a scrape and you want some maybe scar prevention, go ahead put some Aloe on it. But you got a chronic condition, okay if you need a little bit of relief with your eczema or your psoriasis, go ahead put some Aloe on it but heal it from the inside out.

[1:51:55] Ashley James: That’s where it started and that’s what’s having it continue.

[1:52:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Now, with that, there is a time for medicine. I’ll give you an example that most people could probably relate to. If we look at a common skin condition cracked feet, cracked dry feet. Dr. Natasha had always talked about parasites entering through the feet, through cracks in the feet. Once they get in one now you got something else to deal with. A lot of people will have fungus infections, athlete’s foot in these deep cracks. It’s not like you can moisten the feet enough with Aloe Vera, you get a pedicure and file the hard stuff off and keep on treating it. You’re not necessarily getting rid of the fungus infection.

There is a time where you might use a medicated cream or maybe an Aloe with some anti-fungal essential oils.

[1:53:07] Ashley James: Like tea tree oil.

[1:53:09] Dr. Michael Haley: Yes. You might actually medicinally in a sense treat that fungus infection with something natural or medicated. Whatever you choose to do. It’s not always just, there’s not a magic bullet. “Oh. Let me just drink Aloe. Let me just put Aloe on it.”

[1:53:28] Ashley James: Or using as a tool to speed up healing and decrease inflammation. Like the five things you said: helps blood sugar, it’s helping feed the good gut bacteria, I love the fact that it speeds up healing because if we’re doing everything else right then why not just get in a time where Aloe Vera is like a time machine. Let’s just get in the time machine and get some faster results. In order to get those faster results we have to change, we also want to do stuff at the root level: change the diet, change the lifestyle.

I’m actually really excited for my listeners to try your Aloe Vera because this is the best brand that’s the best quality. Like you said, we can grow our own Aloe plants. Not in all climates, maybe indoors. Spend the time growing them and then squeezing, bleeding the stuff out and then squeezing the gel out ourselves, which we wouldn’t be drinking the amounts that are going to be part of a healing routine. That just needs really cumbersome. So getting your Aloe seems like absolutely the best way to go and I’m really looking forward to hearing from my listeners how implementing your Aloe has helped them.

Now, you’re giving us a special bonus. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and with their order they’re going to get your Aloe cream as well which sounds wonderful. That’s made with your special Aloe gel right?

[1:55:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Yes. Absolutely. In fact, 70% of what is in the tube is our Aloe Vera. I didn’t tell you. We’re doing this with a sunscreen that’s coming out soon. It’s going to be a natural formula. I did not know this that pretty much all of your sun protections are mostly water. Ours is going to be zero water. Everywhere water would go we’re putting Aloe.

[1:55:33] Ashley James: That is so cool. The fact that it’s an all-natural. Right now we’re getting into the season where people are flying down south for winter break or spring break. So even though it’s winter up here, so people aren’t necessarily thinking about wearing sunscreen on a day-to-day basis. Many people go down to a tropical area, more sunny area over the holidays. We can all buy your sunscreen especially for when springtime comes. I am very picky when it comes to sunscreen because of how much heavy metals and chemicals and cancer-causing chemicals and also environmentally. There’s some sunscreens that harm the environment as well and kill the coral reef which was just a shock to hear about.

So you have an all-natural sunscreen coming out that is healthy for the body, healthy for the environment and contains Aloe instead of water so it’s medicinal sunscreen. I’m very excited about that.

Now you’re giving our listeners a 10% off coupon. That’s coupon code: LTH. That’s for all of your wonderful products. Your flagship is the Aloe gel that we drink but you have these other products. Tell us a bit about the other products so we know. I know you have some CBD. Tell us about your other Aloe products.

[1:57:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, the Aloe products pretty much two skin formula right now until we have the sunscreen as well. The one is the Youth-Derm Aloe Cream which is your plain formula which I recommend for most of our customers. It’s actually the better value. You get a lot more for less money. What’s the other one and why is it so much more expensive for half the amount? It’s more of an anti-aging product with things that I’ll call synergistic ultra-healing ingredients. So we call it the Ultra Healing Youth-Derm Aloe Cream. What do I mean synergistic ultra-healing ingredients? Things like tremella mushroom and shea butter and lavender essential oil and manuka honey with bee venom and propolis. It’s the exquisite formula that people are using for anti-aging.

For our customers, if you are someone with a gut problem and maybe have more sensitivities, go with the plain formula. Keep it simple. You want less things. Even though it’s filled with natural things like the lavender essential oil is organic. Well, that’s just one more thing that you might be sensitive to. So I always want our gut people to know keep it simple on everything. Those are our two main skin formulas.

We have other things. The CBD oil we’re not manufacturing. Again, there’s thousands of brands but only a few really good manufacturers. What we have found in our research is that most of these products don’t work. That bothered me. In fact I was completely down on the industry until I found out the why to that and found out about the differences based on laboratory testing. Even now, if you’ve been watching the news you realize that lots of the CBD products out there not only don’t have the amounts of CBD in them that’s contained on the label but some don’t have any at all.

I actually went and visited the factory in Colorado and got the tour, saw this massive bales coming in which just blew me away. Incredible experience. A robot and the – it was just neat. Well, the final products were very different color, much darker than things I have seen in the past which okay, that color is nutrients, aroma is nutrients. It’s part of a plant. I gave some to my wife. Actually, a sample at the factory. Gave it to my wife and by that night she was saying that her sciatica pain was gone that she has struggled with for so long. I said, “No way,” because I’m still skeptical. There’s no way because everything we’ve tried in the past didn’t do anything. There’s no way or maybe we really landed on something here.

Well, we had them made one that was twice as potent as the one that she had taken at the factory. The results we’ve been getting have been freaky. So how come we were getting no results with trying all these different brands? I understand. I get it. These other ones were very weak. There was not much CBD in them that’s why they didn’t taste like anything, didn’t smell like anything. Here we’re actually getting results. People sleeping better.

I actually injured my shoulder and after two weeks I was screaming. I remember leaving the office one day. I said, my exact words which this is not like me to say something like this. I said, “I’m going home before I shoot myself.” For some reason I thought about it, “wait a second.” I took a dropper-full of the CBD and then I squirt some on my hand from the same bottle and rubbed it on my shoulder. I woke up that night after sleeping for about five hours straight, which was a record in a couple of weeks, I woke up sleeping on the shoulder that hurts so much. I could not have done that. I was struggling to get a comfortable position for two weeks and I woke up and I thought, “Wow. I barely feel it.”

Of course that next day when I went to work, I had another dropper-full because I still only had a tiny tiny bit of pain, never had it again. So this is doing something. The difference is in the quality of the manufacturing what’s really in it and what the lab reports are showing is really in it. CBD works. If you’re trying one and it’s not working, you just don’t have the right product or it’s not the solution to your problem. But we are seeing some amazing results.

[2:02:23] Ashley James: It really is you get what you pay for. Buying CBD at the drugstore because it’s now just everywhere. It’s good and bad, right? People say, “Well, why isn’t the supplement industry regulated?” You don’t want it regulated because then the pharmaceutical companies would take over. It is the Wild West, it is buyer beware but that’s really to our advantage if we are smart about it. So we have to hunt for the companies that produce quality and sounds like you found one.

[2:02:56] Dr. Michael Haley: If you’re getting CBD 1000, 1500 or more mg per bottle, understand the difference per bottle. If you got a bottle that says 200 mg you might get confused because you might buy a bottle of ibuprofen that says 200 mg. Guess what, ibuprofen that’s 200 mg per capsule. CBD it’s 200 mg per bottle. “Oh. How many servings are in there?” Well, 30 droppers full and a serving is a whole dropper full. 200 divided by 30 servings, that’s what you’re getting each serving size. Or your issue, okay one option is take five servings at a time then. So you get the serving size that you would if it was a 1000 mg bottle.

[2:03:52] Ashley James: So one problem is the concentration but also the quality because of how the plant I mean it depends on the strain. It depends on how it was grown. Was it indoor? Was it outdoor? Do they use chemicals or natural fertilizer? Was it grown in hydroponics or in soil? All of that plays a role in the medicinal qualities.

[2:04:16] Dr. Michael Haley: How did you take out the THC to make it legal and what else did you take out with it when you did that process?

[2:04:23] Ashley James: Or whether it was hemp or cannabis? Is it whole plant extract like you said? Yeah. There’s so many variation that goes into the quality of the medicine. The more process the more likely we are going to remove things that are medicinal. It’s just the beginning. It’s the Wild West. We’re just at the beginning. It’s very very exciting. It should never have been illegal in the first place. This medicine. It’s all political. So it’s very cool that now hemp is coming back because we can use it for building supplies, food, textiles. It’s so good for the environment and it’s so good for our bodies. I love hemp hearts. I eat them weekly. I cook with them and eat them over salads and smoothies.

[2:05:21] Dr. Michael Haley: They’re delicious.

[2:05:22] Ashley James: Yeah. Full of omegas. So good. I have episodes, we have several episodes just on the endocannabinoid system of the body and understanding that there are receptors in the body for CBD that our body actually makes it. When we’re deficient and healthy fats our body can’t make it enough of it. That’s why people such good benefits from taking it externally because it’s a nutrient the body is deficient in and that blew my mind. Yeah. It’s wonderful. I’m really glad that you found a quality source of CBD.

So you sell the tinctures, you sell any creams or salves? How does that work?

[2:06:01] Dr. Michael Haley: No. we just have the ingestible in the dropper. Why? Well, my experience I realized that we don’t have to make it in a wonderful cream because you can use it topically or ingest it. You know what I mean? It’s the same thing either way. What is it when we make it a topical? Well we use the same stuff and we just mix it with other things which really dilutes it.

[2:06:26] Ashley James: No need to.

[2:06:27] Dr. Michael Haley: To me it’s pointless. If you want to use it topically just use it topically.

[2:06:32] Ashley James: Right and we could take your Aloe Vera cream which is 70% Aloe Vera gel and mix it in with the CBD and rub it somewhere if we wanted to or just ingest it. Very cool. I love it. Is there anything else we should know about the products that you sell or about being a customer? The experience being a customer with you that we should know about.

[2:06:53] Dr. Michael Haley: I am available to answer questions. We have a wonderful staff that answers most questions. When it gets in the medical questions they put it through to me. You’re listeners, you have access to get your medical questions answered. What products you should use and how much and things like that. Feel free to call.

[2:07:18] Ashley James: Awesome. Awesome. The listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe to get the special gift that you’re giving Learn True Health listeners. Thank you so much for that. Use the coupon code: LTH for 10% off for your first purchase. I greatly appreciate your generosity today both of your time and also the discount and the free gift that you’re giving us. Dr. Haley, is there anything else that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[2:07:43] Dr. Michael Haley: I want to thank you for all that you are doing because your listeners are getting a wealth of information. I can’t believe who you have interviewed in the past and how much quality content is there on your channel. So thank you for everything that you are doing.

[2:08:01] Outro: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview as much as I did. Go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. He’s giving us a free cream that is very healing as well as his particular juice. Use the coupon code: LTH for an additional discount for the Learn True Health listeners. So go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use the coupon code LTH.

Thank you so much for being a wonderful listener. Be sure to join the Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have over 3500 excellent, wonderful, amazing Learn True Health followers, true health seekers. Together we create a beautiful community that is very supportive and loving. So coming into 2020, launching your health to a whole new level. If you want a wonderfully supportive community, come join us. Learn True Health on Facebook. Join the group and ask questions and join the discussion. I’d love to see you there. Have a fantastic rest of your day.

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Healing Through Prayers

https://www.learntruehealth.com/healing-through-prayers

Highlights:

Power of prayer
Prayer are stepping stones to recovering health
Building relationship through prayer
Let go of fear through faith, belief, and prayer.
As you build your relationship with God through prayer, you start receiving more and more good things
Prayers help people to have more positive outlook
One-on-one connection with God
Reticular activating system
You feel more joy from giving than that person will ever get from receiving
Learn from the returns
God’s answer is yes, no, or later
Looking at all aspects of your life and bring it all into balance
Life in a few years can be so brilliant, so amazing that you wouldn’t want to give it up for anything
Write down who you want to pray for, what you’d like for yourself, and also something to give, if you have something to give praise about
You should surround yourself and try to serve and reach as many people as you can whatever you are

In today’s episode, Emily will share with us the value of prayer and how it helps us recover our health and how it builds a deeper connection with God, ourselves and other people.

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 400.

I am so excited to have back on the show Emily Becker. She was here in Episode 340 sharing about how she reversed her alopecia. She basically went — her entire body went bald. And she restored herself with natural medicine and she helps families and men and women and children who have this condition. She helps them to reverse it naturally as well. So if you have alopecia, if you have hair loss, or if you know anyone who does, listen to Episode 340 and share it with them. And let them know but Emily Becker because she is definitely living proof. You should see pictures. Emily, your hair is gorgeous. And I’ve been Facebook friends with you since your alopecia days when you didn’t have any hair. And then you started to grow the hair. A little peach fuzz at first and now I think your hair is as long as mine. I mean it’s just like it’s going to be so long people are going to be climbing it. That was a Disney movie with no hair.

[00:01:20] Emily Becker: Rapunzel.

[00:01:21] Ashley James: You’re going to be Rapunzel soon. Your hair is so luscious and long. And so it was great having you on the show in Episode 340. And I’m glad you could come back to share what’s happened since. When you came on the show, you shared what your story and what you did to naturally reverse your alopecia, both diet and supplements and topical things. And since then you were just starting your business which is at home. You have formulated the most amazing organic and 100 percent natural herbal creams and salves and remedies for all kinds of skin and hair conditions. And your businesses just taken off and you do it all from home. When the kids go to bed, you’re a busy stay at home mom.

I’ve been loving watching you flourish. And watching all your customers report back to you on Facebook just how much your pain cream with the CBD in it has helped them. Or you know, your face creams. And I love your face cream. It’s so luxurious. So I could go on and on about how wonderful your own natural products are. And I love that you show pictures on Facebook of the process of you making things so we see the ingredients and see how you do it. And we know absolutely 100 percent of the ingredients that are going in so there’s no chemicals or pesticides or anything like that in your home remedy cosmetics. It’s wonderful.

So welcome back to the show.

[00:02:56] Emily Becker: Thank you, Ashley. I’m so happy to be here. I had so much fun last time we did this together. I’ve been wanting to ask you to come back on the show for so long and I’m grateful that you’re willing to do this in such a short notice with me.

[00:03:14] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. This week you’re like, “Can I come back on the show?” I’m like, “Yeah. What you doing this weekend?” It’s like Saturday afternoon – about to be afternoon right now and here we are hanging out.

[00:03:25] Emily Becker: Well, I was feeling inspired to thank your supporters and all your listeners for all of their support for me. I get emails and I mean, they order from me as well. But I get a lot of emails saying that, you know, they need help with their alopecia. Or that they connected with me through face and then we’ll pray together through email and spend some time together like that. And I just wanted to thank them so much for their support.

[00:03:57] Ashley James: Wonderful. Well, I love the community. The Learn True Health community is filled with really loving and caring people who want to get their health back and want to help their friends and family do the same. And so I love that you have found that to be the case as well that my listeners have reached out to you because of their alopecia or other skin issues. That they’ve also connected with you on a level of faith.

I know something that’s really made a big difference to you and to your healing and to your success is utilizing the power of prayer.

[00:04:33] Emily Becker: Absolutely.

[00:04:35] Ashley James: What does that mean? What does it mean to have the power of prayer help you? How has prayer helped you specifically? Because I know you were telling me before we hit record that prayer has been something that has absolutely made a difference in your life. And for those who have not really ever prayed or maybe not to spiritual or religious, they might scoff at it. That, you know, it’s just you’re just basically talking to some Sky Daddy. Like that’s how some people feel, right? So some people, “I’ve never connected with prayer.” And then there’s other people I’ve met who say prayer has been life changing for them. That they absolutely feel that it is one of the biggest reasons why they have gotten their health back, or become successful, or been able to attain the goals that they intend to obtain.

Can you give us – share us the story of what happened in your life that had you see that prayer made a big difference to you?

[00:05:38] Emily Becker: Well, prayer has made a big difference to me from the beginning of my health recovery. I wasn’t a believer as a young child or in my teens or anything. I didn’t – I always knew that there was a God but I didn’t have a relationship with Him or anything like that. And it was when I started to pray without trusting Jesus or anything like that that I started asking God to lead me to health. I stopped fearing my health conditions. I stopped fearing how I looked in the mirror and how my health was affecting me. I started asking for help and guidance through prayer. Within a month of the first time I ever prayed, I was on my way. I didn’t really see it happening when it was happening. But looking back, as I prayed, all of my prayers were answered. It was like stepping stones to recovering my health. I used to have a lot of fear in my heart and in my life. I had anxiety and I was living in fear. And as I would pray, the fear, all that, would be lifted from me momentarily as I prayed for a day or two. And then, eventually, I saw that I personally needed this holy help. I needed Jesus. This is my personal story. This is how I feel that I needed Him to help me with my burdens. I needed to give Him the weight that’s on my shoulders. And that I couldn’t do it alone. And I needed guidance. So I started trusting in Jesus. And then after that, it’s just been building this relationship through prayer. Where instead of feeling like I’m alone and praying for all the bad things to go away, I prayed for help and love and guidance.

And as I did that, I started receiving blessings, gifts. I started meeting people who could help me. I started believing that I could get better. I started believing that everything was going to be okay. And as my faith and my belief and my prayer life grew stronger and stronger, the more I was able to let go my fear.

I actually took – Ashley, I took your anxiety course, how to release your anxiety. And I got to tell you, I never finished. I’ve done the first 15 days three times. And it’s really similar to prayer because when – I love it. I love it. Because once you start talking about stuff that I’m familiar with, I’m like, “I got to get this other stuff ingrained in my head.” Once you set your eyes on what your heart really wants, God is listening. He wants good things for all of us. And that was how I started to believe in the power of prayer. And the things that I personally that have healed or come to me through prayer have been meeting the doctor who could help me with my hair loss. I prayed for that. And I also prayed – there’s other things that I’ll pray for and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe I did that. Now look at this.”

[00:09:19] Ashley James: What do you mean? What specifically?

[00:09:21] Emily Becker: So I’ll pray in simple little areas of my life. Like, “I like to eat more whole foods and eat healthier. And then all of a sudden, my kids get – you know, they’re sick and I know I need to cut out the processed foods or they’re going to just going to get sicker and sicker. So it’s like, “Okay. Well, I don’t want to change my whole lifestyle but it looks like we’re going to have to. Thanks, God.” All right. So it’s not always the answer you want but he’s always there trying to give you good things. So as you build your relationship with God through prayer, you start receiving more and more good things. And then I couldn’t keep that to myself. I started praying over my orders. I started praying over my friends, my neighbors. And by praying for my friends and my neighbors, I’m able to see that, one, it’s rewarding to share that love with Jesus through prayer. Whether they know it or not, it’s really rewarding to love someone enough that you would pray for them.

I really appreciate the breath work before this interview. I am.

[00:10:42] Ashley James: It was hilarious. I shared with Emily the breath work interview I did recently. I said, “You have to listen to this.” And she wrote back a few hours later, “I just listened to the world’s longest interview on breath work.” It was like a two hour long interview on breathing. It’s breathing. We all do it. But I mean, it was amazing. And so before we hit record, I’m like, “Let’s do some deep breathing together. Let’s just, you know, get Emily a bit calm.” Because she doesn’t normally jump on podcasts.

[00:11:13] Emily Becker: No.

[00:11:12] Ashley James: And so let’s get grounded. But you shared something really interesting, just as an offshoot, I want to make sure we covered this. You told me what you do to get your kids to get sleepy and wind them down before bed that you used breathing. Can you share how you do that to get your family to calm down for bedtime?

[00:11:34] Emily Becker: Yeah. Well, yeah, when I was listening to the podcast about breath work, I was like, “Oh, I already do this with my kids.” And what happens is everybody’s excited and they won’t even listen to a story. They won’t settle down for a good book. And what I’ll do is I won’t say anything. I’ll just start breathing nice and slow and deep. And after a few breaths, you’ll start to see – just like how yawning, it’s contagious. You’ll start to see their breathing slow down. Some of them will start to yawn. And then they all start to relax. And I’ve been doing that for a while now. If I haven’t on and off, probably, since my first baby. But a lot recently with my three year old just to help her relax and get ready for bed. I’d spend – so helpful.

[00:12:32] Ashley James: So you don’t sing to her. Like, “It’s bedtime. Okay. Wind it down. Stop playing with toys.” You’re not saying anything. You just are sitting near her as she’s playing. And you start to slow your breath and take deep slow breaths. And then because she has rapport with you at an unconscious level, she starts – her body starts to copy what you’re doing and she also starts to breathe slow and deep. And then that calms her down and then she’s able to sit with you and read some books before bed.

[00:13:03] Emily Becker: And focus and relax.

[00:13:06] Ashley James: Yeah. I love that you pointed that out. Right. It’s so great because that’s actually something I learned when I studied neuro-linguistic programming is this idea of rapport that when we work with our clients, we want to gain rapport with them and watch their breathing. And first, we match them how fast they’re talking, the kind of tonality they’re using, even the words they’re using, how they’re sitting, their body language, and how they’re breathing. And so it’s this idea of –

[00:13:34] Emily Becker: I don’t want to do that with my daughter. I don’t want to get that excited.

[00:13:37] Ashley James: No, no. You don’t – right. Right. You wouldn’t do that with her. But she has a rapport with you. But for clients who you don’t necessarily have rapport with yet, we would do that to put them at ease. And then what happens is once they’ve gained rapport with us, then we slow down our breathing, and then they slow down their breathing. And I learned this trick for children. As a NLP practitioner, if I’m working with children who have ADD or ADHD, that having them match my breath at an unconscious level by slowing down my breathe actually helps their neurology to slow down and calm down. It gives their body unconscious permission to slow down. So I love that idea that we can just take slower deep breaths to tell the people around us that it’s safe and okay to slow down and calm down. That we don’t need to be in fight or flight. And that it’s time for bed.

[00:14:41] Emily Becker: Yeah. It also helps me personally quiet my inner voice. Because I’m an introvert, but my mind is constantly going. And when I start taking my deep breaths, I can relax and think clearly. And then I do that also be for prayer. I don’t do the 20 minutes breath work yet. But maybe I will, maybe, for prayer. Because it’s it really is something that helps, just as we said, helps in layman’s terms for me, seeing clearly and to slow down.

[00:15:18] Ashley James: So you had mentioned that you pray over the orders that your customers have placed before you mail them out. Have you received any feedback since you started doing that? Like, I mean, I know it’s anecdotal. Did you notice any difference between before doing that and after you started praying for your clients?

[00:15:43] Emily Becker: Since I’ve been doing this what I’ve noticed is that people come back with a new energy in their emails, a new level of faith, or they’re just excited about it. Something I didn’t notice from other people. People will say, “Oh, this is great. This is great. This is great.” The products are, right? But after starting the prayers, what I noticed is that people have more positive outlook on what’s going on. I haven’t seen any miracles. I can’t – as far as that goes.

I did send a very, very, very wonderful woman who was going through breast cancer one lotion. And she wasn’t allowed to have any preservatives or anything like that inside. It had to be just raw ingredients. And she really needed a hand cream because when you’re going through cancer and chemo, the chemo medicine dries out your skin. So I sent her a big jug of lotion to put in her fridge. Well, they did the surgery. It was all successful afterwards. And the way she lights up about how amazing that simple gift has been really rewarding. I wish I could share her passion and her excitement and love about what she received.

It’s really a one on one connection. And for me, it’s a three way here. Because I’m not doing this on my own. I’m doing this with God, the Father. And I’m trusting everything in him. As I do this, we talked earlier before this interview about studies and results. You can’t measure divine intervention. You can only have faith in what the results are. Because good things happen without divine intervention anyways. God wants good things for us. And then sometimes it’s his hands are placing people in your life. His hands are that positive voice saying, you know like, “You can do this today.” I didn’t think I would share with anyone that I prayed over the orders. Because I don’t do it every time there’s been a few slips where I’m like, “Oh, I forgot to pray over that order.”

[00:18:16] Ashley James: But you could backdate that prayer.

[00:18:20] Emily Becker: I have.

[00:18:21] Ashley James: It’s never too late.

[00:18:22] Emily Becker: I’ll be like, “Oh, God. Please forgive me. I can’t even remember her last name but she’s an Oklahoman. Please, Lord, let this order that she receives not just be good for her but a blessing to her.” And suddenly that has changed the feedback that I have gotten. So it hasn’t just been, “Oh, these are amazing products.” But, “Wow.” Maybe while we’re talking here, I can pull something up. I don’t want to mention anyone’s names because this is very personal information, which is why I’m hesitant to share. But I also want to give praise to God. I was a late in life Born Again Christian. So I am not well versed in the Bible. I am well versed in my faith and how He’s brought me to where I am. I know, I can look back and be like, “Wow. He really protected me there.”

[00:19:23] Ashley James: You had mentioned that and I just remembered something that happened when I was a kid. So I have to share it. I was maybe about – I don’t know – eight or nine. And I grew up in Canada, in Ontario. And we were up in Muskoka. And it was probably February. I mean, it was cold. There was tons of ice, tons of snow. And I was hiking in the woods with my friend, Jane. We were really close to the lake up on a cliff. And I didn’t realize how close we were to the cliff until I lost my footing and I began to slide backwards.

And something that I guess I just picked up from all the other kids is always saying, “Oh, my God. You know, like, “Oh, my God. Like, Oh, my God.” Right? Because I was like this little – you know, I mean this little, like, nine year old probably thinking she’s like 13, right? I’m like, “Oh, my God.” And so I slipped. And I began to fall backwards and I’m sliding down this cliff. And it drops off. And there’s a few stories. I mean, it’s very, very high on to basically jagged rocks, open water, and ice. And it would have been death. It would have been instant. If I wouldn’t have died from hitting the rocks. It would have been drowning in ice water, right? It was not – I mean, there’s no way in which I would have survived that. And I yelled out, “Oh, my God.” Because I was very afraid. And that was just sort of this instant reaction. But what happened next really surprised me. All of a sudden there was a branch sticking out of the rock. And it was sort of like those cartoons where there’s like a one branch tree in the middle of a cliff with no roots. And you’re like, “How’d that get there?” And it and it caught my back. And I remember looking over my shoulder, like looking down at the rocks, and the ice, and the water. And being like – and I grew up in this area. Swimming in this area in the summertime. I never ever, ever saw this tree before – this branch. It was just like a branch sticking out.

The first thing I realized is I called out God’s name. And I was immediately caught. And that was like – this is like a nine year old going, “Oh, my gosh.” And it hit me and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” He saved me. And I was just there being held by this branch. And my friend, Jane, was like, “Hold on. I got to go get a rope.” And she ran back and got a rope and came back and I was held the whole time. And she got me out. And then I looked and that’s when she when she pulled down and looked down and I realized that, “I don’t think that was there before.” I mean, you know, maybe it was. But that was really like a very odd place for a one branch tree to grow on a side of a cliff and to be able to hold my weight and just everything. Everything, like, I could have – if I was one foot to the left or one foot to the right, I would have been gone. And so that was my first experience of hit sort of His hand and his guidance.

[00:22:39] Emily Becker: Well, literally, that’s amazing.

[00:22:41] Ashley James: Right. And you just reminded me of that. That sometimes in life, there’s just these events that you go, there is something more here than – I don’t know – we’re dead and there’s nothing. Like, there’s something more to this. And I wasn’t sure – I think I believed conceptually, like, maybe theoretically that there was a soul. But when my mom died, I actually had an experience of her soul moving through me. I held her hand as she died. And it was about 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning. All the lights were pretty much off. It was in a hospital room. And it was just a light glow of like beeping things. She took her last breath. And even the doctor lent me their stethoscope so I could – just her heart had slowed over the course of the day because she had gone into a coma. And she had stopped moving her body, had stopped – like, she was stopped responding basically to us talking to her. So we were holding her hand and rubbing her feet and hugging her and everything the whole day. But she was gone. She was in a coma. And as she died, so she died, her heart stopped, she stopped breathing. She squeezed my hand. And it was only the hand – it wasn’t like both hands squeeze, it wasn’t some kind of involuntary. She grabbed – I was holding one of her hands, she squeezed it, pulled it to her heart. And then I felt an intense energy move through me and it was the color yellow. Like if you felt the color yellow. And that was one of my mom’s favorite colors. And the entire room lit up yellow. Her soul was letting me know it was okay and saying goodbye.

[00:24:30] Emily Becker: That’s incredible.

[00:24:32] Ashley James: That was like another big experience of mine to know that there’s more here. So I’m sharing this because sometimes we disregard these amazing experiences. Because I think in the mainstream media, I don’t know if they’re pushing like an atheist agenda. I don’t know what. And I’m not trying to push any religion on anyone. But I want to share, don’t discredit things that happen and just push them to the side. Listen to these amazing miracles that could happen in your life or in other people’s lives. And let that fuel you. Because I’ve heard people have incredible experiences through the power of prayer. Even people who are not religious have used prayer. And through that have found a closer connection to their Creator.

[00:25:28] Emily Becker: Oh, absolutely.

[00:25:31] Ashley James: Health is physical. And I have a lot of doctors on the show. And a lot of times we talk about, you know, using food as medicine or supplements. So health is physical. But there’s also the spiritual aspects that we see that if someone has great physical health but has absolutely no spiritual health, that they can have a level of emptiness in their life. Sort of like a sickness on an energetic level. And a lot of times when people get really sick, they look to prayer and look to God and that –

[00:25:58] Emily Becker: Then be more positive on their outlook and they change their mindset too. They pray.

[00:26:04] Ashley James: Yes. Because there is a mind body connection. There is a kind of direct connection between the emotional body and the physical health. If we’re sick emotionally or sick mentally, we can also feel those effects physically. And same with our energetic and our spiritual body. So we want to look to heal and balance all aspects of life.

So I like to leave no stone unturned. And that’s why I wanted – when you said you wanted to come on and share about your experiences with the power of prayer and how much prayer has helped you in your life. I wanted to, first of all, hear your experiences. And have the listeners hear them because maybe even if one listener can gain some huge benefit from learning from you, then it’ll all be worth it. But I know that when we align our thoughts with what we want versus what we don’t want.

If we’re going to look at neuroscience, there’s a part of our brain it’s in the brainstem called the reticular activating system. And it helps us to seek out what we want. But when we focus on what we don’t want, so if you’re constantly thinking about an illness you have, your particular activating system is going to keep filtering out your experiences to only remind you of all the illness you have. And will actually delete any evidence that you might be getting better. So the reticular activating system just helps you focus on what you’re focusing on. We have this part of our brain because if we’re foraging in the woods, let’s say for a type of berry. A green berry in a green woods and it’s really hard to see. Well, the reticular activating system helps us to identify it and seek it out. So the same goes with our attitude and our focus in life.

So if you’re praying about what you want to have, blessings in your life for yourself or for others, you’re actually telling your brain, your reticular activating system, to seek out and help you on the conscious level help you see the evidence and work towards achieving it.

[00:28:22] Emily Becker: I did a recent Facebook challenge with my friends on my personal page that helped people do exactly what you just said. I told them that – I gave them a little background. I said, “Sometimes I would sit and wonder if my decisions please God.” But that is assuming that God is limited. So now, instead, I wonder how God can bless my choices. So I told them to try, that their next hurdle, their next crossroad, the moment of uncertainty. And this can go for health, you know, something wrong with your health and you’d like to see better. I told him to pray for what that what you choose to do about it to me a blessed choice. And in that, you also want to have the good outcome. You don’t want to sit there and pray about what bad could happen. Anyone, right? About what good do you would like to happen?

And then when that alone has brought me blessings and prayers. And that’s true even with my marriage. You’re like, “Oh, I want to be more involved with my family.” Or, “Eat more wholesome foods.” Or, “I really want to reconnect with my sister again.” All these little things. As soon as you start praying for them, as soon as you start thinking about them, as soon as it’s close to your heart, everything changes for what you want.

[00:29:50] Ashley James: Yes. What you’re bringing up is something that I talked about in my course, the Free Your Anxiety course.

[00:29:56] Emily Becker: I love that course.

[00:29:57] Ashley James: My Free Anxiety course which is available on the website, learntruehealth.com in the menu section there. But you’ve done – it’s funny. You’ve done day one through 15 a few times. You got to finish the course. It’s like the ending is good too.

[00:30:11] Emily Becker: Okay. [Inaudible] [00:30:12] stuff that I’m familiar with. And I want to have the positive rewiring [inaudible] [00:30:18].

[00:30:21] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you’re doing it repeatedly. That’s actually really great to wire it in the stuff that you’re learning. But one thing I talk about is focusing on what you want versus what you don’t want. And what you’re saying is when you pray – I think this is really important – that you catch your language instead of saying like, “Dear God. Please don’t allow my husband to get in a car crash today. And please don’t let my kids fail at school.” I mean, I know I’m being like kind of over exaggerating. But we do this where we focus on what we don’t want to have happen. And that is creating the stress response in the body. And that’s not actually helping us focus on what we do want to have happen or we do want to create in our life. And so we have to catch our language. When we say what we don’t want to have happen, we have to catch our language and go, “Oh, okay. I’m not actually saying what I want. I’m just saying a bunch of what I don’t want. So what do I want?” And then say that. So my example is – when I first learned this lesson – every year I slipped on ice and fell and bruised my tailbone. And this is up in Canada. And I learned this lesson about focusing on what we do want to have happen in our internal dialogue. And I caught myself, it’s around February, we just had an ice rain. I was walking to my car and everything was icy. And I started to feel my feet slip. And I just knew the next step would be, like, a bruised bum. And I caught myself and I heard my inner dialogue say, “I don’t want to slip. I don’t want to slip. I don’t want to slip.” And I’m like, “Oh my, gosh. I’m doing it.” I’m focusing on what I don’t want to have happen.

And we do it so naturally because I think it’s part of our – I don’t know if it’s just part of our culture. Or maybe it’s a bit of, I think, the pessimists are the ones that survived. All the optimists kind of ran into bears in the woods and they didn’t procreate. So all of our ancestors were basically pessimists. So we kind of got the pessimists gene down path. Because the pessimists were like, “Well, there’s probably a bear over there. So I’m not going to go over there.” So they’re looking out for the negative things and avoided them long enough to procreate and pass down the genes. So we were taught that it’s safe to be a pessimist because you if you think about a lot of bad things that could go wrong, then you could avoid them. But the problem with that is, when we think about what we don’t want to have happen, we’re constantly triggering the stress response in the body. But we’re also telling the reticular activating system in the brain to focus on what we don’t want to have happen instead of what we do want to have happen. And so when good things actually do happen, sometimes our brain can’t even see it or perceive it, or take up that opportunity.

And so in that moment, when I was catching myself slipping on the ice, I went, “Well, what’s the opposite of I don’t want to slip.” And that was a really hard one because I was so used to thinking about what I don’t want to have happen. And then I had to go, “Okay. Well, I want to say, walk safely. Okay.” So I told myself, “I want to walk safely.” I imagined myself walking safely to my car. I imagine like there’s little bear claws coming out of my boots and allowing me to walk safely. And then I did. And I didn’t slip. And I have not slipped — knock on wood. I haven’t slept since. And that was, like, 19 years ago.

So to give you that idea that we can catch ourselves in prayer and also out of prayer. When we’re focusing on what we don’t want to have happen by stating the negative. Like, “I don’t want this to happen.” We have to catch ourselves and say, “Well, what do I want to have happen?” And focus on that instead. Because the reticular activating system will delete, distort, and generalize the information coming to us. So through our eyes, and our ears, through all of our senses, will delete, distort, and generalize before it reaches our consciousness. And so our reality is dependent on what we focus on. You and I, Emily, could go to a movie. And we could both walk out with totally different opinions about that movie with the same movie. But you and I saw different things and experienced different things because our unconscious mind deletes the source and generalized filters the information before we get to experience it consciously. So we have to catch ourselves and the languaging.

I’ll give you one example before – as I have a question for you. So I know that you and I have the same doctor mentor. This doctor, we talked about him and Episode 340. This doctor who helped me nine years ago reverse my type 2 diabetes, my chronic adrenal fatigue, my chronic infertility, and my polycystic ovarian syndrome. He helped me reverse those with diet and supplements. And I had an opportunity to actually learn from him about a-year-and-a-half before I did. But this is a perfect example because I was listening to a podcast or some kind of radio show or some kind of alternative media and he was being interviewed. And my reticular activating system at a time, I was focusing on, “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough money. I’m broke. I can’t have money.” I was focusing –

[00:36:05] Emily Becker: Absolutely. I had the same thing happen.

[00:36:10] Ashley James: I was focusing on not having enough money. And so when I heard the interview, my thought was, “That sounds really interesting, but I don’t have enough money.” And so I did not pursue any of his information because it just sound – I was, in my mind, it was like a brick wall. “Well, I don’t have enough money. So I shouldn’t even pursue the information.” Now, if I had not – if my reticular activating system, if I had not programmed my brain by constantly thinking about, “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough money.” If I hadn’t done that, I would have listened to him then and I would have gone, “Wow. I need to dive into his information further.” I may have gone to the library for free and gotten some of his books. I may have listened to more interviews with him. I may have called into his radio show. There’s so many ways I could have – he has a supplement that’s like $24. I could have afforded that. I should have got on that. And the diet that he recommends, I could have gotten that information for free. Lots of stuff, I could have done it. I could have begun my healing journey then, a-year-and-a-half before I did. But the little thought in my head was, “I can’t. I can’t because I don’t have enough money.” And then it was a brick wall and I stopped taking any action.

And a-year-and-a-half later, I was in the same financial situation but I heard the information again. And my husband is the one that said, “We need to pursue this. This sounds like this could be the answer for you.” And it’s because the him that I picked up the phone and started to take action. And thank God I did. But this is a prime example of how we limit ourselves, like you said, God will present the right people in your path. But it’s up to us to see that those people are there – that they’ve been put there in our path. And luckily, that doctor was putting my path again and the information came back to me. And then my husband heard it and he was helping me see the light. But that’s the thing, we have to catch are unconscious mining and see, “Am I blocking myself from moving forward because I’m focusing on what I don’t want to have happen instead of what I do want to have happen.”

[00:38:33] Emily Becker: Well, we can run from what He wants us to do all we want, but He still wants us to do it. And He wants us to get there. I can relate to that. Because my husband is the one who’s like, “Oh, there’s a seminar.” We ordered exactly what later would have recommended for me, just guessing what we needed. We were like, “Okay. Was this is brand new? Let’s get this. This seems to be the right one.” Then we went to the seminar and then when I spoke to him, he’s like, “This is exactly what you need to do.” We went home that day and my husband is like, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to listen.” And I wasn’t able to even have a negative thought because it was just happening.

[00:39:17] Ashley James: But if you had been left on your own, you might have been like, “Oh, we can’t do this.”

[00:39:22] Emily Becker: Right. Right. And I prayed for all these good things and they’re right in front of me. I had to be the one who took advantage of the people. I had take advantage of the tools. To take advantage of the gifts. And, like you were saying, like, financially, you can always never afford what you want. If you think about it, “I can’t afford it.” Just like this business, I cannot afford to start my business. But all I had to do is say, “Hey, honey. I’m going to take away from my family if I ask for a little bit of money.” I was like, “You know what? Okay. People are asking for these remedies. I got to ask.” It was an immediate easy, yes. But anyways, so my husband got me to that doctor, to that lecture. And then was very supportive in ways that I never thought he would be. Like throwing the gluten out of the house. I was amazed that he would even do that.

[00:40:32] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Never underestimate your husband’s desire for you to be healthy. Because I think a lot of times I never thought my husband – man, he’s given up so much. When I met him, he was on ice cream and he drink. I mean, you know, he was on Monster Energy drinks. He was on venti coffees. He was on sugar and dairy and gluten. I think, that’s all he ate. That was his diet. It was like ice cream, coffee, Monsters, and gluten – like Monster Energy drinks. That’s was his entire diet. And now, all he eats is vegetables. It’s just amazing.

[00:41:05] Emily Becker: Some incredible change.

[00:41:06] Ashley James: Right. But never underestimate the power of your husband’s desire for you to be healthy environment.

[00:41:14] Emily Becker: That’s all your inner voice. I asked my husband once I was like, “How do you not think these horrible negative thoughts?” And he’s, “You just push them out.” And I like, “You make it sound so easy.” But you literally do it just through your cores, just the way he said it. It’s like, personally for me, I see it as Satan trying to whisper into your ear just like he whispered into Eve’s at the tree. It’s like, “Eat that fruit. That’s going to be good.” And he doesn’t want good things for you. And he will whisper lies into your ear. He’s not God. He’s nothing. You can push all of that out. You got to do it over and over and over and over. But eventually, he starts to shut up. And then you can have more faith and live more positively.

Before this interview, you had asked some questions about what miracles are out there.

[00:42:10] Ashley James: Well, my thing is that there’s always that part of me that thinks, “Well, what if it’s all just coincidence.” And I’m sure other people feel that way too. Because that’s what faith is. It’s blind, right? God hasn’t come down and been like, “Hello” in person, right? So there has –

[00:42:30] Emily Becker: He wants you to have a relationship with him. It’s a scientific thing. It’s not divine. Because he is more than just what he’s created here on Earth. He’s the Creator. So to have faith and healing, you can’t measure it. You can look at statistics which I’ve done, if you’re interested in that at all.

[00:42:54] Ashley James: I am interested. I think it’s fun. Because then you start to go, “Wow. That’s more than a coincidence.” So my thing is I think some people go, “What if prayer is just coincidence?” Like, let’s say, you never prayed over for anything. When your husband would have still told you to go that health lecture and still got you on supplements and thrown out the gluten. Did prayer really do that? Or is it all just coincidence? Right? So what’s interesting is when we look at the statistics that they’ve done studies on the power of prayer. And they try to be non objective because, really, they just want to pull the information together and go, “Let’s just look and see. Is it just coincidence or is it more times than not that prayers help with the positive outcome?” So yeah, please share. And these statistics are – these studies are online. The National Institutes of Health –

[00:43:52] Emily Becker: The government page, PubMed NCBI, they’re all doctor articles. When you’re going through them, it’s really amazing to see how little faith they have. But they have the numbers. How do they come up with finding that 71 percent of clinical studies and 62 percent of the laboratory studies reported positive outcomes for distinct healing? And by distant healing, they refer to for prayer. After the studies, they’re like, “Well, you know -” they were given names of people. And how do we know that there weren’t multiple people with that name? Or, they look at it at a scientific view where God knows the hearts of people who are praying, So they have the numbers.

[00:44:40] Ashley James: Can you go through the numbers? So 71 percent was what?

[00:44:44] Emily Becker: In one study, Dr. Crawford examined the quality of studies of hands on healing and distant healing. And this was published between 1955 and 2000 — or at least those studies were published between 1955 and 2001.

[00:45:02] Ashley James: How many studies did they look at? Or how many people were involved? So there was 90 different studies. But they split them in half, 45 of them were clinical settings and 45 were laboratory studies settings. What they found was that 71 percent of the clinical studies and 62 percent of the laboratory studies both reported positive outcomes. And that’s pretty good outcomes, in my opinion. And we also reported that the overall internal validity of the studies on healing was 75 percent for the clinical investigations. And 81 percent for the laboratory investigations. They’re able to say that these are valid studies with high percentage positive outcomes.

[00:45:50] Emily Becker: Did they split it up so that there was like a group of people that weren’t prayed for and a group that were prayed for?

[00:45:58] Ashley James: In this specific study, they didn’t have a control group. I also looked at another one with a control group. And that’s where they claim, “Well, they – ” you know, someone from the control group could have the same name as someone from the not controlled group. Because they’re – in those studies, they would get like a name to pray for, just the first name. And so they don’t consider the results valid in those situations. Another study conducted a systematic review of the literature on the efficacy of any form of distant healing as a treatment for any medical condition. And it included 23 trials, which totaled 2,774 patients. They met the inclusion criteria. And they were all subjected to analysis of these studies. Thirteen, about 57 percent, yielded statistically significant treatment effects favoring distant healing. And then nine of the studies showed no superiority of distant healing over control interventions. And only one showed a negative effect for distant healing.

[00:47:13] Ashley James: Well, that still sounds better than drug trials where people, like still die. And the drug still gets approved. Only five people died in our study drug approved, right? Interesting. Like, you’re throwing out numbers like 71 percent, 62 percent, 57 percent. These are all more than 50 percent. Anyone would take these numbers to Vegas. Interesting.

[00:47:43] Emily Becker: We can rely on prayer. But sometimes we got to know what God wants us to do. We got to trust what God wants us to do.

[00:47:50] Ashley James: I like that you brought that up because you said earlier that things come to you through prayer. And that’s how you know or that’s how maybe you’re figuring out what God wants for you. I always thought prayer was a one way street.

[00:48:05] Emily Becker: No. He wants a relationship. And he doesn’t – we’re not here to fill his plan. He has his own plan. But He can use everybody in ways that you won’t even know. Even people who don’t believe in God, He’ll place them in your life to help you get to the next step. And He wants good things for everyone. If He has chosen you to do something, it’s going to happen.

[00:48:33] Ashley James: Sorry. You’re reminding of Jonah and the Whale.

[00:48:36] Emily Becker: Yeah. I thought a lot about that today, too, before this interview. I was just like, “You know, you can run and run and run. But His will be done.” And a lot of ways – a lot of where I am today, when I first started running a business, I would be like, “God. I need this. I need this. I need this. I need this.” and what I’ve realized is that He wants the favor – I don’t know if this is the right words. I don’t want to be held accountable for this. But He wants retort. He wants us to have this relationship where when He gives me everything that I asked for that He wants people to hear my praise for him. And through that I, personally, am a tool for connecting other people with Him and strengthening their relationship with Him by giving praise. I would ask, “I just really want to help this person and get them to feel better.” Well, a lot of the times, I’d be like, “I need $50. I need $130 to make this happen for this person.” And the condition of I want and I need and all that stuff wasn’t being blessed. He wasn’t doing anything for me. He didn’t want to have anything to do with that. And when I started to ask, “How can I use this to praise you? Can we make this work together so we can help these people? Can I start this business so I can help these people? And then also bring people closer to you, God. And somehow, for me, that’s where I started to become successful, just being open and being myself.

I’ve thought about doing a YouTube channel of like, “Let’s be real.” I’m not a good person. I fall all the time. I swear. I’m not the person to look to. But I feel like God who wants me to share my story to help other people to come to him to prayer. And praying has changed my life so much that God can use a doctor to restore someone’s arm. And that’s an amazing gift – ability. Something [inaudible] [00:51:08] and I’m not going to be that doctor. I’m going to be a different tool to help people get better and to strengthen their relationship with Him.

[00:51:19] Ashley James: I like that idea, what kind of tool can I be to help others? Helping us get out of our ego. When we’re in service, they’ve looked at mental health and volunteering and service. And they see that those who are suicidal and depressed, like clinically depressed, when they volunteer, when they actively on a regular basis volunteer, it lifts depression, it creates joy. And there’s even studies to show that it increases longevity. That the more that we give ourselves, it fulfills us, it brings us joy. And it also decreases our stress. Surrounds us with a community. Because when you volunteer, most of the time you’re also around others who are volunteering, you create a community, you’re part of a community. But those people end up living longer, happier lives. And so giving of ourselves to help others actually helps us more. It’s like that it comes back to us more.

I heard, I think, it was Neale Donald Walsch. I went to one of his weekend workshops about five years ago. And Neale said, “You know, carry around some extra money.” Like, he says he carries around 20s. And he calls it his walking money. Now, he’s a millionaire. So he gives away 20s all day long. Anytime he sees someone in need, he gives them a 20. He says, “You know, maybe for you that’s $1. Maybe have like $5 in your wallet and that’s the $5 you’re going to give away to people this week.” And he goes, “Don’t care if they’re going to buy alcohol with it. Don’t stop the flow. You’re passing on. You’re blessing someone. And let them – you know, maybe they’re going to go buy food with it or pay for their shelter or buy new socks. Whatever they’re going to do with it is their business. You’re just blessing someone in need.” And so anytime he finds someone in need, like maybe someone is struggling to pay their grocery bill, he’ll like jump in and pay for it. Or he’ll pay for the person behind him at Starbucks, who knows, or someone who’s homeless. But he’s always looking to help. And he says, “You give that person like $5 or $1 and you notice how good you feel.” He says. “It’s like a high. You feel more joy from giving than that person will ever get from receiving.”

And that’s probably why that client of yours, she loves that cream that you gave her. But you have twice as much joy out of the act of gifting it to her than she’ll ever get from receiving it. And so the business that you’re doing in that, you’re helping clients. But when you do, the charity work you do it is giving you so much purpose and joy. And so when we can connect with others and ask ourselves, “How can I be a tool to help others?” And focusing on that, the ego can’t live there. The ego melts away when we’re in service.

[00:54:48] Emily Becker: Yeah. How can we serve each other? And that can go from your relationship with your husband or your sisters or your neighbors and people you don’t know. Just when you put their needs first, it’s so rewarding. And that goes for my customers too. And I’m not perfect. I’ve had mistakes. I’ve had refunds. I’ve had fallouts. But you can’t let that bring you down. And you just got to keep serving. Because not everyone’s going to like what you have to offer. And you, personally, are always – we’re human, we make mistakes. And you just find ways that you don’t hold on to that. You continue to serve. You continue to help people. And just work hard for others.

[00:55:38] Ashley James: Right. Well, every business has returns. And as long as you learn from the returns, like a broken bottle in shipping or something, you learn from it. And then you give great customer service. And you don’t let ego get in the way. Then you’re growing as a business. You’re a real business now. This isn’t a hobby. So you’re going to have these bumps. But as long as you learn from them, your business will keep improving.

[00:56:06] Ashley James: Speaking of praise — well, not praise. But speaking of my business, I am now a legitimate company with the Department of Wisconsin revenue. Anyways, I’m a real business now. And I have taxes to pay. And I am the owner of Emily’s Remedies. I’m no longer just doing this as myself. I have the business. And that might not seem like a whole lot different. But for me, it’s this huge blessing. I am functioning more as a company. And that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And to operate less as a hobby and more as a professional. Because everybody deserves that professional quality. And as a hobby, I was pushing out orders from three days to a month. And that’s no way to treat a customer. Since this business, it’s been my goal to get orders out right away. To start bringing what I have to my community – my new community since they moved. And just to treat people with – and you have a responsibility of people’s money and their expectations of the product. Every single jar, everything that I make, all the soaps that I’ve introduced are made with the same quality as the very first one I ever made.

[00:57:31] Ashley James: For yourself.

[00:57:33] Emily Becker: For myself, yeah.

[00:57:33] Ashley James: And for your family and the people you love. You know, I wish every business owner was as conscientious and caring as you. You put your heart and soul into it. And we can hear that. And I like following you on Facebook to see – every time you put post orders, every time you mail them out, you announce it. And you don’t rush when you make your products. You make it so that the quality is there. But you do rush – once they’re in the jars, you do rush as much as you can to get the packages out because you want people to get their orders as fast as possible. And you put so much into it. This is exactly what it’s like to start a business from the ground up. And I know that we’re going to see you, like, on Shark Tank in a few years or something like that. You’re going to keep growing and we’re going to see you continue to expand. And you will always keep the same amount of hurt as you did with the very first bottle or jar. And that’s what we want from every business owner is this conscientious business. This is what we want from every single business owner, to have a love of their customer and a love the quality of their product and to never compromise either one. And that’s why I love buying something from you or from someone who is doing it with their own hands. And you’re investing with their own time and energy to be able to create the quality products. Knowing that it’s pure ingredients. So I love that. I love that you’re this example of the kind of business owner that we all should be that takes the time to give great customer service and really, really cares about each customer.

[00:59:23] Emily Becker: Yeah. I really love having a connection with my customers because every order and then I said or – I mean, you know, most of the orders I get, I am like, “Oh, please give me all feedback. I want to know everything that’s bad. And I want to know what other ways I can help the these people who are ordering.” Because I love when you start having connection and conversation with your customers. You get to know them hen you can serve them better the next time. And that’s my favorite part is just this expanse of connections that I’m getting. And it gets a little bit hard sometimes because there’s a lot of people who want to talk to me. But I’m so grateful for all of them. And I try my best to be there for all of them.

[01:00:13] Ashley James: Can we go back to when you first started to pray? You weren’t really – I mean, you said you believe in God but you didn’t really have a relationship with God. And you weren’t really, like, Christian. But you’re very sick. You had your alopecia and your other health issues that you talked more about in Episode 340. Can you remember the first time you prayed for your health?

[01:00:39] Emily Becker: I remember – okay. So I was living in fear in my head. And I knew my husband was a very strong Christian. And I would be like, “Oh, can you please pray for this.” And wake him up and like, “I’m scared.” Just I don’t know where. Like, I can’t sleep or whatever. And I say, “Can you pray for me? And he would. And that’s when I realized I need to take responsibility and action for myself. I sought help. I called a woman who helped me learn how to pray. She’s an incredible woman. And she taught me to say things that I used to be afraid of saying. Like, “In the name of Jesus Christ, please give me this.” Or, “In the name of Jesus Christ, evict these thoughts,” and stuff like that. And that’s when she was teaching me how to pray. Because before, if I tried to pray, it was like, “Please don’t let this happen to me, you know, like evict them.” Instead of someone of faith and courage and confidence.

[01:01:47] Ashley James: You’re focusing on what you didn’t want to have happen.

[01:01:49] Emily Becker: Yeah. So she taught me how to pray. And I can almost remember the day, I want to say it was January 4, late at night, in 2012. I started to pray that ,”God -” instead of that I wouldn’t be bald anymore. That God would bring me healing. That was my first prayer. I would still sometimes break down and be like, “I don’t want this to happen to me.” But now and then I’d remind myself. I knew all the things that were negative. I don’t like looking at – I’m like, “I don’t want to be – when I look in the mirror, God, I want to see someone beautiful.” Instead of praying for that, I wanted healing. And then within a month, my husband was like, “This doctor is in town. We got to go to the seminar.” Just like, I wasn’t even thinking, “Oh, he’s going to help me with my hair.” I wasn’t even hopeful. I was like, “Oh, yeah, we got to go get healthier.” Maybe my husband was more conscious what was going on. But for me, it was just being like someone taking my hand and guiding me. It was then – oh gosh – that was that was really hard because I used everything. Even the good things, I was fearful of, you know? But I was like, “Okay. God, please, I need you in my life. I need your help.” I started praying for healing. And then after that, it just all started to happen.

And then after practice and just experience, I stopped focusing and praying for things not to happen. I started praying for all the good things. And then when I was going through this prayer stage of learning how to pray, I had this unbelievable desire to cleanse both physically and spiritually of everything that was eating away at me. I even did a private – I did my own baptism. I was just like, “I need to be washed.” I got in the bathtub. I was home alone. I looked online, I was like, “What do I say to be baptized?” And some people think you need to have someone there to do it for you. And I did that later in life where I was baptized with someone. But I washed myself clean. And then I started to work on evicting those negative thoughts. And for me, it was a spiritual experience. As I cleansed my spiritual being, I was able to work towards healing my physical being. And as I prayed to God for healing and for all these burdens and weights to be lifted from me of my past and from my health, he was more than willing to do it. And sometimes it was, God it’s a yes. The answer is yes, no, or later. I find a lot more that he has a later in there, in my personal experience.

It’s like, “Okay. This is what your heart wants. We’re going to work on you to help you get there.” That’s how I am here today with a business, with long hair, with confidence, feeling beautiful, and just a completely different person, really.

[01:05:20 Ashley James: Beautiful. I love the transformation that you’ve made since 2012. It’s beautiful. You’ve grown your health spiritually and attended your health physically, and mentally and emotionally. You know, you’re looking at all aspects of your life and bring it all into balance. And if we were to go back and talk to Emily from 2012, she would not believe that the Emily now could be possible. Right?

[01:05:52] Emily Becker: Yeah. Absolutely.

[01:05:56] Ashley James: And so no matter how bad it gets in life – and that’s something I really want us to teach the young generation, Generation Z I believe they’re calling it or Zed, between the ages of 10 and 24. Because in the last ten years, suicide has risen to be the second cause – second leading cause of death among –

[01:06:19] Emily Becker: Isn’t that horrible?

[01:06:21] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s risen. It’s something crazy like 52 percent or something. But it’s totally skyrocketed because of social media, because of the way our culture has changed drastically over one generation. They’re left feeling devastated if one bad thing happens or online. Because the bullying is constant. They feel isolated, alone. And how they’re feeling right now is it’s like how they’re going to feel for the rest of their life.

[01:06:54] Emily Becker: Yeah. You don’t feel like anything good could happen when you’re developing. Everything is forever. And if you’re being bullied, you feel like this is how you’re going to feel forever.

[01:07:12] Ashley James: And it isn’t. The Emily that was depressed, and afraid, and scared, and afraid of everything even good, like you said, back in 2012, that Emily could not perceive of the Emily you are now. And yet you worked on it bit by bit. And you addressed your health on all levels, meaning physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. You addressed it on all levels. And you looked at, also, getting outside of your own head and helping others. And look at what you’ve evolved. And that’s what we can all do. Wherever we are in our life right now, no matter what our age is, no matter what our health level is, the person we are now is nothing compared to the magnificent person that we can become. And we are [inaudible] [01:08:08] right now. But we can become this unrecognizable –

[01:08:13] Emily Becker: You realize how magnificent you are.

[01:08:15] Ashley James: Right. The sky is the limit. But for those who are depressed, who have anxiety, who have fear, who have thought of suicide, life in a few years can be so brilliant, so amazing that you wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. Like, it could just be so amazing. And you can grow that even in chronic illness. Because I know, Emily, back in 2012, you thought that’s how your life is going to be for the rest of your life. And doctors will tell you that you’re going to have this condition for the rest of your life. Many people are suffering with a chronic condition and they’ve been told by doctors that they’re going to have it for the rest of their life. And that doesn’t mean they have to suffer though. That doesn’t mean you know – we can reverse diseases. We can manage them. We can gain health. Even in the face of terminal illness, we can still increase the quality of life and bring in joy. So it’s always more. You can always get better. But we have to look at every aspect of health. So not just diet. Diet is great. And emotional health and mental health and spiritual health looking at it all and start by asking, by praying, by asking and focus on what you want. Can you give us some steps for those who maybe are rusty at praying or haven’t prayed before? And have been inspired by what you’ve shared and they want to start praying. Can you share some steps, like how do we pray?

[01:10:00] Emily Becker: I went through the same thing. I had no idea how to pray. What I find to be useful is some people like to do affirmations. And I’ve never – I’m so busy that I don’t go looking for someone’s [inaudible] [01:10:16]. What I like to do is, I like to get a piece of paper. What I’ll do is, I will write down who I want to pray for, what I’d like for myself, and also something to give, if I have something to give praise about. And I’ll write it down and then just the act of writing it down, gets your mind to start to think about it. And then when you’re ready, for me, personally, it’s that moment like after the kids go to bed. I’ll be like, “I have this on my heart and mind.” Or the next time I see that piece of paper – I leave it right at my nightstand.

It’s usually just one thing. One does five things. But really, you can just start with one thing. It can be something simple like, “God, I’ve been really struggling in this area. I want to start to have more energy for work and for my kids and for my husband.” So it can be something as simple as having more energy. And then when I wake up in morning, I see that paper. I look at it and I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah. That’s important to meet God. God, this is important to me. Can you please help me?”

So from this interview, I reached out to you because I want to thank your supporters. I can’t talk to everybody. So I wanted to reach out to all my customers somehow. Because I get a lot of emails and I also want to let them know that I’m thinking of them. So for me, that’s what’s on my heart. And so I’m going to pray with you if that’s okay, Ashley.

[01:11:52] Ashley James: Sure.

[01:11:54] Emily Becker: And just to give people an idea how to pray. Because sometimes we don’t pray because we don’t hear it and we’re not around it. It’s not something we exercise. And someone else starts. I like to give praise. I like to acknowledge God as God. I like to give thanks for the good things that he’s given me. And then I ask for what’s on my heart. And then I can clear it with trust and confidence and faith. And a lot of how I got this is from the Lord’s prayer that Jesus Himself prayed. The people are asking, “How do we pray?” And then He prayed. He told them to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And you can Google that. But I’m going to do my own prayer.

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to be with Ashley James on the Learn True Health podcast. And for bringing this opportunity to me. Thank you so much, Lord, for all the all the people who have reached out to me. We’re grateful for a relationship. I trust that they are grateful for me. And I am so grateful for how you are using them to transform me. Lord, I thank you for this opportunity to be on a podcast praying. This is incredible 2020 or 2018 to be here giving praise. I ask that my supporters know that you want good things for them. And they can rely on you and that they will continue to come seek your help. And to be blessed by the things that are given to them. I ask that you place people and tools in their lives to bring them health and healing, both spiritually and physically. We pray these things in Jesus Christ’s name your Son, amen.

And it can be a lot shorter than that.

[01:13:57] Ashley James: I hear that you started out with a lot of gratitude.

[01:14:00] Emily Becker: Yes. Yes. I do. And it helps me to condition my heart to not be selfish. Because I told you about that in the past where I tried to be helpful to people. But I was never grateful. And that changed. That also helped me in my prayers and my growth.

[01:14:30] Ashley James: So you would help people but then you weren’t really – there wasn’t gratitude there. So it was still, maybe, selfish intentions. Which when we’re living – when we’re coming from, the selfishness, we’re coming from the fear. We’re afraid of the lack of – so how much can we really help others when we’re focusing on how little money we have or little time we have or little energy we have. How much could we actually help others? And then if we go to help others, then we resent them because they’ve taken off our precious time, money, or energy. And so it becomes this ego of resentment and feeling like they should be more grateful for what I’ve done for them because I had to sacrifice my time and whatever. And it doesn’t become rewarding. Because we’re coming from ego. And our fear, we’re coming from this fear of a lack of. And when we bring gratitude and we become grateful for the money we do have and the time we do have. Even though we have a little bit of it, right? What do we have and become grateful for it and thankful for what we do have and ask for help. And ask for – you know, focusing on the positive direction that we want, the outcome to go in for ourselves and others. Coming from that, that kind of bounty focusing on – because you know what?

Even though I could be perceiving myself as not having a lot of money, I am so fortunate to have a roof over my head. I’m so fortunate to have food in my fridge, to have the electricity on, to have the heat on . I could spend the next hour talking about how grateful I am for all the things I do have that other people don’t. And I could take a little bit of my money at the end of the month and see if I could help someone else become a little bit more comfortable. Maybe handout blankets. I could go to a thrift store and buy clean used blankets and go hand them out to the shelters. Or I could go through all my closets and things that we’re not using and donate it to the battered women’s shelter. You know what I mean? We can help people become more fortunate. Right? So it doesn’t mean it has to be a sacrifice for us. But if we’re focusing on the ego and all the stuff we don’t have, then from that perspective, we can’t actually be of service and help others. But I love that most of your prayer is actually gratitude and grounding yourself in how grateful you are for what we have.

[01:17:19] Emily Becker: Hold on, I’m just breathing. I’m practicing the breath work here. And I am so grateful. Well, I mean, as much as I’d like to win souls for Jesus, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here – well, I think, as Christians and as anyone you should surround yourself and try to serve and reach as many people as you can whatever you are. If you were a doctor who could sew a finger back on, you wouldn’t want to only surround yourself with other doctors. You’re going to want to help everybody you can. You want to find the person who’s got the missing finger. You want to be that tool for them. And I think it’s a great opportunity for me to be able to be this tool for some people. And that said alone, I have so many who are tools for me. I have family that have really helped me along the way spiritually.

Just like the 2012 me, I don’t think I would have known I can be who I’ve become without them. I don’t – there’s a purpose for everything. And I have a lot of more confidence and a lot more things. And for me, it’s a spiritual growth.

[1:19:09] Ashley James: I love that you’re willing to learn. And I love that you’re vulnerable enough to come share with us, share your experience. So in your prayers, have you ever felt the God is talking to you? Have you ever gotten a message?

[01:19:25] Emily Becker: Oh, yes.

[01:19:26] Ashley James: Can you talk a little bit about that? So I was raised Anglican. I have friends that are Mormon. And they’ve shared with me that in the LDS church, they incorporate fasting, meditation, deep, deep prayer. And the elders in the church are going to make like a decision about something that they fast and they do deep long meditative prayers. And that they receive answers. And that shocked me because I was kind of raised to believe that it’s a one way street. That you just – you know, you recite the Lord’s Prayer, you do communion, you basically state where you believe.

[01:20:12] Emily Becker: [Inaudible] [01:20:12].

[01:20:14] Ashley James: Right. Right. I believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. You just repeat these things that you’re taught to say in church. And that you pray. But there’s no God talking to you. Like, it’s a one way street. This is just how I was raised. And then I started to hear from other people and other religions or other – I don’t know -some people believe Mormonism is totally separate from Christianity. Others believe it’s just like a division or flavor of Christianity. But basically, I’ve heard from many different people, that they were raised differently than me, that in different churches that they’re actually receiving messages. And so some people would say, “Well, that must be Satan.” Or other people say, “Well, that’s just your brain. That’s just your brain filling in the gaps. That’s nothing.” So this is again where faith comes in, right? Because what do you believe? And there’s no – no one can prove it or disprove it, right? But what is your experience? So your experiences your reality. And your reality is not my reality. But that’s where faith comes in. So I was really surprised to hear from many people that they’re actually receiving information when they do go through prayer.

And a dear, dear friend of mine who’s had two near death experiences, he’s died twice. And he has recollection – very clear recollection of meeting God both times. And he receives information when he prays. And he is a wonderful being and I love him. And he gets filled with – he says he’s filled with the Holy Spirit. He gets goosebumps. And he is dead on. He actually has been – I don’t want to say prophesizes. But he’ll be told things or know things before it happens. And he’s very, very Christian. And so he’ll get goosebumps. His whole body is filled with goosebumps. You can look at his skin, it’s all goosebumps. And anytime he goes to make a decision in his life, he prays and then he gets filled with goosebumps. If that’s the direction you’re supposed to go in. And he says anytime, let’s say, he really wants something. Like he really wants to buy this car and he prays about it, but he doesn’t get filled with the Holy Spirit. But then, he buys it anyway because it’s like ego. His ego really wants it. The car breaks down immediately. It’s like every single time. But whenever he makes a decision no matter how – like buying a house, like big, big decisions, or little decisions, anytime he makes a decision and he’s filled with the Holy Spirit and when he’s praying, and he goes for it, it always works out. And he goes, it’s like 100 percent success rate. So like I hear from these different people as I’m talking to them but their experience of prayer and it’s very personal. So I just wanted to hear from your very personal experience when you pray, how does God talk to you?

[01:23:17] Emily Becker: This is very personal. Well, I get all – I when I asked for things, a lot of times what I receive – and I think it’s because I’m still trying to figure filter out language here. But I’ll ask for things, I will get a clear yes or no or a jumble sentence that I don’t understand. I don’t think my confidence, my faith, or that I’m ready for his answer is what I get.

But I do get a lot of yeses and noes. And as you pray, I’ve actually invited – you can invite the Holy Spirit into your home. And I did a lot of that. When I was going through my fear phase, I would pray and ask – I would welcome the Holy Spirit into my home. And you can feel that physically, just like you said, your friend feels it. You get chills. And there’s this new atmosphere in your home that’s brighter and lighter and warmer. And that’s what I experienced.

I have family who’s – oh, I wonder if I need his permission. I won’t use any names. But I have family who – when he challenged me to do something because he had an incredible experience. He said he was able to pray from the third heaven. And honestly, I don’t know what that means. But he was able to pray and be in heaven just for a moment and looked down on earth. And he challenged me to try that. And out of fear and understanding, I haven’t done it. I think a lot of times that’s why I can’t understand all of the messages from God is that I still am growing in my faith. How much do I honestly trust them with take full control of everything. And it’s a process. And I have prayed for – I’m trying to think – because I go through phases where I pray more often and speak – just like you do with any relationship, you go through phases where you connect stronger at times with someone. I was praying in private. And I would ask – I wonder what it was. Sometimes it helps to remember what you’re going through. I know what it was. Okay. My husband had – we went through this long process of getting his remote work approved.

[01:26:42] Ashley James: To work from home for his job?

[01:26:44] Emily Becker: Yeah. For his job. So we could move out of the cities and into his hometown. And when he did that, I started praying. And I was like – I even asked, I was like, “God, will his remote work be approved?” And I got a single word answer yes. But then I was so impatient. It just was such a long, ongoing process. I’d be like, “Okay. God, when is this going to happen?” And then I started to lose faith that it was going to happen. And then I asked again, I was like, “God, is his remote work request going to be approved?” And I got another yes. And I was like, “God, can you please make it, you know, next week?” And then I get that garbled and I don’t understand. And then my own thoughts and wouldn’t be able to raise receive anything. But from that alone, I learned to just be patient.

I think before earlier in this interview, we talked about how a lot of his answers in my personal experience have been later. Because God wants miracles to happen but sometimes He’s setting everything up like a domino effect to give you your answer. Well, He already has His answer but He’s setting it up so it can happen wonderfully for Him and be good for you.

I asked once – you know, this is really personal. And I don’t know what the results are going to be because it’s – the prayer hasn’t been answered. But I prayed once for my father-in-law’s eyes to return sight. And he has gone through all different kinds of health adventures, I would say. He’s done every diet. He’s done everything even that I have done to try to restore his sight. And it’s only gotten worse over the years. And I’ve been personally praying that he would be able to see. And once in faith asked God, I was praying for him. I was like, “God, my father-in-law, will he be able to see again?” And I got us cleaning straight answer yes. And now, in faith, I don’t know what to do. It’s like, “Okay. Well, is it going to be that he’s going to be able to see again when he gets to heaven?” Or, “Is he going to be healed on earth? Are we going to see this miraculous healing?” And I don’t know what the answer is. But I’m going to continue to pray for him. And to just wait and see and trying to receive God.

And you had – I know I sidetracked a little bit. You had asked if I’ve heard God. And the answer is yes. And sometimes I don’t understand what he’s saying. And sometimes it is a very clear message. And as far as the tingles and the chills, I get them right now when you were talking earlier in truth about the kids being depressed. I could feel that chill and that truth. And God is the Creator of all things that are true. And when you can – you have to have faith. And I don’t know if everyone gets the same tools. Because there’s some people who have reported having out of body experiences. Well, not all of us are going to have that. Not all of us are going to have the same relationship because we all have a unique relationship with God. He’s going to give us different gifts when we ask for them, or when we try to use them, or whatever the situation is. But when you do, you want to do it and to serve Him, I think, is the keys. How can you use these gifts to serve Him. And for me, I think a lot of how he wants us to serve Him is to praise His son and to just keep growing in our relationship with Him.

[01:32:21] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experiences, Emily. Is there anything left unsaid or is there anything you really want to make sure that you shared in this interview today?

[01:32:33] Emily Becker: Oh, honestly, Ashley, I shared way more than I thought. I felt so called to be on this. I don’t know. Try praying. And I love hearing from the Learn True Health community. They’re just incredible whether they’re asking for prayers or they’re just, like asking, for an inch cream. I love hearing from them. And they’re not all – the ones that reach out to me aren’t all Christians. I get all kinds of emails from people. It’s just really fun. I love it. I love hearing from everyone. And if you want to say something and you want to start a conversation, let’s start a conversation. That’s how we’re going to grow. We need to be ourselves and to relax a little bit in these awkward conversations.

[01:33:46] Ashley James: I like that, relax a little bit in these awkward conversations. Just today on in the Learn True Health Facebook Group, I was having a good discussion with one of the listeners about an episode. She felt as though lately the podcast is more biased around diet in terms of being whole food plant based. And I pointed out to her that I had just a few episodes ago done an episode about a diet that is pretty much 100 percent meat based. But because I had then a few episodes later had an interview with Chef AJ, who’s vegan, that then it might upset people who aren’t vegan. Or vegans might get upset when I have someone on that promotes a meat diet. Right? And my –

[01:34:30] Emily Becker: [Inaudible] [01:34:30] show is that you have everybody. That’s what I love about your show is I can – whether or not I agree with – you had someone on for mushrooms. They mentioned whether it is – gosh – [inaudible] [01:34:50] but something else. Essentially an herbal drug. And even though I disagree with the use of that –

[01:35:04] Ashley James: Are you talking about microdosing psilocybin?

[01:35:07] Emily Becker: I think so.

[01:35:08] Ashley James: Yes. Microdosing psilocybin, it’s not for getting people high. It’s microdosing. And it’s a really interesting interview. And I am not – again, I totally agree with you, I’m not promoting taking street drugs to hallucinate or anything. But I did. I did an interview on some kind of shaman ritual in Peru, Ayahuasca. I was having a brain fart. I did a whole interview on Ayahuasca. And it’s like I’m not saying everyone should go do this or everyone should go – I’m not saying everyone should do one diet or another diet. If we just open our minds and take in information from different people and different points of view, listen for the gold. Because you can learn from someone who eats a different diet than you? It doesn’t mean that you should go eat that diet. And we can learn from people of different spiritual faiths to help us strengthen our faith. Because maybe you hear something and you’re like, “Wow. This makes me want to go investigate something more.” It’s not about converting anyone. I loved that you said, like, saving souls.

Although I love hearing like – I do love getting emails from listeners. And I’ve gotten several of them having them say, “I’ve never gone to a Naturopath. And now I’m seeing one.” Or two listeners have written me and said, “I was in med school. I’m just going to become an MD. And now I’m going to become a Naturopathic physician because of your show.” So those are the kind of like – I like to save people from allopathic medicine when they could be using holistic medicine. I love hearing that kind of conversion. I really want to empower listeners to find their health and build their own health by gaining the goal that they can gain from every single guest. Because the guests don’t have to have the same point of view as you. But that doesn’t mean – let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because when guests might believe in eating meat or not eating meat and you don’t agree with them. It doesn’t mean that that everything they say is not valid, right? And so we have this tendency right now in our social media day and age to do these mass generalizations. Where if someone voted for someone that we don’t like, all of a sudden it’s a master analyzation. We don’t like any of their decisions. How could they be trusted because they believe in this one thing. And that’s how we’re manipulated, unfortunately. So we need to put our bias aside and say, “You know what? It’s okay for other people have different opinions. And I can learn from everyone. Everyone matters. And I can learn from everyone because I’m listening for the gold. I’m listening for my own lessons. And I think that especially when we pray and ask for help that that helped might come in the form of hearing some little gold nuggets of wisdom from other people of other faiths or other diets or other health practices. And it doesn’t mean we have to adopt what they do. But we can learn from everyone. I know my listeners do that. They’re listening to people – a variety of people so we can all learn and grow.

So thank you for coming on the show. And this might be controversial to talk about prayer and God and Christianity and just faith and the power of prayer. And the idea that we can set our intentions by focusing on gratitude. That we can volunteer our time to improve our happiness. That we can free ourselves from anxiety by focusing on what we want instead of we don’t want. These topics are incredibly beneficial. And for some people it might be controversial and that’s okay. It’s okay to be controversial. But our intention is to help people. Not to hurt them. So let’s just keep helping people. And keep having an open mind. And so thank you everyone for listening. And thank you, Emily, for coming and sharing your story. I really, really hope and pray that today’s episode has helped people, has helped the listeners to give them some new tools. And maybe just opened up their mind to start thinking about their healing practices and maybe incorporating gratitude and prayer in them. That’d be great to see what happens in their life if they do.

[01:40:01] Emily Becker: Thank you so much for having me here. I am also going to give you and your listeners a 10 percent off if they ever shop at my store online, emilysremedies.com.

[01:40:13] Ashley James: Okay. Awesome. Well, the links to everything that you do are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcasts at learntruehealth.com, emilysremedies.com.

Thank you, Emily for coming on the show. This has been wonderful.

[01:40:26] Emily Becker: Awesome. Thank you, Ashley.

[01:40:28] Ashley James: Yeah. And you know, I know you were nervous and you did a stellar job. So good job.

[01:40:34] Emily Becker: Awesome. Thank you.

[01:40:35] Outro: -to optimize your health. Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Dec 20, 2019

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The Future of Health Coaching

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Highlights:

Recognizing and honoring our uniqueness is going to be the key to our health and happiness.
Primary food is what feeds us but it’s not because what comes on a plate. It comes in a bunch of different categories. It could be your relationship with health, it could be your physical activity, it could be your career, it could be spiritual, it could be financial. It’s all those things around you that impact who you are and so you need to think about those.
Living a life of balance being our best self every single day, it’s just knowing what you want to do and how you want to get there you have to help get balance in your primary food.
IIN’s philosophy and what it means to be health coach

Want to learn how to be the best version of yourself? Where you could have a life lived with balance in all sorts of ways. Find out on today’s podcast on how you can achieve with as Lynda Cloud shares her success story.

[Intro:]

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am really excited for you to listen to today’s interview. It’s a little bit different than our other interviews because I’m interviewing the CEO of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. The world largest health coaching training company. Lynda Cloud has some wonderful insights. It’s really interesting looking at the life of someone who was so accomplished and so busy working in New York City as a CEO of a major multimillion dollar company. Here she is focusing on how to create balance and health in her life. In a company who’s corporate culture puts the health of the employees first above all else. The emotional, mental and physical health of the employees above all else. Isn’t that interesting? Wouldn’t you like to work for in a company that treated your health as the most important thing? Of course, a very close second, the customer and customer support and customer satisfaction. What an interesting concept. Normally it’s about cutting corners and trying to figure out how to save money and pinch a penny here and there. With IIN, there are bowls of avocados for their staff. They have a chiropractor come in weekly and a massage therapist come in. they have yoga classes and meditation room. They set out to make sure that the staff really are making sure that their life is balanced. That they have joy in every areas of their life and fulfillment. What does IIN get in return for investing in their staff? They get amazing productivity, creativity and trickles down to us, the consumer, the customer. Me as a graduate, while I was going through the program, I felt so supported and the staff are so wonderful to work with.

Many of my friends and many listeners actually have gone through IIN’s program and they had also found that they get incredible service and they feel connected. When they call IIN they feel like they’re being listened to like a human and they’re not just another number. And there’s no high pressure sales that they’re just talking to someone who’s so passionate about helping people become the healthiest versions of their selves. Imagine what the world would be like if every company adapted the same corporate culture as IIN. What’s really neat is that there are companies, and this is what Lynda talks about today is that there are companies who’s training to adapt this. It’s very neat and she shares what she’s done in her life to balance her life in a way that has stopped illness from becoming a problem. I think no matter where you are in life whether you’re interested in becoming a health coach or not. You’re really going to like today’s interview because there’s so much to learn here. I wanted to let you know if you are interested in contacting IIN, they actually created a special phone number, a priority line for Learn True Health listeners. You can give this a call and you’ll be placed with a wonderful staff member at IIN. Most of them are health coaches already where they can discuss with you all the details you want just so you could gather more information and see If that’s something that’s right for you. It’s a major decision to make to want to dive in which of course I did immediately the second I heard about IIN.

I dove into that same day. It’s a major decision to make. If you think about it, you’re investing a year of your life into learning and growing. About half the people that jump into IIN do so because they want the personal growth. I got a lot of personal growth out of the program. I can see just doing it for that alone instead of making a career change. The other half are the people that join do make a career change that they want to add on to their tool belt that they’re already in the holistic health space or they want to join the holistic health space as a health coach. You could call this number, 877-780-5748. That’s 877-780-5748. That will also be on the show notes of today’s podcast on Learntruehealth.com so you can go there. If you’re driving or if you can’t give them a call maybe it’s the middle of the night, you could go to Learntruehealth.com/coach and that gives you access to one of their modules. You can just check it out and see if that’s right for you. I highly recommend giving them a call because having a great discussion with one of their staff members and getting more information from them, you’ll start to feel what it’s like to be part of that culture. Be part of the health coaching culture and you’ll learn more about the different areas that you can work and how it can impact your life and how you can impact others. That phone number again is 877-780-5748. Enjoy today’s interview. Please share it with those who you think would be a great health coach. This is the fastest growing sector of the health space and that’s really exciting. That very soon, I think health coaching would be as popular and as well-known as hiring a personal trainer. That it will be that popular that you’ll be able to go to any gym or any health clinic or hospital and you’ll be able to have access to a health coach. There’s so much potential here and also, with the new legislature. We’ve talked about this in the interview that in 2020 health coaches will be able to work with insurance companies. There are just so many doors that are opening, it’s very exciting. Excellent. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and a wonderful holiday season.

[06:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 399. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us, Lynda Cloud, who is the CEO of Institute for Integrative Nutrition, IIN. It’s the worlds largest health coach training program and the program that I graduated from and many of the listeners have been graduates or are currently going through the program. I’m so excited to learn from you today, Lynda. It’s such a pleasure to have you here on the show.

[06:49] Lynda Cloud: Pleasure is all mine, Ashley.

[06:52] Ashley James: This is awesome. Now, you have over 30 years of experience in the education space and a lot of it even online of course because we’ve all transitioned to learning online. This idea that no matter how old we are, we can go back to school. No matter how busy we are, we can go back. We can get a degree. We can get certification. We can continue our learning no matter where we are in life. No matter what country we are in. I love that IIN is in all countries. There are students from all around the world who come to become health coaches. I’m really curious. What happened in your life that led you to become the CEO of IIN?

[07:40] Lynda Cloud: Well, it’s an interesting question. As you said 30 years experience which makes me feel a little old. Not seasoned but old. Had the distinct pleasure of being in education online learning for really my entire career. I started out in education teaching for a bit and fell in love with the idea of learning and fell in love with the idea of trying to make learning as engaging as I could and accessible as I could. That took me through a journey working for the one of the largest at that time, education companies, Pearson and really grew up there. Learned a lot about instructional design, learned a lot about product management marketing, sales. Kinda sat in lots of different seats and that gave me the opportunity to really get a holistic view on customers and what’s important to them. Even what’s most important which is how we help students be successful. That foundation really led me into the next step on my career which is running a division in the K-12 space online learning. That was incredibly rewarding and we did a lot on innovation, a lot of innovative stuff there. Had a great run with that company and through my whole journey. I knew I loved helping make education and schools better. That’s what the first part of my story is, then as I went through this journey I realized as a working mom and trying to do a million things, the thing I let slipped and probably paid the least attention to was my own health of wellness journey. Because if you get only so many hours in the day, what you end up doing is sacrificing things. At the point in my life, I was really sacrificing the time I needed to help myself be the best person I could. Whether it was fitness and activity or meditation and good nutrition. These were all came together for me when I started to talk to the folks at IIN and learn about the school and learn about the mission. It felt like a natural intersection where I could take the general management experience and the work I’ve been doing in running large education companies and marry that really in a way I hadn’t been able to do personally. Where I could live my best self at work at all the time. That’s what led me her and I fell in love with the people and the school.

[10:26] Ashley James: I love it. Now you have mentioned that you were part of creating some innovative stuff in the K-12 space. Is there particular aspect of the K-12 program that you helped innovate the you’re really proud off?

[10:44] Lynda Cloud: Yes. There’s a couple of examples. I was really fortunate to be given a space in large corporations where I could do a lot of RND and a lot of disruptive stuff to help us re-imagine online learning and education. One area I’m most proud of was at K-12 was at one large online learning school. One of the things I did there as launch a new category for them around career destinations. A lot of the students going through that curriculum really, it was their last chance. They were struggling for what they were doing next and maybe to where four-year college wasn’t the right path for them. They were looking for an alternate path. We looked that where the jobs we’re going to be in the next 10 years and we put together a series of curriculum with partners to get people get their high school diploma online while they were getting certified and key areas and help them get a career advancement and opportunities. That was brand new school that was launched. That was fulfilling and mission-driven. Doing good and having fun.

[12:02] Ashley James: How many people would you say went through that program? Just thinking of thousands of people, the ripple effect that you’ve had that idea that you’ve ran with your team. Now because if that thousands of people have their career path and they’re supporting their families and feel proud of themselves like they belong to society.

[12:27] Lynda Cloud: It was a fun one. It was one of those that everybody was, “Who could say no helping kids be successful and getting a career path?” I don’t know the actual numbers. I do know when I left, it was fast growing part of the company. We had a lot of success there and longevity. Really for me, that would – your point the ripple impact is really what’s driven me. I have been lucky enough to be successful and I really attribute my success because I love what I do everyday and I feel like I’m making a difference in people’s lives. I think that when success comes when you’re passionate about something and as you know, the days are long and to be able to make a difference and to take that ripple and pay it forward is awesome which is what I think IIN does.

[13:21] Ashley James: I love it. What inspired you to be the CEO of IIN? Did someone reached out to you or did you reached out to them?

[13:30] Lynda Cloud: Yes, they reached out to me and I started some conversations. I could tell you the moment that I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted this role was, I spent a day with the IIN team and if any of you get a chance, which we would love to have you come visit us. Our offices in New York City are so cool. You’ll get a chance to meet the incredible team. You walk into the office and you can feel the mission. There’s bowls of avocados, there’s fruit, there’s a vitamin bar, there’s yoga instruction on Thursday night. There’s a chiropractor, there’s a massage therapist. We live our mission everyday and the people here are really passionate about what we do. We have over 78% of our staff are female and they’re mostly all trained health coaches. They are graduates of the program and so they know first hand what’s important to our students and help make our curriculum and our teaching better everyday as a result of it.

[14:39] Ashley James: I get to interview Joshua Rosenthal. The creator of IIN, the founder at episode 106. He talked about the corporate culture that he had created. That he wanted culture where people really did put their health first. Put the company second. Their health obviously everyone’s health is first and then the mission of helping the students is a close second obviously but we have to take care of ourselves. We have to walk the walk and talk the talk. I thought that was so brilliant. I interviewed one of your staff members and she sure enough said that it’s absolutely amazing. That it’s a culture that supported each other and each other’s health. I thought that is so brilliant. What if every business did this? I know that Microsoft did a test in their Japan office where they introduced a four-day workweek and they saw productivity go up. I think it was like over 60%. Every corporate needs to look at IIN and see what they’re doing and look at what Microsoft just did in Japan and see that by shifting the focus from let’s say Amazon. Amazon works their workers to the bone and it’s cutthroat and a really dangerous work environment to be in long term, shift from that to the more nurturing, making sure we have work life balance. We see that productivity goes up and that longevity goes up. The company flourishes long time and which is what is happening with IIN. So you walked for that space that day and you’re just re-pinching yourself thinking that this is different from every other corporation you have ever witnessed.

[16:35] Lynda Cloud: Yes, I did. For me, that was the personal shift I needed to make. I’ve been in corporate America for over 25 years, my typical lens as a general manger and former head of these divisions was figuring out, how do you take the cost out, does this makes sense, are we operating as efficiently. A hard look at business. When I walked in here, what went through my mind, “Gosh, these avocados must’ve cost a fortune” but as I got to spend time with everyone around the organization and realized that, they really are living their true best self here. As a result of it, yes, we have incredible creativity and innovation and productivity. Figuring out how you merge your personal best with your professional. I hadn’t seen in action life there before. So the avocados are staying for sure.

[17:43] Ashley James: Since becoming the CEO this year which is back in March. You’re coming up on a year in a few months and you’ve obviously just got a moment to step into the role and get the landscape. What have you changed or you personally brought in that has been innovative since you’ve stepped in as CEO?

[18:09] Lynda Cloud: The school is incredible. I can’t say enough great things about Joshua and his vision from how he developed and thought about the curriculum to the teams that he hired. Really, I was brought in to help build upon that solid foundation and how to take the organization from good to great. Trying to think through what that can look like ad how we can start to take the footprint that’s here. Really make a bigger impact around the world and so, we are known as the original, the OG’s are what the team calls it. Health and wellness, health coaching. He coined and created the category. Everything we do is about servicing the category and continuing to build the health coach industry so we can have the ripple effect around the world. The work I’ve been doing over the past few months was starting to transition the organization from the school that we are today and help with some professional development and training of the teams. We’ve brought in a new head of sales and marketing. We’ve bought in a new chief financial officer. We’ve kept a nice blend of the old and new guards to help us think through. How we can start to build and enter adjacent markets. We’ve kicked off a new business plan. We’ll be launching a new product line in April because we see how impactful our health coach training program has been and making difference in people’s lives we want to create versions of that. That then can enter for example corporate wellness and help make aspects of the content much more accessible for folks and giving them a taste of small or short-term course. The first courses will start in April. We’re on that which we’re super excited on that. That’s some of the new things we’ve done. We’ve infused new talent. We’ve invested in our existing teams and we’ve started to think about some of the new markets we’re going to be entering.

[20:24] Ashley James: Very cool. When I’ve had Joshua on the show, episode 106. He said that IIN was hiring lobbyists to advocate and educate politicians in DC on the benefits of health coaching and certified health coaches so that we can carve space out. First of all, protect our rights to be health coaches and also make sure that there is space moving forward for certified health coaches and then just this year, IIN announced that here was some movement in legislature. Can you share more details on that?

[21:04] Lynda Cloud: Yes, I’m happy to. We are the only health coach school really that has full time lobbyist in DC. I had the good fortune of going down and something on DC with him. About a month or two ago, meeting with different senators and legislators to talk about the category of health coaching. Part of what we are doing, is bringing awareness. Helping people understand exactly what a health coach is, how we can impact people’s lives and how we can work side by side with hospitals and insurance companies to help be the coach that based on help reverse chronic disease and looking for ways we can help implement new practices and support for people. The change that you’re mentioning is around it’s called CPT111 codes. That consortium in particular is instrumental in getting the work for the ground. Really what that does is positive for the market because it helps get recognized potentially for some insurance payees and different reimbursements in that area. We have right now was a category 3 and that enables us to collect data around the work that we’re all doing around the industry which hopefully results to category 1 which is what we’re striving for in that space.

[22:30] Ashley James: Does that mean that a health coach soon will be able to work with insurance companies?

[22:38] Lynda Cloud: For reimbursement. What we are hoping. Yes, exactly.

[22:41] Ashley James: Very cool. I see it everywhere which is so neat. I didn’t see it everywhere 10 years ago but now I see health coaches at the doctor’s office and even in the hospitals. My health insurance offers health coaches, health coach service. Because now health insurance companies see that they’re going to save money if they get their customers using a health coach because then it’s preventive medicine in a sense. People are cleaning up their diets and being motivate around their health and they’re less likely to get sick. So the insurance companies are investing in hiring health coaches. I’m seeing the space just open and open where there’s so many job opportunities. I know that IIN also teaches people to be independent health coaches. I think some people, they’re being interested in being health coach but they’re not interested at being an entrepreneur? Can you speak to that? For those who maybe a bit hesitant to jump into the health coaching space because they don’t feel like they could not be an entrepreneur?

[23:46] Lynda Cloud: Yes, happy to. Maybe just by way of context, your observations are spot on. I also couldn’t decide if it’s just because I’m living and breathing this every day and now enrolled as a student that I’m seeing health coaches everywhere but when you look at the data, the health coach market is estimated that it’s going to reach 7.9 billion by 2022. We’re seeing incredible acceptance and growth and I feel like we are just at this pivotal moment where we’re going to become ubiquitous in terms of health coaching and how we can help provide health coaches. Our students who go through the programs you know, we graduate close to 10,000 students each year. About 50% and the data’s been remarkably consistent. About 50% of our students are going through the curriculum for personal transformation. Maybe they have something they’re trying to solve in their lives. Maybe they just want to get themselves better. Maybe they’re stuck and they want to get unstuck but about 50% are going though for their own personal journey and personal transformation and betterment. The other 50% are going through it maybe they are a yoga instructor, a fitness instructor, chiropractor and they want to get additional certification or they want to pursue a career in health coaching and those 50% maybe in doctor’s office, they maybe insurance companies.

Where MDs hiring health coaches, hospitals all over the world are hiring health coaches. Our students who come out the other side are what we’re trying to do is we look at the curriculum is look at ways we could support them in their journey with different options at the end of graduation. One of the things you’ll hear from us early in 2020, I can’t quite announce it yet but we’re keenly focused on how do we help our health coaches who maybe loves what they’re doing. Some of our students are incredibly entrepreneurial but some of them really don’t want to spend their time doing all the business administrative stuff so what we’re working on is the solution where we can help them just push play. And it would be a way for them to get their business going on much more quickly. In the curriculum, we have way that you could help with. We could help you get your social page going, we could help you get your webpage going, we could help you if want to write a book and launch your dream book but this would be much more supportive very specific to the health coach graduate who want to start their own business.

[26:32] Ashley James: That sounds really exciting. That sound like another Lynda Cloud innovative thing since you –

[26:39] Lynda Cloud: Well, it is certainly a team innovative thing.

[26:42] Ashley James: Well, you’re the head right? Just looking back the ways that you carved out a whole new space for the k-12 online platform and help those students who were, they didn’t have a place, they didn’t feel like they belong and they had a place. That’s sort of the same. Right now, you’re doing the same for these health coaches who or people who wanted to be health coaches but they don’t have the entrepreneurial skill. They don’t have the time energy or the skill to break out on their own but they are amazing at health coaching. We’re expected nowadays to be a jack-of-all-trades to the jane-of-all trades. We’re expected to be a great mom and a great career woman or a great stay at home mom or a great homeschooler. Whatever we’re doing basically 15-hour days and then on top of that have these know everything we should know about internet marketing so that we can have a successful health coaching practice. It’s like, I would really want to see someone who’s an amazing health coach and I don’t need them to be a great marketer but how am I going to reach them or how are they going to reach me? I love that IIN is creating a way for these amazing health coaches to be able to get connected with the people to the people that are looking for amazing health coaches.

[28:09] Lynda Cloud: Yes, it’s interesting. I think that our students and the people in the health and wellness field in particular, were passionate people. We’re really are doing this because we want the world to be better place. Often times it’s hard for people to put a price tag on that. One of the first notes I got when I started here via LinkedIn was from one of my students saying, “Welcome. What do you think I should charge for my health coaching session?” I was like, “Oh, geez.” Because we just don’t know how to put a price tag and contemplate the business aspect of running a business which is so important. This side, I think what we’re working on people will be super excited about. It’ll all just help make their lives easier. They still have the opportunity to personalize it as much as they want or invest the time if that’s where they want to choose it but if as you say, we want a really good health coach spending their time coaching and advising and partnering and they want their tools and the resources they can get them.

[29:00] Ashley James: That is such a common question back when I was 19. I went to college to become a massage therapist. In Canada, it’s a bigger course. It’s like a 3,000 hour course. We study alongside nurses when we take the anatomy classes in college. That was one of the biggest question was, “What do we charge? What do we charge for a service?” I’ve seen that again in the NLP space. I was master practitioner and trainer and worked with the international training company teaching people how to become NLP practitioners. All the NLP practitioners didn’t know what to charge. That was the big question. You charge too little people don’t value what you do. You charge too much you’re unobtainable. You want the sweet spot and basically you want a price that honors the client. What I love about health coaching is it’s affordable. It’s accessible and affordable for people to go through your program but for people for clients who also hire health coaches. I love that it creates because you could do group coaching. Some people charge like $20 or $40 a month and they get a whole group together and by the end of it, the group learns more from each other. Learns even more from each other than they did from the coach but the coach was the facilitator. There’s so many opportunities for people who are even they can’t afford to go see all these holistic experts but they can definitely afford health coaching because health coaching helps them to identify the actionable steps they can take to bring their life back into balance. Now you started being a student at IIN. How far along are you in the program?

[31:00] Lynda Cloud: I am in early days. I think I’m in fifth module. I started working with the education team on the curriculum. We’re starting to look and refresh of the current and I thought I had to start taking this because this is just so compelling. I’m loving it, I’m doing it at night. I’m having fun with it. My family I think is feeling the impacts of it already.

[31:30] Ashley James: Now even before module five when you first joined IIN, there’s a foundation. The second you join even let’s say your class hasn’t started yet because there’s an official launch. The whole cohort of students go through it together even though it’s online you feel like you have this community. I love that because I connect with people around the world. All the students that were in it that the same time as I was. I participated in discussion throughout the whole year together online. Before your official start date when you join, so you can join anytime. You’re given the fundamentals modules and you have to have Kleenex with you because I bawled. I was crying tears of inspiration the entire time. I was like, “I am meant to be here.” It felt like –

[32:25] Lynda Cloud: You found your people.

[32:26] Ashley James: Yes. And it felt like I wasn’t the black sheep anymore. I was just crying and crying. It was so good. It was so cathartic. I felt like my favorite part of the entire year was the foundation. So don’t change that. Just add to it but don’t change it. It was so good. When you watched the fundamentals, the foundation modules what were you’re thinking as you’re going through it?

[32:56] Lynda Cloud: So for me, there are couple of things that happen. I feel like I cheated a little bit because of my role I have the opportunity to go to one of our live events. We had a couple of months ago that was incredible which I’ll talk about which felt like for me that was cathartic but it all made sense to me. There was a ton of common sense but then there’s this shift that transpired where what you were all of a sudden is primary food is not a primary food anymore. Once you start to make that shift and you think about the idea of what’s feeding your soul versus feeding your body and understanding. All those aspects. That to me was really substantial and how I thought about all aspects of my life. Then it was great to get to know Josh which you’ll do – you just feel like, he’s brought you into his world. As well as the other visiting teachers that are incredible. It’s been great. It’s been really helpful for me. Not just in my own personal life but also professionally.

[34:15] Ashley James: Tell us about the live event because it sounds like you enjoyed that even more than taking the online training.

[34:23] Lynda Cloud: Each student as you know who goes through our program has the opportunity to participate in a live event. It’s an event we hold one big event and that’s another area we’re actually looking at for next year is diversifying that and holding many more live events so that we could give people the opportunity the students the opportunity to come together. The live event that I attended was at the Lincoln center. It was a combination of incredible speakers, incredible community. We we’re dancing, we were swaying, we were crying, it’s like a revival meeting where you’ve come to gather and you found your people and people were just excited to be with other students. We have about 25% of people there who came outside the US, which marries the numbers of students we have in our curriculum who participate from outside the US. But was wonderful. It was just a good combination of wonderful speakers and community and people coming together.

[35:34] Ashley James: That’s really cool. What speaker was your favorite?

[35:37] Lynda Cloud: Dr. Weil was there. I just adore him. Andrew Weil I think is brilliant. He’s fantastic. Cherry Walsh talked about her protocol. I had the chance to visit with her and her daughter. She’s just an inspiration. From the business side, there was a woman there Meghan McCarthy. She is a hospital administrator from a hospital in the Pacific Northwest that we do a lot of work with. She’s like our first corporate client if you will. Meghan is an inspiration because she is breaking down those walls and saying, “I believe that health coaches can save the world and I believe that everybody needs to be health coach. “ What Meghan is doing is putting folks in the hospital through the health coach program and then doing a train the trainer model within her hospital community. She’s breaking it. She’s killing it. She’s just doing great work.

[36:48] Ashley James: Wow. Can you share which hospital it is?

[36:50] Lynda Cloud: PeaceHealth.

[36:53] Ashley James: I live in the Pacific North West, I’ve never heard of it but I bet I will be hearing about it. Sounds amazing.

[36:57] Lynda Cloud: You will, yes. We’re actually doing some outreach. She’s a force and she’s just great to work with. So we’re doing some additional work with her. Going out into committees and helping train the trainer within the communities and some of the work she’s doing with meals on wheels program, YMCA, etc.

[37:18] Ashley James: I love it. Since you joined IIN as their CEO, obviously you’ve been learning, you immersed into the corporate culture of IIN. You have gone to the live event, you’ve rubbed elbows with Joshua Rosenthal which you spent any amount of time with him and he is teaching you how to balance your life in a way that brings you joy. You have started to really absorb all of the education that IIN teaches. What changes have you made to your personal life since joining IIN?

[38:00] Lynda Cloud: My whole world changed when I joined IIN. I’ll tell you about it personally and the how IIN helped me get thought the change. I was living up in a town called Newton, Massachusetts right outside of Boston before taking the role at IIN. I moved to New York City. For the first time in my life, I’m living in New York city. That was a huge change. On top of that, my youngest left for college and we were instant empty nesters. You couldn’t have changed one more thing on our world if you wanted to. For IIN to New York City, that’s a big change. What I found though is I’m eating a lot healthier. We have organic breakfasts and lunches. I eat clean every day that has helped for sure with my energy and my stamina and my overall health. I’m meditating more because New York can eat you up. It can be a really frenetic hectic place. Overwhelming for a sensory perspective, IIN’s philosophy and methodology has helped me I think transition into the city in ways that I can focus on self-care in New York City which is not a an easy thing to do. But it has helped me think about ways to optimize my nutrition, my fitness and my health in a city environment.

[39:39] Ashley James: Very cool. As you’ve been going through the course, I know you’re only five modules in, there’s still a lot of content there. What homework have you implemented in your life from the course?

[39:56] Lynda Cloud: I have taken the spirit of bio-individuality and I’ve taken that from theory to practice. So for those of you who haven’t been through the course when you start to think about bio individuality and the term, it’s really that we’re all unique. Recognizing and honoring our uniqueness is going to be the key to our health and happiness. What you need each point in time in your life may change and it’s very personal to you and one of the things I’ve done in terms of theory to practice is taken that and apply that to a very diverse family that I’ve had. I’ve had vegetarian son and a husband who really loves meat and trying to figure out how do I introduce individualized meals and nutrition for them in ways that are going to make them the best they can be and enjoy what they’re doing and knowing that what’s good for one person isn’t necessarily always good for the other person. It’s really shifted my mindset I would say.

[41:08] Ashley James: Instead of trying to get your son to eat meat and your husband to eat vegetables.

[41:11] Lynda Cloud: Exactly. Which was not successful. We’re trying to find the one meal that would satisfy everybody. That’s been great. We’ve also been busy looking at what the next year’s going to bring for IIN and that’s been super fun. We’ve got a team of really talented people. There’s no shortage of ideas where we can take the company but we think there’s some really great stuff we’re doing in terms of working more closely with our affiliates and ambassadors and visiting teachers. That’s been cool.

[41:52] Ashley James: I love it. You’ve been around enough now to have heard some success stories. Both from the standpoint of the students and the staff and also clients. Can you share some really inspiring success stories that standout in your mind?

[42:12] Lynda Cloud: Yes. I think I’ll share a story of a woman I met at the conference. She was just absolutely fantastic. She just finished the program and she was sharing with me that she had her son who have diabetes and was just really struggling with of how to help him. She was telling me the story welling up at how this gave her clarity in ways that things hadn’t been able to give her family clarity before. She was able to take the philosophy of figuring out exactly what was right for him and helping him become healthier and the success he had. When you hear those kind of nuggets, when you hear those kind of stories, whether it’s health related or it’s just people feeling stronger or people feeling like they’re in a place that they didn’t realize they could get to and how the curriculum and the community which is I would say is the most unsung hero around IIN, is just how strong of a force the community is. Whether you’re posting something or sharing something or seeing someone in person just when the community comes together you feel as you were describing, you found your tribe, you found your people who all of a sudden understand what you needed. They are nothing but supportive and they’re just nothing but supportive and happy people that help you in your journey. That’s kind of the theme of the most of the stories and most of the impact. That’s the vision is to create this cripple around the world and pay it forward. That’s our goal.

[44:11] Ashley James: Back in the day, Joshua used to call this something else. It wasn’t health coaching, it was health counselling? Was it counselling? But then the word counselling, it wasn’t clear enough and I don’t think it was legal to be called counselor because that’s is more for therapy. What I thought is interesting is I went into – I signed up to IIN to become a health coach not knowing how much emotional support you learn how to provide. I thought I was going in because you learn in IIN in the yearlong course, you learn a hundred dietary theories and I thought I was going in to learn nutrition and how much vitamin C is in something. Which is you don’t really need to know. You don’t need to memorize how much vitamin C is in stuff, you could just google it but you actually learn skills in IIN. How to be with someone and hold the space for them to feel heard. Sometimes for the first time in their life. In a way that is not biased or doesn’t have an agenda. Because when we go to our best friend or when we go to our mom, or we go to people that are in our life, they have agenda. I remember going telling my best friend I was moving. I was moving to a different country. I’m from Canada. And she was really upset because she didn’t want me to move right? That was my path and I needed to. I wasn’t going to get a positive space. She wasn’t going to make a positive space for me. She had to process her own emotions about me moving. When we got to friend or a family member, to talk about what’s happening in our life that stop us from achieving our health goals. Their emotions come up. They can’t be a blank supportive space. Sometimes there’s even self-sabotage and I’ve seen it in my family. I have a family member that says to another family member, “When are you going to lose weight?” and then offers them a cookie. Over and over again. This level of sabotage that’s going on and we love our friends and family, they have their own agenda and maybe it’s unconscious.

Going to a health coach you have someone who listens to you who just sits with you listens to you and helps decipher what your goals are. What your true desires are. Then holds that space for you to achieve it and helps you to uncover what’s stopping you and then helps you create an action plan towards it. I’ve had some amazing times with my clients as a health coach that I pinch myself and Joshua says this happens when you as a health coach get as much growth out of health coaching as your client does. Every time my client had a success I felt like I had a success because I learn so much about myself and also my ability to hold the space for someone as they grew.

It’s this career that is constantly evolving you as a person and allowing you to feel human connection and love and care for someone in a way that is not co-dependent. In a way that is uplifting them. Letting them do the work but holding them accountable. It’s a beautiful dance because anyone could google the nutrition or the calories in something that doesn’t teach us how to help someone be the best version of themselves. IIN doesn’t teach us stuff that we can go an just google. It’s teaching us skills that we can really help someone achieve not only their physical health but the emotional health ad help them achieve their life goals. I’ve had clients who we ended up talking about their relationships and their career and things would come up and one of them was an entrepreneur something in her business but changing something in her business it actually affected her health because it lowered her stress. I like that IIN doesn’t just say, “Okay, we’re not talking about your physical health, we’re talking about your client’s entire life.

[48:38] Lynda Cloud: Every aspect of it you’re absolutely right. I love the way when you’re describing it. I pictured this swirl. I pictured this symbiotic imagery that what you’re doing on this side has a direct correlation in this side and this side and this side. So as you talk to a health coach it’s deconstructing and building up and understanding and as you say create the space but also these goals and creating this journey and creating this champion that doesn’t have an agenda. There’s somebody you know you’ve got in your camp that is helping you be the best person you can be based on what you want and what you want to do. That is such a gift. I agree with you, everyone whether it’s friends or families it’s really hard to be at complete objective and partial cheerleader for any of us. I know I try, not always successful with my kids but I’m getting better. It’s a really special space and we’re starting to look with some research behind the power of that in the wellness journey. The hospital I mentioned earlier for example is starting to do some work on we want this to be a third party study of folks who’ve inserted, health coaches into their wellness journey and how that has accelerated and impact what they’re trying to do both on the emotional and physical perspective.

[50:20] Ashley James: Wow. Are there any results back from that study yet?

[50:23] Lynda Cloud: No. Not yet. Just kicked off.

[50:24] Ashley James: I’m so excited. That is going to be so cool to hear about that. I love that you’re doing third party and you just because you want to get the truth.

[50:34] Lynda Cloud: We want to get objective, exactly.

[50:36] Ashley James: Yes. Now you mentioned primary food. For those who have not been immersed in the culture of IIN may not have heard the term primary food. Can you teach us what primary food is?

[50:48] Lynda Cloud: Yes. What I thought primary food was before I started IIN was probably what most of you think primary food is which is the food you eat. Actually when you go through the curriculum what you learn is, primary food is what feeds us but it’s not because what comes on a plate. It comes in a bunch of different categories. It could be your relationship with health, it could be your physical activity, it could be your career, it could be spiritual, it could be financial. It’s all those things around you that impact who you are and so you need to think about those how you balance and what imbalances you have to help get balance in your primary food. As opposed to secondary food which is the things we eat and we start to think about food and food is medicine and how that can help feed our soul but also give us balance in our primary food. It’s very spiral in terms of how you think about it. It’s all interrelated. That’s what generally what primary food means.

[52:02] Ashley James: Right and that’s one of the first things that when someone goes to an IIN health coach that they’re given this little on page quiz that helps them to determine the balance and actually see on this graph the balance of their life. How much joy and fulfillment they have, spiritual fulfillment. Emotional fulfilment, connection, fulfillment within their relationship, within their career. They get to see that. The areas that they’re missing. I’ll give a great example that I just witnessed in myself. I’m looking back at the person I was before IIN. I’ve been on a health journey for many years. In my 20’s, I was very sick. I had type II diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on monthly antibiotics for. I’d wake up every morning feeling like I was hungover with a splitting headache feeling like I drank alcohol but I hadn’t. I was just sick all the time. And in your 20’s you’re supposed to feel the healthiest. I was so sick of being sick. I was also told that I was infertile and I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. Basically every day I was a prisoner trapped in my own body who look outside the doctor’s office for what I could do for my health because being given drugs every month. It was just keeping the infections at bay, it wasn’t helping –

[53:25] Lynda Cloud: The root cause, yes.

[53:26] Ashley James: Right. I was a really busy sales manager for an international training company. I lived in Las Vegas which is sometimes may not be a very healthy environment. Most of the time we’re always indoor in air-conditioning and it’s a very interesting place to live, let’s just put it that way. My husband and I started watching documentaries. Netflix has just started streaming documentaries. That was a new thing for Netflix back in 2008. Some health documentary said, “Eat organic and shop the perimeter of the grocery store.” Within one month, my chronic infections went away just eating organic and not eating as much processed foods. I thought, “If I could change my health in one month, what else could I do.?” That’s what led me down my journey to reverse all of my health conditions. We conceived or child naturally and were just getting healthier and healthier. I’m still on my health journey and what I noticed was before I joined IIN to become a heath coach. I already started the podcast I actually interviewed on of your graduates and I asked him during my interview, “How did you become a health coach?” because that was my first time interviewing a health coach. I almost didn’t interview him because I thought it was so cliché. I thought, “This sounds like a BS certification.” I really almost didn’t give him the time of day. Something me and I love that listen to your gut. Something in me said listen to him and it was a beautiful interview. He had ADD and was put on meds his entire childhood. He had side effects from it. He decided to take control of his health and he completely reversed his ADD using diet and healed his body. Then he went on to become a health coach. Now that’s what he does for others. In the interview he told me all about IIN. I immediately got skype from the interview. I called up IIN and I signed up that day. I was so inspired. Of course I turned to my husband and I said, “Is this okay?” he said, “Go for it. This is great. You should totally do this.” I talked to Juliet. By the way, Juliet is amazing.

[55:37] Lynda Cloud: She’s downstairs right now. She’s a rock star.

[55:41] Ashley James: Yes, I think she’s been there forever. Juliet’s fantastic. That I called up my best friend and then told her about it and then she signed up. So we did it together. Which I highly recommend. It was great. She’s in Canada and I’m here in the States. Being long distance and doing this course together was so wonderful. That was back in 2016. I graduated in 2017. The person I was before IIN, even though I was eating really healthy, I’ve reversed all those health conditions, I’m doing this podcast I’m totally onboard with holistic health, that person I was would not have said “No” to the free sample of chocolate at Costco. That person every time and we go to Costco like twice a week at least because I buy a lot of organic stuff, we have a great Costco it’s filled with organic produce. The cart gets filled up with organic freshfruits and vegetables every time we go and I will go back again and again for the free chocolate samples because they’ll give out as many. The Lindor chocolate they’re really decadent ones. I would just circle the Costco and go back and again and again and get as much free chocolate as they’ll give which they’ll give infinite amount of free chocolate samples but every year I would absolutely do that. And then would just not feel my best for a few days. I’m allergic to milk and so my immune system would be upset. My digestive system would be upset. I would be inflamed. I’d have brain fog. When you’re really healthy and clean, if you eat something your body doesn’t like it causes inflammation you really notice it. When you eat it all the time and you’re habituated, you don’t notice it as much. Even though I was on this great path I would still give into chocolate and then when I went through IIN. I started to look at my primary foods. Meaning, the food in life that brings me joy and happiness and fulfillment and balance. The food being connection with my husband, connection with my child. Feeling like I’m making a difference in this world. Now fast forward to now, I walked through Costco twice this week and didn’t even give them the time of day, didn’t touched any of the chocolate and didn’t feel deprived about it. I actually felt really happy. Because in the past I recognized that I was using chocolate even if it was free samplse, I was using chocolate to try to give myself joy and fulfillment because my primary food where out of balance. Just yesterday I had a package in the mail that had a bunch of Hershey’s kisses in it from a friend of mine who I guess – it’s just people send chocolate and it’s that the time of year that they send chocolate. I love that person. I’m grateful and I threw out the chocolate. I have no need for that in my body but I didn’t feel deprived and I’m not, I don’t have a ton of self-control. It’s not like I’m one of these people that has a ton of self-control. It just didn’t needed it. It doesn’t fulfill that I’m not using chocolate to self medicate because my primary foods are imbalanced. I’m deeply connected with my husband and my son, I feel fulfilled in my career. I’ve gone through and done the work in the primary foods. I recognized that my food addictive behaviors have subsided because I have done the work that I learned through IIN.

[59:36] Lynda Cloud: Your story is awesome and it is inspirational and it’s also very familiar. When you talk to a lot of before and after IIN, it’s very similar. That you don’t realize what was missing or what was out of alignment or what part of your world your primary foods weren’t in sync but once you actually make that shift tor work on making that shift because the way you describe it is exactly right. Just identifying that, “Do I have the strongest healthiest relationship I should? Do I have the most fulfilling career? Am I in the right place for my spiritually? Am I getting the right amount of physical activity?” Once you actually start paying attention to those aspects and then doing the work in those things that you know are going to help you create that balance, you have this Aha moment and you say – the way you describe it was your Lindor chocolate, you don’t actually think about that anymore. That used to be probably the first thing you thought about when you got into the car on your way to Costco. I know probably would’ve been mine too but now, your mission is different. Your priorities are different. Anyway, I love your story and I love your journey. It’s exactly what we want to hear from our grads.

[01:01:02] Ashley James: Thank you. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. I’m really excited for all the innovative stuff you’re going to be doing with you and your team at IIN. Is there anything that you wanted to teach today or homework you want to give? Is there anything that you really wanted to make sure that the listeners walk away with?

[01:01:25] Lynda Cloud: Well. I think what I would say is one of two things. One is I’ll just say some tips maybe as people are headed into the holiday season as you described, the baskets of chocolates, the baskets of cookies. Getting off your rhythm or your routine. It happens. And so I would just caution people to embrace what they’re about to embark on. Enjoy their family, enjoy their friends. Don’t beat yourself up over if you grab the Lindor chocolates a couple of times this months. It’s going to happen. Or where if you fell like you need to just remember that everything you’re doing is good for you and who you are. Stay true to your mission and vision of what you want to be and where your life to take you because we’re all – I think it’s not about being our best self every single day, it’s just knowing what you want to do and how you want to get there. For me, I go into this season I am still be an interesting one, I can tell you from the last 3 years, I have ended up with an incredible sickness that’s started the first week of December. Literally, I had been in an urgent care in the hospital every December for the past 3 years because of the stress of the holidays. It would often be end of year budget. I would have blisters on my throat. I would end up respiratory something. I’d have all sorts of illnesses and going into this December I feel so different.

One is because I’ve got alignment around – not that I haven’t loved my career but I feel like my career and my personal goals are so aligned for the first time in my life. I am paying attention in what my body is feeling so I’m drinking more great tea so I can help with some of the inflammation. I’m eating more mushroom because I know it’s going to help me in terms of detoxing and looking at some things that are going to be stressful for my body. I’m going into the season not that I’m going to live a completely different life but I’m paying attention to my gut and my body and what my body has been telling me for years that I never ever listen to. That’s my advice. People should just go on to the holiday season listening to their body, listen to what they need to be successful and happy and have a fulfilling holiday season. That’s some advice and then I would just, I’d close with keep your eye out for what were going to be, you’ll be hearing from us over the next year. I think we’re doing some super exciting stuff to help based on what we’ve heard from our students and based on how I think we could make a difference in lives around the world. So we’re launching a detox your life healing with alternative medicine, stress management, different types of specialty course that we think will be really interesting for folks to get a taste of IIN curriculum in ways that’s new and different and also our business tool kit which you’ll hear more about as I promise early next year.

[01:04:49] Ashley James: Very cool. Awesome. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/coach to sign up to get a free module just to get a taste of it and see if it’s right for them and learn more about IIN. So it’s learntruehealth.com/coach. They could also just call up IIN. I know that listeners get a really special deal for saying that they heard the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James when they call IIN. I know that there’s a new lower payment plan for those who would instead of paying the price in one payment would rather pay it off monthly. What Juliet told me when I first signed up she said – I joined and did the payment plan. She said to me if you do the 12-month course because now you can actually become a full time student and do it in six but my understanding is that most people because we have full time lives –

[0105:53] Lynda Cloud: It’s designed for most people who have a full day and then want to do it on top of that. Yes.

[01:06:00] Ashley James: Right. For me, I had my son who was a young toddler at that time or just entering toddlerhood. I also had the podcast. I was very busy and I still managed to do it. Log in into the evenings, do 20 minutes a day oftentimes listen to the videos while I was commuting, while I was at the gym, while I was doing the laundry. I could listen and commute a lot I just pretty much anytime we are commuting we are listening and that was cool because I was like getting my husband to listen too and he enjoyed it. He actually went vegan. Went completely whole food plant-based and he went from a carnivore. Maybe play the videos while your husband listening.

[01:06:48] Lynda Cloud: I have been.

[01:06:49] Ashley James: I’m not saying that everyone should go vegan or everyone should go one diet. I don’t believe in any one diet dogma. My husband listened to his body. After listening to enough just sort of being the fly on the wall while I was taking IIN, he listened to enough lectures and he was also listening to my interviews and he was taking all these information listening to his body and he really wasn’t happy with the direction his heath was going. He just cold turkey said, “I’m never eating meat again.” So he just eats one to two pounds of vegetables a day. Potatoes and brown rice and he just says I’m ever going back. I can’t believe food tastes this good. If you told me that the whole food plant-based tasted this good, I would’ve stopped eating meat long ago and that’s just the 180 because my husband when I met him, was like would never ever touch vegetables. Pretty much just ate steak breakfast, lunch and dinner or eggs and steak breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Just very interesting that he started listening to his body. Really this videos do have an impact on the people who absorb them. I found that I could either listen to it little bits of it throughout the week or sometimes if I got really busy I would then to choose to spend a Sunday afternoon catching up for all the work that week. Just so I found it to be easy to go through the entire year but what Juliet said when she first enrolled me into the program, she said after the first six month, you start to take on clients. Some students get to the point where they actually pay of the entire course before they’ve completed the course because they’ve taken on some clients while they’re still in the course. Because the first six months gives you the foundation. The next six months you continue your training but you also learn how to work with clients as you’re working with clients which is just find brilliant.

[01:08:40] Lynda Cloud: That’s right. You’re moving from theory to practice. Exactly. Yes.

[01:08:43] Ashley James: I love that you guys don’t just like, “Okay, here’s all the information. Now you’re on your own.” It’s really you feel supported for the six months while you’re working with clients. It’s really a wonderful system and that people can immediately start to within the first after six months can start to basically pay off the course. It’s accessible to everyone and I love that. Any advice around those who want or interested or have more questions or want to sign up or any sort of want to make sure that potential students know some information?

[01:09:21] Lynda Cloud: I’ll just give you a quick little. As you described, you can do it on accelerated program six months or you can do a full year program. There are lots of promotions so you should check in to instituteofintegrativenutrition.com. You obviously – I think if you go through Ashley, you’re also going to get additional promotions. Logistically that’s just good to know. I think you should also know, Juliet is a really good example. We actually just did a town hall. We celebrated her 14^th year with IIN. Our coaches down stairs are health coaches who’ve gone through the program. Even if you’re just on the fence and you’re saying, “I’m not sure if this is right for me. Can I invest this kind of time? Can I invest this kind of money?” I would have the conversation because you’ll learn something about yourself in that conversation. These are not folks who are going to give you a hard sell. They’re going to walk you through the philosophy and what it means to be health coach because they’re all health coaches and they’ve done this. You’ll get something out of the engagement in the call and learn a little bit about yourself. We would love to have everybody to join one of the cohorts starting next year. We think it’s going to be a super year next year.

[01:10:48] Ashley James: Awesome. Yes, 2020 sounds fantastic. Lynda, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing with us and I would love to have you or one of your wonderful staff members come back on the show to share all of the things you’ve said are in the works. Like the legislation and the new business thing that’s coming out next year who’s going to support health coaches to be entrepreneurs and successfully be health coaches. Also, the third party study implementing health coaches.

[01:11:26] Lynda Cloud: Yes. Our new events too. Yes, we have a lot in the works, we’re super excited, and I would love that. I’d love to visit in person with you so –

[01:11:36] Ashley James: That would be wonderful. If ever you’re in Seattle, let me know. If I’m ever in New York, you know I’m going to be popping by IIN.

[01:11:43] Lynda Cloud: Please do. Please do.

[01:11:45] Ashley James: Fantastic

[01:11:46] Lynda Cloud: Happy Holidays, Ashley.

[01:11:47] Ashley James: Thank you, you too.

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398 Winning The Battle In Your Brain, Homeschooling Mom of Seven Children Molly Christensen Teaches How To Master Mindset, End Procrastination, and Power struggles While Living Your Heroes Journey 0

Dec 16, 2019

Check out IIN to see if Health Coaching is meant for you!

Learntruehealth.com/coach

Molly's sites:

Main website: www.buildingheroesacademy.com
My book: www.homeschoolgetitdone.com
My curriculum funnel: www.3homeschoolsecrets.com

Building Heroes Academy Homeschool curriculum - homeschool all the kids in an hour a day
Book: How to Get Everything Done: How to homeschool AND clean the house AND stay sane

I LOVE encouraging homeschool moms. It's overwhelming to so many because it's such an unknown and goes against what most the world is doing. I love teaching principles to help shift your mindset from overwhelm to enjoying life! I love to talk about "How to get everything done" and "how to build heroes in your home - and why you need to."

Homeschool Secret: How To Master Mindset And Avoid Procrastination

https://www.learntruehealth.com/homeschool-secret-how-to-master-mindset-avoid-procrastination

Highlights:

The Hero’s Journey
Pattern to all myths – the details are different, you have this basic pattern
People feel discontent because we’re not doing what we should be doing
Parents are not here to control their children
Every human being was born with greatness within
Learn how to start listening to calls to action and acting on them
The first voice is your authentic self; listen to the first voice
When you start feeling stuck in the muck, that’s part of the journey
Homeschooling – learn together but you connect it to yourself through principles
Obstacles are learning opportunities
Training with learning how to be consistent
Family economy system – time and money
Learn from real life skills that are going to affect them when they get older
Play is an important part of child development
Program for moms who want to learn how to become disciplined and create habits for themselves
Brain principles
Children model their parents

In today’s episode with Molly Christensen, listeners will get to know about the tools that Molly uses for homeschooling, tips on how to avoid procrastination and get past the overwhelm, and habits that moms should practice to be the best models for their children.

[00:00:00] Intro: Hello, true health seeker. And welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You are going to love today’s guest. Now, Molly Christensen specializes in working with moms, especially ones that are overwhelmed and doing homeschooling. However, I think everyone could benefit from listening to today’s interview because Molly shares some amazing tools that help everyone.

So enjoy today’s interview. Please share it with busy moms. Share with all the busy mom friends that you have. And all the homeschooling friends you have. Because they’ll gain benefit from it as well. Because she does share specifically some information about that. But she gives amazing advice for those that would love to master their mindset and no longer allow procrastination to stop them. So really, really, really great nuggets of gold in today’s interview.

And I want to let you know something really special. If you are a stay at home mom and you would also like to have a career in helping people, you can become a health coach. You can go to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It’s 100 percent online. I did their online program. It’s actually designed for busy moms. Now, dads can take it too. But the program is designed for women who are so busy that they’re taking care of a family. And even moms that are taking care of family and a career, but basically we’re so, so busy that they designed as you can fit it in in the evenings, maybe 20 minutes a day. That’s about how much I did, 20 minutes a day for an entire year and I became a certified health coach. What’s really exciting is that in 2020, it’s going to be covered by healthcare. It’s going to be covered by insurance. So it opens up the doors for so many people who maybe in the past couldn’t afford a health coach, would now be able to. Which is really exciting for you as a health coach and also exciting for people who want to hire a health coach that you can use your insurance which is really, really exciting. Give IIN a call. Just Google IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Give them a call and ask them for more information. You can also get a free module of the course by going to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach. They give you access to a module and you can see if it’s right for you.

Now, I got a special deal for my Learn True Health listeners. You get $1,500 off. It’s a huge chunk of the tuition is taken off for mentioning the Learn True Health podcast for being one of my listeners. They also have lots of great specials throughout the year. Sometimes they include things like a tablet or an Amazon gift card for additional books, because of course we love learning. So you know, call them up and ask them what kind of special is going on right now especially through mentioning the Learn True Health podcast and all of the great discounts that they give us as listeners. And please share this information with those in your life that you know would make an amazing health coach. It is the fastest growing field in the health field – n the health space. I think that we’re going to get to a point where health coaching is a household name and that it’s as common to go to a health coach as it is to have a certified trainer when you go to a gym. I’m very excited about that because we need to turn this around. The rate of disease is just increasing every year. We need to turn this around. We need to give the chance for everyone, give the education and the chance for everyone to have true health. That’s exactly what I’m here to do is to help you learn what you can do mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, to optimize your health.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing the podcast to help as many people as possible. Enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 398.

I am so excited for today’s guests. We have on with us Molly Christensen, who is an expert in homeschooling and supporting busy moms. Helping them to no longer be overwhelmed. I came across — my husband actually came across Molly’s work. And as we were watching one of her videos, my husband said, “You have to have her on the show.” And I was like, “You’re right.” She has so much wisdom to share. I thought this is awesome. Even if you’re not a homeschooling mom, I think you can still take away some amazing gold information from Molly. Because nowadays, even kids that are in the public school system come home with, like, over an hour’s worth of homework and it’s overwhelming. And even if you’re not a stay at home mom and you have a career and then you come home and then you have to help your kids with homework and then you have to manage the chores.

So I just think that Molly even though your expertise is helping homeschooling moms, I still think that all parents could take away great wisdom from you because you teach that how to have balance with your children, with the chores, and with your own emotional state as well. Which if our emotional state is not in order, if our mindset is not in order, everyone in the household suffers. You know what I mean?

[00:06:00] Molly Christensen: For sure. Absolutely. If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Right?

[00:06:04] Ashley James: Nobody happy. That’s right. Oh, Molly, welcome to the show.

[00:06:09] Molly Christensen: Well, thank you so much. I’m super excited to be here. And thank you for inviting me. This is exciting.

[00:06:15] Ashley James: Absolutely. You have three websites I want to let listeners know about. Your main website is buildingheroesacademy.com. Your book is homeschoolgetitdone.com. And your curriculum funnel is the number three, 3homeschoolsecrets.com. Of course the links to everything that Molly does is going to be in the show notes for today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.

I want to dive right into your story because, man, you’ve got — like, I just want to, like, be a fly on the wall and absorb all the wisdom that you emanate from your years of experience. I only have one kid. I don’t know how in the world you’ve done it. You’ve done everything you’ve done. How many children have you homeschooled?

[00:07:09] Molly Christensen: Well, I have seven children.

[00:07:13] Ashley James: And you look amazing by the way.

[00:07:15] Molly Christensen: Thank you.

[00:07:15] Ashley James: So you definitely are doing – you are managing your stress levels. You’re managing everything really well. And I know it’s been trial and error. And now you love teaching people and teaching homeschooling moms how to do that. How to do just what you’re doing. But to take us back to your story, what happened in your life that made you want to homeschool your children?

[00:07:39] Molly Christensen: Okay. For sure. Yeah. So when I was growing up, I actually was kind of an angry child. So people who know me now are like, “Yeah. Right.” So the good news is that you can change that. I was always mad and blaming other people for things. And you know, my siblings now will say, “Yeah. We’re kind of scared of you.” But I was also a very determined person. And luckily, my mother also could see potential in me. She could see that if I put my mind to something, then I could do it. I would do it. But still growing up, I kind of thought, “You know, I’m a mean person. Nobody really likes me.” I remember when my mom came to me – let’s see how old was I? I was probably 14 or so. And she was very brave. She came to me and she said, “You know, if you smiled every once in a while, people might not be – they might want to be in the same room as you.” Okay. She didn’t exactly say that. But that was kind of the gist of it. Of course, I hated hearing that and I was mad at her. But I did take her words to heart and I decided to practice smiling. So I started smiling. And you’re like, “Wait. What does this have to do with homeschool?” Don’t worry, it connects in.

But I did start to smile and I did realize that it was better to be happy and to smile and to have people not be scared of you.

So when I was in high school, she actually started homeschooling my younger brother and sister. And let’s just say I still wasn’t that great at being happy about things. And I thought, “Why in the world would anybody want to do that?” And they even asked me, “Do you want to be homeschooled too?” And I’m like, “Heck no.” I thought it was the worst idea ever. Why would I want to be home with you? Which is really sad in retrospect. But I did get better. So this is good. So that’s why it was kind of interesting that when I started having kids of my own, and my oldest son was about four, I started thinking about homeschooling. And my brain was like, “No way. You can’t do that. Because not only are you a disorganized mess, It’s weird.” People think you’re weird if you homeschool. And what about socialization? Your kids, they’re going to be weird.

[00:10:29] Ashley James: Yeah. We all know that one weird that came in to, like, maybe junior high or something that was homeschooled. Like, we all know or someone told us. Someone told us, “Oh, yeah. I knew a homeschooled kid and they were just weird.” And so it’s, like, you hear about this one person or a rumor gets spread about one person, maybe you never even met them. And then everyone thinks that it’s like the stigma that all homeschooling kids are just weird, and unsocialized, and awkward, and they don’t know how to communicate. Oh, man. I’ve met some more schooling kids that are so brilliant. And they look you in the eye and they have wonderful conversations. And they’re so on and so connected. That is one of those stigmas that it’s just not true.

[00:11:18] Molly Christensen: I know. But everybody worries about it. And actually I can address that later if we want to go into that. Like, why it’s not even a problem. But I didn’t know that then. I was sitting there going, “I can’t do homeschool.” I don’t even know how. And seriously, I am the most undisciplined person ever is what I thought, you know, because I kind of was. I was kind of a mess. So I didn’t do it. I sent him to kindergarten. And I did not like that, actually. Because part of what I was seeing was he was bringing home some bad behaviors that I did not teach him. And he was learning things like, they had a whole two month unit on saving the rain forest. And I’m like, “You know, I am all for saving rain forest. But when you’re five, shouldn’t the focus be like learning how to clean your room first? Why are we putting all this pressure on him?” I don’t know. That just really kind of bugged me because – and I was thinking, “If you were home, that’s what we could focus on.” And I started looking at what was going on in the classroom. And I was like, “You know, this isn’t really rocket science.” Although, rocket science actually would have been easier for me because I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. I was like, “Yeah. I think maybe I could do this.” Only because I was seeing that it didn’t look quite as hard as I had been picturing it to be.

And so the next year in first grade, I decided that I was going to homeschool him. And I asked my husband about it. And he was like, “I don’t care.” He’s just like, “Yeah. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine.” But he didn’t really understand what homeschool is all about either and neither does I at that time. So I pulled him out in first grade. And by then, I had another kid and she was four at the time. But I didn’t think about the fact that she might want to learn too. So I tried to send all my energy to this one kid, my oldest son, who’s six mind you. And we would go from, like, 9:00 a.m. to about 4:00 p.m. and still not get all the stuff done that I had planned for the day. Because I was thinking, “Hey, if I’m going to homeschool, well, then you’re going to be way ahead of everybody else. And I’m going to make sure that happens.”

Why are we laughing?

[00:14:07] Ashley James: Well, I’m laughing because it’s funny –

[00:14:09] Molly Christensen: I’m just kidding.

[00:14:09] Ashley James: – how much pressure we put on ourselves and also put on our children. On one hand, children really can excel in homeschooling because they’re getting one on one. If they went to – even if they went somewhere else and it wasn’t you that was teaching them and they had a teacher, a tutor, teach them one on one for a whole entire day, they would have learned more in that day than they would in an entire week at a school. Because a teacher that has to manage 15 or 30 kids is not going to be able to give your child the amount of attention. And also cater to where they are and their learning style. So I’m laughing because they can – and children, when kids are really young, their minds are like sponges. They can really take on and learn so much. But at the same time, I think that as parents, we can put too much on their plate. And I’m talking from my experience. I’ve noticed that with our four year old. I’ve put too much pressure on him. And then I backed off and realized, “Okay. Maybe I need to -” there’s got to be some balance. And I definitely want to talk to you about that.

But continue with your story. So here you have your six year old and you have, basically, created a college level curriculum for a first grader that he’s getting the best tutelage in the world. And what’s happening with the four year old? Is the four year old jumping in and wanting to learn also?

[00:15:38] Molly Christensen: Right. So this is what happens. It is kind of funny because so many of us homeschool moms think, “Oh my gosh. I’m going to make my kid be a genius or something.” And then reality hits and you’re like, “I can’t even get him out of bed in the morning.” Because there’s no place to go. So what happened was, my four year old would just kind of tag along. But I didn’t really include her much, which was kind of silly of me. But she was listening and she was soaking everything in. She would actually go off preschool, which is kind of funny, so that I would have free time to work with my other son during that time too. And then when she was home, I would let her do a little bit of stuff here and there. But I was mainly focused on this oldest child. And I was trying to get through this list of, like, 25 different subjects every day. And I was trying to have him do writing assignments that would be things like, “Write three sentences to describe this pencil.” And now if there was anything that was going to ignite passion in a first grade boy, that’s not it. Right?

So it was pretty miserable because I was trying to follow all those curriculum that said this is what I had to do in order to get him where I thought he should be. And it was a nightmare because we would end up crying every day. Because I’m like, “Oh, I can’t do this.” And he is like, “I don’t want to do this. I just want to play.” Because he’s a six year old boy, which is what they do. And they do learn a ton from playing. But I didn’t know that. And so I just started searching for answers. And I finally had this thought pop into my brain, which was, instead of trying to get him through all these checklist items and then rewarding him by reading aloud at the end. Why don’t you start off with just reading aloud at the beginning of the day? And I was like, “I can’t do that. That’s the fun part.” But I tried it and actually that made life so much easier when I just put read aloud first. Because what it did is, it was so fun and we had loved it so much to learn and hear different stories together. That what it did is it built our relationship, made us grow closer together. And we have this common learning ground here that was fun instead of miserable. So it was then that I was like, “Okay. If I’m going to homeschool, I got to figure this thing out.” Because it’s great to put the reading first. But how is he supposed to learn everything else? I can’t make him because we’re in power struggles all the time. And it’s miserable. And so that’s kind of when I really just started my journey to figure out what it was that I needed to do. And also at the same time when I’m trying to homeschool, I’ve got these two kids and we are a disaster at home. Because I was spending all this time trying to homeschool all day long that I didn’t ever get around to cleaning the house or actually preparing meals. I just go the fridge and say, “Hm. What’s not moldy in here? Let’s see what I can pull out.” Because they always keep getting hungry, strangely enough. They want food.

And I kind of as a free spirit, I’m like, “You know, I just want to be spontaneous and free.” Except for when you can’t find your shoes. You can’t go out anywhere to field trips. So it was one of these really kind of defining moments in my life rose just like, always – so I had started smiling. And so that’s how you could actually get married because I wasn’t so grumpy anymore. And I could have kids. But what I learned was that in my heart, I was still very grumpy. And I was still blaming people. And I was still complaining about everything. And I didn’t realize that it was me causing most of my problems. And so what I had to figure out was that If I really wanted to make homeschool work, I was going to have to change. I was going to have to do things differently. I was going to have to think differently. And so I started reading all the books I could. Because that’s what I do. I’m like, “I got a problem to solve. I want to solve it.” I’m going to start reading. I’m not a quitter. I’m determined. I am pretty stubborn. I have a stubborn card in my back pocket. I can pull it out when I need it. So I started reading all these books. I started learning all these things. But what I found is that I could hardly even ever implement anything because I really was that undisciplined. And I wanted my kids to be able to say they’re going to do something and then be able to do it. Just even with no one nagging them. I always wanted my mom there. Well, I don’t have my mom here to nag me to do the stuff I know I should be doing but I can’t make myself do.

[00:21:01] Ashley James: It took it took me many years of personal growth to get rid of that little nagging – my mom’s nagging voice in my head telling me I’m not doing enough.

[00:21:11] Molly Christensen: Well, I just wanted her told me to do it. You know, sometimes because I couldn’t make myself do it. But yes, we do have our moms that they love us so much and they wanted this so much for us. But I was like, at some point I just got to figure this out for myself. I’ve just got to do this. Because I do not want to ruin my child’s life by homeschooling but I felt pretty strongly that I was supposed to do it. So that’s when I had it turned to me. And what is really funny that happens first for most homeschool moms and probably just moms who are parents, they’ll do is too. They’re always looking for the magic bullet. And this happened to me too. We go through every single curriculum out there. We buy all of them because we want the one that’s going to work and solve all of our problems. And the same thing with moms just who aren’t homeschoolers, we’re trying to find things that will fix our kids, really. When really, it’s us as a mom who is kind of creating a lot of the issues in our own lives. So I did that. I went out and bought a ton of different curriculum and none of it worked, surprisingly. Not really. But that’s because I didn’t even have the discipline in the first place to be able to teach my kids good character. And this is not against my parents, by the way. Part of is just my personality and my mom’s personality. And my mom was just struggling to get through raising these kids mostly by herself. I do have a dad, who’s a wonderful dad. But she felt like a single mom because he was an international airline pilot and he was always gone. Always gone. And when he was home, which I didn’t even think about until I was an adult, was the fact that he was jet lagged when he was home. So they were doing the best they could. But somehow some of the training kind of slipped away. And I didn’t get it mostly just because I did whatever I wanted kind of a free spirit. I got away with it.

So as I started reading all these self help books and taking classes and all this stuff, I was just getting more and more discouraged as I went along. Because I’m like, “I am a reasonably smart person. I should be able to figure this out. Why is this so hard? Why is it so hard to actually homeschool my kids, and to keep my house clean, and to just stay sane? And as I was reading all these books, I was getting different bits and pieces here and there. And so I was improving but it was pretty slow. Pretty slow improvement. But as I did get through this, I did finally come up with some key things that really changed the way I thought about things. And how I could actually homeschool my kids without completely failing them and ruining them. And how I could actually have a house where I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to have visitors come over. And where I could be happy and not always feeling like a miserable failure.

And so that’s kind of what the message that I want — well, that is the message. That is the message that I like to share with people because there is hope. Like, if me, Miss Super Disorganized can figure these things out, you can too.

[00:25:05] Ashley James: And you’re no longer super disorganized is the point. You have really conquered these issues because – and so much so that you’ve mastered them after homeschooling seven children. And now this is what you do, you teach others how to do the same.

[00:25:23] Molly Christensen: Exactly I mean some people say your mess is your message. Which I love because, yeah it’s the mess that I had to deal with and figure out how to get over. And that’s why I want to share that with other people because it’s all about having hope. And the other thing, too, is I have not mastered everything in my life. Which is actually pretty awesome because it just means I get to keep learning. If I had mastered everything, I’d be done.

[00:25:55] Ashley James: We are never done.

[00:25:55] Molly Christensen: I’m not done yet. I am not done yet. And I am still homeschooling as well because I have these seven kids. So that takes a long time to get through them all. But I have my three oldest who have graduated from high school. And actually, the two oldest have graduated from college. The third has gotten his associates degree and high school degree. He’s 18 now. So I still have four left at home. So we’re still doing this project.

[00:26:26] Ashley James: Nice. Man, by the time you’re done with the last one, all your kids are going to turn to you and hand over your grandchildren to you. And say, “Mom, can you homeschool our kids too?”

[00:26:39] Molly Christensen: And I’m going to be like, “Nope. That’s your journey.” That is your journey. But I’ll help. I would love to help and encourage and support you along your journey. That’s what I do.

[00:26:51] Ashley James: That is what you do.

[00:26:53] Molly Christensen: Uh-huh. And actually, that is the key to what really changed my mindset. So this is actually probably a good time to share that. So when I started homeschooling, I thought it was all up to me to make sure that my son knew everything. And my poor son, being my guinea pig, number one. Let’s just say he actually turned out really, really awesome. And he doesn’t remember all the hard things those first few years. I was like, “Yes. He’s forgiven. And he’s awesome. It’s so good, it works.”

Anyway, so I want to share with you – is this a good time to do that? Should I just do that? Share with you this pattern that I had come across that actually really changed the whole way that I thought about homeschooling my kids and just raising my kids in general.

[00:27:50] Ashley James: Yes. Oh, I’m so excited. Absolutely.

[00:27:53] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Okay. So I heard about this pattern of the Hero’s Journey, probably a good 10 or 15 years ago now. I don’t remember exactly. But I had heard about it and I thought, “Yeah. That’s pretty cool.” So what the Hero’s Journey is this this pattern that was discovered – or I don’t know if discovered is the right word – but noticed because you notice patterns, right? It was a pattern that was noticed by an Oxford English professor. And of course, right now, his name has slipped my mind. But he wrote a book called The Power of Myth. Anyway, he studied all this mythology of the world, you know, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, all the different cultures. And he noticed there was a pattern to all these myths. And he called it the Hero’s Journey, because while the details are different, you have this basic pattern. And then he also noticed, too – well, okay. We’ll go here.

The basic pattern is this, you start with an ordinary person or at least a person who thinks they’re ordinary, who gets a call to action. A call to do something bigger than themselves and they don’t know how to do it. And so the next thing is they refuse. They’re not going to follow up on that call to action because they can’t do it. But then something happens and they decide to commit to the action and dive in and do it. Along the way on their journey, they will have mentors that will help them. They will have friends and allies who are on the same path with them. They also have enemies who try to stop them or tell them it’s stupid. And they’ll also run into test traps, trials, and temptations that may stop them if they’re not aware that they need to get around it. And that they need to continue on this journey because that call to action was so important that they need to finish the journey. And then as they get to the final conflict that’s really big and they finally get around it, they have success. And they are transformed and they are changed as a person, but also just as part of the journey and whatever it was they set out to accomplish has been accomplished.

So when I learned that pattern, I started noticing it everywhere because it is. It’s in every movie that we like, so many good books, and it’s everywhere. And I thought, “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty cool. That’s a pattern. It’s everywhere.” But when it really became powerful for me was when I realized it was a pattern for our own lives and the lives of my kids. And so what it did for me is it made me realize that I cannot just fill my kids up with all the information that they need. Because that’s not the purpose of learning and education.

[00:31:05] Ashley James: Yeah. And it’s not how we really learn it.

[00:31:09] Molly Christensen: It’s not.

[00:31:09] Ashley James: I mean, school is really good at filling us up with facts that we can regurgitate. Like, when was the war of blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It’s like, “Okay. Great. You memorized that fact. But did you learn to think?”

[00:31:22] Molly Christensen: No. And I didn’t know how that knowledge applied to me. In fact, when I was in school, I hated history because it was so boring memorizing all the facts. It wasn’t until I started teaching my own kids about history where I was like, “Holy cow. History is amazing. Because it’s all just hero journey stories. How do people overcome.” And it’s telling us how to live life, what the success principles are. That’s what it’s all about. But we didn’t know that growing up in my AP – well, I didn’t take AP History. I took AP English. But whatever. In my history class, it was very boring because we didn’t know the stories. It’s all about the stories. And so the Hero’s Journey is the story of our own life. And most of us don’t know that. We don’t know that we are potential heroes who can go on the journey. We get calls to action do you think is greater than us but we listen to the refusals and then do nothing. And that’s why we don’t go on the journey of our life. And that’s why people feel discontent because we’re not doing what we should be doing.

[00:32:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, one thing I’ve noticed parenting is, I have this urge to jump in and fix things for my son and do it but I don’t. It is an uncomfortable feeling to watch my son struggle. And I consciously pull back and I just encourage him. He will get it. Encourage him. Let him do it himself. So like, we’re doing arts and crafts and he’s got to paint something. And if I just let him do it himself, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s going to be messy. Because he’s still learning how to do that. And it’s also going to be his own creativity. And I hold back and I let him figure something out, like how to tie that knot or how to – whatever he’s struggling with. But that look on his face when he triumphs, when he does something he didn’t think he could do, he has now learned. And he had that moment where he was struggling, he was failing. I was encouraging him. And then he figured it out. It clicked and it works. And that triumphant on his face, that neurologically set that lesson in place. He now has that. Whereas, if I just did it for him and like, “Look what I’m doing. You do it this way.” There would be no emotion of triumph associated with the lesson for him. When we set up circumstances for them to have a challenge that they get to rise to, and struggle, and then learn from that, and then succeed, that has so much more emotion involved invested in the learning that it really solidifies the learning inside their neurology.

[00:34:18] Molly Christensen: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so that’s exactly why it changed my whole perspective of raising my kids because I realized that I am not here to control them. It doesn’t work anyway. You can try it. You get power struggles.

[00:34:36] Ashley James: I definitely want to talk about power struggles because setting boundaries and getting kids to do their chores and what happens when the kid says no to you? Like, I definitely want to go there.

[00:34:48] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let’s go there in a minute. But I’ll finish this thought. So what I realized is my role is not to be the bucket filler. But my role is to be the support team, to be the mentor, to be the trainer, to be the coach. So I heard this quote – well, I don’t know if it’s a quote but it’s kind of one of those things. But a pastor got up in church and he said to his congregation, “Are you preparing your kids for the path? Or are you preparing the path for your kids?” And I said, “Yeah. Wow.” There’s a big difference there.

[00:35:33] Ashley James: Because we can never- we won’t be around their whole lives. So we can never put padding and safety, whatever, make it safe for them. We can’t just go around and keep preparing the path for them. We have to give them all the tools because we want them to be independent.

[00:35:54] Molly Christensen: Right. And also, we don’t even know what their path is. They have a totally different path than mine is. It’s their own path. It’s their hero’s journey. And the hero’s journey is just full of things they need in order for them to learn to become the person that they are meant to be.

So the other part of why that pattern was so powerful for me was not only did it shift my role, but it shifted how I thought about them. Because I think sometimes we think that people are intentionally mean or naughty or whatever. And you know, “You’re bad. You’re bad boy,” or whatever. But really, every human being was born with greatness within. Every human being desires good. Every human being has that inside of them. And when you shift your focus to believing that and focusing on the good intention rather than how it comes out, then it changes things. Your kid accept and this is, maybe, where we can go into more obedient stuff. It’s not because they’re horrible people or you’re a horrible person. It’s just because they are human. And they are learning how to become better and they just haven’t gotten there yet. And that’s actually a really good thing to remember for teenagers, especially. Especially when they start going, “Mom, you just don’t understand. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And they get a little grumpy and all those hormones are going around. It’s not because they’re bad. It’s only because they do have all this hormone stuff coming up. They’re confused. They don’t always know how to manage themselves at all. They haven’t learned it all yet. But they are good people. They want good. They want to be kind to other people. But it doesn’t always come out that way. And so it’s always really good to keep that vision of who they are. They are potential heroes. I mean, they are. They have the goodness inside. They can go on the journey to get to the greatness but only if they choose not to listen to all those negative voices in their head that tell them why they can’t do it.

[00:38:13] Ashley James: So how do you help them to not hear the negative? How do you help them to focus on what they want – the positive and create the positive behavior?

[00:38:27] Molly Christensen: So it really had to start with me first. Because I was so sucked into that negative thinking. I had to learn how to start listening to calls to action and acting on them. Because the Hero’s Journey is a pattern for your whole life but you’re also getting calls to action all the time. You don’t even hear most of them. Because you rationalize them away. And when I say you, I mean me too. It’s a learned skill there. And so to get out of the negative thought patterns I had to lead the way in. And the beautiful thing about having kids is you love them so much that you actually change for them. Because you want to lead the way for them. I figured that if I’m not willing to go there, why would I expect them to,? Even though it’s hard. So I started working hard on me first.

And so what I did one year, I had this thought pop into my head that I should make this blog called Kindness Daily, where I would do something kind every day. And I would blog about it. Now, the funny thing about that is, I’m not a disciplined consistent person. But my oldest son and I were just talking about how, with marketing or with a business really, people are attracted to people who can be consistent. Very consistent in their message, right? And so I blurted it out one day, I’m like, “Oh, you know, this would be kind of cool.” And he’s like, “Yeah. You should do it.” I was like, “Oh man, why did I say that out loud?” And as soon as I got that call to action to do this for 365 days, to write a blog, my brain immediately came up with all the refusals. And I sit and I said to myself, “I can’t do that. I don’t even know how to make a blog. And what if I can’t think of anything kind to do and I’m not consistent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” And, then I was like, “You know, I think I’m just going to try it. I’m going to do it.” I decided I was going to do it because I was at the point where I was like, “You know what? If I’m not going to do hard things then why are my kids?” So I thought, “I’ll give it a try.” So I started it. And the first few days, I was worried because – well, I wasn’t too worried. I just made cookies for the neighbors.

But after like three or four days that I was just like, “You know what? I really cannot make cookies every single day. I’m not that kind of mom.” And it’s going to get out of control. So I’m going to have to come up with different things to be kind about.

And I realized that I was getting thoughts to do kindnesses that I didn’t want to do. So I didn’t do them. So like one day – I know, right? One day, I had my neighbor’s kids over because she had to go to a doctor’s appointment. And I had this thought, “You know, you have to make dinner. Why don’t you just make her some dinner too?” And I immediately got these refusals in my brain that said, “Well, they’re not going to like what we’re having. I don’t think I have enough ingredients. I probably don’t have enough time.” So then I went, “Wait. That was a call to action with refusals. Oh, I should do it.” I did. I committed to doing it. And it turns out, I didn’t have enough gradients and I did have enough time. And she was – I don’t know if they liked it or not but it doesn’t matter. Because when she came home a lot later than she expected, I said, “Hey, I knew you’re going to be running late and you’re not going to have time to make dinner. So I just made it for you.” And she was just delighted. And she felt just so loved. So I learned from these experiences when I was doing these kindnesses every day that if I get three refusals, I darn well better do it. Because that’s part of my hero journey. I need to act on those things to become better to develop the character that I need to become the example for my kids. To go through this hero’s journey. To do the hard things that I’m asked to do.

And so I did do this blog where I recorded a lot of my kindnesses. Some of the days were super – I mean, they were so uninteresting to write about. But other days were really awesome. And I was like, “Wow. This is cool stuff.” And I actually ended up – I told you I wasn’t consistent, which was actually true. I was not consistent. And I did not do it for 365 days. But I did do it for 180 days out of the whole year. And I thought, “You know what? I have a choice here.” So I could look back at the year and I had a choice. I could look at it and think of it as a miserable failure because I did not do what I set out to do. I did not get 365 days. But I also could look at it and say, “You know what? I did do half of it. And I did learn so much just from the process of that.” I learned so much about how my brain worked, and how I was refusing calls to action, and how I could learn what calls to action I actually needed to follow. And so you asked me, “How do we teach this to our children? And then I went off on this big long story about how we have to lead our way – lead the way and figure it out ourselves first. And that’s actually what I did.

So after I did these kind of daily challenges – after I started doing them, I introduced it to my kids. And I had them do the similar thing. I said, “Here’s a jar. And here’s a bag of pompoms. Whenever you think of something kind to do and you actually do it, you can put a pompom in the jar. And when the jar is full, we’ll go do a fun family activity or something like that.” And they started to realize that their heroes on this hero journey. They get calls to action and sometimes they really don’t want to do it. They get refusals. But they can listen to those and not do them. Or they can listen to the call to action and then hear the refusals and then say, “No. Those are not true. I’m going to do it anyway because it’s a good thing.” So that that’s been huge in teaching the kids how to overcome those negative thoughts. So that’s an awesome tool right there is really – because heroes – this is probably one thing I didn’t say earlier, but heroes are not in it for themselves. They’re not going on this journey just for all the honor and glory. Maybe some of them are in some of the movies. But they’re doing it because it’s for a cause bigger than themselves, is to serve other people. That’s why we’re here. And so that’s why – I’m sorry. I totally neglected to say that earlier. That would made more sense. But that’s why this little smaller scale hero journey works out so nicely and it preps them for the real thing. It’s a good training.

[00:46:04] Ashley James: Can you give us an example? Like, when working with your kids, an example where they did some – they came up with an idea and they heard the refusals in their head. But you encouraged them and they then did it anyway. And it was a project that served others.

[00:46:22] Molly Christensen: Yeah. For sure. My 16 year old daughter just the other day, she said, “You know, I had this thought that I should text this friend that I hadn’t talked to for a while and just say something nice to her.” And she said, in her brain she heard, “No. That’s weird. You haven’t talked to him forever. And besides, what would you say if that’s a bad idea?” And then she’s like, “Wait. I got to do that.” And so she did. She texted this friend anyway. And it turns out that friend had been feeling really down that day. And when my daughter texted her she just felt so loved.

[00:47:03] Ashley James: I love it. Because when you first started sharing this, I immediately went to health related topics. So we’ve had Naturopaths on the show. Naturopathic doctors share that our body has a language. It speaks its symptoms. The symptoms of the body are the language that it speaks. So if you have a headache, don’t just go take a medication for it. Or if you’re tired, don’t just go drink coffee. But that’s the body actually speaking to you and saying, “Hey, there’s something I’m missing. Help me.” This is how it speaks to us. So when we think to ourselves, I want to run a marathon or I want to go to the gym. And then there’s these little thoughts that come up, like, “You can’t. That’s going to be too hard. You can’t do it.”

[00:47:53] Molly Christensen: I got a story about that one. No, it does. It’s the goodness inside of us that’s speaking. Because we are good. We do get those good thoughts. I got a call to action to run a half marathon. And I can tell you some of the refusals I got. My husband and my two sons had actually run it the year before. And I got the call. I was like, “Well, why don’t you run it within them the next year?” That was in my own brain. They didn’t say it to me. And my refusals were, “No way. I do not run. I am not a runner.” The last time I really seriously ran was when I was in high school, which was like 20 years before. And I had run a-mile-and-a-half for the PE test, you know, to show that you’re fit. And I passed it. But then I pretty much felt like I was going to die afterwards because I found out later that I actually had bronchitis. So I probably shouldn’t have run it. But they told us to. So I had that thought in my head that I was going to die if I ran more than a-mile-and-a-half for 20 years. And it was actually right around this time where I started experimenting with controlling my thoughts and my brain with the calls to action and everything that this call to run the half marathon came up. And I thought, “You know what? This will be a really good test. Let’s see if I actually have power of my thoughts in my head.” You know, can I actually do this? And so I had all these reasons not to. And I thought, “You know what? I’m going to do it anyway.”

So the first day I get out there and I go running like half-a-block before I feel like I’m about to die. And my brain kicked in. Because our brains are there to keep us comfortable. When you’re trying to change, that is not comfortable. And so it’s going to give you all the reasons to pull you back to where you used to be. That was more comfortable for it. So my brain starts going, “This is a really dumb idea. You can’t do this. What are you thinking? You’re about to die after half-a-block.” So what I did was I just told my brain, “Thank you for sharing that with me because that’s good to know. I’m on the right path.” I’m getting refusals, which means that if I keep going, I’m going to grow. So thanks for sharing but we’re going to keep doing this. So I did. I kept running. And I kept going slightly farther every day until I got to a-mile-and-a-half. And what was really funny is I didn’t realize I was doing this to myself. But for about two months, I only ran for a-mile-and-a-half until I was like, “Wait a second. I can run a-mile-and-a-half and I don’t feel like I’m about to die. Well, why don’t I just go farther?”

[00:50:41] Ashley James: You had to bust through a belief system that you unconsciously created in high school.

[00:50:46] Molly Christensen: Totally did. Totally did. And so I just kept going. And I did run the half marathon. I did post a pretty good time for somebody who was never runner before. I mean, I was just over two hours. I was like, “Holy cow. Look what I did I could do that.” That is what you’re talking about, it’s that feeling of triumph, which is awesome. But I would have never got there had I not failed along the way.

[00:51:13] Ashley James: Yes. And listen to the first voice. I really love that you have deciphered this. The first voice is your authentic self. The first thought happens really quick. And sometimes it’s actually quieter than the refusals that come after. They can be pretty loud. But the first voice like. “I should go to the gym. I should do a juice fast. I should eat more broccoli.” Like whatever, right? The first voice, that’s your authentic self. That’s the part of you that wants you to grow, that wants you to live a healthy happy life full of lessons and learning and just joy. That is the authentic self. But that’s the self that wants you to go up against the wall and push yourself and to really grow. And then the refusals –

You know, it’s interesting because I’ve had different interviews on about self-talk. And one Naturopathic physician, the whole episode was about self-talk. And she talked about how this voice, as you call, the refusals. She calls it self-talk that it is part of our survival mechanism because the pessimists are the ones that survived. All of our ancestors were the pessimists. If you think about the ancestors that were like, “There’s no bears in the woods. Let’s go frolic.” They were all eaten by the bears. It was the ones that were very pessimistic. And was like, “Fire burns you. Don’t touch the fire. Don’t go in the woods, the Bears are over there.” The pessimists looking for all the bad things that could happen were probably the ones that ended up surviving. So we just have this genetic predisposition to looking at conserving our energy as much as possible, which is talked about in the book, The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhamer. He talks about the evolution of our brain and what motivates us in an unconscious level to survive, which is to procreate, conserve energy, and consume food.

So we basically want to be lazy as possible. Consume as much calories as possible. And we’re motivated by procreation. Because that’s just genetically what all animals do to survive and to carry on the species. So that little voice inside of us is like, “Don’t run a marathon. That would not be conserving energy.” That would not be part of fulfilling the genetic – this genetic programming. So on one level, it’s genetic programming. On the other level, it’s this voice in our heads that tries to keep us safe. But safe is not – there’s no happiness in safe. There’s no growth in safe. If being safe is being stuck in the gray zone of just – what’s that? – purgatory. It’s like purgatory. You’re just stuck. And that is where depression sets in. That’s where people end up self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and sugary foods. Because their life is so safe that they bring a pint of ice cream home. Because it’s like that’s the only joy they’re going to get. So that’s like when we’re feeling stuck in life, that’s because we’re listening to all the refusals and not the first voice.

[00:54:31] Molly Christensen: Right. And we also don’t realize that a lot of times we get stuck because we hit a wall or a tract or something on our journey. So when you start feeling stuck in the muck, that’s part of the journey. It’s got to happen. But if you can see in the perspective of the Hero’s Journey, you’re like, ” Oh, wait. I’m stuck. I don’t have to be stuck here. This is a journey. I can get out.”

[00:54:55] Ashley James: Like a Disney Princess. This is just the middle of the movie, right?

[00:54:59] Molly Christensen: That’s right. It’s just part of the journey.

[00:55:00] Ashley James: Right. I’m just hitting the wall. I need to overcome it. On an esoteric level, there’s a consideration that the refusals are the devil or the negative spiritual energy that wants to keep us down. Which it has no power over us if we refuse it. If we go, “No. I’m not listening to those voices. I’m not listening to that. That’s not me.” You know that t-shirt, Not today, Satan? It’s like, “No. That’s not me. Thanks.” But I like that you think it. Because that’s actually what the Naturopath that I interviewed does. She says, thank that voice. “Thanks for letting me know I can’t run a marathon because I’ll probably collapse. Thanks. I take that into consideration but I’m going to prove you wrong.”

[00:55:50] Molly Christensen: Well, and I think it because it’s letting me figure out where my blocks are, where my walls are, what’s keeping me stuck. Because now that I see seen it, I can do something about it. Talk about empowering.

[00:56:03] Ashley James: Yes. So when you hear the refusals, you go, “Hey. Thanks for letting me know where my blind spots are and what’s keeping me in purgatory.”

[00:56:12] Molly Christensen: Uh-huh. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, the whole journey is all really just a battle in your brain. Because it’s a battle about whether your bodily appetites are going to control your brain or if that goodness, your soul, your spirit, whatever you want to call it, is going to control your brain. Because it’s much easier to sit on the couch and watch TV. Not that I’m knocking that. Sometimes you got to do it. But it’s much easier to do that than it is to get up and go wash the dishes.

[00:56:46] Ashley James: Choose your hard.

[00:56:48] Molly Christensen: Yeah. I mean, so your bodily appetite is the one that’s dealing with easy. Your goodness is getting up and doing what’s right. Which one’s going to control your brain?

[00:57:01] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. So this is how you – you took this and designed your entire homeschooling curriculum around the concept of the Hero’s Journey.

[00:57:10] Molly Christensen: Yes. That is what I did. Because what I realized is knowledge right now in the internet age, anybody can get knowledge. It’s free all over the internet. You don’t even have to go to school, really, you could just Google if you just want to get knowledge. And what I did with my homeschool curriculum is I feel like, “You know, there’s a lot of great knowledge out there.” But unless it is relevant to you, unless you can connect it to you, it’s not really helpful. So knowledge is still important. I’m not saying it’s unimportant. But it’s knowledge that’s applied wisely that really makes your life better. And especially with little kids, they love to learn. They love to learn new things. But sometimes they get crushed down because we’re trying to force feed it to them. And so they’re like, “Well, what’s the point? Why are you trying to make me do this?”

So what I did with my curriculum is I went through and I got all the basic knowledge in the different subject areas, you know, topics. And I created it so that you can just sit down with your kids, your family, however many you got. And then you just learn together but then you connect it to yourself through principles. So you’re using it as a vehicle to teach principles, like for success in life and for good character. And that’s how it makes it relevant. So we’re not learning it just to learn it to pass the test. But we’re learning it because it brings us together. It’s exciting. We can love learning because it’s so interesting. And then we can make connections. Because when you make connections, it sits those neurons firing off in your brain. And it’s like, “Oh, this is so cool.”

A funny example is when one of my little daughters figured out that green beans and re-fried beans were both beans. Oh, my gosh. She made that connection herself. And she was so proud. And the more epiphanies you can get – and you get those from when you make connections – the more exciting learning is going to be. And the more excited you are about learning, the more you’re going to do it. And the more you’re excited about learning, the more excited you are to go on that hero journey, too, because you’re going to hit the obstacles. And those are all about learning. In fact, I call the obstacles, learning opportunities. Because that’s what they’re all about. And so we want to love learning but some of the learning is hard when you get stuck. But you have to look and go, “Oh, this is a learning opportunity. Isn’t this exciting.” So that’s the feeling I want – it’s more important to inspire this feeling. That’s the feeling I want to inspire. Rather than, “This is miserable and I’m not doing what mom says because it’s stupid.”

[01:00:10] Ashley James: So then they get really excited about their homeschooling because they’re taking charge.

[01:00:18] Molly Christensen: Yeah. I mean, you’re setting the environment by learning with them and showing them what it’s like to make connections and to just love it. And then they can take that off into the other parts of their lives, too, when you’re not there actively learning with them.

[01:00:37] Ashley James: Since you have so many children of different ages, you’re homeschooling different grades, right? Your different levels at the same time. Can you give us an example of what a day looks like?

[01:00:53] Molly Christensen: Yes. And it’s kind of funny because I actually did a Facebook Live on my day on Monday. And everybody felt very validated because it did not look as perfect as they were picturing for what my day might look like. So I can tell you the ideal and then I can tell you reality. Okay? So we do family style homeschooling because people are going to learn at whatever level they are on. They don’t have to learn at whatever level some expert says that they should learn on. Because it’s their own journey. If they’re not ready to learn something yet, then why am I trying to make them? So we do family style learning. A big part of our homeschool is actually training with learning how to be consistent. Probably, I might be – I’d like to focus on that just maybe because it was such a big struggle for me. For some of my kids, it’s not as much of a struggle just because their personality type is just different. My husband is excellent at being consistent at things and disciplined with himself. Every kid is different. They all have different personalities. But we do work a lot on consistency. They do a lot of chores. Or at least they think they do. I don’t. I want them to know how to work.

And we also have a family economy system where my kids, when they turn eight, they have to purchase their own clothing. Which is interesting because they don’t get an allowance and they can’t really go out and get a job so they get creative. I will pay the minimum wage though. But this is probably a whole other talk. But I will let them work extra money for me to earn money. And people wonder how I afford it is because I don’t have to buy their clothes. Anyway, so we have systems in place where they can learn from real life skills that are going to affect them when they get older. And big ones, big challenges for people, for adults, for most adults are time and money. So that’s why we have those two systems in place for the work because that helps with being consistent with time and then for the money. So that’s a big part of our homeschool is just life, just living life and doing that.

So we do, do like a morning devotional in the mornings most of the time. And we will have breakfast. And we will clean. And then if we haven’t gotten all distracted like, we will sit down in the morning and we will just learn together as a family for about an hour. Now, sometimes my older kids who are in high school and have other – when I say they’re in high school, they’re not really in high school but high school level. But they’ll have projects and stuff that they have to work on their own. And Austin, my older kid, will be in Co Op. So they’ll have classes that they need to take. So they’ll have homework. And so they start just self studying themselves. And so me and, usually, the younger kids and, sometimes, the older kids will join it, too, we will learn together. So we will read aloud and we’ll just learn things together. And there’s no pressure. There’s no homework on that. It’s like we just do activities. Today, we drew drafts. So that was fun. Some of them want to do it. Some of them didn’t. And that was fine.

And we also usually eat a snack. Because snacks just make life better. I don’t know.

[01:04:39] Ashley James: Yeah. They definitely keep kids engaged.

[01:04:44] Molly Christensen: Yes. And it keeps their mouths full so they can’t talk as much if you want them to listen. I like them to talk but not when I’m reading aloud. So we always try to have a shared learning experience. Then in the afternoons, my kids play. I work so hard to protect my schedule so I don’t over schedule them. I want them to be able to play. I want them to run outside. Because play is such an important part of their development. And a lot of people think, “Oh, they’re just wasting time. Nuh-uh.” No. They are learning so much through play. And in he afternoons, if they do have classes, they’ll usually take those then. So that’s kind of the basics of it. That’s kind of the ideal day to kind of flow through that. Because, really, homeschooling is just life. But it’s not a free for all. It’s structured. But sometimes it might look like a free for all. And what I mean by structured is, I’ve thought a lot about how to set up the environment of my home. Like, what feeling do I want there and how do we get that in here and how do we flow. And I always got it adjusted because it never just stays that way. I’m like, “Wait. The feeling I want is not chaos. So how do we fix that?” You know what I mean? So there’s always things you can keep adjusting. But for me, it’s more about creating this environment of learning where they know that they are heroes and that they’re meant to have a mission in life where they’re doing good for other people. And so instead of me constantly telling them what to do and how to do it, it makes my life so much less stressful. And in fact, that’s how I get everything done is because I realized the only one I can control is really me. And I can control the household feeling and the environment. But I can’t control them. But I can love them.

[01:06:46] Ashley James: So what happens when you need to control them? Like they’re defying house rules, like, power struggles? And of course it depends. Obviously, a 16 year old and a four year old are going to be treated a little differently, I imagine. But how do you handle disobedience or power struggles?

[01:07:05] Molly Christensen: Yes. Okay. So the thing here is I’m still not controlling them. I’m training them because they’re heroes. I am training them for the journey. And that’s how I had to reframe it. And it’s the same principle whether they’re four or 16. I, here again, have to realize they are good. I have to remember that they’re good. And they’re not acting up because I’m a failure. They’re not acting up because they’re bad. They’re just acting up because they don’t know another way yet. So it just simply means that they need a little extra help in training and learning how to obey.

Now, sometimes when I talk about obedience, I know there’s two extremes here. You got some people who just don’t even believe in obedience at all. Because they’re kids. Let kids be kids. And then you got other people who believe in very strict obedience. I’m hoping that I fell somewhere in between. I expect that my kids are going to obey when I ask them to do something. And it’s not like I’m asking them to do unreasonable things. But I have to be very careful with what I’m going to ask them to do. And I’m going to also usually train more on obedience with chores rather than education. Because education, I want them – if I require it, then they’re going to do the bare minimum. You know what I’m saying? So, I want them to get inspired and want to do more. So I have to be very careful with what I require and what I ask them to do. So I do have to train them to be obedient. But I do it from that perspective that they are good and I am just helping them to become better. And I’m doing it because I love them and I know they’re good. But I just know that sometimes it’s hard to be obedient because you don’t want to do it. So I don’t get into a power struggle because I don’t get mad. And I set the expectation up front. They know, if you don’t obey, then we’re probably going to have to do kid training. And once I’ve done the initial kid training, they sometimes slip a little bit. And all I have to do is mention, “Oh, I’m sorry. You don’t obey right now. Do we need to do some extra kid training right now?” And they’ll be like, “Nope. I’m going to go obey.”

So it also helps with teaching emotional regulation as well .Because if they’re going to throw a fit, that’s not obeying. Because they got to obey when they’re calm. So basically, when they’re younger, ideally three, four, or five, sometimes it goes into six and seven, it depends on the kid, I will just be very intentional about training them in obedience. And sometimes that’s what my homeschool days would look like is all I did was train in obedience. And I would have to keep myself very calm. And then sometimes go in my room and give myself a timeout.

[01:10:31] Ashley James: Mama needs a timeout.

[01:10:34] Molly Christensen: Oh, yeah. Yes. So I’d be very intentional. And if I ask them to obey and do something, I would expect them to go do it right away. If they didn’t, I would say, “Oh, I’m sorry. Just now I asked you to obey and you didn’t. So now we’re going to have to go into – now, you’re going to have an extra chore.” And if they scream or yell or whatever, I would have to say, “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re not calm enough to do that chore. So we’re going to have to go into level two where you’re going to get another chore.” And lot of times they still scream and yell until they know you’re really serious and that you’re going to actually follow through. And so we’d get to level three. And they’re still screaming and yelling. They don’t want to do it. And they got three extra chores. So you can’t blame them, right? It’s usually just little things that I could think of on the fly that they could do based on their age. And they can do

fairly easily. They just have to be obedient to do it. If they got all three levels, I would just say, “Well, I’m sorry. We’re doing this kid training so you can learn to obey because it’s a really good skill to have in life. So right now you’ve lost all your privileges for the next day. So that just means you can’t watch any shows. You can’t have any snacks.” Just whatever you decide were privileges. You can only have the basics. You can’t play with friends. After doing that a couple times, although it depends on the kid, like some kids it only takes one time of getting that far. Other kids would take me like ten times because they’re very stubborn. But it was it was mostly just me, where I would just have to stay calm and consistent, which was really, really hard for me to do at first.

But I just realized, “You know what? There’s no sense in making them feel like they’re bad.” You do it all in a loving way. Because they’re not. They’re good. And they have this journey. And it’s not like I’m a failure if they’re acting up, because this is just part of the journey. This is just part of what they’ve got to learn. It’s okay. And it’s really all about that consistent training at first. But it takes – your mind thinks it takes way longer than it does once you do it. Initially, it doesn’t take as long. But, like, maybe a week or two of just intense training. So it’s a lot more intense maybe than your mind thinks of it before you do it. But it doesn’t take nearly as many weeks or days or months as you might think. You know what I’m saying? So that’s how I deal with the obedience part. Because you do still need obedience in there. They need to know how to obey and how to make themselves obey. And they also need to know who to obey to and why.

[01:13:20] Ashley James: So you’re making it to be a lesson in obedience. Like you’re training if you’re training a hero, you’re the coach, or the trainer. And if they don’t obey, they get more and more chores until it’s like strike three. And then they have all their privileges removed. How do you get them to calm down though from that? I mean, if they’re in a power struggle and they’re really upset and they’re maybe throwing things or they’re just very upset at you and upset of the situation. How do you get them to the point where they’re like, they’re happy they’re learning the lesson of obedience?

[01:13:57] Molly Christensen: Their time doesn’t start for the loss of their privileges until they’re calm. So it’s their choice. I just tell them that, “You know what, buddy? It’s your choice. When you want to get out of this, I’ll be so excited when you get your privileges back. But we got to do this. We can learn how to obey.” And then I also teach them, too. It’s like we’re learning how to obey those voices in our head too. It’s the same principle there. Because the obedience pattern, it starts with learning how to obey in your family. You got to be your parents. And then you’ve got to learn how to obey the good. Your conscience, really. You need to learn to obey your parents first. Because that’s kind of the physical thing that they can see. And then you learn how to obey the more spiritual aspect of your brain. You got to learn how – right?

[01:14:58] Ashley James: So you’re teaching them obedience not because you are like a general and you just want some good soldiers. And children should just do what we say without question. You’re not coming from that at all. You’re coming from you want them to learn the life skill of self-discipline.

[01:15:17] Molly Christensen: Exactly. Yeah. It’s not because – yeah. It’s not because I’m so lazy that I want them to do everything for me either. Sometimes they’ll say that but no.

[01:15:27] Ashley James: Wow. That’s harsh.

[01:15:30] Molly Christensen: I know. Well, it’s just because that’s what their brains come up with as a reason why they don’t want to do it. You know what I mean? I’ve thought that before. So it’s not that. It’s not that I want to control them. It’s because it’s a life skill. It’s because we grow up as adults and we don’t know who to obey.

[01:15:53] Ashley James: I love it. You know, we weren’t taught how to listen to the first voice and how to deny the negative thoughts that tell us not to follow through. No one taught us the self-discipline or how to foster it. And I love that you made, like, manners and following the rules and obedience be a lesson in how they can listen to their authentic voice and then follow through with it. That’s really beautiful.

[01:16:36] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Isn’t it though? They don’t always understand that when they’re kids. But as we keep repeating it, they’ll get it when they’re adults.

[0:16:46] Ashley James: Are you seeing that now and your three oldest children?

[01:16:49] Molly Christensen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. They’re awesome. They’re really awesome at self-regulating. And following their consciences.

[01:17:00] Ashley James: Now, I’ve seen videos where you’re talking more about this. Is this part of your training as well? The training that you sell? Do you also teach this, how to discipline and ideas for different age groups?

[01:17:17] Molly Christensen: I haven’t got a specific program for this yet. But what I do have is I have a program for moms who want to learn how to become disciplined and create habits for themselves. Like even the habits they’ve never even been able to do before. Because a lot of times those habits that we wish we had, that’s a big call to action. But the refusals are so strong. And they’re just so hard to do because we tried them so many times and failed that we can figure out how to do them anymore. So I do have that program for moms and then a lot of moms take it and teach their kids how to do that. It’s really how to – like for me for example, I was such a night owl. I could never get to bed before, like, 2:00 in the morning. And I would rationalize that away. And whenever I would think about changing it, so I had the call to action, “I should go to bed earlier.” And then I’d be like, “Oh. But the kids are in bed and I’m getting all this stuff done, blah, blah, blah.” And I finally realized – well, I finally came up with all these different keys of how my brain works partly by doing that kindness daily blog. I learned so much about how my brain works and how it’s not just my brain that works like this. So I teach a lot of those brain principles from that. And also from reading other books and mentors and stuff, too. But I teach moms how to listen to what’s going on in their brains so that they can lead the way for their kids too. So if you want something that’s just going to fix the kids that way, I don’t have that program yet.

[01:18:54] Ashley James:Yet.

[01:18:55] Molly Christensen: Yet.

[01:18:57] Ashley James: But we have to be the example. Like you said, we have to be the example.

[01:19:00] Molly Christensen: Right. We have to lead the way.

[01:19:02] Ashley James: So as parents, we need to learn how to do that. And then we can be the example but also teach our kids.

[01:19:08] Molly Christensen: Exactly. And that’s what I encourage the moms – and I have some dads too – of how to do that, how to get control of your brain. And we do it with the vehicle of creating some of these good habits that you wish you had but could never figure out how to get.

[01:19:28] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. So I watched some of your videos and they’ve got lots of free content as well that people can absorb and learn from you. And I did one of your webinars where I was – and even there was like a link to watch some videos on your curriculum. Because you teach a homeschooling – you sell a homeschooling curriculum that can be taught to all ages. Because the parent would then adjust it for the age level. And I loved it. I got so excited about it. Actually, I really want to do it with our son. You were showing how like day one, they’re starting reading about Egypt. And so they’re getting excited about learning about the cool things about Egypt. But they’re learning about geography and history. And then they’re learning about architecture. And it’s all kind of wrapped into one, which I love that whole learning where it’s not – they could be drawing and then writing at the same time. And it’s like art and language and science are all wrapped into one. It’s not like, “Okay. Well, put down your pencils now we’re learning math.: It’s like math could be part of that, right? So it’s all wrapped into one. And that’s how the brain learns so well when it’s a whole lesson learning.

But I looked through your curriculum and I was inspired by it. And there’s so much of it as you turning to the child and getting them to share their creative ideas and to come up with new ones. And then they’re so excited about the lesson that they’re not bummed out about writing something or doing a writing assignment because they were so inspired by it.

[01:21:21] Molly Christensen: Right. Right. And that’s what the whole idea is, is because it’s all connected, they can make connections too. It’s like subjects are a new invention of the modern age. And we do actually have it broken up into subjects. Kind of funny. But even though I know it’s so much better when it’s all connected. But we do it in subjects just because that’s kind of – well, for one reason, the reason why I came up with subjects for industrial ages was just because it made it more systemized. And so that’s one reason why I just kept it that way. But all the subjects are interconnected.

[01:21:53] Ashley James: That’s what I meant. They’re all connected so that they get the connections. My husband and I are both very creative and smart. Not to toot my own horn. But we both struggled in school because we’re the kind of learners that need to know why do I need to know this. Before they’re just like, “You have to learn this”. And I’ve always found it so frustrating in high school when – I loved science. And I was in physics. And they hadn’t taught us the type of math that I needed to know yet to do the physics work. And I went up to my physics teacher, I’m like, “I haven’t learned this yet in my math class.” And he’s like, “Oh, we’ll go talk to your Math teacher.” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah. We’re doing that next quarter.” And I’m like, “You are just all not talking to each other. How is this possible?” And then I was writing my first history exam in grade ten. And it said, “Write the answer in essay format.” Never ever in my life had I heard of the term essay format. And my history teacher was so upset for me. And he advocated for me. I remember him grabbing my hand and storming into my English teachers office saying, “How is it possible she’s in grade ten and she has fallen through the cracks and she has never learned how to do an essay. This is not okay.” And it was like how many children are falling through the cracks that we’re learning these different – the separate subjects?

Whereas, if you are doing homeschooling, for example, you’re talking about the middle ages. And then within that theme, then you’re learning some math, and then you’re learning some geography, and then you’re learning some history, and learning the science. But you’re using a theme that connects it. And that maybe even a project like, “Okay. We’re going to make a castle out of popsicle sticks. But we have to do the math and we have to do the architecture.” So it allows them to apply it and understand why they need to know all these things. And then they end up coming up with all their questions that they want to have answered. So it makes sense to their brains and then it solidifies the learnings.

[01:24:24] Molly Christensen: Absolutely. And also, if you think about the famous men and women of the Renaissance. They did not just limit themselves to going deep in one subject. They need all the different subjects. When you call a renaissance man a renaissance man is because they are well read in all the different areas. And that’s the kind of person that’s going to come up with the most creative ideas because they can make the connections. And that’s where they come up with the new things. So like our industrialized age, we go really deep and specialized, which is great if you’ve got somebody who’s a heart surgeon or something. I want them to be specialized. But if you’re going to be creative and come up with new ideas, you want to connect everything. So what I did in my curriculum is I just used history to connect everything. Well, not just. We used history and principle.

So each month, you have new principles that we call the superpowers. Superpower principles, and they’re just like success principles, leadership principles. Because that’s what I wanted my kids to learn the awareness they’re getting until they’re a little older, especially. So I wanted to put it in my family style curriculum because that’s what makes life worth living is knowing how to go on your journey. So when you connect everything with history, it’s awesome because it’s the story of why and who we are and why we came up with things. So I loved the math part, especially because a lot of times we’re just throwing in all these calculations, which is boring.

[01:26:03] Ashley James: There’s no story.

[01:26:04] Molly Christensen: There’s no story.

[01:26:04] Ashley James: There’s no reason. And the thing is, when you get out into the real world as an adult, there is a story. I am balancing the family budget, there is a story. Because if I messed that up, we don’t have food on the table. So there’s an emotional – when we’re out in the real world or doing math for our job, like doing payroll or something, there is a story. There’s always, always in the real world an emotional component and a story behind math. Or if you’re doing math for NASA, like people could die because you’re flying out to outer space. And that math needs to make sense. So there’s always a reason why we’re doing math in the real world. But when we’re learning it, it’s like just figure these situations out.

[01:26:50] Molly Christensen: Just do it.

[01:26:50] Ashley James: Just do it. Just do it. And that’s just not how math – that’s not how we do math. I the real world, we do math with a reason with our emotional component. So I love that you’re including that because it helps us learn and really solidify that learning.

[01:27:03] Molly Christensen: Well, and also, you look at, let’s say, 12 years of math, right? It took mankind 6,000 years to learn most of that math. So they had to figure it out for a reason and why. And so that’s the stories I’m including in there. It’s like, “Well, why did they have to figure this out? Where did this come from?” So it’s pretty fascinating that way. And it really does make kids pretty excited because it brings in the music of math. I mean, you still have to learn the calculation skills. But that’s just something that I use to practice consistency and discipline. Because that doesn’t require thinking so much once you got it – once you understand it. So it’s all about inspiring them to love it, to love it more so they think. But then also training them so they get the skills. And the training is just the stuff that they don’t have to think about. But just practice.

[01:28:06] Ashley James: I love it. Oh, it’s so cool. So in all of this because you, after seven children, have developed a really amazing curriculum that now you sell. And so many, many other families are doing it and sharing with you their success. Can you tell us a bit about that? Like, what had you – because you told us your story but you didn’t get to the part where you then sat down and taught yourself how to create an internet course. And how to make this replicatable. And it is so – it’s so good looking, by the way. It looks like you hired a company to put it together. It looks so good. It’s like a textbook. It looks so good. I could tell you really put a lot of work into it. So I’m congratulating you on the hard work because I know what it takes.

[01:29:00] Molly Christensen: Thank you.

[01:29:00] Ashley James: I know what it takes. But you thought, how can I then make this replicatable so other families can do it? And now you have had other families do it. So can you share a bit about that?

[01:29:12] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Sure. Okay. So another big part of my journey is the entrepreneurship journey, which anybody who’s an entrepreneur knows is a journey. But I mean, that too, is just another hero’s journey of life. I was always kind of entrepreneurial when I was a kid. But I also got tons of refusals. Like, “I don’t like to talk to people. People think I mean.” So I kind of just hobby entrepreneured. Entrepreneured, I don’t know if that’s a verb. But I tended to set it down because so many people think that entrepreneurship is bad. It’s a lot of people losing a lot of money and they’re kind of crazy and all this. I had to really just shift my mind said about entrepreneurs. But as I started developing this program, because I wanted this program for my own kids. To systemize it because you can follow rabbit trails if you want. But my brain, we get so distracted that I would never come back to earth. And I just wanted a simple easy system that I could sit down and just cover all the basics in an hour a day.

I actually had a friend who said – well, where this really came up? I should back up a little bit. Is that I thought, you know, when our kids are teenagers and are Co-Ops, we do a really good job of teaching them leadership principles. Because we created that culture of teaching them that. And I thought, why don’t have something like this for the whole family and especially for the younger kids. Why not introduce them earlier to these principles? And I said that to her. And she’s like, “Oh, that’s a great idea. You should do it.” And I was like, “No. No, no, no. I don’t have time for that.” And then all the refusals came in. You know how that goes, right? Now, you’ve seeing this pattern. And I said, “I do have a lot of experience though. Maybe I could do this.” I own every single curriculum out there since I bought them all in my days when I was insecure and thinking a curriculum would solve all my problems. But I thought – you know, I have researched a lot of curriculum and I’ve noticed there’s not anything like this out there. And so I just thought, “Okay. I will do this.” But as many homeschool moms are, I’m a real DIY-er, you know, do everything yourself. And one of the big things I knew I was going to learn on this journey was that I was going to have to allow other people to help me, which has been fantastic. I’ve done a ton of it myself, for sure. But I have had other people come in and help me with this. And I did have a graphic designer. I don’t know how to do that. Thank goodness.

[01:32:04] Ashley James: Well, it looks so professional. So good job. Good job.

[01:32:07] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Yes. So she came up with kind of the ideas there too. But I was like – we’ve been writing the content. I write the math and the science. My sister came in. She homeschools too. And she’s wonderful. And she’s been writing the history and the language arts. And as we keep growing, I’m hoping I can bring more people on to help with it as well. But it’s really been a wonderful journey to learn all this stuff and to learn how to let other people help you too. Because guess what? That’s another huge chunk of the hero’s journey. Because when I was describing that hero’s journey to you, I said, the journey includes mentors. It includes friends and allies who are going on the path with you. It also includes enemies sometimes. Sometimes you hear things that are just aren’t so nice. And you don’t worry about it because you just know it’s part of the journey. And you feel compassion for the enemies because you think, “Oh, I’m so sorry that you haven’t found your path yet.” And maybe they have. But it’s just different.

So yes, really, it’s been an amazing project to do. And I love that I can share this with other homeschool moms so that they can see that, really, you can cover all of this basic knowledge in just an hour a day and to conspire them to want to go learn more. And to become the person that they’re meant to become. And to travel on their hero’s journey.

[01:33:38] Ashley James: So you just spend an hour a day homeschooling?

[01:33:43] Molly Christensen: Essentially, yes.

[01:33:44] Ashley James: And the kids are doing other things throughout the day like reading, and doing projects, and playing, and doing art, and stuff like that. But you sit down and you basically have a classroom for one hour a day. Is it seven days a week?

[01:33:59] Molly Christensen: No. We have a couch. Not a classroom. And the kitchen table. And no, we actually usually only do it about three or four days a week. Because the other – I definitely wouldn’t do it on the weekends. But I say three or four days because sometimes we’re going to go on a field trip or maybe we’re just running errands or something, you know. So yes, it takes surprisingly a lot less time than one might think to teach your kids because of this, we think it takes 9:00 to 3:00 like the public schools, but they’ve done all these studies about how much time is wasted there. But also, it’s because of the teaching style is different. I’m focusing on the feeling. If they have the right feeling, they’re going to learn it so much faster because they want to. Public schools, because there’s so many kids in there – and I’m not knocking public schools. It is what it is. And it’s a good option for many people. But they have to focus more on repetition. It does not take six years of grammar worksheets to learn grammar. It just doesn’t. If they’re ready and they have something they want to say, they can learn it really fast. And if they’ve been read really good books to, they have it in their brain when they read. A lot of the stuff they just pick up. I don’t even have to teach them because it’s like osmosis, you know. So it really is not as – it’s not rocket science as we think.

[01:35:31 Ashley James: There’s this type of school – is it called the Sudbury School? The type of school? Yeah. So I was looking – when we were pregnant, my husband and I – well, I was really motivated too. Because when you’re pregnant, you’re like – or at least with the first baby because I only had one – I was trying to consume all the information possible about my child’s future. Like, you know what kind of schooling and all this stuff. What are we going to do and how are we going to discipline, and what kind of birth are we going to have. And I came across this type of school called the Sudbury School. And it completely blew my mind. It is totally – I don’t know. I feel like I’ve entered – I’ve gone into a time warp but entered like 1969 and we’re surrounded by hippies. Because it’s basically a kid commune where you drop your kid off on a place with buildings and a few acres. And you leave your kid there and there’s no formal classrooms, there’s no teachers. There are adults and they’re called coaches or something. And the child is just allowed to do whatever they want. Of course, actually the children come up with their own rules. Because they come up with their own government. And the kids get to run the place. And the kids could actually vote to fire one of the adults should they want to.

And so the adults really who are there because they love to share and teach. And so the kids, if they’re interested will go to the computer room and ask the adult to teach them how to do – how to make a video game, how to code. Or the child would go to the music room and say, “I want to learn how to play the guitar.” And I’ve watched a lot of videos of graduates of this system. And the they go on to college. And they say, for the first year, you might just – the kids might spend the entire time playing video games. And he says, “Yeah. They do.” They kind of get it all out. They get it out of their system. They do whatever they want and they get it out of their system. And then they start to look around and go, “How does this work? How does that work? Oh, man, I really want to try this. I really want to do this.” And they start getting inspired by things. And then they go ask the adults for help to learn those things. And then if they decided they want to – because they get so inspired, they go, “You know, I really want to become an engineer.” Well, they have to ask, “What do I need to do?” “Okay. Well, you have to learn this, this, this, and this. And in order to pass this test to go on to college.” And then they want to and then they’re constantly asking for help because they’re learning. So it’s like the Wild West there. And there are children who don’t excel in that environment because – for whatever reason. Bt there are children who excel incredibly well because their learning style is just, “Leave me alone and let me come to you when I’m ready. And I want to completely have my education be based on my motivation.”

And that blew my mind. I think it blew a circuit in my brain. Because I was raised in the system of you, you shut up, you sit down, don’t talk until you’re spoken to. Children are seen and not heard. Raise your hand if you need to go to the bathroom. You have to have a hall pass. And really made to feel afraid of adults and afraid of the teachers. And education is not supposed to be fun. That was the system I was raised in. And I was always – I always had a belief that I was stupid because that was the system I was raised in. But then as an adult, I’m like,” I want to learn how to code. I want to learn how to make a website. I want to learn how to video edit.” And I found myself picking things up so quickly that I realized I am a really good learner. But it has to be something that I love to do, which is how our brain works. So that’s why – and so I think Sudbury is the type of that schooling or unschooling is this one end of the extreme. And then military school would be the other side of the extreme.

But I like that what you’ve done is you’ve picked mindset and teaching them how to be the best versions of themselves as the core of your curriculum. So you’re building – like you said, you’re building the their character but you’re also building your own character as a parent, which is really beautiful.

[01:39:56] Molly Christensen: Yeah. You nailed it. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. Because I love the idea of Sudbury. But part of me wonders where does the character coming in especially if they’re being sent away all day. Plus, I don’t want to send my kids away all day. You know what I mean?

[01:40:12] Ashley James: Right. I imagine it like Lord of the Flies. You just get a bunch of kids together –

[01:40:16] Molly Christensen: That’s kind of what I would do.

[01:40:18] Ashley James: Oh man, Lord of the Flies. It just scares me. But it did open my mind and expand my mind to this idea of there are aspects of this unschooling that make a lot of sense or child led learning that makes a lot of sense. Not 100 percent of the time for me as a parent. But it opened my mind up to, “Well, how do we learn?” And I really want my son to want to learn and get excited about learning. And he is. And I don’t want to thwart that, which we do. By the time we send our kids to school, a lot of the school system thwarts their desire to learn because –

[01:40:55] Molly Christensen: Absolutely. And the comparison culture to. I mean, you even said you thought you were stupid. It’s like, none of those kids are stupid. They all have their own unique abilities. And they all have goodness inside. They just have different journeys. I’ve had some kids learn to read when they were four. And I have another kid now who’s eight-and-a-half and it just hasn’t quite clicked yet. It’s just about to though. But because I can let her go on her own journey, I can just keep saying, “This is awesome. You can keep working out. You’re going to get there.”

[01:41:30] Ashley James: Beautiful. Now, let’s talk about socialization. Because I think that’s on everyone’s mind. I mean, the fact that you did have seven kids so those kids are all working together so they’re not alone. But there’s a lot of parents that just have one or two kids. And so if they’re at home all day, how are they going to be amazing adults to connecting with people and knowing how to communicate if they’re those oddball kids who are isolated at home as we often think or that’s the mainstream media’s idea of homeschooling.

[01:42:03] Molly Christensen: Right. Well, what I learned really quickly was that basically children they model their parents. So if you feel like somebody else unsocialized, it could come from the parents. Sad to say. And we got unsocialized kids at public school too. The outcast. The social outcast. So for me, because I was worried about that, I was like, “Well, I guess I better lead the way.” So I am a total introvert. I went through high school and was I socialized? Did I learn how to communicate with people? No. Not really. I felt awkward all the time in high school. Like, why do we think that’s a good environment to learn how to communicate with people? I just mostly just felt awkward. And so I just decided I just need to learn how to love and serve other people. And I figure if we can do that, hey, we’re going to be socialized. We’re going to know how to get along with other people.

So I just remember some of my first few Co-Op activities I took my son to. What I really want to do is just go sit in the corner and hide and he did too. In fact, he didn’t even want get out the car. But I just made myself go introduce myself to other people and get to know them. You know, what, people are amazing. People are great. And it was really like, as I practiced my socialization skills, they followed suit as well. I was a little worried at first when he wouldn’t get out of the car ever. But he figured it about. He’s an amazing kid. And so, really, what socialization is all about is just loving and serving people. And you can absolutely do that in your home. You can absolutely do that and take your kids to other places and just love and serve people. And there’s so much of the other socialization stuff that comes from sending your kids to school that I didn’t want. Like, I mentioned that my son was bringing home some bad behaviors. I was like, “Why would I want that?”

[01:44:15] Ashley James: Bullying. And it’s really sad that the number two cause of death between the ages of 10 and 24 suicide right now. That it raised up to, I think, it’s 56 percent in the last ten years. I mean, suicide is at an all time high, basically, with our youth.

[01:44:38] Molly Christensen: Yeah. It’s horrible.

[01:44:38] Ashley James: And that’s something we have to stop and say there’s something wrong with our system. And I don’t think there’s only one thing. I don’t think you can only say that it’s the school system. Or you only say that they all have cell phones or social media. I think it is -and we have to look at everything. We have to take the shotgun approach. We have to look at everything and go there’s something wrong with how we’re addressing mental health, with how we’re addressing bullying, with how we’re addressing online bullying, with how we’re addressing it in the schools.

There was a child – this is such a sad topic to bring up. There’s a eight or nine year old child just this week that committed suicide because he was knocked unconscious when beaten in his school. And it was filmed by one of the students. And the school tried to suppress it and deny it. And I don’t know what kind –

[01:45:31] Molly Christensen: He didn’t feel heard.

[01:45:31] Ashley James: So he didn’t feel heard. And then he killed himself. And that is so wrong and so sad. And we should all feel very angry and want to take action to fix this problem. I think that we all need to fix the problem. That we all need to take – we need to take personal responsibility because we can only change ourselves. So we need to figure out what can we do as individuals to make this world, to make this society, to make our community, a place where mental health can be addressed and what is the root cause of bullying. What is going on? The root cause of bullying and figure that out. We have to figure it out. And then we have to address it with our children, with our children’s friends, with all the parents that were around. We need to take action as individuals. Because we can’t wait for the government to fix it or the school system to fix it. If we just wait it’s going to just get worse and worse. And so that’s my little soapbox about this that we need to take responsibility for our own actions. And the first voice, the little voice that everyone just heard in themselves go, “That is wrong. And I want to help stop this. I want to help turn this around.” That voice was our authentic self. And then all the refusals that came after, “Well, who am I to do that? And I’m just one person. And I don’t know anyone -“

[01:47:08] Molly Christensen: What to do.

[01:47:09] Ashley James: “I don’t know what to do.” All those little refusals, that’s the party that wants to keep you safe. But we need to go. “Ah. Thanks for pointing out where I’m stuck in life. I’m going to break through that. And I’m going to prove those voices wrong. Listen to the authentic voice.” So all of us could just do one thing like you did your blog. You did 180 beautiful acts of kindness in a year. And what if we all just did one act of kindness dedicated to lowering the suicide rate among youth? We don’t have to know what it looks like but just start. Just start by saying, “I’m going to do something and be part of this change to turn the world around.” And I don’t know what it looks like yet but I’m declaring it. I’m declaring it right now. And then I’m going to go and talk to other parents. And maybe we’ll create a little organization or get them all together for tea and just brainstorm what can we do as individuals to turn this around. Because this is our mission. As long as we’re in service of others with love and service of others and being an example for our children, then we will have a positive impact.

[01:48:21] Molly Christensen: Well, absolutely. And I actually think that so many elements of the hero’s journey address this as well. Because I think our nation is a nation with an identity crisis. People do not know who they are. They don’t know that they have goodness inside because they have no purpose. They don’t understand so many of these principles. And I think this as long as we’re doing these kindnesses and we see people who are lonely. We reach out and we teach people and love people. That’s what we can do.

[01:48:54] Ashley James: It’s so beautiful. Molly, thank you so much for coming today and sharing. This episode would help anyone. Although the formal topic was on homeschooling, you addressed some principles of personal growth that I find to be so beautiful and so, so, so helpful to everyone that wants to break through and to grow. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Of course, the links to everything that Molly does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcasts at learntruehealth.com. Your main website which is buildingheroesacademy.com is fantastic. Also, your book is homeschool get it done.com. And then your curriculum funnel is the number 3homeschoolsecrets.com.

Molly, is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Is there anything left unsaid or anything that you want to make sure that you’ve got to share?

[01:49:52] Molly Christensen: Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been great. And I love that you are sharing your message. And that’s actually another thing that many of us are called to do is to share our messages. But we have fears and we shut ourselves down. So I guess really what I want to end we’re with is just that, to remember that you are one of those heroes that we’ve been talking about on this hero’s journey. Everybody listening to this and Ashley, for sure. Because just knowing that just makes such a shift in your life. And I love the visual that that can bring to you so you can remember, when you do get down, when you do hit obstacles, it’s just part of the journey. And it’s a great thing because it just means that you are on the right path, that you are just going to be learning and growing. And as you’ve learned how to get through those obstacles and you’re changing so many lives as you go through because you are doing what you were meant to do. You were called to the action that you did it. And that’s really what life is all about, it’s just doing that so that you can serve people. So thank you so much for having me on. And I hope to talk to you again sometime.

[01:50:58] Ashley James: Absolutely, Molly. This is not our last conversation. This is just the first of many. Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you so much.

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Happy Gut

https://www.learntruehealth.com/happy-gut

Highlights:

What gut health is really about.
Acid Reflux is not really having too much acid in our stomachs but actually less of it.
Mindset id the first thing we should change when accepting the challenge of being healthy also goes with lifestyle changes.
Having a healthy gut is the start of being healthy all throughout.
How concussions can sometimes be the cause of gut dysfunction.
The health of the body is really dependent on the health of your entire digestive system.
Medication is not going to build good health for a person, it’s going to be lifestyle, it’s going to be the way they eat.

Sometimes we have to listen our bodies when it’s telling us that something is wrong. A certain symptom can sometimes present itself with a different root cause. In the instance of having an unhealthy gut, an upset stomach or maybe even heartburn can manifest towards when our bodies are fighting off the imbalances in the acids within. Dr. Vincent Pedre shares some of his expertise towards having a healthy gut in this episode we’re sure everyone is interested to know about.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s show with functional medicine doctor, Vincent Pedre. He has some amazing information about healing the gut and I know you will just love it. I wanted to share an email I got. I love emails from you guys, from the listeners. They often bring me to tears and this one from a listener that I’ve received a few days ago and I got permission to read it. I won’t share their name. They’re actually really excited for me to share because they wanted to spread hope. They say, “Hey there, Ashley. Hope the start of your holiday season is treating you and your family well. I just wanted to sincere thank you for the incredible impact you and your podcast has had in my life. After struggling with nervous system issues, digestive system issues for over 5 years, after a concussion landed me in the ER, after years of bouncing around to numerous practitioner and following countless protocols and spending way more money that I’d like to admit. It was two episodes of your podcast in particular that introduced me to the missing links in my healing process. I was able to locate an atlas orthogonal chiropractor in Seattle after hearing your episode with Dr. Patrick Gallagher. And I happen to see Eric Thorton who literally put my brain back in place. I imagine you get loads of emails like these but just wanted to extend my appreciation and gratitude for you and your work. All your shows are so jam-packed with valuable information that I will continue to listen, learn and pass along the information. Many cheers and hope you have a very happy and healthy holiday.”

Thank you so much for this letter. I wanted to share this because this listener had spent years and years over 5 years going from doctor to doctor with all kinds of issues and they didn’t give up hope. They’ve kept educating themselves and through some wonderful episodes, they really unlocked and unlocked what they’re looking for. I’ve had similar emails recently saying that specific episodes were the missing links that they were searching and searching and something just clicked. That was the missing link. Sometimes its diet. Sometimes it’s really simple like removing something out of your diet. Sometimes it’s a nutrient deficiency. Something as simple as magnesium or zinc. Sometimes it’s taking the time to breathe. Something really simple. And sometimes it is a lot of things. It’s the shotgun approach needing to do many changes. If you’re suffering and you are feeling sick. You’re tired of feeling sick, know that there’s hope. Keep moving forward and every little change matters. You’ll look back and you’ll realize, today you’re better than the day before. That’s how I was. I was so sick for so many years and now looking back, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe how sick I was because I feel so good now. It took me years to build this. It’s the foundation of health you’re building, it’s funny that this listener wrote this about having a concussion because in today’s interview, Dr. Pedre talks about one cause of gut dysfunction, is concussion. He explains that.

Concussions are really common and often overlooked by regular doctors. When I say regular, I mean just like, run of the mill doctors. Not ones that have more advanced training like in functional medicine. So you go to an average doctor and they wouldn’t know when you’re having digestive issues to actually look at your brain health. Very interesting. So you’ll enjoy today’s interview if you have gut issues and that you’re looking to heal because Dr. Pedre has a wonderful book called, Happy Gut and he teaches some and brings us some great information in today’s interview. He’s going to come back on the show because even after 90 minutes we just got in the surface. I’m very excited to have him continue to come back and teach more and more. I want all of you to have wonderfully healthy guts. That doesn’t sound good. I want all of us to have wonderfully healthy tummies and happy healthy tummies and digestive systems. Enjoy today’s interview. Please share this episode with those you love who you also want to extend having healthy tummies with. That would be great if we could include all of our loved ones. Build happy healthy tummies with us. Enjoy today’s episode and have an excellent rest of your day.

[05:25] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 397. I am so excited for today’s guest. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and my gut. We have Dr. Vincent Pedre, who is an MD that specializes in healing the gut, holistically. Man, your bio, we could spend 2 hours just talking about your bio and your credentials. You have been on some amazing TV shows, you’ve hung out with Dr. Oz, you’ve done so many interviews. You’ve written so much great articles and books and your website, Happygutlife.com. I’m really excited for us to talk about this today because so many people complain. A lot of my listeners that they have bloating, they have constipation. That they’re on medications for heart burn that they just don’t know where to start or maybe they’ve been trying to do some diet to heal their candida, or heal their small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It’s such a long path and they’re not getting the results that they want to get. Gut health is the foundation. If we don’t have our gut health, we don’t have anything. Because if we’re not absorbing and utilizing our nutrition, everything falls apart. That’s where it all begins.

[07:03] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Totally. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I’d like to think of the gut as the root system of the body. The same that the roots are for a tree. They are foundational. Imagine the health of the tree is guided by the health of the roots. Same way, the health of the body is really dependent on the health of your entire digestive system.

[07:27] Ashley James: Absolutely. Yes. Then more recently, people have been talking about how they’re seeing a direct correlation between gut health and brain health. That the vagus nerve can become inflamed and they’re seeing that also in the gut. That we make some of our neuro chemicals in the gut and that even our T3’s converted, 25% of our T3’s converted in the gut. The gut is not just for digesting food, it’s also affecting our brain and our hormones.

[08:03] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Let’s say, metabolically active organ system that is involved in making if we include the gut microbiome in that picture, is included in making neuro transmitters. It makes it’s own hormone that affect things like your appetite also your sense of that you’ve already eaten enough. It control so many things, it regulates blood sugar. It’s a really integral part of the entire picture of what makes up our health.

[08:39:] Ashley James: Now you wrote a book called Happy Gut. The cleansing program to help you lose weight, gain energy and eliminate pain. I heard about the study where they took obese, I think it was obese mice and mice of a healthy weight. They did a fecal transplant from the healthy weight mice to the obese mice and then the obese mice then became, without changing their chloric intake, the obese mice became not obese. So they’re saying that even our gut health has to do with the obesity and since we’re seeing that that is one of the largest health problems occurring today. Would you say that gut health and that almost everyone doesn’t have gut health right now?

[09:28] Dr. Vincent Pedre: You could argue for that. That we are in an epidemic of gut disorders. Let’s say in gut related disorders all throughout the world. It’s fascinating because I teach – I’ve had the honor to teach in Australia and Mexico. I just came back from Peru. Obesity is a problem that is a worldwide problem and the rise in diabetes and metabolic syndrome which is a precursor to diabetes that’s growing all over the world. You could argue which is the chicken or the egg, what’s coming first. There has been so many changes in the way that we eat. Our dietary patterns are so skewed from our ancestral patterns because of the availability of food, but also just the preponderance of sugar-laden foods, the refined carbohydrates, packaged foods. All sorts of things that are convenient but they’re just not healthy for us and certainly not healthy for the gut microbiome which then regulates things like how your body processes sugars. That’s going to relate to how much fat you pack into the middle of your body because that’s regulated by the hormone insulin.

You could argue, look at just the trends for example. The second most prescribed medication worldwide is a proton pump inhibitor, which lowers the acidity of the stomach. If you just look at this just as a late person. Even just like of an innocent child asking questions like, “Weren’t we made to have acid in our stomach for a reason? Is it okay to go in and alter that?” And think that we are solving a problem without a problem without creating downstream problems. That was my question in the 90’s when the proton pump inhibitors became the new panacea for gut issues if you’ve’ had acid reflux, let’s give you a proton pump inhibitor. You know, even back then, I asked the question, “You know, our physiology evolved to have a PH in the stomach around 3. We evolved to create stomach acid, why is it okay to change that? Are you sure that by changing that we’re not causing some downstream problems?” Early on in the days of the proton pump inhibitors, I swear if you spoke to a gastroenterologist, they thought it should just be added to the water and there were no problems with it. We know now, more than two decades later, that they lead to all sorts of things like calcium malabsorption, iron malabsorption. It could cause B12 deficiency. They lead to low bone mass eventually maybe to osteoporosis.

[12:46] Ashley James: Would it also lead to something like H-Pylori and allow for other parasitic infections to occur because if we don’t have enough acid in the stomach, like that’s our line of defense, it’s kind of a like a mote around it’s castle. It’s preventing stuff from getting in right?

[13:06] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. It’s initial line of defense, let’s say bacteria that might get through the food that we eat. Yeast for example. Candida has a hard time surviving stomach acid but if your stomach PH is raised and much easier than to colonize the stomach and really the small intestine and large intestine with yeast. H. Pylori’s a different story because PPI’s actually inhibit H.Pylori. Slow down the growth H.Pylori but they don’t eradicate the infection. They could actually perpetuate an H.Pylori infection at a very low grade but never fully get rid of it.

[13:52] Ashley James: That sounds like, you could insert that into almost any condition where chronic drugs we’re given to mask how the body functions. To sort of manage symptoms but not solve the problem. It persists. Something persists.

[14:10] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Exactly and for many people, we’re starting with stomach acid. For many people, acid reflux, heart burn is both an issue of diet and lifestyle habits, but it can also be an issue with not enough stomach acid production which is counter intuitive. Most people think that acid reflux means you’re making too much acid. For the majority of people what it means they making too little acid. They’re probably not making enough stomach acid because there’s different levels of malfunction they could be nutrient deficient so maybe they don’t have enough zinc in their diet. For example, they could have vagal nerve malfunction and thus they’re not getting the nerve impulses that would stimulate the stomach to produce enough acid to break down protein.

[15:06] Ashley James: What causes that? What causes vagal nerve malfunction?

[15:09] Dr. Vincent Pedre: The probably the easiest thing to understand that could cause that is a concussion for example. How many people have had concussions in their life where they lose consciousness and they recover for it. At least they think they’ve recovered from it but then something is not quite right after that. We know that if you have a concussion with loss of consciousness that within 30 minutes, you have vagal nerve malfunction and because of that you get leaky gut syndrome. The vagus nerve also regulates the gut barrier and the permeability of the gut. The other thing that I see in my practice that is more common that concussion that causes vagal nerve malfunction is stress. I would say that’s the number one reason people are – just think through a time where you’ve been really stressed and you eat but that food feels like it’s like a rock in your stomach? That’s because you’re not making enough digestive enzyme. They say you have to rest to digest. Or another word is you have to be in a relax state in order for your body to be able to digest foods. If you’re not into a relax state your body thinks that you need to be ready to run because something’s going to come and attack you. That’s the state of our modern lives. It’s maladaptive stress response because we’re not out in the wild. We don’t need to protect ourselves form some animals that going to try and attack and eat us. We’re living in a state as if it exists and we don’t resolve that state so a lot of people live in that chronic fight or flight response.

That will then affect your vagal tone that reduces vagal tones and terms has cascading effects of reducing stomach acid production. You might get stomachaches, maybe you start getting some reflux and then you think, “Well, I’m producing too much acid so I should take some of the acid lowering medication.” For the most part, that is the wrong thing to do. Now you’re going to create new problems because once you’re reducing stomach acid, I’ve mentioned calcium malabsorption, B12. They’ve also found that people who take PPI’s long term so proton pump inhibitors, these acid reducing medications out there that they’re at increased risk for some pneumonia and for being hospitalized with a pneumonia. They’re also at an increased risk for an infection and infection that you never want to get which is C. DIFF Diarrhea which is caused by bacteria called Clostridium Difficile. Which is extremely difficult to treat has become more and more resistant to the classic antibiotics that were used for that because of the overuse of antibiotics. It’s something that you don’t want to get. Along with yeast overgrowth and potentially I had a patient who came in who develop C. DIFF as a result of being on a proton pump inhibitor.

[18:28] Ashley James: There just doesn’t seem like there any positive news that comes to taking these medications. They get temporarily relief but they’re going to have worse side effects down the road.

[18:43] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Right. It’s either the quick solution versus what is going to be a little bit harder work. Which is figuring out, “Okay, you need to look at yourself, change your lifestyle.” Maybe you’re coming home at 8pm at night. Eating dinner and then you’re in bed by 11. You haven’t had enough time to digest your food and then at nighttime that food is sitting there putting pressure and stomach acid comes up because you’re lying down. A lot of times it takes making some tough choices about changing lifestyle habits. A lot of people, they’d rather just take a pill than change lifestyle but honestly, the lifestyle’s going to have the most favorable effects. The other thing is not breaking down protein properly. We started talking about neuro transmitters and hormones, what not. If you don’t break down your protein properly, you’re not going to have the sub stream necessary to make the neuro transmitter that help keep you happy and help life feel satisfying. Then you know you can go down the path of depression and anxiety because you’re not breaking down your protein properly.

[19:57] Ashley James: I’ve been advertised to recently, Zantac which is an anti-acid and anti-histamine now there’s a big recall because it’s now linked to causing cancer.

[20:12] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Let me explain it. There’s an ingredient in there, the scientific term for it, it’s an inert ingredient that’s used as filler to make these tablets.

[20:25] Ashley James: So it’s not that anti-acids directly causes cancer.

[20:28] Dr. Vincent Pedre: No. It was an ingredient within Zantac and it was a lot of the generic manufacturers. It was actually a recall that affected other generics as well because I have patients that take blood pressure medication that was also within that recall and it’s because they found that it had an ingredient that had an increase suspicion of being increasing the risk of cancer for people. So it was basically not the active ingredient itself, but another ingredient in the – which is scary because there are over the counter medications that you can just go and buy without a doctor’s prescription. And it had a substance in it that had been found to increase the risk for cancer.

[21:17] Ashley James: We live in a world where we feel that because it’s been sold over the counter that it’s safe. But if we go to Costco, you can buy one purchase of cough syrup because they sell this both too so that there’s two bulk giant, it’s like half a liter I think or something. It’s some crazy amount of cough syrup and they’re strapped together but two bottles of this big cough syrup and if you were to accidentally, maybe you were just sipping on it or you have a cough and you don’t read a label, you could kill yourself. It has a lethal dose of acetaminophen in it. It’s sold over the counter like we can go to a drugstore and buy something that doesn’t seem excessive and kill ourselves. We have to like really be careful taking any medication at all and make sure that we’re talking tour doctor and doing our research and like you said, stopping and looking at lifestyle and diet.

[22:16] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. I think a lot of doctors are trained within the system. You know, I hate to say it but I was trained in that system. That in some ways and this is what really turned me off to medicine at the end of my training is that, we’re just glorified reps for the pharmaceutical industry. That’s the way they train us. We’re constantly being marketed to by the different companies and back in the day and the early 2000’s, we were wined and dined. They found that doctors that were visited by pharmaceutical reps with the newest most expensive drugs tended to prescribe those newer and more expensive medications. When maybe there were alternatives that were much cheaper that would have been out for the long time. Obviously, the push is always to sell the newest because those are the medications that are unpatented and the companies that are going to make most money with. It’s horrible to say but in some ways I feel like until you wake up as a doctor, you’re basically a glorified rep for pharmaceutical companies writing their medications.

[23:37] Ashley James: This is so refreshing because normally I’m the one that gets into the soapbox that starts ranting and raving about the allopathic medical system but I decided to just hold back and you just filled in everything. It was perfect. I love it.

[23:52] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I can say that now because what I do as much as – I’m talking about the system, medications can be lifesaving. They are definitely places where medications can help change the course of the disease that has gone too far to be able to make and immediate change by using natural means. Even when and even with because I sit on both sides of the fence as in internal medicine trained doctor but also functional medicine trained. I kind of mewled the two and there are places for each but I’m always regardless having a conversation with a patient about nutrition, about lifestyle, about stress management. Everything that I think builds good health because a medication is not going to build good health for a person, it’s going to be lifestyle, it’s going to be the way they eat. That’s what’s going to help build good health for people.

[24:58] Ashley James: Exactly. The thing is, by the time they go to get on the medication, they’re really sick of being sick and they’re sick of that symptom. They need some relief and pain is the biggest motivator. When we’re in pain –

[25:14] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Anything that makes us uncomfortable. Right? You know, thank goodness for podcasts like yours that are out there educating people because if you think about it, 20 plus years ago, pre internet age, the place that people got their medical knowledge was from doctors who were trained to prescribe medications and to treat disease with bandage rather than to look at the root cause. Now we’re in an era where information is wide and open. You would probably chuckle if you saw the sticker that’s on the side of my computer that faces my patients because I think it’s funny but I also respect the free flow of information and the searching that this is created in. It’s really the last 20 years I think empowered patients to see that they had played a bigger role in their health than they were made to believe by our paternalistic allopathic medical system. My sticker says, “Please don’t confuse your google search with my medical degree.” [Laughter] As I say that I still encourage people to be their own doctor and part of what I do with my patients is I teach them to listen to their body and to basically evolve their own intuitive awareness of what is right for them and what is wrong for them. I think a lot of people are moving through life and we’re talking about gut health here and just think the gut is the intuitive center of the body. It’s really about tuning into your body and seeing that if you eat this, how does it make you feel? If you don’t eat it? Do you feel better? Do you feel more clear headed? Some people are really not living by that level of awareness. They’re feeling horrible. They’re not connecting the two together that the way they’re eating is part of the reason they don’t feel that great.

[27:27] Ashley James: About 2 years ago, I started to get this sore throat and my glands were swollen and I went to my Naturopath and she did swabs for everything and everything came out negative. I’m so weird, I’m like, “What’s going on?” I didn’t feel sick other than my glands were swollen, my adenoids, and my throat was always sore just out of nowhere. It was around February so I thought, “Okay, I got to have something, some kind of bug.” I was talking all this herbs and stuff for anti-viral and anti-bacterial and when again few weeks later, I said, “This is ridiculous.” I got to the point where I couldn’t do interviews because my throat was so sore, my voice was so sore. She was swabbing me checking again, nothing. Everything came back, all the cultures came back negative and she looks at me and she goes, “This could be heartburn.” I thought, “There’s no way this is heart burn. I eat so healthy.” Then she says, “Okay, let’s do a test.” She doesn’t think that Tums are a healthy thing to take but it’s an easy diagnostic tool. It’s the cheapest diagnostic tool. She was like, “Take Tums for 3 days and if you get relief and your sore throat goes away then we need to look at your diet. We need to look at what’s going on.” Sure enough, within hours of talking some Tums, my sore throat starts to subside. I thought, “Shoot. Are you kidding me?”

That heartburn can appear as just a sore throat. It doesn’t have to be that classic, sensation in the tummy or in the esophagus. I figured out that I – because I was my husband went vegan like whole food plant based and I was trying to adapt to that way of eating so I started to eating tofu at every meal. Because I hadn’t really learned yet how to do this way of eating and my body was going, “What are you feeding me?” My body was giving me heartburn from eating tofu so I cut tofu out. I all went away and then I had to learn that I can eat lots of beans and peas and nuts and seeds and all other kinds of foods for fiber and protein and all that. Now I can eat tofu once in a while and I had absolutely no problem but it was sort of the daily eating at pretty much every meal my body went, “This isn’t happening.” I thought that was really interesting because if I had gone to an MD, I don’t know, they would started probably with anti-biotic. I had classic look like infected throat and maybe later on I would’ve been put on some antacids. Never looking at adjusting the diet whereas going to you, the functional doctor, you would’ve started with, “Okay, what’s going on with your life? What’s going on with your diet? What changes have you made? How was your stress level? What are you eating?” You know, you’re looking at the root.

[30:28] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Exactly. Definitely. We’re looking at a much bigger picture of where the symptoms are coming from.

[30:38] Ashley James: What can people do if they’re currently on anti-acids and they want to get their gut to the point where it’s making healthy levels of acid, they no longer have those painful symptoms. What kind of steps can they ate to get themselves so healthy so that they no longer need that crutch?

[30:58] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That is a really great question. It can be tough for some people. That ones that I’ve had that are the most challenging, part of it can be also belief system. If you’ve been on anti-acid mediation for over 10 years, you’ve learn that you can’t live without it. The first part of it is changing the mindset around that because there is almost like a psychological dependence around taking the medication because if you don’t, you’re going to have acid reflux. You’re not going to feel well, you’re not going to be able to eat but the way I used to do presentation where I showed a picture of hoover dam and that was my analogy of the PPI is that, it basically slows down the acid production. It’s blocking those proton pumps but the body has a response hypertrophies, the proton pumps so it actually makes more of them but then they’re all getting blocked right? Now say you stop taking the PPI, now you have more proton pumps than you had before. Guess what’s going to happen?

[32:21] Ashley James: Is it like a flood?

[32:23] Dr. Vincent Pedre: You’re going to start producing too much stomach acid. You stop the medication then you feel worse, and then you think, “Well, that means, I can’t be off of this medication.” Right? A lot of the work that I do with patients is that transition point which can be a multi-month process. It could be a 6 month process. A lot of times involves looking at full lifestyle because we started talking about the role of the vagus nerve and stress and how that affects stomach acid secretion. How acid reflux is probably for the most part, low stomach acid not high stomach acid production and yet yes, it does respond to going on a PPI because it raises the PH o the stomach acid so if it does come up it doesn’t bother the esophagus. You don’t get those heartburn symptoms in the same way. The transition can be tough for some people but very slow taper of the medication we don’t go from on to off knowing that there is a hypertrophy of those proton pumps that if you stop if suddenly you’re going to get a flood of acid.

Then we work on giving them nutrients that help heal the gut barrier. A lot of people are zinc deficient and zinc is very important for the health of the stomach lining. We may supplement with some zinc carnosine. A lot of times use combination supplement with marshmallow roots, slippery elm bark, aloe, DGL, which is a licorice derivative. Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice. Then we might also start and this is so counter intuitive and hard for people to understand. I may start to introduce a hydrochloric acid supplement with meals where they’re eating protein. That’s to help them break down the protein better. A lot of times that’s the hard part for patient who’s been used to being taught and told that you’re producing too much stomach acid now I’m going to give you more stomach acid, like, “How is that going to make me better?”

[35:00] Ashley James: But they were taught a lie. For those who don’t know the physiology of the esophageal sphincter, isn’t that why they get GERD because they weren’t producing enough stomach acid so the sphincter wasn’t closing. The sphincter is triggered by a certain level of acid? Can you explain that?

[35:27] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That is part of the picture. Then you have to think about all the things that people might be doing that we can or relax the lower esophageal sphincter which is a protection from that acid coming up. For example, chewing gum excessively or eating too much chocolate or drinking a bunch of coffee or smoking. All of these things affect the tone of the lower esophageal sphincter. Then that can also allow acid to come up.

[36:09] Ashley James: Does stress or the vagal nerve malfunction also affect the lower esophageal sphincter?

[36:18] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I’m going to say that there’s stronger influence on what’s happening on the stomach. It probably has some level of defect because stress definitely can affect the ability of the esophageal sphincter to contract or relax but it’s probably the bigger role as it effects on stomach acid production.

[36:47] Ashley James: Got it. So someone stressed out one of the listeners, busy mom. Stay at home mom or a guy that one of the listener’s is a male and he rushes off to work or a female who has manage taking care of their elderly parents and a job. They’re basically burning the candles at both ends. They’re stressed. Maybe they’ve had a concussion in their past, who knows. Concussions are really common. They have that, they’ve got the stress. Maybe they’ve had in the past, a few years they’ve had some antibiotics that they’ve been on so their gut flora isn’t that great. Maybe they have like you said a nutrient deficiency of zinc so they’ve sent out his perfect storm. Maybe they’re sort off so tried that they’ve pounding back the coffee just to like be able to get through the day. Have some adrenaline going on. Now they start getting this heartburn so they start popping this over the counter medications, TUMS, whatever they’re doing which is lowering stomach acid because that gives temp relief but what that does is persist the problem of malabsorption of nutrients, might even allow for Candida overgrowth or other dysbiosis to occur. Now they’re having more and more symptoms. So then it just grows and grows and grows and grows.

[38:15] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. So you see like this is like a snowball or avalanche effect. It starts small and then before you know it, you feel sick. You feel fat. You feel like you don’t have you’re bloated and you don’t have energy for anything and you’re supposed to be this super mom.

[38:42] Ashley James: Yes. And it’s really hard because we, I can only speak from my experience as a woman. We will put the oxygen mask on everyone else first especially when we’re a mom. Especially if we have family member who are in need of help. Right now, so many baby boomers or even our grandparents who are still around need us. We’re taking care of a lot of people and then we have to pay the bills. We sometimes put our needs last and sometimes, we self-medicate.

[39:17] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Sometimes or a lot of the times. I have such respect for women do in the world. You have to hold so much space for so many things. We are in an era where it’s just in many ways so difficult because it would be much simpler if you’re a mom to stay home and take care of the kids but I have a lot of working moms that have a child. They’re giving 3 months maternity leave which in my opinion is not long enough. Then they have to say goodbye to their baby child, leave them with a nanny or in best-case scenario it’s the mom or family member. Go back to work and now they’re supposed to work full time, maybe pumping breastmilk. I feel like it’s a huge load on women because you have to be like superhuman. That is a huge stressor. Huge stressor. Then of course, you know we’ve talked about snowball effect of stress and how that affects the body. It affects the gut microbiome. It affects the way the gut functions from acid productions to digestive enzyme production to the permeability of the gut and also for the makeup of your gut microbiome. All of that is sensitive to the stress signals within the body.

[40:46] Ashley James: You know, so many listeners are really intrigued by, “What’s the perfect diet?” Like, “What should I eat to be healthy?” I keep saying there’s no one perfect diet for everyone. Right? Because if an athlete, 40-year-old athlete came in versus 70-year-old woman with osteoporosis versus a 20-year-old with the recent diagnosis of type two diabetes. Those three people might need a different nutrient plan, right? They have different needs. Their body one person might be in a histamine response and great amount of inflammation whereas the other person might have zinc deficiency and calcium deficiency. There’s not one perfect approach like a one diet that fits all but diet isn’t the first thing we should be asking. What you’re sharing is really gut health is the first thing, we should be asking. “Do I have gut health?” Because if I don’t have gut health, it doesn’t matter what I’m eating. My body’s not digesting and absorbing it.

[42:00] Dr. Vincent Pedre: It could be problematic because you could think that you’re being super healthy. Eating lots of salads raw vegetables and if your gut is disordered, you don’t have the right microbiome to break down those very difficult to break down plant cell wall fibers, then you’re not going to feel well. Perhaps in that moment in time, timestamped, you would do better with cooked vegetables, healing the gut microbiome. Healing the production of digestive enzymes then over time then Segway the diet back towards a mix of cooked and raw or maybe just lightly steamed. Even what is the right diet is not just what is the right diet for you as an individual but what is the right diet for you now. You know you almost have to put that out also in the timeline because the right diet changes. I do see general trends. We know that the more plants you eat, in my opinion and that’s what the science had showed its what’s better for you but then there are really interesting studies have been done. Like the Hadza people of Tanzania, the hunter-gatherers. Which is I’m so excited because I’m going to be travelling there to meet them next year.

[43:39] Ashley James: Wow. Cool.

[43:42] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Then there’s about little over a thousand of them but at least a quarter still lived in their more traditional way which is eating tubers, berries, the baobab fruit. They eat the seed, also the meat the pulp of the fruit. It’s very high in fiber. They also hunt. They eat large two medium sized animals. Sometimes bigger. They also eat honey but when I say that, you have to take your western mind out of it. It’s not honey that comes in a jar. They’re actually going and getting the honeycomb and they’re eating the entire thing including larvae inside. Their gut microbiome when they’ve done test, they’ve done PCR testing had a much greater variety than in one study they’ve looked at Italian group of control. You can imagine an Italian diet, pasta and meat dishes and lots of fresh tomatoes and vegetables from the garden.

Their gut microbiome was not as diverse as the Hadza people. So you ask, “Okay. What is the missing element?” The Hadza are certainly not eating the diet that as varied as the Italian group. So why do they have such a diverse microbiome and probably part of it is their contact with nature and living out in the wild and contact with dirt. They’re not living in this hygiene, over clean environment. They’re not washing their hands when they come home from hunting. Maybe they have some blood in their hands before they hug or kiss their wives. That’s something else to look at is the missing element of just being connected with nature. Being out there. That’s part of what builds diversity in our microbiome and creates a healthy gut.

[45:54] Ashley James: I’d be really interested to know that what they incorporate in their – when you go there remember this question, what do they incorporate as an anti-parasitic because when we looked at traditional ancient cultures, they have like in India, Mimosa Pudica seed for example is used commonly to deworm eating pumpkin seeds deworms. That was normal. Like a hundred years ago, it was normal for farmers twice a year to deworm their animals and the farmers would take the same herb themselves. That was normal. So I’m wondering what do they do to deworm themselves. Like, is it honey? What is it that’s just cleaning them out because parasites they happen.

[46:47] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Exactly. Also, the question is are they living in a different state of balance with parasites than people in the west do? Because of a slightly different composition of their gut microbiome. I would keep that in mind. It’s so crazy to me that I will be out on the middle of the bush in Tanzania and get to live and spend a couple of days with them in this various small group. It’s going to be really amazing because I’ve been looking at their microbiome and the studies on that and seeing it’s just a big curiosity. Like, why do they have such a diverse microbiome and why do they have no diabetes, they do not have cancer.

[47:43] Ashley James: What do they die off? When it comes to illness, what do they die off?

[47:47] Dr. Vincent Pedre: When it comes to illness, they die of a lot of times from accidents. Funny enough. There might be some infant mortality but otherwise if they don’t die in the young age or because of an accident, they live into their 60’s, 70’s. Not as long of a life span that would think but still pretty amazing for hunter gatherer.

[48:17] Ashley James: I’d be really curious thought when they die in their 60s or 70’s. What illnesses do they die from? Is it all heart disease? Is it all infection like that? It would be interesting to see the correlation between their lifestyle and then what they die from.

[48:35] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That would be another question for my research when I go.

[48:37] Ashley James: Nice. All right. I want to have you back on the show after that trip because I want to hear all about it. I think that sounds fascinating. That is a true, average and all diet. That’s like if all of us were picked up some reality TV show and threw us on an island, that’s how we have to eat to survive.

[48:57] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Oh my gosh, can you imagine eating like –

[49:00] Ashley James: Larvae and honey?

[49:03] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Can you imagine eating honeycomb? That would be – [laughter].

[49:07] Ashley James: I think my 4-year-old would fight me for it. I think he would be so excited. He has this fascination with insects and I don’t think he would mind eating them at all. There has to be something primal in there.

[49:19] Dr. Vincent Pedre: There’s a lot of nutrition in the honeycomb that helps support the gut microbiome. It’s also interesting how- I’ve looked at their microbiome every time as they go from a rainy season to a more dry season. During those two different seasons, their diet skews in one direction and in the other. I see that there are parts of the microbiome that appear during the season because they’re being fed, let’s say the honey and when their diet skews in another direction that part disappears, seemingly disappears but then it comes back the next season.

[49:56] Ashley James: Yes. Isn’t there like a whole season where all they eat are tubers for a few months and that their microbiome adapts for that?

[50:05] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That is a really big part of, at least my understanding a big part of their diet. Also interestingly, when they wean kids off of breastmilk what they do is create a porridge of the baobab. The baobab is kind of really hard fruit. It’s got a lot of fiber inside. They grind that out and they make a porridge out of it. The kids are getting anywhere between 50 and a hundred grams of fiber a day. Their bellies will be bit extended because that amount of fiber is going to produce a good amount of gas which I think about because in the west, we don’t want to be distended. We don’t want to look fat. For them, it’s like yes, whatever it’s part of. In comparison, the average American gets about 10 maybe maximum 15 grams of fiber in a day just to put it in perspective and the recommended amount of fiber we should be eating is anywhere between 25 and 35 grams of fiber and yet the Hads are eating up to 50 grams of fiber per day.

[51:26] Ashley James: Can we eat too much fiber? Is there any point where it’s like, “Oh, 100 grams of fiber’s dangerous.” I mean, as long as you’re consuming enough water and you feel fine and you’re not hurting, it’s okay to have 100 grams of fiber?

[51:39] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. I have a feeling if you have a 100 grams you would be really bloated and uncomfortable. Yes, the danger is you get really stocked inside, constipated because you’re not drinking enough water with the fiber or maybe you’re not getting enough healthy fats to lubricate things and help move things along. I always think it’s important to be careful to make sure you’re balancing all.

[52:10] Ashley James: Right. I made this chia seed pudding. It’s amazing. It tastes exactly like pumpkin pie and my husband swears he can taste the crust in it too. It kind of something like Willy Wonka, would make where you can it tastes like an entire pumpkin pie with the crust and there’s a ton of chia seeds in it, like a ton. Your gut is getting so lubricated but it tastes just like pumpkin pie and it’s great for breakfast because it’s so filling. Such good fiber in it.

[52:46] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Oh my god, that sounds so good.

[52:46] Ashley James: I will give you the recipe. I’m launching a membership called Learn True Health home kitchen. Where we’re doing cooking videos and teaching people how to cook whole food plant based. For those who don’t want to give up meat entirely, they can just learn to have more vegetables and have more fiber and more whole food in their life but people who want to try to learn whole food plant based and experience it, they can jump in and do everything. That’s one of the recipes that I’m adding to the membership. We’re going to launch it soon. I got so excited because my son really wanted some pumpkin pie and I really wanted to make something healthy for him for breakfast. I was just like, “I’ve got a lot of chia seeds and a lot of pumpkin, let me see what I can do with that.” Yes but I was just thinking, how much fiber is in it. It’s crazy. It’s a crazy amount of fiber but you feel so good afterwards. Obviously, it’s moist and it’s not dehydrating but you definitely want to drink a lot of water if you’re adding chia or flax to your food. I’ve learned that the hard way once. I thought I was safe to just adding some flax meal to my salads and I didn’t drink enough water and I found out pretty quickly that it’s not a smart move.

[54:04] Dr. Vincent Pedre: No and it just can kind of condense things in the gut and not let things move. You definitely want a mix of both soluble and insoluble fibers that’s also important. You think of insoluble fibers a roughage. Kind of like cleans out the inside of the gut. Gets things moving, provides a lot of the fibers that are fermented and the soluble fiber which are things like oats which then allow for control of how nutrients come into the bloodstream so they help slow down the sugars like the sugars that are getting broken down, carbohydrates from entering too quickly and causing an insulin spike. It’s important to make sure you’re getting a balance of both types of fibers. Apples are another great example. Organic apples.

[54:58] Ashley James: Organic apples are my favorite. The outside the peel of an apple is insoluble fiber and then the inside is soluble fiber.

[55:07] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. Basically you’re getting both types of fibers in an apple. I don’t know if your listeners know this but if you’re eating non organic apples they are sprayed with up to several different types of pesticides that have up to 40 something different neuro toxins. If you ever follow the environmental working group, the Clean15 and the Dirty Dozen, you know that apples are very high up on the list of the dirty dozen. Anything that has a thin skin like an apple that is sprayed with pesticide is going to be infused with that pesticide. You cannot wash it off. So you should never and if you can choose that, if you’re going to choose where do you spend your dollars on groceries, buy organic apples. Don’t buy non-organic. You can get them at them farm – you’re in Seattle so you’re like in an apple state and I’m in New York which also is a great apple state. I think it’s either pay a little bit more now or pay later for the consequences thereof.

[56:20] Ashley James: I’ve told the story before on the show but I’ll share with you. I was really sick in my 20’s. I was just eating the standard American diet, I had type two diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic monthly infections for which is was taking antibiotics monthly. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and told by an endocrinologist that I was infertile and I’d never have kids. I’ve spent my 20’s on medications and sick and getting sicker and sicker I ended up actually on medication for heart burn. I mean the whole thing and I remember watching – I was also completely stressed out to the max. I was in an abusive relationship. My mom had died, I was very depressed,

[57:02] Dr. Vincent Pedre: You sound like our talking patient. Like what we’re talking about.

[57:08] Ashley James: Exactly. I was going through the ringer. I found joy in the day-to-day things but I was just going downhill and I was gaining weight even though I was exercising like crazy and I eat like all the other guys in the dojo. I was doing martial arts 6 days a week. I would eat like all of them because they look healthy so I go to subway with them and get like whole wheat. Think that’s like super healthy, “I’m getting whole wheat subway sandwiches thinking, Oh I’m eating healthy.” Of course, then I immediately have heartburn after and then I popped my heart burn pills. This is my 20’s when this happened. I happen to turn on the TV and then there was this show, I guess a Naturopath and they were just some kind of talk show and she was saying, “If you have heartburn, it’s too little stomach acid not too much. Drink some apple cider vinegar and drink some aloe.” I threw away that box of over-the-counter meds, started drinking aloe, and started listening to my body a bit more. And my heartburn went away I’m like, “Whoa.” Then a few years later, it’s 2008 we watched the documentary on Netflix right when I started doing streaming of videos and it was some health documentary like Food Inc. or something. They said, “Shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic.” At this point, I was so sick. I’d wake up every morning with a pounding headache. Feeling as though I drank a bottle of vodka and got hit by a mad truck the night before. I was out of control sick. I felt like a prisoner of my own body. I cried daily because of how much pain and suffering I was in because I felt like such a prisoner of a sick body. We did it. We went to whole foods and we shopped the perimeter of the store and we bought organic and within 30 days my chronic infections went away. I thought the only thing I changed besides, I probably cut out some sugar like accidentally because I wasn’t buying processed food. I’m still eating meat, I’m still eating dairy even. I was eating just fruits, vegetables, meat and I wasn’t even gluten free at the time. I was still eating grains but I was just eating less processed food and cutting out all the pesticides. It just hit me, I’m like, “Pesticides were the reason that I was getting these infections. It was the stressor on my body and in my gut.” When I went organic, that was the biggest shift that happened within 30 days. That’s what had me keep seeing how to heal my body. With food and lifestyle changes and supplements, I healed my type 2 diabetes. My chronic adrenal fatigue went away. I got rid of my polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m now completely free of that. My numbers are amazing. I get regular bloodwork with my Naturopath. We naturally conceived our child who is almost five and he’s so healthy.

[1:00:10] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That is so great.

[01:00:11] Ashley James: So that’s what shifting to organic and then shifting lifestyle looking at stress, taking supplements to fill in those nutrient gaps. That’s why I do what I do know because I know my listeners are suffering and I want them to find the answers that they need so that they don’t have to suffer anymore because it’s possible. That healing is possible. That’s why I love the message that you give and what you teach because you’re showing people that they can be free of the suffering of the heartburn or the bloating, of the constipation or the small intestinal overgrowth. That they could be free of it.

[01:00:55] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I’ve always been, as much as I can be the type of practitioner that walks his talk because I also was subject to multiple rounds of antibiotics when I was a child. As a teenager and I didn’t realize at that time because I was getting 2 or 3 rounds of antibiotics. Every year the doctors, the pediatricians were telling my parents my immune system is weak. I couldn’t gain weight, I was super thin. I ate probably more than 3,000 calories a day but I was eating cereal with milk in the morning and maybe a sandwich at school or pastry. Then there was breaded dinner and maybe there was ice cream after dinner. A lot of times I used to go and get a milkshake on the way home from school. It’s crazy how much sugar and wheat and dairy that I was eating. I can look back and now say that the multiple rounds of antibiotics was probably the instigator of the dysbiosis of the balance of the good and bad bacteria in my gut. Then lead to leaky gut and allowed me to become sensitive to wheat, gluten and dairy. It was over the years figuring that out because by my 20’s I’ve had IBS and I just thought this is just the way my life is going to be. I’m always going to have sensitive stomach, I’m not going to be able to tolerate a lot of things. I had to be careful when I ate out. I never knew what is causing what.

It wasn’t until I discovered and started making changes in the diet but I was always even though when I was in my medical education and not being taught nutrition I always had a gut intuition, pardon the pun, that nutrition was a big part of the picture. I was always trying to hack, it’s perhaps a little bit selfish on my part but I think it guided a lot of what I’ve strived to learn. Then what I do with my patients was I – just back in my early 20’s wanted to hack, “Why do I get sick so often and how can I not get so sick so often?” I was in medical school, experimenting with my diet. Reduced the amount of dairy in my diet and then immediately noticed that I wasn’t getting sick as often. Without anybody teaching me back then, there was not teaching around dairy and it’s inflammatory effects. I just kind of concluded by being an observer in my own body that dairy was problematic for me and I had to be careful about consuming dairy as much as I loved in my 20’s, ice cream.

[01:03:53] Ashley James: Who doesn’t? [Laughter]

[01:03:54] Vincent Pedre: I know. It’s still a weakness. Thankfully now, there’s vegan ice creams and coconut –

[01:04:01] Ashley James: You can get a vitamix and make your own ice cream.

[01:04:04] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Exactly. I’ve made avocado ice cream.

[01:04:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that sounds crazy.

[01:04:09] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. Over the years, there was one point when I was in my residency training in New York. I was going out with my friends and late nights and eating out and I wasn’t feeling that great and I was dragging. I just told all of them, I’m going to disappear for the next month and I’m going to do some self-care and I went to the supermarket. I bought organic, I started coking for myself more often. No more take out and within, I kid you not, in two weeks I felt so different. Just eating food that was more vital. In 4 weeks, I felt great. At that time, I had also been doing yoga and had started meditating. I was meditating 5 days per week and when I went back, and met up with my friends they looked at me and like, “What did you do? You look totally different.” All I did was reduce my stress by meditating and eating right. That was it. I was listening to your story and thinking, you know, I have a very similar story. But even then, I had not completely hacked the gut issues and it wasn’t until I ran into a functional medicine and started learning functional medicine and understand the role of the gut and the gut microbiome and really the complexity of all that. That I was able to heal my gut. Because of that, I had such a big fascination with gut health and patients who came in with gut problems because we’re really not taught in western medicine all the potential root causes of gut problems. We are taught – let me clarify it.

We’re taught from the perspective of western medicine but we’re not really taught the root root causes which could be yeast overgrowth. Which could be dysbiosis, which could be low stomach acid, which could be not enough leaky gut with damage to the brush boarder in the small intestine then affecting your pancreas ability to produce enzyme because it’s not getting the right signals. I got a much more complex understanding of gut health and all the interconnections and how it’s connected to allergies, asthmas, migraine, auto immune disease and that became a fascination for me and working with gut patients was just something that I enjoyed. Of course, when you enjoy something, you want to do more of that. Just accidentally one gut patient would get better, they would refer a friend. The friend would get better. A friend would refer another friend. It wasn’t like I was out there saying, “I want to be a gut expert.” It was more like, “I’m just pursuing my passion. My passion is helping people heal at the root.” It turned out that had to do with even my own plight growing up with gut issues. That was where my book Happy Gut was born from. Was from my own struggles figuring that out and working with patients and seeing them improve and seeing what a dramatic influence you can make in people’s lives by healing their gut health.

[01:07:36] Ashley James: I love it. How long have you been practicing functional medicine?

[01:07:43] Dr. Vincent Pedre: My first conference was in 2006 and soon after that, I started learning and I dove into their advanced practice modules starting in 2008. The institute have not had a whole certification program built out and they came out with that over that time period and then I started doing the advance practice modules. Over 10 years that I’m integrating that into my practice. Obviously, you learn it in theory but then you have to practice it, you gain a lot of experience by dealing with a bunch of different patients and scenarios and then as you become more of a recognized gut expert which I am now. You then get the more difficult cases.

[01:08:38] Ashley James: Nice. Very cool. So my listeners who have really or the difficult cases, I have listeners out there who feel that they’re complex, can they see you? Do you take consultations over Skype? Or could they come see you in person?

[01:08:56] Dr. Vincent Pedre: They could come see me in person. I take very few patients now because as you can imagine, I’ve got a pretty full practice but my plan is to, next year to bring in a functional trained nurse practitioner who can train with me and start to see patients. Because I recognize it’s just funny how you go from not being known to known and then everybody wants to come in and see you and you realize, I just can’t serve everyone. That’s part of the reason why I wrote my book because I realized there are so many people out there who need help that I can’t possibly ever see in my lifetime. Because there’s just – I’m very much into balance and I’m very much into also my own self-care and bringing my best foot forward which means that I don’t work a 12-hour day. I don’t see patient every 15 minutes because I believe in quality over quantity and I think that’s what the people who come see me know that I’m about is I’ll spent significant amount of time with you. To me for any doctor’s practicing functional medicine, it’s a collaborative effort. It’s me and the patient both facing the path into the future together. It not the old paradigm of I’m a fatherly doctor, you come in and I give you this medication and you just take that and you don’t have to do anything else and you’ll be better.

No. I give my patients homework but realizing that it’s impossible for me to see all the people that I would ever want to help in my life and I wanted to have a bigger impact that why I do things like interview with you and give this information for people to hear this and then think maybe they could do things a little bit differently. Or maybe there’s something that they could change that could help them heal or at least start a conversation with their health practitioner with, “What is really going on here? Are we really addressing the root cause?” That’s why I wrote my book because I realized partly honestly I don’t know if you have felt this but even from the early 2000’s, I started getting this feeling inside that I had a book in me that had to be written. I didn’t know what that book was.

If you look at my files in my iPhone, I’ve got so many book ideas that have been written down but it wasn’t until I landed on this idea that was also connected to my own story. That it felt authentic enough for me to put the work in because doing a book is like running a 50-mile mega marathon. It is a toil. It is a labor of love. It is not for the weak hearted. Yes, I mean you could produce a really short book but for me, it was like my manifesto was like me putting all my work everything that I had learned together to teach people how to have healthy gut. Why did I get sidetracked on that?

[01:12:41] Ashley James: Oh, well your book, it’s a marathon and you have more books in you. By the way, you’ll definitely going to write more books but that Happy Gut is you’ve poured your passion into it, your over 10 years’ experience of helping people heal their gut but also your own story, healer heal thyself. You healed yourself and you walk the walk.

[01:13:10] Dr. Vincent Pedre: You’re always a better healer I think when you have to face your own challenges that have made you human. The hardest thing about being a doctor is being put on the pedestal and people think that you’re like this super human. We were talking about super women and supermoms, in some many ways walking the walk of the doctor sometimes being that super human but we are also human. I have been so grateful in my life for all the challenges that I’ve had that have really condensed me into just being a grounded human and understanding things not just from theory, from learning in the book but from having lived it myself. One thing, I don’t know if you ever watched Grey’s Anatomy?

[01:14:04] Ashley James: I do.

[01:14:06] Dr. Vincent Pedre: There was an episode where the chief of surgery I think was speaking with the woman doctor that was also in surgery. It was about being a parent and he said, this was I remember seeing this episode when my son was probably two or three years old and he said, “Being a parent makes you a better doctor.” I totally connected with that because having a child was that first moment of, “Wow. It’s not about me anymore. It’s not just about me anymore. It’s about this new life that has arrived.” It really puts you in a place of service. I looked at for me, my work with patients is almost like a in some ways, I almost feel like it’s almost like the service that a priest does. It alike vocation. Sometimes I think of my patients as my sheep. It really does require a great deal of sacrifice on our part but with that sacrifice and kind of tied back into the important or realizing that at some point, the balance can shift too far and you have to come back and look into the mirror and realize, you also need to take care of myself. Put your oxygen ask on first, then put on everyone else’s oxygen mask. Because what you don’t realize is when you’re not doing that, yes, you might be taking care of everyone, you’re not doing it as well as you could if you are in your best light.

[01:16:09] Ashley James: Right. We absolutely don’t take care of those we love best if we’re neglecting ourselves just like, I mean it’s funny, people will take care of their car more than they take care of themselves. They’ll make sure it gets an oil change. All the foods are topped of. It’s clean.

[01:16:25] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I have patients who will cook an entire dinner for their kids and then just order in for themselves. Or they’ll cook for their dog and then their dogs eats better than they do. Okay, if you’re taking trouble to do that, let’s refocus here. Let’s see how can get care back to self and that was part of the reason that I named the program, when I was trying to come up with an acronym for the program. That would be like the system that I used for healing the gut, I called it Gut C.A.R.E. Care being an acronym for cleanse, activate, restore and enhance. It’s a whole system for healing the gut that I wrote in my book but in the bigger picture it’s also care. Caring for self. I think it’s so important because the commonality I find in patients that come in with gut health issues is a lot of times, they’re really putting themselves last.

[01:17:33] Ashley James: Yes. I love it that you started at the beginning of the interview talking about how the first thing you do to help someone get off a medication and heal the gut to the point where they no longer need that crutch is mindset. I think a lot of people will go, “Pfft, mindset. Whatever, okay.” Really that is everything. We can actually create a placebo effect or a nocebo effect based our belief system. Based on our mindset.

[01:18:00] Dr. Vincent Pedre: This is a crazy fact. Patients who feel more connected and liked their doctor have better results than patients that don’t.

[01:18:12] Ashley James: That’s the nocebo or the placebo effect. If you like your doctor then you think it’s going to work even if you got a sugar pill –

[01:18:22] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Just think of the blue zones around the world and the factors that affect the reason that people lived past a hundred and part of it is a sense of community. Being together and that’s a very important part of I think for humans healing is to feel like they’re in community connected. Whether it’s with family, with friends, for some people it’s church. For other people it’s their CrossFit box. Whatever it is. It’s a sense of having community where you feel you belong. I think that’s a very important human need and something we don’t often talk about in health is that importance of community. If you think about it, each individual is a community. We are the this symbiotic organisms that some people argue couldn’t not exist without the metabolic byproducts produced by the gut microbiome because some scientists say there are not enough genes in the body to encode for everything the body needs in order to function optimally. That you also need the microbiome and the genetic pool of the microbiome which is hundred times greater than our own genetic pool to create metabolic byproducts that regulate and help support the body.

That to me is super fascinating because if you only thought that your gut microbiome is one of the most complex eco systems on the planet, think of it that way. How would you treat that? Now that you know that within you, you have this treasure. This really great treasure that is evolved over centuries with us passed on from human to human through our environment. Through our interaction with nature that helps support health or it can be a detriment to health. Depending on circumstances like antibiotics. Over use of antibiotics. How do you treat your body? What would you eat if you know you have this really important internal garden. I think that there is a lot of mindlessness that happens with people. A lot of unintentional eating, they’re not really thinking about how they feel and how things affect them. I think that’s really important.

[01:21:19] Ashley James: I was just grabbing a few studies that are printed out on my paper on my desk that’s why I was making some noise because what you said goes exactly with, I love the serendipity of this. I’m holding in my hand some studies on the gut biome and that they’re seeing that the signaling in parasitic nematodes that there’s a psychochemical communication between host and parasite and the indigenous molecular transduction pathways governing the warm development and survival. That was one. The other one was parasites nutrition and immune response in the biology of metabolic tissues but in these, they talk about not only are they talking about negative pathogens, like negative stuff in your gut but basically the gut biome which could have parasites. Not all parasites are worms, right? But parasites are good bacteria, bad bacteria. Anything living in the gut is sending their seeing that they’re sending signals. There’s these studies now that show that they can see that their psycho chemicals being created by whatever it is in your gut. Let’s say you want fast food every day, that’s the gut biome you created. You created the Homer Simpson of gut biomes. That is signaling to you. The gut biome is actually telling you to feed it more fast food because that’s what feeds it.

[01:22:57] Dr. Vincent Pedre: And the most blatant example of that that I see in practice is when someone has yeast overgrowth or candida. They have an irrational craving for sugar or for refined carbohydrates. It could be sugar or it could just comfort foods like potatoes, pasta, rice. Yes, that’s another really blatant example of where it’s like who’s in control. Is your brain in control or is your microbiome in the gut in control?

[01:23:35] Ashley James: Yes. Who’s craving? Who’s having the cravings? Right. A dear friend of mine is going through a parasite cleanse right now because she was having very strange symptoms around the full moon for about 4 months now and I kept saying, “Dude this is parasites. You’ve got to look at this.” She was having heart palpitations, mood swings and just feeing totally off but it was only during the full moon. Which of course someone might think that’s hormones. But she was like, it was pretty consistent around the full moon so she started a parasite cleanse and she can tell a difference and that is just very interesting that the parasites and even gut dysbiosis can cause crazy symptoms in the body but it an also tell us what to eat to feed it. That’s what I noticed when I started eating whole foods plant based. I didn’t like love vegetable but I admit I hate them and now, when I see kale I actually have a pavlovian’s response. I actually stare salivating. I started getting a little excited. Just like someone might get exited if they see Krispy Kreme donuts which I will have like a revulsion towards now. Not even interested but man if you made me a kale salad, I’m like I’m getting a little happy actually salad my mouth is getting watery just thinking about it. Just because the gut biome I created over the last few years is like super happy with eating that way. I get almost a high off of eating these leafy greens.

[01:25:14] Dr. Vincent Pedre: For me, because I travel a lot and sometimes to foreign countries, when you’re missing the amount of greens that I’m used to eating on a regular basis, you started to crave it. It’s almost like you’re – that’s yet another level of that intuitive awareness where you sense a craving but then you actually honor it. You realize, oh it’s because my body needs this.

[01:25:46] Ashley James: Now we’ve got to catch ourselves now because if we’re having that craving for processed sugar of –

[01:25:51] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That’s a whole different – I was going to say actually I’m glad that you come back to that because I was going to say that, what I’ve seen with patients and it was amazing because you can take a person who feels like they cannot live without sugar and if you can put them on a sugar cleanse. You take all processed sugars out of the diet and keep them on that. The first day or two they’re going to feel horrible. They’re going to feel like they’re not going to make it through the day. By day 3, they’re a little bit better. By day 4, they’re really not needing sugar and by the end of 7 days, they’re off of sugar.

[01:26:34] Ashley James: It’s like getting on heroine.

[01:26:36] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. We know sugar has the same effect on the brain as cocaine. It affects the dopamine pathway which is the reward pathway in the brain that makes you feel good when you do something. So, of course. Everyone wants sugar. The interesting thing. I know you don’t eat processed sugar, eat a lot of sugar. I’m the same. I find that I’m also dogmatic but I also allow for fussy boarders because I think that in my own eating because I think if we just are strict all the time, that can get a little too much and that becomes a stressor. You know, I might be travelling and someone offers a dessert but they didn’t tell you if there’s too much sugar. I actually feel horrible. I can’t feel it immediately. My heart rates goes up as soon as I eat it. I have the reverse effect like I’ll have sugar and I’ll realize, you know what, this is not worth it for me. You heard me unwrapping this earlier was my dark chocolate form Peru.

[01:27:45] Ashley James: Right. I was like, “Is that a candy wrapper in the background? What was going on?” And you’re like, “Well, let me tell you about my 85% Peruvian dark chocolate.”

[01:27:57] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes and that is my go to because it’s low in sugar. It’s not going to bump my blood sugar. It’s not going to give me sugar cravings and it satisfies a little element of sweetness. There’s we were talking about dark chocolate with stevia. You know, sometimes I need that little bit of sweet but I also know if I have something too sweet it’s going to actually feel pretty horrible for me because once you get your body accustomed to being cleaner it actually tells you when you don’t, when you step outside of that.

[01:28:33] Ashley James: Yes. Just yesterday we are filming for the Learn True Health home kitchen and we made brownies. Whole food brownies. And it’s sweetened with yams, with sweet potatoes and there’s raw organic cacao powder but when you bake them your whole house smells like brownies. Now they’re not as sweet as store bought brownies because obviously, they’re whole foods but they tastes really good and my son loves them. He thinks they’re the best thing in the world. If you can get a 4-year-old to eat something that’s healthy and love it, oh man, you’re hitting a home run. He likes that. That’s his new go to food. Between that and the chia seed pumpkin pie pudding.

[01:29:25] Dr. Vincent Pedre: What is the base for the brownie?

[01:25:26] Ashley James: It is yams. I call them sweet potatoes but they’re orange yams. They’re organic. The big bag of them from Costco is really cheap right now and we make them in the instant pot and then we blend them with cacao and vanilla. You can put in some maple syrup if you want. Or stevia if you want. If you need more sweet because sometimes you need more sweet if you’re first of all giving it to people who are neuro adapted to eating no sugar. Just help them transition or if sometimes yams, sometimes they’re really sweet or sometimes they aren’t so you just got to play around basically taste the batter. We just blended it and then we –

[01:30:15] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Japanese yams.

[01:30:16] Ashley James: Yes. Oh my gosh, seriously. Yes, you can play around with the different kinds of sweet potatoes and yam because some of them are sweeter than the others. Then you bake it for an hour and that creates that brownie crust as wonderful. Very moist and it really does feel like there’s flour. There’s no flour in it.

[01:30:37] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That sounds like a dream. Last year I tried and failed. This was my first try to make black bean brownies for the holidays. Needless to say, my family doesn’t share the same zest for healthy renditions of things as I do and I thought they were actually pretty good but they did not.

[01:31:02] Ashley James: I love black bean brownies but one thing I’d say is, do one can of black beans with between 1 and 2 cups of yams. That really balances it out.

[01:31:16] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. To keep it a little more sustenance.

[01:31:19] Ashley James: Yes and you can add some vanilla powder in there. There’s a few things you can add in there like some cinnamon. You can play around it and then lots of the cacao powder which has caffeine in it so don’t eat it late at night. I learned that the hard way. I’m like, “Why am I so awake right now?”

[01:31:43] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes, I have to be careful because usually my desire for dark chocolate is right after dinner. By the way the benefits of dark chocolate partly and due to the microbiome. They’re processing of the I believe it’s an endemite in the dark chocolate. You need the microbiome to convert the chemical in there to a version that is antioxidant for the body. It’s kind of a little fascinating fact.

[01:32:16] Ashley James: That is so fascinating. It’s amazing the microbiome is needed to convert so much of what our body needs. It really is that garden in our body. We have the most complex garden inside us. It’s somewhere between I heard between 4 and 6 pounds of bacteria living inside us. I have so many more questions for you. We have to have you back on the show. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s been so much fun.

[01:32:43] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I know. How did this fly? How did this go by?

[01:32:44] Ashley James: I know. It’s just amazing.

[01:32:45] Dr. Vincent Pedre: You’ve got to have me back after I get back from Africa.

[01:32:48] Ashley James: Please. Yes.

[01:32:50] Dr. Vincent Pedre: The Hadzas, that’s going to be so wild.

[01:32:52] Ashley James: I’m so excited. When are you going next year?

[01:32:55] Dr. Vincent Pedre: February.

[01:32:56] Ashley James: Awesome. Okay. I need to get you on the calendar when you get back and after you’ve recovered from the wonderful trip. While you’re still on the glow of how amazing it was I have to get you back on the show. I think I’d be wonderful. I’m definitely going to make sure that links to everything that Dr. Vincent Pedre does is in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. Dr. Vincent’s book, Happy Gut making sure the link is there as well. We should all get it for Christmas and give it to each other. What a great Christmas gift. Let’s all give each other the gift of a healthy gut.

[01:33:28] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That sounds like a great idea. [Laughter]

[01:33:32] Ashley James: Awesome. Of course, your website is happygutlife.com. You also have PedreMD.com. That’s P-E-D-R-E-M-D.com

[01:33:45] Dr. Vincent Pedre: That was my practice website.

[01:33:46] Ashley James: Got it. You know I see you hiring five nurse practitioners and maybe like 12 certified health coaches. You should just hire a bunch at once and train this whole team, it’ll save you time. Instead of training one person at a time you should just hire a whole team.

[01:34:03] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. Well guess what, you’re ahead of me but I have already shot the video for and I’m going to be rolling out probably quarter two of 2020, a health coach certification in Happy Gut.

[01:34:22] Ashley James: Awesome. Well you know what, I’ve got a ton of health coaches as listeners especially a lot of IIN graduates. I’m an IIN graduate as well. I know a lot of my listeners who’d be really interested because we have a lot of health coaches and a lot of holistic health professionals that are listeners that would love to take your course. When you come back and tell us about your trip, you’ll also going to tell us about your Happy Gut health coaching training.

[01:34:50] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. Can I briefly end with a funny story?

[01:34:54] Ashley James: Yes, please do.

[01:34:56] Dr. Vincent Pedre: Yes. I was just with my family in Washington DC for Thanksgiving. It’s my sister with my niece and nephews and obviously, the kids, a lot of their high school friends get back there. My niece is 25 years old. So she was with a friend of hers and she was raving about this book and how it changed her life and how she had IBS and now she’s followed the diet plan and it took away all her gut issues. They’re out at a bar and she pulls our my book, and it’s like, it has notes and bent pages and she’s got marking everywhere and she says, “I never travel without this book.” She didn’t know that my niece was related to me and my niece tells her, “You know, that’s my uncle?” Because my sister she has a different last name and so she says, “You know, my uncle’s in town if you want to meet him.” and she’s like, “Oh no, I don’t think I could handle it I think I would faint or something.” I thought, it’s so funny, I told her, “Yes, if she wants to meet me. Yes, I’m in town.” I thought, that why I did this. To help people that I probably maybe would never have the opportunity to meet but to be able to change their lives in that way. That’s why I did what I did. That’s why I continue to do things like these, be on podcasts and interviews. I just want to help as many people as possible.

[01:36:45] Ashley James: I love it. That’s my mission too. We’re right in alignment. We have a really active Facebook group, the listeners. The Learn True Health Facebook group. I know that my listeners after they get your book and they start reading it and loving it and writing notes in it and everything. They’ll start talking about it in the Facebook group and we’ll start having some wonderful discussion about it. I can’t wait to have you back on the show. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I love this topic. Can’t wait to continue exploring happy gut and gut health and how to balance ourselves naturally in our next interviews. I can’t wait to hear all about your trip. Have a very safe and very enlightening trip. I can’t wait to connect with you when you come back.

[01:37:31] Dr. Vincent Pedre: I look forward to it. Thank you.

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? And how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity. Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business and support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program. And it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition. But from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information.

Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome program.

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Happy Gut Life

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396 Resolving the Compound Effect of Poor Lymphatic Flow, Heavy Metals, EMF, and High Acidity with Kellyann Andrews, Founder of Platinum Energy Systems 0

Dec 10, 2019

Get the CBD Holiday Special for Learn True Health listeners!

Go to MedTerraCBD.com and use the coupon code lthholiday

to get the extra bottle added to your order of $50 or more.

Listen to my interview with the founder of MedTerra CBD:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/cbd

Kellyann's website:

https://www.platinumenergysystems.ca

15% off LTH discount on PES

Music:

Finally by Loxbeats https://soundcloud.com/loxbeats Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 Free Download: http://bit.ly/FinallyLoxbeats Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/fGquX0Te1Yo

"Uniq - Japan" is under a Royalty Free license. Photo of the license: http://bit.ly/2sTETUQ Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: https://youtu.be/MAiHpRUbc0k

EMF And Heavy Metal Detox

https://www.learntruehealth.com/emf-heavy-metal-detox

Highlights:

Medterra CBD, medterracbd.com
Platinum Energy Systems, platinumenergysystems.ca
5G, heavy metals, and WiFi, and EMF exposure
Exposure to EMF, heavy metals, high acidity is clogging up the lymph system
Three primary metal toxicity: lead, mercury, and aluminum
Edema from heavy metals
Cells, organs, and tissues, thoughts, and emotions have a specific frequency
Manmade electromagnetic frequency
Create a healing environment inside and outside your body
Set the tone within your being to vibrate at this higher frequency
Take mastery over your emotions and your thoughts because we are all exposed to all this content every day
Health is putting the right stuff in and getting the wrong stuff out.
Illness is putting the wrong stuff in and not getting the wrong stuff out

In today’s episode, Kellyann Andrews and I will discuss and share about what EMF does to our body and how we’re exposed to it. We will also tackle heavy metal toxicity and how we can get rid of it to promote a healing environment outside and inside our body.

[00:00:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker. And welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast.

I’m excited for you to hear today’s interview with Kellyann Andrews. She’s back on the show with us. She’s been here for a few episodes teaching about heavy metal detoxification, and how to alkalize the body, and how to test our pH. She’s shared so much wonderful advice in past episodes. So we’re continuing our great conversation with her about detoxification and promotion of optimal health.

To promote your optimal health, I have wonderful news. I just heard from my favorite CBD company, Medterra CBD, that’s medterracbd.com. I interviewed the founder a while back. You can find that episode by going to learntruehealth.com and search CBD to find my interview with the founder of Medterra CBD. He shares how they source their hemp to make sure that it’s organic. And the different processes it goes through to extract the CBD in the healthiest way possible. Now, it is not a whole hemp plant extract. Meaning, you will pass a drug test if you take it because there is no THC in it. It is pure CBD.

I’ve used a lot of different companies trying out different types of CBD from cannabis plants and from hemp plants. I really like their CBD. I don’t suffer, fortunately, with chronic pain but I do. notice that for me it really calms me down. Sometimes I get really wound up after a great interview and I need to wind down a little bit. It really calms me down. And I could see their CBD being a fantastic replacement for alcohol. If you’re the type of person that wants to come home and have a glass of wine at night, I can see this being absolutely very healthy replacement. Because as we know, alcohol is a poison. It’s a toxin for the liver. And over time it does do liver damage. It also drains our resources and drains our minerals in our body. Whereas, CBD is so healthy for the nervous system. And that’s something that we’ve discussed in our episodes in our CBD interviews. So you could go to learntruehealth.com, type in CBD, learn more about CBD.

But if you’re interested in it for pain management, for sleep, or for stress reduction, then check it out. Go to medterracbd.com and use the promo code they gave us just for December. It ends December 31st. When you purchase $50 or more, they’re going to throw in a free 250 milligram tincture. So you get a free bottle which is so cool because you can throw that in your purse, or in your car, or you can gift it to a friend. So for every purchase, you’re going to receive an additional bottle by using a coupon code LTHHoliday. Our normal coupon code is LTH. And that gives you the listener discount. And then right now we’re getting this additional promotion which is LTHHoliday, all one word. So go to medterracbd.com and put in the coupon code LTHHoliday. Check it out.

If you want to just to try and see what’s the hype, what’s CBD all about it. It gives me the same amount of relief that, like, a glass of wine would. But it doesn’t create a buzz in your head. It doesn’t make you stoned in any way. It doesn’t make you feel high in any way. It just is wonderfully calming for the nervous system. And a lot of people have reported that it’s really helped them with their pain, and also with their anxiety, and also with their sleep, which is excellent. Just a wonderful news.

Than you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing the Learn True Health Podcast with those you love so that we can help as many people as possible. If you want to join the email list, go to learntruehealth.com, wait for the pop up. It happens after about five seconds. Put in your email. I promise not to spam you. I just send a few emails a month. And also join the Facebook Group. It’s an active wonderful community. We’re all helping each other answering each other’s health questions. If you just want a tribe of really great and positive people that love helping each other, then you absolutely will love the Learn True Health Facebook Group. So you can just search Learn True Health in Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group and you will be able to join us. I can’t wait to see you there. Awesome.

So remember, medterracbd.com, using the coupon code LTHHoliday. Get your free bottle. And let me know what you think. You can chat about it with all the other listeners in the Facebook Group. Or you can email me, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 396.

I’m very happy to have back on the show with us Kellyann Andrews. This is your fifth time being here, Kellyann. You were in Episode 292, 293, 329, and 330. Kellyann is the co-founder of Platinum Energy Systems. And their website is platinumenergysystems.ca. I love your – we call the PES for short, right? I love the PES. Many listeners have – I think, like, over 60 or something listeners have purchased a PES and have been sharing with their friends and family. I’ve shared it with many of my friends with outstanding results, really interesting results.

I originally – and please, listeners, go back and check out the first episode, 292, because I share my serendipitous experience of how Kellyann and I met shortly after I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt. And I was on a mission to figure out how to detox my body of heavy metals. Because I realized that my liver – my chronic liver inflammation one of the problems was heavy metal toxicity. And I was looking at all the healthy things I could do to remove heavy metals in the safest way possible. And Dr. Klinghardt says in our interview, that this ionic foot bath is a thing he highly recommends. And I thought, “Man, I really want to get one of those.” And then that’s when I met Kellyann. And it was just, like, perfect timing. And it turned out that, Kellyann, your system is the same one that Dr. Klinghardt uses in his clinics to help very ill patients regain their health through removing these heavy metals in a safe way.

So I started using the PES. It has to be over a year that I’ve been using it now. I should go back and look at the exact date I started using it. And I noticed right away really positive results for myself. My liver inflammation went away. I no longer taste heavy metals in my mouth. I was having issues, my immune system was reacting to the heavy metals as well. And I’m not having those issues anymore. So it is a shotgun approach because I also use the Sunlight and Sauna, and I soak in magnesium, and I eat chlorella, and I take supplements and I exercise, and I juice, and I eat eight cups of vegetables a day. You know, I do all kinds of things for my health. So I’m not saying it’s just one thing but I did notice that what really helped is when I added the PES system to my life, I got great results.

So this episode though is not strictly about the PES system. I’m just in prefacing the wonderful guest we have on today. I wanted to share that I love the work that you do, Kellyann. I love the PES. And I know that my listeners who also have one would agree. As I’ve heard from many of them that it makes a big difference. But today you’re here to talk about something that I think instills a lot of fear in people. And there’s a lot of fear around 5G, heavy metals, and WiFi, and EMF exposure. Especially when we start to look into it and realize that there is a really big problem.

And that’s something that Dr. Klinghardt talked about in our interview. He talked about how he’s able to reverse autism. And he does it regularly. And one thing he says is the first thing he does with autistic children is he gets them away from WiFi, because the WiFi vibrates at a certain frequency that vibrates the heavy metals in their brain. And it’s like putting their brain in a microwave. And it, like, short circuits the brain. And when he removes autistic children from WiFi – 100 percent removes them out of WiFi, there’s a difference in their behavior. And then he gets them on a gentle heavy metal detox. And that’s his next step. Including the PES.

Just recently, I had a friend come over who has a son who has developmental delays. And it’s very difficult to understand what he’s saying. He’s four years old. And when he speaks,

you really want to understand him because he has such enthusiasm. But really, I rarely understand a word he says. And we have video footage. His mom filmed it. After one session in the PES, he spoke clearly. And the mom was beside herself. She had never heard him speak so clearly. He was able to communicate. And it was just amazing. That was after his first session. So I’ve seen wonderful things happen when we help the body to pull heavy metals out and detox.

Now, Kellyann, I know that you want to make sure that we start today’s interview by setting a tone. Not a fear based tone. But a tone of hope and bringing in actionable steps and showing the listeners the things that we can do in our daily life to support our body’s ability to heal itself and to protect our body. So I want to make sure that you get a chance to set this tone. I know that you don’t want to be fear based and you want to make sure the listeners feel that they can do something. That they’re in the driver’s seat of their health.

[00:11:04] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. Exactly. You know, I’ve watched as we all have and listened to so many podcasts especially around health issues. And there’s a lot of them that just really portray almost a doomsday kind of mentality and mindset. By the end of it, it’s sort of like watching a horror show. You just don’t feel good. That’s where I love being with you because you just set such a different tone. And really focus on the solution orientation and what people can do to decrease the fear. Because the fear has everything to do with hyper acidifying your body causing a sympathetic nervous system overdrive response to fight and flight. A trapped feeling you’re in the box and there’s no doors, all that kind of thing. And I think there’s just a huge amount of that going on in the world today. And people are just stressed beyond their capacity. And people are having meltdowns on not only physical levels which we’re seeing if anybody ever has to go to emergency. I mean, the poor people who work in the emergency rooms now, they need to get treatment almost because they are so overwhelmed by all that’s coming at them. But it’s not just on that level. It’s on the emotional and the mental level as well.

So in this podcast I want to give your listeners the insights of what I have. I was the field biologist at age five, six collecting the tadpole eggs to watch them change to tadpoles and then the frogs. So I’ve always had a watcher kind of interest and curiosity and fascination. And so during the journey of my own detoxification of heavy metals and other toxic content, then expanding that into other practitioners and their patients and then family members, and just sort of the ripple effect outward. And then working with medical clinics all over North America. I began to see a pattern occurring in what was happening, like the Platinum Energy System seem to somehow be hitting a reset button for people. And that in itself fascinated me. But what occurred as we went through this journey of watching people’s recovery was the pattern that started to emerged, what I’ve watched when they had their sessions.

Initially, they released a lot of lymphatic clog up. So this fatty substance, sometimes it almost looked like molten lava being released on the surface of the water would come out. And until that content came out, the heavy metals didn’t. But when that content came out, like in the previous podcast I told about a woman who came to us in a total state of dimension. Didn’t know where she was. And I don’t know who she was. But she released like an inch or two of goop into the base and that looked like chicken soup stuck in the fridge overnight. But once that content came out, boom, out came some other content. In which then we began to realize that all of these patients were suffering from some version of what the Chinese called stagnation, where there was a lack of flow of energy. And that the various circulatory systems in the body were clogging up. Whether it was a systemic entire broad view of the arterial system or whether it was a localized issue of sinus congestion. So wherever the congestion was, then that’s where the issue was primarily showing up. But I always use the analogy of an aquarium. And if it’s in one corner of the aquarium, it’s through the whole aquarium. So then what we began to see was just like if you have a lack of exercise, the blood and the length don’t flow. And that is so vital. But behind the stagnation was a high level of pH. And so the things that we saw in the pattern of the clients history was that they all came to us usually with mold, microbe, and parasite issues, infections. But behind that was heavy metals. And behind that was an exposure to EMF. And that combination along with high acidity was clogging up the lymph system.

In the podcast we talked about previously the issue with copper and nickel. So the listeners can just go back there and begin to see how those are complicating human physiology. But in our testing, what we did was we were fascinated to see what was being released and what was the content. So when we did the water analysis, we ran the system with no feet and then we ran with four different patients. So we compared the control with no feet in the water as opposed to patients. And so for example, in terms of lead, one of the things that we’re seeing is just the majority of people are coming to us with lead, mercury, and aluminum toxicity are the three primary ones. So in the control, what we saw was lead was 1.7. But the last patient who was a commercial artist, she had 30 units of lead released in one session. So then we looked at the blood. So we had a 50 year old male come to us who had the flu. And his pH was 6 at the beginning. But at the end, it was 7.5. And he released a lot of heavy metals. But you can see in the photographs of the blood that he had total stagnation in his blood. His blood cells were all stacked together. But yet after the session, they opened up and started to move and you could actually see the difference in the red blood cells.

[00:17:31] Ashley James: You mean live blood cell analysis. Just for people who don’t know what it means in the photos of his blood. And I’ve had live blood cell analysis done back in ’99. It was fascinating. And I wish it was more readily used because I think it would be so convincing to go to the doctor’s office. They take a prick of your blood and they put it under a microscope and they project it onto a computer. And you can see right there, your red blood cells and the health of your red blood cells. You see so much just by looking. When red blood cells are stuck together, they get clumped stuck together like a Congo line. And you can see the way that they’re stuck together, they’re not functioning correctly. They’re not able to fully release oxygen and grab on to what they need to grab on to take stuff away from the cells. They’re not able to really bring the nutrients to the cell. The blood isn’t able to work correctly. So you can see it’s like sludge. You can see big fat globule. You can see Candida floating around. You can see how the white blood cells are responding.

And it’s interesting, if you eat a cheeseburger and an hour later go and get your blood cell analysis done, you can see your blood turns to sludge and there’s big globs of fat floating around in your blood. And then if you do stuff like this kind of frequency work, I’ve seen live blood cell analysis done after being on a Beemer mat, where they use specific frequencies or a PES system using the PES detox system. That the blood looks and acts differently just minutes after, like before and after the sessions. And it lasts. It’s a lasting effect that lasts all day. But you see that the red blood cells are no longer clump together. That the cells are more viscous. Everything is moving and able to function correctly.

[00:19:43] Kellyann Andrews: And you know what makes that difference, Ashley? Electricity. So what happens with all diseases – and this is why the photographs are so fabulous – because it showed what the Chinese called that stagnation, which is what you’re just talking about. The blood cells all stuck together. So the reason they were stuck together is because they had no electricity. And so once the heavy metals were removed, now the blood completely opened up and moved. It was just so beautiful. I mean, another artist looked at and she said, “I don’t know anything about blood.” But she said this top picture, which was a picture of them all stuck together, like as you said, salmon roe or salmon eggs, she said, “That’s a picture of chaos.” And then she saw the bottom picture after the session and after a series of sessions, she said, “My God, that’s the picture of harmony.” And that’s why I want to bring this this topic in because I’m going to show you why that is occurring in terms of heavy metals and EMF.

[00:20:49] Ashley James: Now, to clear up a confusion. EMF is electromagnetic frequency. And you’re saying that the energy from a PES, for example, it’s a positive – it’s a healing frequency. But that the EMF we get from being around electronics is a harmful frequency.

[00:21:09] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. And I’m going to go into full detail about that just a little later on. But just to mention the last one – because this was really significant – was we then tested urine. A medical clinic that we were working with had two patients that tested the urine. And neither of these patients had any intervention, which is really interesting before because that’s an unusual case. But the first male had lead at 73 – sorry – at 23. And after six sessions had a 50 percent reduction. But lead on the second male was at 79, which was an astronomical score. And after ten sessions, released 50 percent. But what we watched was how the pH change in all of those cases with all those patients.

Now, what’s interesting about lead – I don’t know if you realize this – but I was quite shocked when I checked into it. Lead pipes – at least in Canada – were not outlawed until 1975. Like, that is so close to where we live now. I mean, you know, it’s not that many years ago. But no lead soldering in the pipes wasn’t outlawed until 86.

[00:22:34] Ashley James: So many of us could be living in homes with lead pipes or lead soldering.

[00:22:38] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. And the person that released the 30 units of lead into the base and in one session, she was a commercial artist and did stained glass. What do you use to hold the glass together? Lead soldering. And so then you could see it. So now we had another patient, it was sent to us from clinic. Now, she was in her 50s and she had Lyme. And she had really severe pain in her face. And she said the pain in her face was almost at a constant five or six but it had spikes up to ten. And she felt very nauseated and her pH was six. And she had had a lot of dental fillings and a lot of dental work done. And when they tested her, she had high levels of mercury, lead, and aluminum. But she said – and we see this often with heavy metals – because you see heavy metals in the body, because they are heavy. Of course, gravity takes them down to the feet. She said when she walked on her feet, she felt like she was walking on glass. And her whole body was tight. And her description of her own body was that she felt like she was constipated through her whole body. And her ankles were swollen with edema. Well, of course, heavy metals when they joined together make a perfect log jam Beaver Dam. And so then they totally create the flow of blood through the body to be logged jammed. And then of course, it just builds up and becomes edema. But she said that her brain felt like a veil was in front of her all the time. And she had very poor level of memory at the time. They discovered that she lived in a house with mold and she actually had to leave the house and move and leave all her possessions behind. We have many patients that have that, where they can’t even take anything out of their house because it’s all contaminated. But here’s the key, is that she grew up on a farm with well water. And that iron content was so immense that she couldn’t wear white because it would stain all her white clothes orange.

So that’s where her original contact was. But after she had a session and a series, she released those heavy metals. And she said that her water smells like iron. And her feet weren’t sore anymore and they’re lighter. And she could feel the difference in her feet that she didn’t have that stagnation occurring anymore. And I mean, her energy levels sore. But the greatest thing was to listen to her before and after. And that’s what I just absolutely love is all these people who are liberated. I mean, she sounded so joyful and perky. She sounded like a chirping Robin.

Now, when you talked about Dr. Klinghardt before, he is very keenly focused, of course, as you say, on the electromagnetic sensitivities of people. And he ends up with people that are so extreme in the sensitivity that a lot of these people have a hard time detoxifying because they want to overwhelm so easily. But there is a huge correlation with electromagnetic frequencies affecting them with those high metals in their body. And they all seem to have -all the ones that come to us from Dr. Klinghardt’s clinics is they all have that mold exposure and the heavy metals. There’s a huge correlation there. And so the recovery started to occur when the heavy metals were released. And so we just sort of watched this pattern of stagnation and hyperacidity disappear once these heavy metals came out of the body. And they’re so affecting the central nervous system of the human body.

I mean, the artists who had 30 y units of lead released in the session, she came in walking on a cane. Her mobility, I mean, she was just like a stiff robot when she came in. But I had to run out to the car to give her cane afterwards because she forgot. She forgot her cane. That was so funny.

But I want to give you an example of a city – a small town, actually, that’s in the United States that will not be named. But in this city – and we won’t name the company either. But there’s a huge chemical company in this town. And this chemical company, as we know, is just the source of a lot of not only bad chemistry, but heavy metals. And also of course, then a lot of these companies are having to use sophisticated technologies. And so they’re a big emitter of electromagnetic frequencies. So in this town, they are the main employer in this town. And everybody in the town is either connected with it by being employed by them or family members employed or somehow there’s a connection back to them. But the whole entire town is sick. So this clinic came to us with the, focus on detoxifying their people in the town. And so people started coming in for sessions to get detox with Platinum Energy. And the patients all started having different recoveries in all different systems of the body. And so that was sort of the fascination.

But if you go back to the concept of the heavy metals, the hyper acidity, and the stagnation, their symptoms are just showing up where the sites of stagnation are. So for example, one woman who had a thyroid issue. Sso the glands and the organs of the bodies get clogged up with this content. And then, of course, it can’t function properly. So once you started to detox and the heavy metals came out, her scores on her thyroid improved. Her brain, she said, felt like it was working better. She feels better in general and looks better. But what was interesting was that the men and women that are coming in, they’re now thinking clear. They’re not as cloudy or foggy. They’re feeling lighter. And their feet are feeling lighter. And they’re very, very relaxed. Now, I’m going to tie this all in with the science later as to why these people are experiencing these very specific symptoms to begin with and then why the releases are related.

And so the clinic told me that they’re all leaving feeling revitalized and things like joints aren’t hurting. The joint pain is diminishing and they’re no longer got restless legs syndrome. I mean, how many people do you hear about restless leg syndrome? And that’s hugely related to stagnation, heavy metals clogging up the arterial system in the legs. And neuropathy, we talked about that already. So here’s an example, people need to realize that, for example, we had a husband come to us who was a welder. So of course, a welder is dealing with metals all day, right? Well, his wife when their blood tests were taken – I mean, when their urine challenge tests were done – now, that’s a really good point by the way. People will go and have their blood tested for heavy metals. Now, it will show up an acute exposure in the blood. Like, if they just had something happened and one of these mining disasters where the wall breaks and all the content comes down into the city or into the water or whatever. So that’s an acute exposure. But what happens when the people get it chronically is that they got to test the urine. And so when you test the urine – both husband and wife were tested – she had as much heavy metals as he had because she washed his uniforms in the family laundry.

[00:31:24] Ashley James: So how did you figure that one out?

[00:31:27] Kellyann Andrews: Well, because of the fact – I’ve got this investigator mind. And so I was like, the fact that she had as much as him and she didn’t do the welding and yet he did, there was some form of pass it forward, which wasn’t a good story. And so then I was like – I just asked her, “Are you washing this uniforms?” And she said yeah. And so then it was being put in with all the clothes and it was just contaminating the next person.

[00:32:00] Ashley James: And they both were very high?

[00:32:01] Kellyann Andrews: They were very high in the metals that he was working with – in the exact metals he was working with. And so we see this a lot in industry where people are coming to us. I remember one person who was working in a factory in Calgary and it was pop cans, so aluminum. She was so full of aluminum. She was like off the chart. And she was totally debilitated. I mean, absolutely debilitated. But as she started to unravel the extreme levels of heavy metals, her health started to come – rebound.

So we had a stockbroker who came to us. Now, you think – I always ask people right up front what is their industry so that I can start to see where the toxicology issues are in their lives. So this man was a stockbroker. So boom, immediately up comes, “Okay. Lots of exposure to electrical.” I mean, I don’t know if you ever been on a stock broker room. But they’ve got the band thing go on across the ceiling that’s telling what all the numbers are. They’re all in this small room with, God knows, how many computers going off at the same time, phone’s going off, everybody’s on a cell phone walking around. It’s just got to be an electrical nightmare in those kind of rooms. So what happened was eight years before he came to us, he had a complete nervous system breakdown. And when they analyzed his metal levels, he had high mercury because we’ve been having a lot of dental work done plus he had a lot of lead. What had happened was that he had the experience of really strong current running through his entire body. But he said it created a violent sensation. And his heart was beating completely out of rhythm. And when he tested his pH and the before session it was six. And I had him test his urine as well and his urine was 5.5 and like norm. The blood should be 7.35 to 7.45. So we’re seeing a huge correlation with these people with low level levels of alkalinity but high levels of acidity. So he has a series of sessions. Now, he feels lighter, he’s more flexible. He released – what I always jokingly say which isn’t so great really – but it’s the mother lode of heavy metals.

But after this oily content came out, so he was all clogged up. So again, stagnation. So the lymph system gets all clogged up.

Now, a lot of people are doing diets in which they’re doing a lot of animal protein and they’re also doing high fats. Well, it amazes me in our modern times that we don’t learn from our history. But the Pritikin diet, I mean, Pritikin himself didn’t last on it. But it clogs them up. And so they get clogged up in the lymphatic system. And we see this hugely especially with the – you know, we need protein. Granted. I agree absolutely really need protein way more than we’re eating all these carbs. But too much protein especially from an animal source and too much oil is completely logged jamming the lymphatic system. So that’s where with his heavy metal content and high levels of acidity were hugely affecting him. So after a series of sessions and releasing this heavy metals, boing, his urine comes up to a 7 and so does his saliva. Now, he’s sleeping deeper, his energy levels up, his stamina is up, his mood is up, he feels mellow, and he’s more present and alert.

And wait to see how this ties in with the electrical system of the body and the EMF and all of that together. So I’m going to get to that. But I want people to understand there is a pattern here that’s emerging. So now we have people that have a very high level of electromagnetic sensitivity. These people can’t go near computers .They can’t use phones, especially cell phones. So we had a patient who was sent to us who if she touched a wire, her heart would go into extreme palpitations. In other words, beat very, very fast. But the great thing was – and she knew she knew how much heavy metal she had in her body. So she knew she couldn’t go near anything electric. But once she released those heavy metals, a month later, she could touch the wire and she had no heart palpitations. And she was so joyful.

Because people when they get in these states of health, as you’ve seen and experienced, and we’ve all experienced, is the trouble is when you get into – what I call – a low tide position. You become very fearful. And it’s a now experience. But the human body when not happy, gives very strong signals. And the trouble with the human thought form or mindset is that then you project that to be eternity. That you’re always going to feel this. And if there’s one message that I could get across today, is to realize it’s just a moment in time. And the fact that it continues, if it’s more than a moment in time, is because of the body is clogged up and it needs to release this content. But once you release the content, rejuvenation occurs. But in these states have the debilitating, degeneration is occurring. But that is not an eternal position. It’s just a temporary focus if you address the core cause.

[00:38:30] Ashley James: I noticed that when I did – because I’ve taken the PES machine and used it with many of my friends. And I noticed that the first few sessions were thick black tar that when we were done in the session, it would be very frothy and it would be oily. And this is stuff that came out of their feet. What is it? What is this stuff that’s coming out of our feet?

[ 00:39:01] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. Well, it’s the same content that would come out of the colon or the urine. We’ve just created a different door of exit. So what we’ve done is we’ve gone directly to accessing it straight out of the lymph system. But the body is intelligent. The whole discovery process – and it was just such a an interesting journey of trying to determine and be able to answer your question – was what was occurring here? Why were some people experiencing complete relief on a sinus issue or a joint issue or digestive issue or a bone issue or whatever? So it’s like how can this technology knowing exactly what it is that the body needs? Well, it’s the body knowing. So the technology joins with the body wisdom. And your body has thousands of years of wisdom on how to survive. It is absolutely completely program for survival. And if there’s anything that I could get also across today is to test it to trust – trust and also test – you might as well test it too – the intelligence of your body to give you the signals that it needs to tell you whether something is good or bad for you. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening in the process of release, is the body knows what is most toxic at this time, which is most running interference with its metabolism, its ability to function. So it will release that per session. The body’s wisdom is understanding we are just creating a new outlet for which the content can be released.

[00:40:47] Ashley James: So after the first – it depends on the person, I’ve noticed. But after the first one to three sessions, the water changes. And I’ve done it with – it’s not the machine. It’s, like, with each array. I know it’s not because if I run the array in just plain water with a little bit of salt like you’re supposed to without feet in it, it’s different. I noticed that for the first three sessions that someone does. It’s like this weird frothy water. And then after a while, it becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And you said that even when the water is clear and doesn’t have the oily frothy film that’s coming out of us, that when you have the water tested that they see that there’s still high levels of lead, mercury, or aluminum coming out of the people. Because we don’t necessarily can see those particles in the water.

[00:41:42] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that’s the thing is people try to – especially the imitation models are all into the look of the water. And so we completely try to diminish that whole fascination. It’s like how does your body feel as a result of that session? But you’re right, the content will change over time. Now, when you have the lighter purges, that is usually current levels of toxicity, especially hyper acidity. So what we noticed with people are really releasing a lot of acid in the session and usually heavy metals with that, is that – I don’t know if you ever noticed the feet exfoliating, the dead skin coming off of the feet. That’s when you know you’ve had a really big acid download into the water. But that’s why we tested the pH to see then how pH is rebounded. And usually in those cases, you can see it.

But I had a dentist phone me up the other day. I always get the greatest questions coming at me. And she goes, “Why was it that at the beginning of the session, the patient’s pH was 7. But at the end of the session, it was 5?” Because people were expecting it to start at 5 and end at 7 t the end of the session. And I said, “Well, that’s because whatever they ate or drank before – ” because she’s a holistic dentist and she’s dealing with lots of supplements and nutrients and alkalizer. I said, “Whatever they ate or drank before they came in for a session, hyper alkalized them so it reborns their alkalinity. But that’s not their native score. Their native score, their real score was that after score. So 5 was what they had.” And that’s what we’re classically seeing with all of these sick people is they’re down in the 5 and 6 range on pH when they first come to us. And they’re just, like, on their knees with some kind of issue in the body.

[00:43:51] Ashley James: Right. And then in our past interviews, you’ve talked about these test strips which are so affordable that you can use is to test your saliva and your urine pH. And you explained in a previous interview exactly how to test your pH in the morning and then throughout the day and to understand what it means. And it’s a good indicator of where your body is right now.

It’s funny, the first time we used the test trips, my husband had just eaten a big glass of blueberries. And so of course, his pH was, like, 8. It was perfect. It was like the best pH ever. And then he had a big smile on his face. But you’re right, whatever we eat or drink can affect the pH, whether we took our supplements or ate some food that was alkalizing. So it’s best to do it several hours away from food or first thing in the morning to get a baseline of where we are. And it’s interesting though that it changes. I’ve seen pH change for the positive after people have done a session.

But let’s get into this idea of how EMF is affecting us. Because I know you’re painting a picture. I know you’ve been preparing us mentally for understanding what you’re here to teach us today.

[00:45:18] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. So that’s why if we just keep in that idea of the stagnation and the cells being all stuck together because they didn’t have any electricity. So that correlates with hyper acidity. So that’s where the tie into that is. But it also ties into heavy metals. But then will lead into how the energy in the body is affected externally by external sources as well. So of course, we know the body is made out of atoms. Now these atoms produce [inaudible 00:45:50] and receive electricity. And there’s a very specific frequency for health. All of our cells, organs, and tissues, and even your thoughts and emotions have a specific frequency. So they create as a result of that frequency an electromagnetic field. And so we’ve all seen pictures of that energy field that is emitted from beyond the physical skin. So there’s an energy field that’s emitted. And actually, I saw just this morning on something where when the astronauts got out of the shuttle on to the moon, that there was this glow of light around the astronaut. And so it’s actually portraying that electromagnetic field. But even things like chanting which is really interesting. And of course, that’s taking energy into the body through the oxygen. But even chanting something like Om, O-M, will actually create a Mandala pattern around the body and they’ve been able to see that. So what happens is the body requires certain things. It requires water, minerals, a flow as opposed to stagnation, and a pH of 7.3 to 7.5 – I mean – sorry – 7.45.

So now if you start to think of the body as an energy field, and just for an example, think about a tuning fork. When you ding the first tuning fork – so you got two tuning forks. Ding the first one and it vibrates at whatever that frequency is. Then you bring it up against the second tuning fork and you’re not dinging the second tuning fork. You’re just holding the vibrating first fork near the second one. The second one will start vibrating at the same frequency. So it synchronizes to the first tuning fork. Now, we just begin to realize that the human body is the same as the tuning fork. That our internals – this is an expression I coined – how our internals are affected by our externals. So now we look at things like solar flares and geomagnetic activity on the earth. So solar flares cause an imbalance in the brain and hearts synchronicity.

So I don’t know – did you know this, Ashley? I found this out recently. And I was quite astounded. We all think of the brain as sort of the control tower at the airport. And it’s giving off all of the signals to the airplanes kind of thing, you know, the messages in the body. So we think of the brain as the major communicator in the body. But they found that in actual fact, the heart is communicating more to the brain than the brain is to the heart.

[00:49:15] Ashley James: Yes. Yes. Something like – I heard that recently that the brain receives between six and ten more signals in that it puts out.

[00:49:29] Kellyann Andrews: I just thought that was so fascinating. And so, to me, that is so classic. Because I mean, you and I operate at the physical level, like we all do. But my fascination is to go up a few levels to the spiritual and to see how that correlates. So the heart, of course, in western medicine is the center of everything happening. Granted if your heart is not pumping, then nothing’s happening. So the heart is the center of the energetic aspect of the body. And so define that the heart is the one who’s the master communicator, I just thought was so brilliant.

So basically, what happens though is that solar flares – to bring it back to the energy level. Solar flares will affect things like our blood pressure. It will actually even affect reproduction in our immune systems. It affects the heart. It affects all neurological and causes neurological problems. It can even cause mental and emotional disorders, even as much as depression and suicide. So solar flares are doing that. Now, on the earth itself, there is a natural frequency on the earth, as you know, the Schumann frequency. And it is 7.8 hertz. So what’s really interesting is – I’m going to tie that back in with the brain frequency in a minute. But basically, what happens with geomagnetic storms and solar flares is that it affects – it has an effect on the body on the frequencies to our internal parts and functions. So it will alter the actual heart-brain synchronicity and it will change even the brain’s level of melatonin.

[00:51:28] Ashley James: I just had a complete aha moment. You mentioned that the – so I mean, hold that thought about melatonin. That’s also interesting. But what you said just made me go, “Oh my gosh. What if? ” Okay. So you talked about solar flares increase suicide rates. It affects us on that level. You reminded me of back in the fourth grade, I read a paper and it always stuck with me that during the times of the Santa Ana winds, the Santa Ana Hills near LA, the wind would blow and it would create – because it was so dry, it would create positive ions which are not positive. They’re very bad for us. And they would increase the positive ions. The positive ionic charge of the air. And it would increase the suicide rates in the area. That they could see the suicides would go up when the Santa Ana winds blew because it would increase the ionic charge in the air. Again, affecting us on an energetic level. We are electromagnetic, right? That’s how we work. You know, when you go to a hospital, you get hooked up to machines to read your energy, right? That’s how they read your heartbeat and read – they put all these – you know, the EKG and then then EEG and all these machines on your head and your heart, their reading the energy of your impulses of your brain and of your heart. So, of course, of course that makes sense.

And it just hit me because lately I’ve been seeing how much all this information about the children ages from 10 to 24 – I know 24 year olds are children – but this particular generation, in the last ten years, the suicide rates went up 52 percent. It is the second leading cause of death among those ages 10 to 24 right now. And thinking about how much exposure they have to EMF, I’m wondering if – and of course, the bullying on social media and that, obviously, plays a role in the fact that they’re given an overly toxic world with 80,000 more chemicals in their food than we had when we were 10. Far more medications. They’re even putting infants now on antipsychotic medication. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. It’s a toxic world. It’s way more toxic than was when we were kids. I agree that it’s not just one thing. But to then think, “Wait a second.” If exposure to an electrical frequency that is disruptive for the body can increase suicide rates. Is it possible that the EMF exposure that this generation has had since they were born, if that is also playing a role?

[00:54:53] Kellyann Andrews: It is hugely playing a role. I mean, here’s the subtlety. When we find that solar flares are effective, the Schumann frequency at 10 hertz will speed up body reactions. But at 3 hertz, it will slow it down – megahertz. And so they actually been able to witness this on EEG patterns, like brain patterns. And what it’s doing is it’s affecting the calcium iron uptake in the brain.

[00:55:29] Ashley James: Interesting. So when it speeds up the calcium and iron uptake in the brain, what does that do?

[00:55:35] Kellyann Andrews: Well, that was just the illustration of how low these frequencies are actually having an effect. But here we go on to realize that solar flares is so far away. Schumann frequency is so subtle. But what is occurring is we’ve got this electromagnetic frequency, manmade, that’s right up close. And when they originally came out and they said how cell phones were okay and they didn’t cause any damage and all that kind of stuff. It was an infrequent use of them. But that’s not what’s happening now. What’s happening now is you can’t go anywhere and not be exposed to it.

I went into the grocery store and everybody’s on their iPhone, either sending a picture back of some product to say, “Is this the one you want?” Or talking to somebody on it. Or you’re in the lineup or you go to the doctor’s office and everybody in the waiting room is on a cell phone. I mean, you just can’t get away from it. So what is occurring is that these frequencies, when it’s a natural frequency, like Schuler, it’s a resonance in that frequency is a natural vibration. So the body has its own natural vibration. So the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system of the human body, vibrates at a certain level. And so you have your parasympathetic and then you have your, sympathetic. And what is occurring when they get around manmade frequencies is that is altering, the pattern is being altered.

So, for example, we got the brainwaves. So you have delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. So delta is like, 0.5 to 4. And they theta is 4 to 7. Alpha is 8 to 12. Now, remember when I talked about Schuler’s frequency, that’s why people feel so mellow when they’re in an alpha frequency. Because it’s Schuler’s frequency. But what is happening, which is what you brought in and especially going up into the suicide level, even on the extreme level, is that these kids are resonating like the tuning fork at beta and gamma, and that is 12 to 30 and 30 to 100. Well, what they found with autism is the children cannot settle into an alpha pattern. So they’re remaining in a ADHD or hyperactivity level because they can’t settle the brain. Because I used the analogy of the dribble or the mouse on the wheel. And that’s what happens with the brain when it gets hyper acidic. So when you got too much heavy metals in the brain, and of course, the noggin fillings are right next to the brain and other things are getting there as well through other sources. Now, you got hyper acidity, you’ve got heavy metals which put off chaos frequency right next to the brain and a higher frequency, is there any wonder why people can’t settle? And we saw, from what I talked about earlier with the melatonin, that if solar flares are affecting our melatonin level – my God – it’s not surprising to see that this electromagnetic manmade frequency is causing people to be completely insomniacs.

[00:59:40] Ashley James: And remembering that when they approved cell phones for safety back in – gosh, was it the 80s? I don’t know. It must have been the 80s, yeah. When they did their tests, they tested it for, like, a two minute phone call or something. Because back then you paid, like, $12 a minute for cell phone use. And so why would anyone have more than a two minute phone call? Back then it was like you called because you need to ask if they – your wife needed to bring eggs home. And that would be, like, $12 to make that phone call to ask. So it was we really did not use them very frequently. And they did a test and they held a cell phone up to a man’s head or whatever. And they figured that it didn’t – it heated up the brain a little bit but not enough to cause damage for the two minutes. And then they approved it. And they haven’t done – it’s not required for them to do any safety tests now for someone to have a cell phone on their body or using a cell phone 24 hours a day.

[01:00:5] Kellyann Andrews: Let me add something to what you just said because it’s so important. Is that the man they tested was a 210 pound male, six feet tall. You said it was a two minute phone call and it heated up his brain, I think, two degrees and went in three centimeters or whatever. But anyway, so now they’ve retested it using thermography, heat sensory to see what it’s actually doing to the brain. Or like an MRI or CAT scan kind of situation. So they’re able to see – what these people did was – God – I can’t imagine being the subject of this person doing this. But anyways, they put him with a cell phone to see what was happening. So with someone like that guy who’s got probably a lion size head, it was going like, say, a third into his head. But then as the heads got smaller in terms of your children there, it was going further across the head. So that when you got a little kid who was, like, eight years old, it went from one ear to the other all the way across his head.

[01:02:11] Ashley James: Uh-huh. And heating up the whole brain. I had a guest on the show – I can’t remember his name right now. But an expert in this field said that they found that having a cell phone – holding it in your hand or whatever the cell phone was basically close to within a two inch range, the mitochondria in those cells would go dormant for hours afterwards. And when you have a cell phone up to your brain, the mitochondria in your brain are going dormant. Those are the powerhouses of the brain. No wonder we’re feeling fatigued and not ourselves. But we’re surrounded by this. We’re surrounded by WiFi. We’re surrounded by by cell phone towers. We’re surrounded by computers. I’m in front of a computer right now to be able to talk to you. So we are surrounded by – and we have to be in this –

[01:03:00] Kellyann Andrews: Yes. The reality.

[01:03:00] Ashley James: That’s the reality. I mean, there’s these measures we can take. I know like we had Robyn Openshaw on the show in the past talking about the kind of measures that we can take to reduce our EMF exposure. And there’s smart things we can do. My husband and I never have the WiFi on. We have a little switch on the back. And we just turn it on only when we need it. Like, when I use the sauna, because it’s WiFi and then we turn it off.

[01:03:28] Kellyann Andrews: And the routers, what you can do with the routers which is what my husband has done. You put a timer on it. You can actually have it turned off and turned on by a timer. And so that just is wonderful because it will make the difference. But along this level, you said something that I just really need to have the women understand is – for God’s sake – do not put the cell phone in your bra. They actually showed on something I was looking at where cell phone – she had a tumor in her breast and it was the exact shape of her cell phone. But the other thing women really need to understand is nobody should be wearing wired bras. That completely changes the whole electrical around your mammary gland – your breast glands and also the heart. The heart is so close to that whole area and sending into different frequency. Now right back in 1920s, they said that every disease has a frequency.

So here’s the facts on the frequency. Disease body start at 58 so cold and the flu. Now those pictures that I was telling you about before the person had the flu – the blood pictures. So the person had the flu and the pH was 6 at the beginning. Now colds and flus frequency start at 78 to 60. Candida overgrowth is 55. Receptivity to Epstein Barr is 52. Receptivity to cancer is 42. Notice how the numbers are going down. And death begins at 25. So it’s the frequency of the body is being brought down, that’s where the life of the cell. And that’s what you talked about the mitochondria, the more and more the body is going into a lower state of frequency –

[01:05:35] Ashley James: The sicker we become.

[01:05:36] Kellyann Andrews: The more unhealthy we are.

[01:05:38] Ashley James: Yeah. That’s something that Robyn Openshaw brought up almost two years ago. I believe I had her on the show about two years ago. I know this because right after the episodet my husband went vegan. He went he went basically from eating Atkins. He only ate meat. And then after hearing – I mean this was kind of a compilation of many things he was hearing. But this was the straw for him – the final straw to break for him to decide to go whole food plant based. That he heard that the healthier you are, the higher your body vibrate. Actually, our bodies vibrate at a certain level and that they can hook you up to a machine and say, “Oh, you’re vibrating at, you know, 80 hertz. Oh, you’re vibrating at 100 hertz.” But when we are sick that we go lower and lower at 60 and lower than 60 is disease. And then death is around – like on a deathbed is, like, 40. And she said – she started listing off the hertz of different – or the frequency of different foods like broccoli and these healthy foods very, very high frequency, like 200. The frequency of certain a vegetable is 200. And she said, “How much you think pork is?” And I think we had just eaten pork sausages for breakfast that morning. And she says it’s six. And I nearly fell off my chair. And she said, “Yeah. There’s this – “

Her whole book was called Vibe. And it was about this concept of we’re either putting foods that lower frequency into our body or putting foods that raise our frequency into our body. And she’s not trying to make people go vegan. She’s just showing you when we eat dead animal flesh, we’re eating a very, very low frequency food. And when we eat vegetables and fruit and raw foods, we’re eating incredibly high frequency food. And they’re seeing that the people who eat more low frequency foods that just lowers their body’s frequency into the frequencies that create disease. So if we’re looking if disease starts on an energetic level, then this is it. You know, what can we do to raise the frequency? And raising the frequency of the body can also be exercise, breathing, praying, meditating. The things that can bring us into that alpha state. The things that calm us down. Unplugging from the WiFi. Unplugging from the EMFs. Eating foods that are vibrating really high. Juicing smoothies. Getting tons of vegetables into us. And that brings the whole body up because you can’t be sick and be vibrating at 100 on this frequency scale. You can’t. The sick people always are vibrating at that lower level.

So it just made so much sense, if we’re looking at disease from the energetic standpoint, like Rife was able to discover in the 1920s. And that book about him which is, you pick up that book, you’ll finish the entire thing. It’s a very short book. But you will absolutely can’t put it down. I got it on eBay. You have to get it – I don’t think it’s in print anymore. It’s called The Cancer Cure That Worked. And it’s about Rife’s research and his discoveries in the 1920s. And how he discovered that he could turn off disease in the body, basically, explode viruses by using frequencies.

[01:09:26] Kellyann Andrews: He would send back their own frequency to them and that’s what exploded them.

[01:09:29] Ashley James: Yeah. He figured out what the frequency of cancer was, for example. And he was able to just explode it. It was like a sine wave that neutralized it. And then the government came in and destroyed everything and stole it all because that is bad for business to be able to end disease.

[01:09:49] Kellyann Andrews: Well, they tried to buy it first. He wouldn’t sell it. And so when he wouldn’t sell it. But to go back to your food thing, just it’s a really important point, processed food and canned food, guess what vibration that is? Zero. Zero. No vibration. And then you think of all those people that are eating that kind of – it just makes sense, you know. It totally makes sense.

So yeah, it’s such an interesting world. But when you realized that – for example, in Europe. When we go back to the EMF focus, in Europe, they call it electrosmog. And when you think of that, it’s so true. Like, microwave and radio wave sickness is recognized as an occupational disease in Soviet Union. And then out of a group of 17 men who worked on an experiment, experimental electromagnetic pulse experiment generating system in 1967, five of them died of cancer in the following seven years. But the University of Colorado, the medical research found that death rate in certain cancers such as leukemia was higher than average in homes that were 130 feet or 40 meters from a high currency power line.

[01:11:28] Ashley James: Can you say that again? So 130 feet?

[ 01:11:31] Kellyann Andrews: 130 feet from a high current power line.

[01:11:35] Ashley James: That’s not the regular ones, like the regular lines on the street? But the really big ones that buzz.

[01:11:41] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. The buzz. Yeah. If it’s a buzz, it’s not a good thing. I was thinking this morning because I loved your analogy in the other talk that you did with Robyn when you said it’s too bad it doesn’t create a burn. You know, like a sunburn. Sun is lovely, it will do things for you. But too much exposure isn’t great. So I was thinking about if you just think of anything electric like a beehive. But think of it, especially the cell phone as like a swarming beehive, in all of your sensory perception that’s built into that beautiful intelligence in your body, you would never go stand by a swarming beehive. Just think of everything electric on that kind of level. And so what’s the answer? The answer is distance. How far away you are to it. So like holding a cell phone up to your head. But the other thing is, is that you also got to watch out that all the iPhones, they not only are doing an antenna. The actual electric aspect is coming from the whole body of the phone. And that’s what’s making a difference. But anybody who’s using YouTube – what is it called? Bluetooth. Bluetooth is putting an antenna right in your head. It’s putting an antenna right in your head. So what they found at University of California – this was a real shocker – they had this monster – well, not so monster. But it was a cell tower. And so the cell tower was on the campus right beside this building. And what they found over a period of time was every single professor in every one of those classrooms ended up with brain tumor.

[01:13:40] Ashley James: No.

[01:13:41] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. And so why are we not hearing about the adverse effects? I mean, you and I are because we investigate it. And then we also do deep research to find it. But what’s happened recently – and I’m sure that you’ve been telling people – but Google has been completely muffled. And so people like Mercola, The Truth About Cancer, even Green PubMed, I mean, all of these people have been knocked out by Google. And even on Amazon, Amazon is restricting what can be sold through Amazon because they’re all been bought out by pharmaceuticals. And so people need to realize why are they not hearing about it because the media is being muffled.

[01:14:30] Ashley James: You know, iTunes, which most listeners – like, 95 percent of listeners listen through iTunes. iTunes has not suppressed the information yet. Knock on wood. Good for iTunes. I know. I’m really happy of that. Because they spent the last year optimizing their search engine. iTunes now basically transcribes all the audio for all the podcasts. So that when you search for things, like if you type in something very specific, it’s going to bring up a better representation for you. Because it scans through the content of what’s said in the podcast. And then brings up what you really want to find. So they’re not – as of yet, they had not suppressed any holistic information. Whereas Google, about six months ago – you know, a year ago, you could type in natural cure for – I don’t know – for yeast infection. And you would get all kinds of wonderful blogs by Naturopaths. And great, great, great information. Now, the first five are going to be medical – pharmaceutical based medical things. And you have to go several pages – which no one ever clicks on page two. It’s something like 1 percent of people click on page two.

[01:15:49] Kellyann Andrews: I go to five.

[01:15:51] Ashley James: Well, you’re in the top, top, top 0.01 percent of people. Most people go to the first few in the search. But Google has also made it so that some websites are completely unlisted now. It won’t even show up in a Google search. And these are good, holistic websites. So yeah, there’s a war.

[01:16:15] Kellyann Andrews: So have you told people about DuckDuckGo?

[01:16:18] Ashley James: I have not. But that’s something that you could definitely let them know about.

[01:16:22] Kellyann Andrews: Well, it’s another search engine. And apparently they’re, shall we say, more open minded that you can find things through that one. So DuckDuckGo is another option for people to access through. But you just need to keep digging deeper to find the answers nowadays. And yeah,it’s really interesting because I have a medical background. I was trained as a nurse. And so I can see a lot of what is occurring and what’s being presented. And have that understanding of the filter that is going on presently.

But the awesome thing – and that’s why I really want to acknowledge you, Ashley, is you’ve gone out on a limb to create this entire environment in which people can find the truth. And the truth is, as my husband says, EMF is what he calls inconvenient truth. People don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to know that their cell phone isn’t great. And having your cell phone on in your car is like being inside a microwave oven. So people don’t want to hear that part. But the thing is, is that your audience is so awesome because they are open minded. They are seekers. They’re truth finders. They’re walking the talk. They’re doing what it takes to change it around. And that’s such a big, big thing. Because the way things are on the planet, especially at this moment, is quite chaotic. And it’s so easy to get disillusioned. And when your energy goes down, your emotions go down, your mind starts to think all the bad things. And you just go into a negative spin.

But like Ashley said at the beginning of the call, you just do the domino effect in the right direction. So you take your nutrients, you drink your water, you do all the things that bring your electric up, you dance, you sing, you do exercise, you move your body, you listen to positive influences, and you allow positive influences into your body, your being and your world. And it becomes a whole different orientation. You don’t have to resonate at that low frequency that the world is vibrating at right now. A bunch of us can just have a party and resonate at a whole different frequency. So let us all be high frequency tuning forks and we’ll all resonate together.

[01:19:15] Ashley James: I love that. Teach us how can we resonate on a higher level?

[01:19:21] Kellyann Andrews: First of all, its mindset. It is definitely a mindset. You need to just absolutely want to live that other life so that you’re willing to move into action steps on what you can do. So you need to have a mastery mindset. You need to do what it takes. And number one is to create a healing environment inside and outside your body. So identify what you want. That’s the first step. If there’s anything that’s really important is you got to know what you want. If you’re going on a trip, where are you going? People spend more time and attention on their vacations than they do their lives. So what is it you want and then you create the actions to achieve it. So number one is to protect yourself. And number two is to nourish yourself. And these are not just physical. These are emotional, mental, and spiritual. And on the physical level but also on all of those levels as you purify yourself. So if you have someone that’s in your world, if they’re your family, it can be kind of interesting. But if there’s negative influences in your world, you got to be – this is the one example that we’ll use. It’s an office and asset on a computer. You can hit the minus screen. Minimize, minimize that influence in your world. So the number one thing we need to do on a physical level is be smart. We have such incredible brilliance designed into us biologically, intelligently, and universally. We just connect with that wisdom that is so part of our nature. So on an electrical level, obviously, you distance yourself from the electronics. You time or dosage, you turn down the dosage level and how much you go on it. And obviously, there’s an aspect to the intensity of it, too.

But here’s the key of life is the contrast between expansion and contraction. Is your life expanding or contracting? And just think about your muscles expanding and contracting. So well-being – so expansion is relaxed. It’s having an attitude and latitude of gratitude. And then there’s a sense of ease that comes with that and allowing. You are allowing your world to expand. You’re allowing your health to expand. You’re allowing yourself to feel good. So many of us, especially as women, I think are programmed to not feel good. That we’re supposed to be in service to everybody else. So I deal with all these women. They’re completely exhausted because they’re the caretakers of their – they’re the hubcap of their entire family. And nobody’s taking care of them. But more importantly, they’re not taking care of themselves. So there’s an allowingness that self-care is a priority in your life. So the opposite is contraction, where there’s a whole sense of resistance. There’s resentment. There’s anger. There’s struggle. And there’s blocking, blocking energy. And that’s low frequency way to go through life for sure.

But the attitude and gratitude is so important. One of the things that I do every day is I spend the day literally all day saying thank you. I get the parking place or someone I connect with in the lineup at the grocery store or wherever I’m doing my errands, we just have a wonderful interaction. And you may never ever see that person but you just have the soul to soul connection and three minutes space of time. And it can change your frequency. And then focusing on ideas and inspirations. I spend all of my meal preparation time listening to inspirational kind of things. There’s one that I’m listening to right no and it’s about breathing. And it’s like, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. So there’s all these positive affirmations that are beginning. And so you literally like breathe them in and then you send them out. And so that’s why I always sort of see myself as the sunshine presence of taking the light in and then sending it out.

And having an attitude. This is a beautiful mindset to have that everything today is falling into place. My day is harmonic. Everything around me as harmony. And so it’s so important because I am one of those who truly believes in God, the angels, and miracles. And all day long, I will thank all those sources for setting everything up in my world to work. So I surrender to all that works is the most beautiful mindset and affirmation. And so as if something derails in your world, you just say, “Okay. That’s just a momentary time. But I am returning to all that works.” And because I am Irish, I have a strong thing about signs. So I always ask for signs to be given to me. And it’s amazing how many I get in a day. And it’s so important to ask for help. Not only from humans but from all sources, spiritual and above, to just come along. Because the thing is you got to set the tone within your being to vibrate at this higher frequency.

So let me give you an example of fear. So I was going from Victoria to Vancouver. And on the way, because I was focusing on putting this together, what came into my awareness 100 percent was all the cell towers. So on the first trip to Vancouver, I saw these cell towers and I was just like a rabbit. I was cringing every time I saw cell tower. And it just set off all of this absolutely sympathetic nervous system fight and flight response in my body. So my heart beat got faster. My adrenaline was racing through my body. My respiratory level was higher. Everything was sped up inside of me. And so I had all of this fear every time I saw cell tower. And so what I realized on the second trip to Vancouver was that that wasn’t doing my body any good. So in the second trip to Vancouver, I decided ask the four archangels to go surround each cell tower I saw. So I put all this light around the cell towers and then violet flamed them. And I did all this spiritual stuff. And you know what was the most amazing thing, Ashley, was that I ended up feeling awesome. I felt so great. So when I said, “Oh, there’s another cell tower we need to heal.” So I send all this healing energy to the cell tower so it couldn’t radiate all this negativity. But what happened to me in the process of doing that was that I started feeling phenomenally calm, more centered, my breathing went deeper, I felt more relaxed.

[01:27:41] Ashley James: Sure. Because you weren’t perceiving it as a threat.

[01:27:44] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. So that whole cell danger response, people need to watch out for that. Because what happens biologically in the moment is when the body feels danger. Now, that can be on a physical level, mental level, emotional level. When it feels danger, it goes into that fight or flight cell danger response. And it will physiologically change all of your body to gear up as if it was an espresso coffee.

[01:28:17] Ashley James: Uh-huh. Right. Any perception of a threat or a potential threat causes the body to go into that fight or flight response.

[01:28:27] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. Exactly. So some of the things that you can do to help the body and its frequency, of course, is to be conscious to reduce your exposure to toxins, EMFs, and all the above the cause the danger response, and to decrease the heavy metals. Number one, you see, we can do all these things in life. Like, if you have a thorn in your finger and you can put a Band-Aid over it, you can put iodine on it, you can put rescue remedy on it, you can do all these things. But if you don’t take the thorn out and address the core issue, then you’re still going to have the problem. And that’s why it’s so important if people don’t want to be a walking antenna that they need to get the heavy metals out of the body.

So for those that are really interested and want to test their levels, a client of mine actually has a lab and she is brilliant at at labs and understanding the physiology of lab work and what is actually portraying. She goes into a very deep level with it. So her organization and company is called My Labs For Life. So for those that are interested in knowing what their levels actually are, I would highly recommend that. And then to do what it takes to decrease your body burden. Because through input of diet and output of releasing through either the urine, the colon, the detox organs, or using the PES system, you’ve got to get that content out of the body, like the thorn in the finger. Until you release it, you’re not going to feel excellent.

So another thing people can do and I talked about this in the last podcast was slippery elm. Slippery elm is really great because along with increasing fiber, which tends to absorb toxicity in the body and seaweed which also helps to create a slippery mucosal level like Slippery Elm does. All of these will help so that you decrease leaky gut. Because leaky gut is a huge problem. Because when the protein molecules get across the body in too large of form, the body will go into that danger alert thing. And it will start to attack those. But what happens is heavy metals will start to be attached to those molecules as well and the body will go into immune responses because it knows. The people have the immune issues and diseases. Those are because the body’s intelligence is at work trying to attack that foreign content that is on the tissue or the organ or the cell or whatever. And so we need to get that content out of the body to calm the body down.

And that’s what we see with these autistic children when they have a session. I mean, it’s just so amazing to watch what happens with these kids that are so hyperactive. The moms say to me, “How am I going again to sit for 30 minutes in a foot spa when they can’t sit for three seconds?” I said, “Put them in and see what happens.” And they completely chill out. Like, this one child was only four years old and very, very hyperactive. The mother called him the Tasmanian Devil because he was such a whirlwind. Anyways, but when he had a session, he would sit through the whole session very calmly. So they were seeing the body is shifting from that danger response that’s making them very hyperactive. The heavy metals and the acidity in the body is causing the pH to be a very acidic level. And then the EMF are amplifying to make the body an absolute antenna. So that’s why the kids are beyond hyper state. And with the little autistic kids, apparently, when they knock their heads on the floor, the reason they’re doing that is they’re trying to numb their brains. And that’s why they’re doing it.

But when we’ve had whether it’s little ones are very elderly. One of the examples was kidneys. Now, I don’t know if you realize but glyphosate, which everybody is well talking about these days, round up, did you realize that Roundup has 11 metals in it?. And pesticides, every pesticide they tested had, like, 22 metals in them. So now you have people who are walking around in bare feet and exposed to all of this on grass. The other day somebody phoned me up because their client phoned them up, because he had just gone outside in Florida and walked on grass. And he absorbed all this glyphosate through his feet. So what they found in Sri Lanka was that there was a huge correlation. They actually banned glyphosate because we found there’s a huge correlation to kidney disease.

[01:34:26] Ashley James: I had Dr. Stephanie Seneff on the show. That is definitely an episode worth listening to. I had her on twice. And listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search in the search box for any past episodes when you want to listen to them. But Dr. Stephanie Seneff is a PhD MIT top research scientist with a team of researchers has been trying to decipher what’s going on with autism and the huge spike. When I was a kid – I’m 39. I’m going to be 40. So it’s not that long ago. But when I was a kid, there was one in 10,000. I never knew an autistic child growing up because that’s how rare it was. And granted, they’ve changed how they diagnose autism. So there’s more of a spectrum. And now, maybe children they would have perceived as hyperactive back then might be put on a spectrum now. But however, that does not account for – and if you talk to teachers who’ve been teachers for 40 years, they will tell you the children have changed. They’re not the same. Now, it is one in every 30 or 40 children are diagnosed on the spectrum. So literally every classroom has someone on the spectrum or potentially could have someone on the spectrum because that’s how common it is. And that wasn’t the case back then. So Dr. Stephanie Seneff with these amazing research scientists have put together this information because they’re looking for what happened in the last 40 years to cause it to go from a rare event to a common event that our children have autism. And what she saw – what these scientists saw was that glyphosate is present in the MMR vaccine. Because they used some kind of – they used an extract from bovine – a bovine material. And she explains it. She explains how does Roundup get in the vaccine and she explains how.

But basically, what she describes is that glyphosate – and she didn’t even talk about the fact that Roundup also has 11 metals in it. She said that glyphosate itself is a key leader. Meaning it binds to heavy metals and washes them away. Well, this particular molecule and how it works, glyphosate will bind to a heavy metal. So let’s say, aluminum. And then it will release. It lets go of kind of like losing a static charge, losing a bond. It lets go of heavy metals when the pH changes. And she says where in the body does pH change? When fluids cross over from one kind of fluid to another. So for example, blood becomes urine, pH changes. Blood becomes cerebral spinal fluid, pH changes. And she said, what’s happening with the glyphosate when we eat it? So let’s say our children are eating it. It’s very high in cereal. Non-organic cereal and I’m not going to mention which brands but they’re circles, little holes in them, look like donuts. And all kinds of other cereals out there on the market are tested very high for glyphosate. So we eat glyphosate. It binds to heavy metals and releases them, deposits them in our kidneys and in our brain.

And they’re able to see this. And that’s what Dr. Klinghardt sees as well. And that’s how he’s able to reverse autism. Because what we’re seeing, the majority of people on the spectrum now are not actually autistic. They have all the same symptoms as autism. It’s not actually – the one in 40 that we’re seeing now is not autism. A true, true autism is still like that one in 10,000. What we’re seeing is toxicity in the brain, heavy metal toxicity in the brain, and overexposure to these frequencies like WiFi, which are stimulating the metals in the brain. So this is what Dr. Dr. Klinghardt says. And then he backs it up by completely reversing autism. He gets children who are rocking, beating their heads, and nonverbal to be able to talk again, completely function in society, be happy, be healthy, and go to school, and later go to college. He talks about in our interview that the children he’s worked with for so many years because he’s been a doctor for over 40 years are now – he has children that are now professors and PhDs and composers and very intellectual and wonderful positions. And these kids were rocking and nonverbal when they came to him. And so he says, it’s not autism.

And the thing is, we are allowing the first – we’re allowing this blanket diagnosis to then prevent us from seeking the answers. Like, “Well, why?” Right? Why is it? So it isn’t vaccines is what they’re saying. Because you can’t just say it’s all vaccines because what they’re saying is it’s actually the glyphosate. And that, although vaccines do have heavy metals in them, which is like you’re directly depositing heavy metals in the body. The delivery system into the brain is the glyphosate. So that’s what these scientists are proposing.

And then what do we do? That’s the next question. Because as individuals, we can’t stop them from spraying glyphosate. We can choose not to buy it. We can choose not to buy those products. I even know listeners who have called up their organizations around them, like the schools, and the golf courses, and their neighborhoods, and convince the communities to stop using glyphosate. So there are there are things that we can do at individual levels. Unfortunately, we can’t change everything. We can do what we can do. But what we do have control over is our day to day choices. And so there are things that we can do for ourselves and our children on a day to day level to ensure that we minimize our exposure to these chemicals that are rampant in our environment. I wish there was some kind of special goggles we could put on to see all the chemicals. You can’t see glyphosate when it’s in your food. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we put on – remember that that sci-fi movie. I love sci-fi movie. I love sci-fi anything. And there’s that sci-fi movie, it was called They Live. Where he puts on the glasses and he can see all the aliens that are living among us. Imagine if we could put on these glasses and see the damaging EMFs and see the damaging chemicals. And then look and see the healthy foods that aren’t contaminated, that don’t have radiation and pesticides, and they are healthy vibrating, and on a good frequency. Imagine if we had that ability to –

[01:42:31] Kellyann Andrews: Well, you do have the ability. Because if you go into the grocery store and you see the produce that looks like they put it out four weeks ago, that will tell you the unhealthy state of the lack of energy in that food. But in the markets when you go in the summertime and you see the food that’s just come out of the ground, its color, its vibrancy. That is one of the things where you can tell how high the level of minerals are. And minerals in the body create the electricity. So if the food is this brilliant, like a carrot, just imagine the most vivid color of orange that you can ever imagine. And then you look at a carrot that looks like it’s been bleached because it has, then you get which foods are the best ones for you. And then you start to look around but your body will queue you to all of that if we just tune into that. And that’s what’s so brilliant.

I want to give an example because you brought up Dr. Klinghardt. Here’s one of his clients, an eight year old boy who had a brain injury and was in total agitated behavior. When he first came to us, his pH was six. And so again, that agitation was being antagonized by that pH. But when he had a session, it would boil up to 7.5. But here’s the way I want to share the story is that he became so calm and relaxed. And I was on the phone with his mom. And I was asking for his feedback at the time. And he goes, “I love my foot spices.” And then he says in the most beautiful voice, he goes, “I feel so good.” And you could just hear the joyous tone.

And then we had another five year olds – because it’s always so awesome when you can connect with the kids. Because as you said, they’re the ones that’s been most exposed in their lifetime. So there was a five year old and she was very, very hyperactive. And if not on the spectrum close. But anyways, she went to kindergarten and the teacher asked her and the whole class to draw their favorite family activity. And she drew herself having a foot spa and mom putting the water into it. Isn’t that awesome? But what was so lovely was that the mom told me after her sessions, she noticed how her daughter became more affectionate and would hold eye contact now. And she would become more articulate like your friends then.

But here’s the interesting thing which we didn’t mention before to give insight. Heavy metals affect the humans in this way. They create headaches and migraines. And we talked about that in the podcast on copper, especially. Fatigue, stress symptoms and responses, dizziness. So how many people have you got ringing in the ear and that kind of thing and sleep disturbances. So skin issues, GI issues, muscle cramps and aches, and joint pain, and stiffness. A lot of people phone me up and say, “How come I’m now experiencing this one? I’m 40. And I’ve never experienced this before. ” And the answer to that is the accumulation factor. And they’re also experiencing things like numbness. But to turn that around is just so awesome.

I’ve got to give you this example because we were talking about the glyphosate. So here’s the example that I was bringing up because I want people to realize there is an answer. There is solutions. It’s not, “We’re doomed.” So here’s the sunshine coming up and dawn. So we had a famous wildlife photographer – sorry – artist. He was a photographer but he also did artwork. Originally did artwork and now he does photography. He’s in his 70s and he was in complete renal failure. And the Nephrologist was hounding him like crazy to go on dialysis. But he didn’t want to for all the reasons that most people would understand including having to sit next door machine that’s – anyways, we won’t go into it. So anyways he goes and has – because his doctor recommended it to him – has sessions in our system. And he has not had to go on dialysis. As a matter of fact his Nephrologist, the kidney doctor, and for other Nephrologists have all told clients of ours that they have never ever seen kidney function improve. And these are old time docs. They’ve been in business for decades. And so they said,” I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it.” But that’s why in this illustration, the whole thing is, you’ve just got to get the toxicity out. So by doing the fiber and the water and the minerals, and also, of course, B vitamins. Because the B vitamins create healthy nerve cell growth. And then iodine, iodine, we talked about mitochondria. By the way, I don’t know if you know, mitochondria in the cell creates energy .So it creates energy and that’s ATP. Now ATP in the cell creates energy. But ATP outside the cell actually is part of the alert signal of the danger. So that’s kind of interesting. But anyways, going back to solutions, iodine. Iodine feeds the mitochondria. Now, when you were born, Ashley, everybody was using iodine for any cuts or scrapes. They’re using it for surgery preparations. You saw people being prepped, shaved, and then iodine put all over their belly when they’re having whatever operation. And so iodine used to be part of our entire culture. But it has completely disappeared in our era. But it actually is a mineral. So we think of iodine in the holistic field is feeding the thyroid. But in actual fact, it feeds every cell in the body because it’s a mineral. And the mitochondria needs it to function.

So you talked about before when the EMF puts the mitochondria in a state of shock and goes offline for a while. Here’s how to bring your mitochondria online. And then as you mentioned earlier, too, breath work is so important. And when you breathe through the feet, because we’re all spinning too fast because we’re multitasking, our days are requiring us to do more in it than then there’s time. And that creates pressure internally. So we need to ground ourselves. So just go through your day and breathe through your feet. So not only will that oxygenate your body and bring energy into your cells, but it will also ground you.

Then the other thing that’s really, really important nowadays is Bach flowers. So Bach, like the musician, B-A-C-H. Bach flowers help to balance out your emotional and mental realms. And there’s 38 different remedies and you can just get in at the health food store or look it up online, whatever.

[01:50:26] Ashley James: It’s like homeopathy for emotions.

[01:50:30] Kellyann Andrews: And thoughts. Yeah. So it’s like, mindsets. And so it takes rescue remedy is the most famous one. And veterinarians, like animals, will use it for the distress of the animal. And when it works on kids and animals, it’s not just the placebo effect. And so that one’s a really great solution.

But the others is to smile. The big thing is you got to get oxygen up into the brain by smiling. You’re literally relaxing the muscles around your neck. And that opens up the arterial system to the brain. So we want to get that oxygen and nutrients up into the brain. And so by smiling, you open up the arterial system. By frowning, you close it down. So think – because we’re at Christmas time, think of the difference in the face of Santa Claus and Scrooge. And that will show you what smiling and gratitude does. Because Santa is grateful for all those little elves. And Scrooge has got a totally different mindset. So look in the mirror every day and look to see what your face is looking like. And you want to get your face to have that permanent smile and not the permanent frown.

So one of the things that I really want to focus on and it actually was a book that I have sitting in front of me every day. Because what I do in the morning is I choose to get up and immediately go exercise . And I do shi bafa. And that is S-H-I-space-B-A-F-A. And this was designed by the Chinese to keep the Chinese out of the hospital. So it’s like stand up yoga kind of posture. Some people think I’m – like, when I’m waiting for the ferry, I’ll do it in the terminal and they go, “Oh, are you doing Tai Chi?” And I said, “Well, it’s sort of similar or Qi Gong. And it’s sort of similar to that too.” So it’s movement with breath and intent. But it actually opens up the physiology of the body. So while I’m doing that, at home, I have a book that’s in front of me and it says, “And this is your message for today. Love only today. Breathe more, stress less, and choose love.” Because that will keep you in a parasympathetic mode. And then the last thing is, treat your body as your best friend because it is.

[01:53:31] Ashley James: No kidding. We need to step back and look at the thoughts we have about ourselves. And look at how we treat ourselves. And then and think about how we treat our best friend or how we treat a loved one and start treating ourselves like we’re worth. We’re worth being put first because if we put everyone else first, we won’t be here to take care of them.

[01:54:02] Kellyann Andrews: Oh, yes. You know what? I just was going through my notes as you were saying that, one of the things going back to the electromagnetic solutions. Things to do is reduce the amount of sources of EMF in your life, reduce your time exposure, increase your distance from it – the beehive concept – use wired accessories. Now, there’s a whole test that you can do with a cheap AM radio. Because a lot of these you know gadgets that will test the level of output from an electrical thing do sort of tend to be pricey. But here’s something you can do on a easy level. Get hold of a really inexpensive AM radio. Now, not AM/FM, just AM. Turn it on and you can either have it on the station or in between the station and it will create that kind of noise. But take it up against an electronic thing and it will amplify the closer you get to it. So you can go around. Now, my friend who has that My Labs For Life, she will do this when she goes into hotel rooms. And she will go up against the wall to see where the wiring is. She’ll go up close to the bed to see anything that’s active there. She’ll unplug the alarm clock, radio.

And so you can actually go up to all the electronics in your house and you can see what kind of intensity they’re putting out. And one of the suggestions is just unplug all – well, obviously, you can’t unplug your fridge or your freezer but the appliances that you’re not using so it’s not putting things out. But here’s another one that that is so easy to not do is, when you go to the grocery store or even London Drugs or Costco or whoever has them, do not use one of those scanners. self checkout. They’re putting out major stuff. I back away anytime I see that light. And my body has that response. And even when you’re fueling up your car, make sure you’re breathing the opposite direction of the field.

[01:56:27] Ashley James: Just hold your breath.

[01:56:29] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. Yeah. Usually when you fill up your car, you can’t hold it that long. But just try to catch the wind in the other direction. And then just listen to your body’s alert signals. Your body is awesome for understanding what, what you need in the moment. And just tuning into its wisdom is so wonderful.

[01:56:54] Ashley James: Absolutely. And I’d say that more specific advice on decreasing heavy metals in the body. Dr. Stephanie Seneff and Dr. Klinghardt both go into this. But I’ve had firsthand experience with it having spent the last two years working on – or more than two years, actually, working on decreasing my heavy metals. And obviously, I love the PES system. I’m having great experience with it. I sweat in my Sunlight and Sauna. I eat the chlorella from ENERGYbits. And that is my favorite brand because she has it tested twice. And it’s all about purity. There’s a lot of chlorella out there that has lead in it. And hers does not. I’ve had Katherine Ornstein on the show several times sharing about the benefits of LG. But chlorella specifically, is a key leader. And then taking herbs like parsley and cilantro and putting them in a blender, maybe like a Vitamix. You can throw in something like a handful of spinach or kale and blend it with some water and drink it. It doesn’t need to taste good. I mean, if you want to make it taste good throw in an apple and some ginger to make it taste good. But it’s really not about taste because you just kind of chug it and get it into your body. But the cilantro is very effective for gentle chelation as well. So those are daily gentle things.

Now, there’s also a whole form of homeopathy that are homeopathic chelators. And that would be worth going to. And I’ve used them in the past. It will be worth going to a Naturopathic physician or homeopath to get access to those as well. But these are all the things that we can do gently that are very supportive of the body that don’t have side effects. Like, if you were to go get actual chelation therapy, IV chelation, that unfortunately also strips all the really good minerals out of the body as well. It kind of washes – it’s kind of like taking antibiotic. It takes the good with the bad.

[01:59:17] Kellyann Andrews: And you do need to watch out for that one. Especially calcium, if they don’t get the calcium levels right – I mean, they’ve actually had people not be on the planet after that experience because the calcium levels were – so that’s why a lot of Naturopaths will not choose that methodology to do that.

Now, what was really interesting was we have an acupuncturist and other therapists who use our system. And they said that what they’re finding nowadays, Ashley, is that people are not able to naturally release their toxic burden loads. Because it’s just coming in too quickly. And so she actually – this one acupuncturist – had a patient who he worked in the industry of – he was actually an inventor. So he worked with a lot of metals and a lot of chemicals. Silly soul. He didn’t put gloves on. So he had for 20 years pain at seven out of ten. And she was doing a lot of the different methods you just mentioned and she wasn’t able to shift the sky at all. And so finally, the detox foot spa with him and, boom, the water just turned completely black. The guy was just so full of heavy metals.

So some people are getting good results through this methodologies. But if you’re using those and finding that you’re not getting it, it’s just because your load or burden level is too high. And so that you need to then do a more efficient methodology. And that’s what we found was just, the older someone is, the higher levels they have. And the higher levels they have, the more they’re a walking antenna. And so they’re more feeling the effect. But with all of those methodologies that you mentioned, just to highlight it again. Please, please, make sure that you’re drinking lots and lots of water to help the flushing process after doing any kind of therapy. Because otherwise you’re just going to get it reabsorbing in your body.

[02:01:32] Ashley James: I love doing things to stimulate the lymph system. Not a lot of people understand what the lymph system is. So we have our circulatory system, which we understand that there are arteries and veins and that blood is circulating through them. Lymph is everything else. Lymph is the fluid in between every single cell in interstitial fluid. This fluid is part of the immune system. And also it delivers nutrients to the cells, it helps remove toxins away from the cells. And it’s like our cells are coral reef. They’re stationary animals, in a sense. They’re stationary creatures. And that the lymph system is like the ocean bringing nutrients to it and removing toxins away from it. And so the lymph system doesn’t have a heart to beat it. It does and of get sucked back up. Re-brought up back into our circulatory system so that the liver can flush – can clean it so that those toxins can be brought to the kidneys as well. But our lymph system doesn’t move if we don’t move. And the only way it actually pumps, because it doesn’t have a hurt to beat it, is by moving our joints. And because at each joint in our body, there are lymph nodes. And the nodes kind of squeeze and pump this along. So with this day and age, we’re not moving like we’re designed to move. We’re sitting all the time.

[02:03:11] Kellyann Andrews: Stagnation.

[02:03:13] Ashley James: We’re being stagnant. Right. So I love a Rebounder which is a small – and you should get an adult one. I tried using my son’s one, it does not work. Get a small Rebounder. I have it actually linked on my website. At the top of learntruehealth.com, there’s like Ashley Recommends and it goes to Amazon and my favorite health gadgets are there. But there’s an adult Rebounder. And you’re not supposed to jump on it to the point where your feet leave the mat. It’s actually just very gentle. Your body is only moving three or four inches up and down. You’re just bouncing gently.

[02:03:48] Kellyann Andrews: Rocking chair motion rather than roller coaster ride.

[02:03:51] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. You’re just bouncing gently up and down. Kind of like if you – imagine if you’re holding a baby and you just want to bounce the baby. But you’re bouncing your whole body on the Rebounder and do some deep breathing. Just do it for five minutes, put on a good song – one or two good songs and you’re done. Do that a few times a day, that’s flushed your entire lymph system and flushed all the fluids. Now, of course, going for a brisk walk, doing weightlifting, doing cardio, all that would help as well. But if you’re at an office or at home and you can’t just leave and go for a brisk walk for 15 minutes a few times a day, then jump on a Rebounder. And I noticed that when I do a Rebounder before a PES session or before soaking in magnesium or before going in the sauna, that I get better results during my detox. Much better results. It’s very interesting. Just a few minutes of stimulating the lymph system, how that kick starts detoxification.

[02:04:51] Kellyann Andrews: It is. It’s amazing how that works. And here’s a great visual for the lymph system is just a volcano and you got the molten lava at the core of the mountain, and you want to release it to the surface. So in the human body you’ve got the toxins stuck inside the cell and it needs to release. So the lymph system is the portal to get it out of the body. And so just image the lymph system to being like lava tubes.

[02:05:19] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Lava tubes throughout the body. Right. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So we’ve got this sludge, we’ve got this stagnation, we have this heavy metal buildup through many different sources. But it’s no longer a problem that only welders have or only people who’ve worked directly with heavy metals. And now we’re seeing that, like you said, entire towns. If there’s a company that’s emitting heavy metals into the water in the air and the soil, that the entire town is sick from it. And the sickness is going to show up as different symptoms depending on someone’s genetics.

[02:06:08] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. You know what I just found out which is just horrible, is that in Canada they are starting to test the water. And the water in many of the Canadian cities was worse than Flint, Michigan.

[02:06:23] Ashley James: The water in the tap?

[02:06:25] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah.

[02:06:26] Ashley James: So you said water and I imagined lakes. I was like –

[02:06:29] Kellyann Andrews: No. The tap water.

[2:06:31] Ashley James: So I was just for Thanksgiving several of my friends got together and we had like a friends giving. American Thanksgiving just happened, for listeners who are not in the United States. And it’s different than Canada. But basically last week, I was at a friend’s house and we’re all very health conscious. It was a whole foods plant based Thanksgiving. It was great. We did bowls. And everyone, there was, like, 40 different things that we could choose from. It was so delicious. It was amazing. So, so yummy. And we had all our kids there and we had a really, really great time. The kids were on one side the house and adults were on the other. It was fantastic. It was wonderful. Yes, it was great. We had little adult time. And I was helping to prepare some of the food and I noticed that there was, like, these black flakes in the keen wall, like, the water. We put the water in the keen wall and at first I thought it was maybe some food particles of something else that got washed into it. And then I realized it was these big black flakes. So I was picking it out. And then I go to use the sink and black flakes were coming out of the tap. Big black flakes we’re coming out of the tap. And it’s an older house in Seattle.

[02:07:44] Kellyann Andrews: Lead.

[02:07:45] Ashley James: Is that what that is? I was like, what –

[02:07:47] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. Actually, anything – that’s what’s so amazing. Anything prior to 1975, that’s not that long ago. So that’s the thing, is that we’re – just to bring it back to solution. So you get exposed. so you can’t freak out about what you’re exposed to every day. That will just ask from your body more. Keep your body in sympathetic overdrive, cell danger mode. That’s why you got it take mastery over your emotions and your thoughts because we are all exposed to all this content every day. But it doesn’t mean that it has to cripple you. It doesn’t mean that it has to cause illness in you. You do the dominoes in the right direction. And you move it out. But the most important thing is your mental attitude and your mindset. So be your body’s own best friend. So if you have something that derails your day, some event that causes you agitation that puts you in a sympathetic focus, catch yourself in that moment. And just absolutely breathe. Breathe in, breathe out. Just hear me saying this to you breathe in, breathe out. And reset. Hit your reset button by saying to yourself, “Now, if this was happening to my best friend, what would I tell him or her to do in this situation?” Because you’re brilliant at giving awesome wise advice to others. So now, you just need to give it to yourself. But the key here is you’ve got to do whatever you advise the other one to do. Amen.

[02:09:49] Ashley James: Right. We’re so good at giving advice. We can start taking our own advice.

[02:09:54] Kellyann Andrews: Because your objective when it’s someone else’s story. But you lose that clarity when it’s your own because you go to hind brain fight or flight. So I’m bringing it to the front part of your brain. And you can even tap on the front part of your brain, like right up by your hairline, and that will bring you to your creative centers of your brain. And you can go back into a thinking mode. But when you go into fight or flight, you go right into the back of the brain and you shut down all your creativity in that moment.

[02:10:22] Ashley James: Well, here’s what happens. Someone goes, “I should eat more vegetables.” Or whatever it is. Whatever it is that they decide they should do. “Oh, man. I should turn off my WiFi.” Or “I shouldn’t have my cell phone on me.” Or, “I want to make these changes.” And then there’s this other voice in the head that goes, “but, but, but, and excuse, excuse, excuse.” “Oh, but the kids won’t like that.” Or. “My husband doesn’t eat that way.”

[02:10:48 Kellyann Andrews: You rationalize.

[02:10:49 Ashley James: We rationalize our other ourselves back to status quo.

[02:10:55] Kellyann Andrews: I know. I know. And that’s where you got to catch yourself. So that’s where the word mastery. We’re all on this planet to learn mastery. That is why you’re here. And the first mastery you need to accomplish is over your thoughts and your feelings and your reactions. So I always find it very fun in a day to have my human experience and my spiritual experience is happening simultaneously. So I feel how my emotions are wild like a dog with hackles over some injustice or something that’s happened or someone almost hits your car, whatever. And so I feel the reaction happen. And then I’m also watching the reaction happen. But in that moment, I can just choose to breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. That’s sort of the reset button and rethink button. And then you can choose how you respond instead of react.

[02:11:57] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show today and bringing this awareness. I’m sure many of us have heard of these different things. But we go back to that status quo. We let the excuses come in. Or sometimes we just like to go unconscious. And right now is the perfect time to become conscious again. We tend to do it right around the New Year. The most amount of gym memberships happen right around the New Year. And then by March, the attendance drops down by, like, over 70 percent. So it’s how we are. But if we could, this time around, especially since we’re coming into a whole new decade 2020, we can really kick into a different gear and never go back to the old complacency. Kick into a new gear by taking Kellyann’s advice. Start by get out a journal. Get out a blank piece of paper and ask yourself, “What do I want? What do I want? What kind of health do I want in my body? And what do I want to do about it?” And and if you ever find excuses, if you ever here the little voice go, “but, but, but.” “I’m too tired in the morning to go to gym.” Or, “I don’t like cleaning up after juicing.” Or, “My kids don’t like eating that way. I’m going to have to cook for two different -” whatever. All those little excuses, right? You can write them down on a separate piece of paper and just keep writing down the excuses because get it out of your head. I find that when we get the mess out of our head, and that’s why working with a health coach really helps, working with a counselor really helps. Someone that is not judgmental, doesn’t have an ulterior motive of like, maybe, if you talk to a friend or family member. They would have an ulterior motive. But someone who’s a sounding board. And then you get the chaos out of your head and you start to see it for what it is. And those excuses stop having power over you. And I’ve heard this from so many people, the little excuse in the head, “Oh. Vegetables don’t taste good. I don’t want to eat a stir fry. I don’t want to eat a salad. I don’t want to have a green smoothie. That doesn’t taste good.” That little voice in the head is trying to convince us not to do it. But the second you put that first bite in your mouth of that salad or drink that smoothie, it’s like, “This is good. My body’s buzzing.”

Today for breakfast, I had a green juice. And my son drink it too. And my husband drink it. And our bodies were buzzing until after the gym we came home and had lunch. It was just like we were buzzing. We felt so good. But you bet, that little voice in my head first thing in the morning when I woke up was saying, “Can we just sleep in longer? We don’t have to go to the gym. I want waffles for breakfast. I don’t want to have a juice.” That’s the thing we’re fighting against is either the status quo in our own head. Or we make up excuses for that other people wouldn’t like it. Like, “Oh, my husband wouldn’t like it. So therefore, I’m not going to do it.” Or we think about, “Oh, the children wouldn’t like it. So therefore, I can’t do it.” We don’t even talk to them about it. We just decide that there’s going to be too much turmoil. And therefore we’re just going to stick with the status quo. But the status quo is going to continue to give us the ill health that we have right now.

[02:15:29] Kellyann Andrews: Low frequency.

[02:15:31] Ashley James: Right. So let’s get ourselves to a new frequency.

[02:15:33] Kellyann Andrews: Let’s get to a high frequency. And so one of the things I do, like you just said, is all day long, I look and I surround myself with high nutrient food. Whether it’s chlorella or wheatgrass or minerals. Or my drink that I love to do, which is, turmeric, Goats whey, mineral matrix – and what else do I put in there? The Slippery Elm and sunflower lecithin and then I’ve been adding collagen into that. So I just created a drink or something, some form of nutrients that are easy for you to literally absorb. And when you take that into the body, you just make your body sing, yourself sing. And that’s what is so lovely is when your bodies are singing like a chirping robin in springtime, you’re at a higher frequency. Your thoughts are clear. Your emotions are balanced. You’re feeling like singing. And you have energetic sunshine presence.

And so one of the things that I wish for you in this next year of 2020 is that you completely open up to receiving all the blessings the this wonderful world has to give you. And that you allow us to support you and to surrender to the highest blessings you could ever imagine. Just literally open up your hands right at this minute and just say, “I surrender to God’s, the angels -” or whatever it is you honor – “support and I receive your blessings today. And I will then pass them forward.”

[02:17:37] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much, Kellyann, for coming on the show and getting us aware. Because the first step is awareness. Just like in AA, the first step is being aware.

[02:17:49 Kellyann Andrews: Awake. Awake.

[02:17:50] Ashley James: Being awake and conscious. We are awake and aware and conscious. And then we need to know what we want and write it down.

[02:17:58] Kellyann Andrews: And make a choice.

[02:17:59] Ashley James: And make a choice.

[02:18:01] Kellyann Andrews: And make a conscious choice, just what you were talking about.

[02:18:04] Ashley James: I have a whole interview, this was done a while ago, maybe close to three years ago. So you can look it up on learntruehealth.com. About how to install healthy new habits. There’s a way to utilize how the brain works to create new habits. I mean, you could listen to that whole episode to get all the steps. But the takeaway is, grab a habit you already do and piggyback a new habit onto it.

[02:18:34] Kellyann Andrews: I call it the domino effect in the right direction.

[0 2:18:36] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. So if you always – I use coffee as an example. If you always brew coffee in the morning, what can you do while you’re brewing coffee? What new habit? And so my husband took these exercise bands and we do exercise. This is back when we brewed coffee. He would do exercises. It’s like – I don’t know – five minutes. And he’d really feel it in his legs, you know, burning. Because we do these leg exercises until the coffee was done. If you brush your teeth every morning, what could you do right before or after brushing your teeth? So you grab a habit you already do, that you never forget to do. And even during vacations or weekends, you still do.

[02:19:16] Kellyann Andrews: The one with the brushing of the teeth – let me add that – is you look in the mirror at yourself and you say, “I love you.” And you look into your eyes and keep doing it until you can totally open up to receive that love back.

[02:19:36] Ashley James: Beautiful. So we think about the different habits and we install things like that. So it might be how can we get our eight cups of vegetables in every day? How can we get our 80 ounces or more water in every day? Get our supplements and minerals in every day. Get some kind of exercise that stimulates the lymph system every day. Get some kind of green smoothie filled with those greens that I had mentioned before that are amazing. Get them in first thing in the morning because they will replace the need for coffee. You get a good greens, get in some alive food, juice or make a smoothie. It feels amazing.

[02:20:23] Kellyann Andrews: I suck on chlorella tablets all day long.

[02:20:27] Ashley James: Yes.

[02:20:30] Kellyann Andrews: I have them as a candy.

[02:20:32] Ashley James: Well, my son loves them. He calls them green crackers. And some people complain that they’re dry and they get stuck in your teeth. I just chew them with water. And it just dissolves. So I don’t have a problem. But you can also take the chlorella tablets and put them in a smoothie if you want. So there’s just – it’s little habits. But if every day, we switched a few negative things into positives, it will exponentially grow. And we want to look at decreasing our exposure to the heavy metals into the EMFs. And we want to look at everything that we can do to support the body’s ability to not have that stagnation.

I know you told told me about shi bafa. And I’m going to go look it up on YouTube. Also, you mentioned that you listen to these motivational talks while you’re doing your food prep. Where do you get them from?

[02:21:30] Kellyann Andrews: It’s on YouTube. So if you look up, I Am Affirmations. I Am Affirmations. And the one that I love the best – he does a ton of them – and just put in I Am Affirmations-Miracles and Gratitude. And it just has the most soothing music and beautiful visuals and fabulous things. So I just listen to that when I’m doing the meal preparations every day And then just take that in and then focus on your breathing. Because that was the other one that I added on recently, doing the affirmations and just breathe it in and breathe it out. So like you’re taking it in and you’re giving it out, breathe it in and breathe it out.

[02:22:19] Ashley James: I love it. Awesome. Kellyann, is there anything left unsaid to wrap up today’s show?

[02:22:24] Kellyann Andrews: I think just for people to be gentle on themselves. Because we always got that parent voice in our head of all the things we didn’t get done today or the derailments that happened, it’s so easy to focus on them. And just at the end of the day and throughout the day, to take pauses of time where you just sit and do nothing but breathe. Just literally sit in a chair and just completely relax your body so that you go into that parasympathetic nervous system. And so the summary of the whole entire topic today is health is putting the right stuff in and getting the wrong stuff out. Illness is putting the wrong stuff in and not getting the wrong stuff out.

[02:23:10] Ashley James: And putting good the right stuff in.

[02:23:12] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. We want to definitely put the right stuff in.

[02:23:16] Ashley James: Right. Higher vibration.

[02:23:18] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. Everything. Whether that’s on a physical level or mental level or emotional level, especially spiritual. Because the spiritual can transform all of the the others so quickly. And it’s so important to connect into that realm.

[02:23:37] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Kellyann, for coming on the show. And listeners can check out your website.

[02:23:46] Kellyann Andrews: Platinumenergysytems.ca. CA is Canada.

[02:23:47] Ashley James: I was going to say PES.

[02:23:49] Kellyann Andrews: Right. That’s right. Platinum energy, you know, people are so fun. They go, “Platinum?” And I said, “Yes. Like the ultimate credit card. That platinum. The platinum energy. That’s what you want is the ultimate ,the highest frequency energy.” And so platinumenergysystems.ca.

[02:24:11] Ashley James: Great. Excellent. Thank you so much, Kellyann. And listeners, definitely check out the past episodes as well, Episode 292, 293, 329, and 330 It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. And I can’t wait to have you back again. Thanks so much.

[02:24:26] Kellyann Andrews: Well, it’s so awesome to connect with you always, Ashley. And thank you so much for being such an amazing person yourself. And willingness to be who you are and to be a beautiful circle of influence on this planet this time. Because your message is exactly what we all need to hear, that there is a way forward. And then we just need to all pass that forward.

[02:25:00] Ashley James: Yes. Yes. Let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn what it is like to have true health.

[02:25:08] Kellyann Andrews: And to feel worthy of it. There’s something on humans level, especially women. There’s a psychological aspect that just is, why wouldn’t you choose the food that is the highest vibration? Why wouldn’t you choose to stop doing the things that make you feel not great? So I give you absolute full permission to be your own best friend and to put into your body and your being all those things that make you feel your best.

[02:25:44] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? And how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

I definitely recommend that you check them out. You can Google Institute for integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call. Or you can go to learnttruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health

Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. And I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information.

We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctors offices. You can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children to be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success in their health goals.

There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Get Connected With Kellyann Andrews!

Official Website

Check out other interviews of Kellyann Andrews!

Episode 330 – Holistic Habits And Success Stories (Part 2)

Episode 329 – Stories of Success Through Detox

Episode 293 – Balancing pH

Episode 292 – Creating Wellness

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