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Learn True Health with Ashley James

On Learn True Health, Ashley James interviews today's most successful natural healers. Learn True Health was created for YOU, the health enthusiast. If you are passionate about organic living or struggling with health issues and are looking to gain your health naturally, our holistic podcast is what you have been looking for! Ashley James interviews Naturopathic Doctors and expert holistic health care practitioners to bring you key holistic health information, results based advice and new natural steps you can take to achieve true health, starting NOW! If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you are fed up with prescription drug side effects, if you want to live in optimal health but you don't know where to start, this podcast is for you! If you are looking for ACTIONABLE advice from holistic doctors to get you on your path to healing, you will enjoy the wisdom each episode brings. Each practitioner will leave you with a challenge, something that you can do now, and each day, to measurably improve your health, energy, and vitality. Learn about new healing diet strategies, how to boost your immune system, balance your hormones, increase your energy, what supplements to take and why and how to experience your health and stamina in a new way. Ashley James from Learn True Health interviews doctors like Dr. Joel Wallach, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz, Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Molly Niedermeyer on Naturopathic Medicine, Homeopathy, Supplements, Meditation, Holistic Health and Alternative Health Strategies for Gaining Optimal Health.
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Now displaying: July, 2019
Jul 31, 2019

Check out the info about my favorite bed for the best sleep: https://www.learntruehealth.com/bed

Listen to my interviews about Sunlighten Saunas and detoxification: https://www.learntruehealth.com/?s=sunlighten

 Grounding for decreased inflammation and stress:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding

https://aspirenaturalhealth.com

 

The Clear Path To Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-clear-path-to-health-tim-gertsmar

 

Highlights:

  • Recognize the help of health professionals around you not juts MDs
  • Pharmaceuticals can only manage the symptoms we have to go to the root cause of the illness
  • food is either causing disease or it’s healing our body
  • Food and stress are triggers of our health

  

Considered as a “taboo” when it comes to conversations, one may never know how important gut health is. Listen to today’s interview to learn more about how to take good care of your gut health besides treating it as a simple digestive system which simply has to function.

 

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. Today Dr. Tim Gerstmar shares some excellent advice for those who have gut health issues and autoimmune issues and who wish to no longer have them. He talks about the foundations of health that when disrupted lead to exacerbating those issues, inflaming them and creating acute symptoms and how to get them under control. He works with people that within a year most of them are in remission which is really exciting. He gets such great results. There’s three key things. We talked a little bit about the importance of sleep and stress reduction and some ways to do that. I mentioned that my absolute favorite mattress that a few months ago I got. My husband and I love it. It completely changed how we sleep. We sleep deep. We get such great quality sleep. You can go to learntruehealth.com/bed to learn more about my favorite mattress. There’s a really great special that they’re providing for my listeners. There’s 2 educational videos on that site talking about the science behind the mattresses. They’re non-toxic. They have I believe it’s a 20-year guarantee, a 20-year warranty. What I mostly love about it is that the science behind it allows you to no matter what you’re a side sleeper, whether you sleep on your stomach, whether you sleep on your back, any direction. It relieves pressure and allows your spine to be straight the entire time. It’s the most luxurious deepest restful sleep you’ll ever have. I highly recommend going to learntruehealth.com/bed to check that out. I also mentioned that I absolutely loved using my Sunlighten Sauna both for detoxification and to decrease stress. You can go to learntruehealth.com and search sauna or search Sunlighten to listen to the two episodes I’ve done on sunlighten sauna and why it’s my favorite. I had the co-founder Connie Zack on the show and she shares some great information about their low EMF non-toxic saunas. I have one in my house and I’ve been using them for over a year. Getting some really great results with detoxification. Like I said, it’s also wonderful for stress reduction and that’s really important in today’s interview. My third thing that I absolutely love that I have to mention especially about autoimmune and decreasing inflammation, are grounding mats. I recently had Clint over on the show. I highly recommend listening into that episode. You can join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Check out the pinned post right now which is the movie. The documentary that Clint created so you can learn more about why people are going into remission. Going into remission from autoimmune condition when doing grounding or earthing. They explain the science of it in that video which is in the Learn True Health Facebook group. Excellent. If you want to learn more about the grounding, you can go to learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s learntruehealth.com/grounding. Thank you so much for being a listener.  I know you’re going to love today’s episode. Please share it with those you love who have gut issues and who have autoimmune issues so we can help them to learn true health.

 

[03:44] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 372. I am so excited for today’s interview. We have with us Dr. Tim Gerstmar who is an expert in autoimmune and gut health. He’s actually a local naturopathic here, just south of me in Redmond, Washington but he can also consult people all around the world through the magic of Skype or the magic of the internet. Tim, I’m really excited to have you here today because I actually know your office manager, Lorelie. She’s the one that introduced us and she became an avid listener. She raves about you. She says that people around the world come to your clinic who are just the most complex cases of gut health and people with autoimmune conditions that - she see miracles performed in the clinic. You must have holy water on your office desk or something that people come in and you help them to dial in their diet, their herbs, their supplements, their lifestyle and that you’re really helping them to gain a foundation of health especially after they have seen so many other specialists and they feel like the medical system has failed them. So really excited to have you here today, welcome to the show.

 

[05:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Thanks, Ashley. I really appreciate it. I’m very grateful to get in front of your audience and share some nuggets of wisdom here. See if we can help people. I really want to thank you. You’ve created something magical. I’ve seen your podcast, your Facebook group. To everyone listening, you’ve done a good thing for yourself by being part of this community and thank you for the kinds words. I also don’t want to take too much credit. One of the things, the good thing and the bad thing about integrative or holistic medicine is compared to conventional medicine is it’s not like the doctor as the mechanic. I’m taking out your muffler and putting in a new one and it solves all your problems. Certainly, a lot of our great results come from people who are really engaged in the process. They’re really willing to dive in there and get into their own diet and lifestyle. Work on their mindset and make some of these changes and do some of these things. I owe so much of my results to the hard work and the willingness to change that the people who come to work with us are willing to do because without that the people who come to us and they’re just like, “Hey, give me the magic herb that will fix my problems.” They invariably walk away disappointed and in fact over the years I’ve been practicing, I’ve been doing this for over 10 years now. We actually have a screening process to turn those people away not because there’s anything wrong with them but we just know that they’re not going to get the results. They’re going to be disappointed and it’s just a waste of their time, their money, their energy. Nothing’s are going to happen unless people are engaged in and that is probably the single biggest reason not to engage with holistic medicine is because some people just start in a place where they’re already willing and able to make those changes. We understand and we’re grateful. We’re going to talk about a different approach to autoimmunity but I also want to be clear, I’m not anti-drug. There is a time and a place for those drugs. They saved people’s lives they continue to be valuable tools. We don’t believe that they address the root causes and the issues that are going on but they’re a helpful tool that can have their place and some people even with the best holistic medicine that we have available find that they still do need some of those medications.  A lot of people are able to get off them. A lot of people are able to reduce their medicine or move from stronger ones to less potent ones but it is important to know one of the very first things that we talked about. For anyone who’s interested to come and see us is understanding what the goals are. A lot of people their goal is to get off medicine. We always say, “Look it is really easy to get off the medicine, just stop taking the medicine.” but of course, that can be a very, very bad thing for the person to do. Their quality of life can be very poor. Their pain or disability or other issues can be quite serious. So our goal first and foremost is that people have a great quality of life. Not only do they feel good but they’re thriving in all the aspects of their life. If we can get a person to that place without the need for prescription medicine and immune suppressant or anti-inflammatory or other medications then awesome. That is our goal. But if we do need those medicines for people to achieve that quality of life, that safety of life and limb now we’re going to make us the medicine. I’m bringing this off right of the bat because there may be a few people who hear that message and are like, “I don’t know if I want to continue in this conversation if this guy is saying that medicines are useful.” and that’s okay but we do believe medicines aren’t bad. They’re tools. A lot of times they’re misused or they’re used to just put a band-aid on top of things instead of really going in and addressing it but they are valuable tools nonetheless.

 

[09:20] Ashley James: With naturopathic medicine, you learn how to use other tools. Whereas MDs are taught how to use pharmaceutical medicine. They’re not taught how to use herbs or how to use supplements even how to use diet. They’re not taught anything about therapeutic diets or foods or herbs so you have bigger tool belt than MDs. For those who don’t know much about naturopaths, there’s a lot of listeners that would know a lot about naturopaths because I have them on the show all the time but for those who don’t know about naturopaths, I urge listeners to get yourself a naturopathic physician. They are the best. Because of naturopathic medicine I’m no longer a diabetic, no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome, I no longer have chronic adrenal fatigue. The things that plagued me. I was so sick in my 20’s and 30’s. I was so sick. I was bedridden. When I was 19, I was told by an endocrinologist I’d never have kids. I was infertile my entire adult life until naturopathic medicine and we conceived naturally and our son is 4 years old. Whereas MDs that I saw through my 20’s and 30’s said, every time I came to them it’s like, “Okay, here’s another drug, here’s another drug.” They had no tools in their tool belt for help me heal anything in my chronic illness. Could you just let people know what’s the difference between a naturopath and a medical doctor in terms of your education and your ability to help people.

 

[10:58] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Totally. Absolutely. Listen it’s important to recognize, I’m happy to answer that. This is just quickly on what you said. MDs in the conventional medical system there’s no one better to treat serious illnesses life-threatening disease, injuries, surgeries. Nobody does it better than the conventional system and regular MDs. That is where they absolutely shine. If I get in a car accident, I’m not going to go see a Naturopathic doctor if I’m bleeding. I’m going to get myself to a hospital. I’m going to get the surgery that I need. I’m going to take the medications to protect my life and limb. Exactly what you said in this chronic health issues like PCOS like chronic digestive issues like irritable bowel syndrome or heartburn or autoimmune disease. The best that MDs can do is manage those things for you. Use prescription medications to manage those things. Diabetes, for example, is considered as incurable, progressive, meaning it will just continue to get worse and worse over time disease. Basically any Naturopath work the result will tell you that type II diabetes, we’re not talking about type 1 the autoimmune type of diabetes. But type II diabetes is incredibly manageable. The vast majority of the time it’s completely reversible and can disappear and it does not have to be a chronic progressive disease. Of course, you have to go far beyond just taking medications to try and manage it. You actually have to get into diet and lifestyle and all of these factors. Like you said, MDs just don’t have the training. People express frustration all the time. “Why won’t my MD talk about these things with me? Why won’t they prescribe this type of treatments for me? Why did they look at me like I have two heads when I bring these things up?” There are a lot of reasons but fundamentally most MDs out there are dedicated, diligent, very intelligent, hardworking people. They’re trying to make a difference in people’s lives. They just don’t have the education to understand that these thing are possible or to know what to do about them. Again, use an MD for their expertise and the things they’re good at. My hope with integrative medicine is that instead of each side saying, so again if you break a leg, don’t come and see me I’d be a terrible doctor to help treat those. If you need to have surgery, you do not want me to be wielding the knife and doing the surgery. You probably not going to make it out there. At the same time, what I want is, when someone like you Ashley goes and says, “Hey, I have PCOS. Hey, I have diabetes. Hey, I have these other issues.” In my dream world that MD says, “You know what, this is not my wheelhouse. This is not my expertise. You need to go see someone like a naturopath to get those issues resolved. We’d all worked together and be friends.” In some ways it’s starting to happen a little bit, in other ways it’s a long way off. One of the deep frustrations of basically everyone that comes to see us “Why isn’t this stuff more commonplace. If I’d only known 2, 3, 5, 10” – was just talking to a lady on the phone the other day who’s had chronic digestive issues for 40 years and has tried to seek out help many different places and just hasn’t found it. There’s a very good chance within the next six months we can have these things majorly improved for this person. So why don’t people know about it? To answer your other question quickly. Naturopathic Medicine for many people maybe not the listeners of this show, for many people it’s something they’ve never heard about before. People may think, “Does that mean a herbalist? Does that mean a nutritionist? A homeopath is that what you’re talking about?” and the answer is No, that’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about the profession of Naturopathic medicine, which is to attend a rigorous medical school education. I went to 4 years of intensive medical school. All of the sciences that MDS have. Anatomy, biochemistry, we were in the labs dissecting the bodies, we were doing rotations, we were doing all of these things. The major most critical difference is after we get that education in basic science, instead of going on to exclusively focus on drugs and surgery, our focus is on lifestyle, nutrition, therapeutic diets, the use of herbal medicines and on and on and on. A whole host of different therapy. We know prescription drugs but we also know and favor the use of non-prescription drugs. That would be the single biggest difference. You get the same level of medical education with a completely different focus for therapies and that’s what is many people are looking for.

 

[16:25] Ashley James:  I love it. Thank you so much for just laying the groundwork. Moving forward to the interview, everyone knows you’re a naturopathic physician. It’s like the best of both worlds. You can diagnose. You have drugs to treat if you want them but you also have the herb supplements, diet like all the other things out there. Naturopaths love to help people by doing the least amount of harm. And so you’re going to find the tool that does the least amount of harm and helps the person the most.

 

[16:57] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Well, we always talk about, you can imagine a pyramid. In your mind, you imagine pyramid or a triangle with four different levels on it. The lowest level to the ground, we talk about is diet and lifestyle. That is the foundation of what we’re working with. You go one step up to the second level of the pyramid and that’s things like herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients go in that second level. The third level up is going to be prescription medications and the fourth level up is going to be things like surgeries and other very aggressive type of therapies for people. We always start at the bottom and work our way upwards. Again, it’s not that no one ever needs prescription medicine or no one needs surgeries, that’s definitely not the case but were saying to the MDs like, “Look, you’re starting to the third level up. How about we back up and make sure that those two bottom levels are taken care of first and a good trunk of the time we find out if those base levels are taken care off. We don’t even need to get to the third and fourth levels.” Again, it’s not that one is good ant the other is bad. It’s saying we need a bigger picture of what’s going on. Again, I find that MDs are stuck at the top of the pyramid and I find some natural practitioners are stuck at the bottom of the pyramid and refused to acknowledge that just the bigger picture all around. If our goal is the well-being, the health and the well-being of everyone or at least the people we come in contact with and are able to help. We need to use every tool that’s available. Again, some people need drugs, a lot of people don’t. We want to have all those tools available and thank you for tuning the horn for naturopaths here. We are one of the few professions that really has the training and the understanding to make use of all of it. That is the reason I evaluated many different types of medicine before I chose to become a naturopath and it was that blending together. Getting the best of all worlds. That’s the reason that I chose this profession and I pursued it all these years. Because it gives me the flexibility to deploy a whole range of tools for people.

 

[19:25] Ashley James: I definitely want to get into how to help people. Later in this interview, we’re going to give some really great actionable advice and help people have a clear path to health. The name of your book, The Clear Path to Health. I want to first learn a bit more about your story. What happened in your life that made you want to become a doctor specifically a naturopathic physician?

 

[19:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes. If you ask most the majority of doctors or other health practitioners, you’re going to hear one of two stories. Either their own personal health struggles and their journey led them into healing and medicine. Then they pursued that down a particular path. Or that a loved one their struggles brought someone into medicine and that second one is me. I was on college at that time about to graduate and finish college. My dad went into surgery, it all went perfectly fine. I can remember very vividly, I was at work. I came home late. Full disclosure here, I was popping a microwave meal into the microwave to have some dinner after a long day of school and then work. The phone rang and I picked it up and my mom was just sobbing on the other end of the phone. Long story short, after the surgery, while my dad was in recovery, he’d have a massive stroke. No one had known or paid attention because he was unconscious from the sedatives. It was only when my mom said, “Shouldn’t he be waking up?” And they were like, “Well, maybe but it’s okay.” And then she finally said put her foot down and said, “No. Listen, it’s been hours and hours and hours now. He should be awake. Wake him up.” and suddenly it was, he’s had a severe stroke. They rushed him off. So she called me and said they were taking him to intensive care. He might not live through the night. I scarfed down my microwave meal and that began my health journey. The short version is. I moved home. Along with my mom, his caretaker for a little over a year. Taking him to all his appointments. I’ve been grateful and lucky to be a healthy young man. I never really had too much experience with medicine or the medical system but I was in and out of doctor’s offices and physical therapists and other therapists near constantly so I got to see everything from the inside. All the good stuff that was awesome and all the bad stuff. Like so many other people, I was asking “What else can we do? What else can help him?” You know, the conventional answer was nothing. There are no other options. No, his diet doesn’t make any difference. No herbs or nutrients can possibly help. No other therapies beyond physical therapy speech and occupational therapy could make any difference on him. Like so many other people, I refused to accept that answer. In those days, the internet was not such a big thing. Google and Facebook didn’t exist at that time. It was a little harder to find information. I started going to libraries during the day and bookstores. I started calling practitioners and talking to them, trying to understand what other options. I found out for example in China, if you have stroke while you’re there in the hospital, they will start acupuncture right away and find that the combination again of conventional medicine and a more holistic approach is more effective than one or either alone. After that year and a half or so, I was aimless. I didn’t quite know what I needed to do. Short version is, medicine sounded really interesting to me. I spent so many hours studying and talking to people but I was trying to figure out which one was right for me. I thought at first, I would go the conventional route. Get an MD and maybe like Andrew Weil who was just kind of becoming popular around this time. Maybe I would be a more integrative. I had a fortune of talking to a few good MDs who very quickly stirred me away from that path and said, “You’re setting yourself up for a very unpleasant number of years if that’s what you’re really hope to do. You’re not going to find it within the conventional system.” I explored many other options from chiropractic to acupuncture and just could not find the right fit for me until I heard about this little profession. It was headquartered in the Pacific North West in Washington, in Oregon. Really where it’s home was called naturopathic medicine. I explored it and knew immediately that that was the right choice for me and that’s been my path ever since.

 

[24:24] Ashley James:  I love it. As you were going to school, were you able to help your dad further? Did you start to see that natural medicine could help him?

 

[24:37] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: That year plus that I was caretaking him, we engaged in quite a bit of holistic medicine. From acupuncture to something called neurofeedback. To some vitamins and minerals and such and we found that they were all helpful. One of the greatest tragedies of anyone who learns this stuff either as a professional practitioner or just as a layperson listening to a podcast like this and educating themselves, one of the greatest tragedies is that the people closest to us so often don’t listen to us. My mom who since passed on was more than pleased to tell everyone that I was a doctor. Her son the doctor but when it came to listening to me about making changes or trying this, they very rarely happen. Unfortunately, despite all my expertise, I like to believe I was able to help a little bit but that was not the be my calling but instead, help with other people locally here and all over the place, all over the States and all over the world to help them.

 

[25:53] Ashley James: When did you decide in autoimmune and in healing the gut?

 

[25:56] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: That’s a great question. The gut had become trendy now. You look on the internet, you listen to shows and you hear a lot about the gut and were having more and more research every day coming out telling us about how the gut and what’s going on in it affects basically every single part of our bodies. One of the beautiful things about naturopathic medicine which is about a hundred years old now, the profession from the very beginning focused on the importance of the gut. It’s always said from the earlier part of our schooling was always, “Look, disease begins in the gut.” That old Hippocrates, that ancient great physician Hippocrates quote, “Disease begins at the gut.” And so we always took that to heart.  When I graduated, no matter else I was doing what other symptoms someone had going on. I was always coming back to the digestion as an important part of healing that. The gut is not a very glamorous thing. It’s not something most of us want to talk about. Our digestive function, what’s happening in in the bathroom. I found as I was working with people that I just grew more and more interested in the gut. I was very grateful that I got into the earlier research on the microbiome or the bacteria that live inside our digestive tract and began to see the influence that it had on health. I was just able to make such an impact on people’s lives that I very quickly transitioned to sort of just being a general naturopath to working on the gut. What I found over the years was that many people came to me with autoimmune issues both digestive and autoimmune issues and as we worked on their digestive issues, we saw a lot of improvement in their autoimmune issues. It wasn’t the primary focus but we saw so much improving. Coupled with more research and the increasing prevalence of autoimmune disease it became a segway for me moving from exclusively working on the gut to working with people with autoimmune disease as well. Thankfully, now there are many practitioners who are queued into the importance of the gut and are helping people. There are still far and away not enough people taking a holistic approach to autoimmune disease and helping people with that.

 

[28:33] Ashley James:  Since you decide to focus specifically on those two, what kind of results have you seen? Can you share some stories of success or some kind of results that you’ve gotten through the years of helping people to recover from autoimmune and heal their gut?

 

[28:51] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes. Absolutely. It’s a joy to see people go from the bad place that they’re in to go to feeling great and many even thriving. One recent for example, I had a gentleman in something called inflammatory bowel disease. This is one of our specialties because it is at the inner section between the digestive system and autoimmunity. Inflammatory bowel disease is a type of autoimmunity specifically affecting the digestion. This gentleman had a version of it known as ulcerative colitis.  It causes a lot of pain in the gut, diarrhea, and blood. It’s a very scary disease because you can imagine you go to the bathroom, your guts are hurting, you pass some diarrhea which is unpleasant enough to start with but you happen to look down into the toilet bowl and there’s just blood everywhere. It’s a very scary experience for people to go through. So this gentleman had been dealing with ulcerative colitis for a number of years now. He’d been on and off medication with ups and downs going on. Finally, like many people, he said, ”Is there something more that can be done rather than having to keep running back to the doctor and getting a prescription for steroid or prednisone every time something flares up?” He came to see us. We worked with him over the course of about 9 months. Made dietary changes for him. Recommended some different herbs and nutrients. He has done exceptionally well. We’ve been monitoring him now, his ulcerative colitis is in complete remission. It’s absolutely dormant and quiet for him. He’s not taking any medications. Actually in his case been able to wean off many of the supplements, the herbs and nutrient as well. There’s a few that he takes. Does definitely pays attention to his diet. He finds it’s a major factor. We help him identify specific foods that are problematic for him. Others that don’t have any issue whatsoever. It was such joy at his last visit, which was a few weeks back to see, not only was the UC not bothering him. He had no digestive issues whatsoever. He had no other complaints of autoimmunity that were going on. He was actually thriving. He was happy. Speaking to going just beyond the symptoms. Of course, when people come to us they’re hyper-focused, “I’m going to the bathroom 5-10 times a day. It’s diarrhea, there’s blood in it. It’s scary. I don’t feel good.” All these issues are going on. One of the things that we found in his case was that stress was a big factor for him. Stress at home. Stress at work. By his willingness to dive in and start addressing those factors. He’s made some fundamental changes at work. He’s made some changes at home. He’s made some changes in some of the relationships in his life. Again, not only is the UC quiet, but his quality of life, his ability to thrive has skyrocketed. That’s just one example. We’re so incredibly proud of all the work that he’s done and the progress. In contrast, what would have happened if he had just gone down the conventional routes is there would have been an escalation of medications possibly up to the biologic medications, which if insurance covers them that’s good. There’s often major out of pocket cost. Most of the medications run $20,000 or more a year as their base price. These are very expensive medications for people. They either have to give themselves injections or they have to go into the facility and have IVs put in every once in a while to get these medications. There would’ve been no discussion of diet, no discussion of stress, no discussion of these other factors. If everything worked right and we hope it would. His UC would’ve been quiet and not bothering him. We wouldn’t have moved to simply being symptom-free to thriving having a better quality of life than before.

  

[33:18] Ashley James:  Awesome. I love it. I love that story. Do you get people who have an autoimmune and gut issue all the time? Is that your main focus or do you find that you get people with just the autoimmune or do all autoimmune people have some gut-level issues?

 

[33:35] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  I shy away from all, every and none. Those big categorical words. Does every person who has autoimmune disease have a gut dysfunction? I don’t believe the answer is yes. Do the vast majority of people with autoimmunity have gut dysfunction? Yes, they do. We found our experience has been that 80-90% of people find that making dietary changes result in from major to at least minor improvement in their autoimmunity. Do there seem to be some people maybe 10% of people out there from our experiences where diet seems to play little to no role in what’s going on for them? Yes. I’m cautious when we say every person but our experience the people that we worked with, almost all of them. They may not recognize they have gut problems. In fact, it’s very common when you come in they say, “I have rheumatoid arthritis” “Okay, let’s talk about your digestion.” “Oh, it’s fine.” “Okay, no worries but let’s talk about it a little bit more what’s going on.” “Oh yes, I have this issue. Oh yes, I guess I have that as well. Oh, doesn’t everybody have that?” It’s just like, “Okay. There is a dysfunction.” Now a gut dysfunction seems to be at the root of many cases of autoimmunity and again, we routinely find that by improving the gut function that we’re able to make a real positive difference in people’s autoimmunity. Again, if everybody remembers the pyramid, at the bottom of it. Diet and lifestyle and we would also put gut function right down there at the base. is just treating the gut going to cure all autoimmune disease and deal with everything? No. It’s not, unfortunately. I wish it was a simple answer that we could say like that. Is it fundamental that many, many people are going to find significant benefit by treating their gut? Yes. Again, what would you say to people, look if diet and lifestyle and treating the gut are not enough to take care of your problems on their own, it’s good to start at a lower level where the side effects, the issues there are very minimal. Again if you clean up your diet and lifestyle and even if it makes absolutely zero impact on your autoimmune disease, it’s going to make a significant impact on the rest of you as a human being. Who has a body who has all the systems functioning? The worst we can say, for example, another case were still going, we have a person come to us with autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto's, hoping to get off their medication. Again, one of the things we tell people, we cannot guarantee that you’re going to get off your medicine. I just want to put this out there. If people have seen other practitioner or other courses or other people saying, “Absolutely, positively, I guarantee you can get off your thyroid medication if you do this thing” either they have some magic that I’m not aware of or my experience says that’s a false spell of goods. There is no guarantee that everyone everywhere will be able to get off medication. We found through some dietary changes that have been ongoing thus far, we have not been able to make a big impact on her thyroid function or the hashimotos. But at a minimum, she lost some weight, her skin is better, her energy has improved. She feels better. Her stress levels are down. That’s what we always tell people is look, by starting with these fundamentals even if it’s not able to make a big impact on the autoimmunity or the other disease or issue that you have going on. It’s able to improve the general quality of your life and your overall well-being and reducing your long term risk for things like heart disease or cancer. The big E’s that cut people’s life short and destroy their quality of life. I personally believe it’s always worthwhile to address this. Most of the time it’s going to improve a persons’ autoimmunity and in those instances where it doesn’t. I have yet to see someone who doesn’t feel that it’s improved their quality of life or their overall health.

 

[38:27] Ashley James: Got it. There’s this theory that autoimmune issues are caused by leaky gut syndrome which has been exacerbated by or caused by gluten and grains among other things. Can you talk about that? Do you get everyone off of grains or every one off of gluten? How effective have you found that? I’ve heard from other practitioners that they cannot get results with an autoimmune client if they don’t go gluten-free. Is that your experience?

 

[39:07] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Sure. Gluten is one of the more common problematic foods. Again, I am not an every and all. So generally, if we have our way, we start people on a gluten-free diet. We often will use a paleo diet or an autoimmune paleo diet as a starting place to put people on. I want to say a lot of people with autoimmunity definitely do have problems with gluten. It is a very problematic food for people as is dairy. Probably the two biggest problematic foods that are really unfortunate because so many foods that we all love to eat have gluten and dairy in them but they are very problematic foods for people. Having said that, does every person with autoimmunity must be gluten-free or cannot heal if they eat gluten? That has not been my experience. Again, many people have problems with gluten but not everyone does. I’ve seen people with a variety of autoimmune diseases, again, we usually cut it out in the beginning as we get to work and as we’re trying to identify the problematic foods for people but in a later time, we almost always recommend that people re-introduce gluten and see if it’s a problematic food for them. There are percentage of people they find that gluten is just not an issue. They’re able to eat it and be perfectly fine.

 

[40:37] Ashley James: I know you’re not always person when it comes to advise. What are the most common things though that you found are really helpful?

 

[40:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Definitely diet. We always recommend unless people come to us already have done a lot of experimentation with diet, already identified a lot of the triggers and issues that are going on but virtually everyone who comes to see us. Again, we kind of consider this low hanging fruit. We go through to an elimination diet. There are a lot of different ways to do it but again, something like a paleo diet or an autoimmune paleo diet is a nice segway into it. A paleo diet remove grains and dairy at its base. There are a few different tweaks to it. An autoimmune paleo diet goes one step further taking out all of the big problematic foods to include things like eggs and nightshade and nuts and some other foods as well. It can be quite a restrictive diet. Certainly, if no one has ever done that before this idea for you that food could possibly impact what’s going on. The number of people that have been told by their gastroenterologist, that’s a conventional gut doctor, or rheumatologist, kind of conventional autoimmune doctor that food has zero impact what’s going on. I’ve wanted to bang my head against the wall so many times for that bad advice for people. Food absolutely for the majority of people plays at least a modest role in their autoimmunity. The majority of people by finding their dietary triggers and removing them can make a significant impact in their autoimmunity and in their health in general. Kind of a low hanging fruit for everyone is I do recommend if you’ve never done it before. Do an elimination diet. In fact, not quite autoimmunity. Just yesterday I spoke with someone and they found they were healing with eczema. Very common immune conditions. Eczema is not autoimmune. In fact, Ashley do you think you would help just briefly to talk about the different between inflammatory or an autoimmune issues. I find there’s a lot of confusion about that.

 

[43:07] Ashley James:  Absolutely. Go ahead.

 

[43:08] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Inflammation a lot of people specially the educated people who are listening to a podcast like this have heard the word inflammation before. They know that information is at the root of many different conditions and problems and diseases that are going on. I find that a lot of people who come to see me don’t actually know what inflammation is. Inflammation at its heart just means an active immune system. When the immune system gears up and activates itself a whole bunch of things happen. Chemicals are released and things happen but globally we call that those changes inflammation. Now we come to think of inflammation as a bad thing. Somethings that’s a problem and it absolutely can be. Inflammation can also be a very good thing. If we are able to magically reach in and shut down inflammation in your body, you would not be able to fight off infections. We need inflammation to happen. Again, inflammation active immune system when we’re fighting off a virus or bacteria. It’s one of the reasons that these immune-suppressing drugs whether they’re steroids or whether they’re the more aggressive immune suppressors make people more vulnerable to things like infection and possibly cancer as well. It’s because by shutting down the immune system or reducing it’s effectiveness, it can’t fight off those things in the same way as if it didn’t have those drugs pulling down immune functions. Inflammation in and of itself is not bad. The problem is inflammation and active immune system is supposed to be there to fight off an infection. To help heal an injury or wound. Again, if anybody’s taken steroids or immune suppressants, you can see that cuts and scratches and other wounds just basically can stop healing or take forever to heal because the necessary inflammation that the body needs to generate to cause that healing just isn’t happening. Again, that inflammation continuing on unshackled or too much of it or for too long is where we see all of these problems occurring. Something like eczema which his very common is an inflammatory condition. The immune system is flaring up, it’s causing the skin to react to become red or itchy. In contrast, an autoimmune issue is when the immune system has decided that part of your body is a problem. It is treating your joints for example as if they were a foreign bacteria that invading you. It’s attacking those joints and causing damage and pain and destruction to those joints. Something like eczema is inflammatory but not autoimmune. The body is not attacking or trying to destroy or damage the skin or other tissues but it is immune-inflammatory. Psoriasis, on the other hand, is an autoimmune disease. Now we have the immune system targeting the skin and causing issues for people. I just find a lot of confusion for people so I hope it helps to clarify and give people a little bit better understanding of the difference between inflammation and autoimmunity. If you have autoimmunity, you’re going to have inflammation but if you have an inflammatory issue it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an autoimmune one.

 

[46:40] Ashley James: Got it. As someone who has an autoimmune condition, you want to make sure that you’re not doing things that increase inflammation in your life. You want to decrease inflammation. I learned from an old school naturopath, I think he’s in ’80s now. He said that this issue with autoimmune which is it feels new to me. It doesn’t sound like something that we had hundred years ago that was as big of a deal. I don’t know if that’s because diagnosing has become so much more advanced or is it that we are really seeing this like huge leap in auto immune conditions in the last 50 years through just the toxic environment and those standard American diet and the chemicals that we’re exposed to. The body is just way more toxic now than it is ever been so more agitated and inflamed. He says that - he also before he became a naturopath was a pathologist so he has that unique relationship to tissue and on a cellular level and he says that when someone has inflation cell damage at the tissue at the cellular level that the immune system comes along to clean it up. That autoimmune is where there’s inflammation on and damage like let’s say to the thyroid. A healthy thyroid but there’s inflammation in the body and the immune system keeps going keeps trying to clean it up and in doing so, it's digesting the thyroid. The MDs will say, “Okay, the body’s attacking itself we need to suppress the immune system.” He says, “No, the immune system’s trying to clean up the damaged tissue. But the damages from the inflammation so something about the immune system of people with autoimmune is a little either hyperactive or what’s going on that some people can have inflammation and that their body doesn’t continue to clean it up and clean it up like an autoimmune response whereas others do. What is the difference? Can we see through genetics? Can we see through like toxicology reports? What can we see that is the difference between those with autoimmune and those without?

 

[49:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Right. That’s the million-dollar question. If I have that exact answer for you, I would be trumpeting it to the world because all these we’re doing, all doctors were doing the best that we can. There’s a lot that we do know and frankly, there’s still so much that we don’t know and we’re hoping to continue to uncover. Now for most autoimmune disease there seem to be some genetic pre-dispositions, I argue that there are. Like for example why does one person get rheumatoid arthritis where the other gets ulcerative colitis where the other gets multiple sclerosis. I think there are some genetic predispositions. Now there’s no smoking gun that’s been identified oh if you have this gene you are going to get multiple sclerosis. I think the way I look at it is in autoimmune disease the immune system loses its way. Our immune systems have a very difficult job. Their job is to be constantly be patrolling around our body looking for things that don’t belong. Now when everything works properly even if the immune cells that are a little too aggressive or that want to target the body’s tissues get weeded out. They don’t exist. Where we‘re seeing autoimmunity occur is because something has gone wrong there. Cells that can target the body are now doing so and that process gets laid down and gets locked into the body. I think from my perspective again, my focus is to try and keep zoomed out and keep a holistic picture on someone. You name a number of factors. I think both detection of autoimmune disease is greater. There are more treatments we can argue about how much we like the different prescription drugs but there are many more treatments available for people than they were in the past. Hundred years ago someone with rheumatoid arthritis was just sort of doomed. They were stuck in their home or they were stuck in a wheelchair. They were just going to live a shorter more miserable life because there were really no, from a conventional side, there were really no available treatments for them. When steroid first become available, they were hailed as a miracle drug because these people that are crippled with pain, their joints and finger were all deformed from damage suddenly could leap out of their chairs and they could move around and they could be pain-free and they could have energy again. Certainly, part of it is that we’re able to detect these things now. The treatments are available. People come forward and they’re diagnosed and they’re brought out into the light if you will some of them were kind of captive in a way in the past. Yes, absolutely we’re seeing a dramatic uptake in autoimmune disease and other issues. One of my mentors begin practicing in the 1970’s he said to me that in his experience diseases all from the 70’s to the present day. He’s seeing diseases happen 20-30 years earlier in people than they used to. Something used to effect to people in their 60s we’re seeing it now affecting people in their 30’s. If something only affecting adults before we’re seeing it now affecting children and teens as well. Definitely many, many factors from our environment. Things we put out there to the way that people are living their lives now. I think all combined together. Whether on autoimmune disease begins as a healing process like you said, it is true when tissue is damaged or needs to be broken down or gotten rid of, it’s the immune system’s job to be a little janitor or a little garbage person and take out that trash and help that tissue rebuild and be healthy again. Whether it’s a genetic predisposition. The immune cells are little faulty in that regard. They’re a little too aggressive now and they’ll go after things they should be restrained from. Think about like we have guard dog on a leash if that leash is a little bit too long or the guard dog is a little bit too aggressive, it can end up biting things that you don’t want to when you want to protect other things. Whether there’s a genetic predisposition or whether the balance that’s going on with that person’s life. If your listeners can imagine those old scales where they have a pan on one side and a pan on the other, you put weights on one side it goes up or down and the things are balanced out. The level with one the other sides heavier it’ll be down lower than the lower one. We can imagine having a balance like that. One side of the scale you can imagine one of those pans being all the anti-inflammatory factors in a person’s life. A good nutritious diet, getting enough rest, reasonable level of exercise, managing their stress correctly that can be again certain supplements or nutrients, all of those different factors that serve to calm the immune system and reduce inflammation go on one side. All the factors that increase or raise inflammation go on the other side. The fact is that the modern lifestyles tilt heavily towards a pro-inflammatory state. My opinion is whether it’s a damage or other issues that kick things off for people, whether you throw in a dash of genetic predisposition towards it and then you tilt those scales heavily in terms of inflammatory factors, it’s no wonder that so many of us are suffering in health conditions in general and autoimmunity here in specific that we’re talking about.

 

[55:26] Ashley James: It’s really scary and interesting to see that what we used to suffer in our 60‘s and 70s’ with, we now suffer in our 30’s or 40’s or even earlier. I know Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, the cardiologist I’ve had on the show. He’s in his 80’s and still practicing. He’s the man that wrote the book, How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He said that when they would open people up and they would see this sort of the beginnings of heart disease that they see beginnings of heart disease people like 40 or 50, these are autopsies from people who died in accidents. Like car accidents. They do those autopsies and they’d find sort of the baseline of the population in terms of heart disease that they could see a 50-year-old beginning to have maybe some blockages or some calcification build up. They’re seeing that in teenagers now. As a population as a whole, we are dying sooner of preventable lifestyle-based diseases and we are as an entire population going down the wrong path. You said the lowest hanging fruit is fixing diet. We definitely all need to be responsible for our diet and I want to talk a bit more about that. What about the toxins that people are exposed to? Do you look into chelation or detoxing or sweating in a sauna. Have you find that helping autoimmune patients to detoxify? Has that also benefited their condition?

 

[57:26] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Yes, because we know there are many different toxic compounds. I define a toxin. My personal definitely is going to be any substance that interferes with the normal functioning of the body symptom. The most basic level is you hold your breath the carbon dioxide, it builds up in your body becomes a toxin and then things your metabolism things start not working correctly so you desperately breathe out to get rid some of that carbon dioxide and get more oxygen into your body. Anything that interferes with that normal functioning there are normal body process that are going to produced toxins and sort of unfortunately we are the inheritors we’ve done a really great job of putting out a lot. The estimates range about a hundred thousand man-made chemicals into the environment that were not there before and are new to the environment. We either dug them of the ground or we synthesized and created them in a laboratory. The sad thing and I wish it weren’t true is that many of these compounds have undergone very minimal testing. It’s usually been around how much you have to give to someone to kill them or to cause them to have cancer. The newest research that has been accumulating shows that lower levels of these toxins of these compounds that won’t kill you can still have a chronic long term impact. We know many of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors. Endocrine’s another word for hormones. We have these compounds that act as hormone disruptors. Whether that’s in causing obesity, diabetes, whether that’s being a carcinogen or chemical that causes cancer. Immune disruptors. So we know many of these chemicals have these issues. Now when it comes to treatment, again, there’s kind of a low hanging fruit and then there’s the more complex stuff. Everything at the simplest level for your listeners reducing as many of these compounds and chemicals in their life as possible. We can break them down into a couple. We have beauty products, I’m sure you’ve probably had experts on before to talk about in particular women’s make-up as a very unregulated field. All the big cosmetic companies, there is no big oversight of them. They voluntarily are supposed to keep an eye on the stuff that they put into their make-up and their beauty products. We know many of them are full of some really nasty products so if people haven’t seen it, the environmental working group has a nice website. A section of it is called skin deep and they talk about a number of different studies and analysis of various cosmetics and beauty products and they make recommendations for some cleaner more organic, less toxic compounds. We always think about beauty products things, people are putting in their skin is being one factor. Household cleaners would be another and then the yard or the office would be another place. We’ve seen many people they move into a new building or a new workplace and their health took a big downturn. Obviously, there could be a variety of factors. One that I just want to bring up because it is so often ignored when we focus on diet, we focus on things like toxins are is mindset as well. That stress factor we find this is such a big deal. We’ve seen people eating good clean diets. Let me back up for just one second Ashley, we talked about the health triad. The three most critical health factors for autoimmunity. It’s not saying that there are other factors that aren’t important or that need to be addressed. The three most critical factors that we see are one, diet. Two, stress and three, sleep. We see it all the time. If one of these factors get a little off, people go out to eat or they go on vacation or they’re on traveling of for some reason their diet gets a little off track. If the other two factors sleep and stress are really under control, they’ll see either just a minor shift in symptoms or they may not notice much of anything. If two of these factors get out of control, we often see a flare and if all three of these factors are out of control, look out this person is set up for some pain unfortunately in a not too distant future. So diet is one critical piece we’ve kind of talked about that to some degree. Sleep is critically important. When people sleep well that is the signal to repair and rebuild their body. We see a lot of improvement from that. Stress is a factor that is just very often overlooked. We were talking earlier about doctors saying if they don’t get gluten out of the diet, we found in addition, that if people don’t or unwilling to look at their stress or unwilling to make changes in their life to help manage and deal with stress then we are unable to get long-lasting significant improvement for people. That if they just changed their diet, that they will see improvement in their autoimmune disease but if they don’t get some of these other factors and stress is probably the elephant in the room if they don’t get that addressed then they’re not going to see really significant results and they’re not going to see really long-lasting results.

 

[01:03:19] Ashley James:  I really like that you pointed this out. I had a client who was she was transiting into type 1 diabetes. The doctors were calling it type 1.5. I’ve never heard of that but she was basically pre-diabetic and then they could see that her even though she was, this was like adult onset type 1 coming on as an autoimmune response. I was helping her as a health coach with her diet and her supplements and I kept addressing stress. I just intuitively felt this was probably the biggest piece of the puzzle and she kept fighting me on it. At one point she said, “I don’t feel stressed.” I said, ”Thank you. Thank you for pointing this out because stress isn’t an emotion like anger and I think we’re all sort of waiting to feel stressed but it’s not an emotion” Right? Can you tell us what is stress and how do we know we have it?

 

 

[01:04:19] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  The short answer, there’s a few pieces to answer here. We don’t ask people anymore if they are stressed. We ask them how they’re managing their stress because almost everyone with the exception of a few retirees or Microsoft millionaires who are independently wealthy and no longer working and can structure their life however they want. With the exception of few people, the vast majority of us are stressed. Now when we ask people or think about stress what they imagine is that inner sensation of pressure. That could be a psychological feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got so much to do today. So many things going on.” It can be that physical sensation of pressure or tightness. The classic shoulders-up-in-your-ears tension in your body that people are feeling but at a fundamental level there are two kinds of stress. There’s the mental-emotional stress, so this is everything from deadlines to children to bosses to traffic. All of those mental-emotional feelings that we have going on. Then their physical stresses as well. Those can range from inflammation is a kind of stress on our body that can go from poor fueling strategies, blood sugar crashes are going to be a source of stress on the body. It’s important to realize that no matter whether it’s a mental stress whether it’s a physical stress the reaction that happens in the body is the same. From a primitive physiological or body-based perspective, stress is gearing us up to deal with a life or death situation. The gazelle on the grasslands, they don’t have too much mental or emotional stress. They’re not thinking about jobs or deadlines, planning for retirement, or dealing so much with the kids or any of those things. Their life is mostly built around the physical stress which is a lion wants to eat me. When that stress responds kicks in we call the fight or flight response is really what stress is. That causes changes within a person’s body. It changes within that animal’s body. Changes within our bodies. Based around that response which is to fight off something that wants to hurt us or run away from something that wants to hurts us. Now human beings we have the blessing and the curse. For most other animals out there, their stresses are mostly physical. For human beings who are fortunate enough like we are to live in the modern world most of us were not dealing with starvation, work or physical harm as real ever-present issues that are going on for us. Most of us modern humans are lucky enough not to deal with those and most of our issues are psychological. Traffic that I had to wave trough, my kids bugging me, my boss is nagging me. All those kinds of issues. It’s important to realize those mental stressors trigger the same physical reactions to occur in a person’s body. Now the other big piece that you said is most of us are dealing with a load of chronic stress but like the story of the frog in the pot of water. If people haven’t heard, I don’t think this story is actually true but you hear it repeated everywhere so it’s good to use as an example. You put a frog in a pot of water if you suddenly pour boiling water on there, it will hurt and the frog will leap out of the pot. The story goes if you just slowly heat up the water the frog gets used to that hot water and doesn’t leap out of the pot. For most of us, we’re in the same situation as the frog in a pot of hot water that’s been turned up and turned up and turned up. That hot water feels normal to us. The chronic stress that we’re under is what we call normalized. We don’t even know it because most of the time it’s there. It’s become background and baseline but still affecting us but we don’t notice it. It's only when there’s big changes in our lives. When we go away on a extended vacation, for example, we’re able to get out from under all that stress and then we suddenly go, “Oh my god. I didn’t even realized how much this was affecting me.” It’s very common. We see it all the time with people. For example with food, there are food that they really need to stay away from. They see flares of those food when they eat those foods. They go away on vacation and they suddenly go, “Oh my god. I was able to eat that food. I thought –“ I accidentally got it for example. “I was so worried that thing were going to flare up” And you know what? They didn’t. Maybe I felt the twinge or maybe I actually felt nothing. It’s very common for people to do a celebratory dance and say, “My gosh, I no longer have problem with gluten. I no longer have a problem with the foods that are an issue for me.” They get back home and they climb back into the pot of hot water that stress level and all of a sudden they go, “Why can I not eat that food? When I was on vacation I was able to eat that food and now I can't do it anymore?” If you remember back to the scale the one side is anti-inflammatory, the other side being pro-inflammatory. If you’re on vacation, your stress level goes way down. There’s other factors you’re’ loading at the anti-inflammatory side of the scale. Now it’s hanging down low. You put a little bit of inflammatory food on the other side it’s not enough to tip the balance into big active inflammation. It’s not a problem. You get back home. You load up the pro-inflammatory side of the scale and so now, you drop that inflammatory food on and it and it shift things over and brings up a flare of symptoms for people. I’m so glad you’ve recognized it. Oftentimes it can feel like talking to brick wall. People either say,” I’m not stressed.” When majority of the time we find when we dig into it, there’s a lot of normalized stress going on for the person. They’re stressed. They just don’t pay attention to it anymore. For some people they just refuse to acknowledge and work on it because on some level, it’s much easier to change your diet that something external to you than to dig into the issues that are stressful. It can be work, it can be family life, they can be priorities, they can be issue patterns that you have, it can go back into all the way into childhood. They can be challenging to deal with it. It feels more internal and it feels more personal. If people are willing fundamentally we’ve seen if they are not willing to address this they’re going to limit their healing and what positive things that can happen for them.

 

[01:11:38] Ashley James:  I interviewed a naturopath actually local one here as well. She made a funny joke. She goes, “You know every time – “she just had another client come back from Hawaii. She says, “Every time a patient of mine comes back from Hawaii, all their symptoms go away. I think I’m going to start prescribing vacations to Hawaii.” It’s just, it’s amazing how you’re painting this picture. This correlation of my condition gets better when I’m on vacation and then I come home and it gets worst. Hello, this is the soup we live in. The stress soup. We want to do things like see mental health counselors to learn healthy coping strategies and mechanisms for helping us on a daily basis. Deal with the daily stressors like you said even from childhood. I know that I run programs that I learn from my parents who are both entrepreneurs. There are things from my childhood that I need to examine and re-program. What can we immediately do or implement on a daily basis to significantly reduce stress? What do you see works really well in your clinic?

 

[01:12:56] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  This is one of the more personal approaches because again, there is no one perfect things that one person finds stress relieving can be stress-inducing for another person. Right?

 

[01:13:13] Ashley James:  Like meditation?

 

[01:13:14] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Meditation. You totally read my mind there. Meditation works beautifully for some people. Such a magical tool. For other people, it makes them insane with rage. It’s like the worst possible thing that we can do. I’m happy here to give you a few suggestions. It is important for anyone listening to know while we can roughly come to some generics like, “Hey, from our perspective try something like a paleo diet or that autoimmune paleo diet or the whole 30 diet. Those are all specific carbohydrate diets. These are all reasonable starting places to work with diet. When it comes to stress, there are few basics. As always it’s figuring out what works for you. Doing this “stress-relieving thing” leaves you feeling more stressed out. It’s not working, right?

 

[01:14:13] Ashley James: If they’re not in touch with their body and in touch with their stress levels, how do they now whether if it’s working or not? We know of heart rate variability. It’s difficult to find an affordable and effective heart rate variability monitor so how would they know that they’re actually lowering their stress when they’re doing something new?

 

[01:14:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Again if stress is triggering the fight or flight response then de-stressing should trigger the relax and digest response going on. Certainly, we can conjure back to those times in our lives when we were not stressed. We can watch what little kids look like when they play. Kids, of course, can get stressed out and have their own issues but by enlarge most kids thankfully aren’t dealing with all the chronic stressors that we have. So there’s smiles, there’s enjoyment, there’s play going on. From a big-picture perspective, this takes most adults totally aback when we ask it. What do you do for play? What do you do for just pleasure and enjoyment? For example, a lot of people have come to us understandably have been doing a lot of research on the internet, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching blogs or vlogs and videos. All of these things to try and better understand what’s going on for them. One of the challenges that will put to people is “What was the last book you read for enjoyment?” Not self-help. Not health related but purely for enjoyment. A lot of times they sit there and stare at us, trying to think up the last thing they did that was purely for joy. Purely for pleasure and have a hard time and often we need to put people, I’m all for people being educated it’s great but often times we have to put people on little bit of a fast of information that’s purely help their self-improvement, make it a homework piece to read something fun or something enjoyable. An activity that people can get lost in by its nature, that flow state is a state of not being stressed. Right? So what do you enjoy doing? This time of year in the pacific northwest, is it getting out for a walk with your dog? Not a power walk, not an “I need to walk for 30 minutes and get my heart rate to 85 % of my cardiovascular maximum” but “Can I actually get outside and enjoy the view? Can I just get some time to de-stress and to bring my creativity out?” One of the things that we see that disappears when people are stressed is creativity. Because we’re on fight or flight. There’s no need to be creative when a tiger’s trying to eat you. Creativity by its nature is a more relaxed flow state. We can’t be worried about the next thing trying to be too creative when you’re driving to work and bumper to bumper traffic. It’s not going to happen. But when we’re talking a nice hot shower. We’re relaxing, our mind is pacing out and all of a sudden the ideas come flooding out. We know we’ve switched off from that sympathetic fight or flight response into a more parasympathetic one.

 

 

[01:17:40] Ashley James:  I love it. My husband has the best ideas when he’s in the shower. He always comes to the shower and tells me something really cool. He’s really creative. I love my time in the sauna. I got my sunlighten sauna, which I absolutely love. Decrease stress and sweating out the toxins which is so great. I have my grounding mat. I really feel relaxed on it and it’s funny because I have it on my bed and I also have it on my desk and now whenever I’m on it, I don’t want to get off of it. I’m lying there going, “I have so much energy, I’m so awake, I’m so ready to get up out of bed but I’m so happy and relaxed right now.” I know that’s working for me. I have a newer mattress. I got a few months ago which I adore. I’ve talked about it before on the show. It’s completely changed how I sleep. That in and of itself decreases stress because when I don’t get sleep, I worry about not getting sleep and I worry about not getting sleep increases stress. Just like about worrying about diets can increase stress. Worrying about stress is going to increase your stress. Worrying about your sleep so it’s that vicious cycle of “Oh, I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m not going to be able to function today.” That worry exacerbates it. That exacerbation of worry it means the next night you won’t be able to sleep well. We’ve got to have that break state. Before we hit record you were talking about the studies they’ve done around getting out in nature and how effective that is in decreasing stress in general. You obviously mentioned, “Let’s go for a walk with our dog.” What about just being in nature? Why is that so important? Why is that rather than walking down a busy city street. Why is so nature so relaxing?

 

[01:19:37] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Right. We can dissect it a million and one ways but anyone who’s interested amongst to look at any of the research there out of Japan in particular and some of the Asian societies there is a long-standing ritual that is very poetic sounding it’s called forest bathing. It has nothing to do with taking a bath or slipping into a bathtub in the middle of a forest that sounds like a drug commercial that we see sometimes. Forest bathing merely means to get outside and be surrounded by nature. Whether that’s sitting and spending time in a natural surrounding or walking through a forest or being around a natural scene. There’s a lot of theories. Now we could talk about and I think this is so very cool. We know the plants breathe themselves. Opposite of us they breathe out oxygen and they breathe in carbon dioxide and we actually know that for example, if you go for a walk in a pine forest and we’re blessed to have many pines and evergreens here in the Pacific Northwest but we actually know that in that exhalation those trees there are essential oils. We know that when we breathe in these exhalations of the trees we’re breathing in trace amounts of these essential oils and other compounds and it’s been theorized that they’re one factor that’s having a positive influence on our immune system. On our nervous systems or stress levels as well. I think most of us have the experience partly it’s noise, I don’t know about you but I know for me going out in a natural scene where there’s some stillness and some quiet and you can hear the wind moving through and you’re not hearing cars and airplane sand jackhammers and all sorts of people yelling and screaming and doing all the stuff that people do. I feel personally if I spend time there I can feel my nervous system ratcheting down whereas for me if I’m walking downtown there’s people everywhere. There’s car buzzing here to and all over the place and there’s all of that. There’s lights, there’s sounds, there’s all these things going on it is profoundly non-relaxing experience for me. Evidence bears that out. There was an interesting study done in Europe as well that asked about people living in downtown areas with constant noise and the constant activity and again to our idea of normalized stress Ashley. When they’re asked these to self-report like, do they feel stressed, do they notice the noise anymore, does it bother them? They basically say no. They don’t notice the noise. It does not bother them. But when they measured their body and what was going on with their body they found that their body was indeed still reacting to those stressors from the noise and the activity and everything else that was going on. Even for people who would live there for a very long time. Again, I don’t believe - you’ll find many people out there and I hope I can caution your audience. Human beings love simple answers. The reason that we have autoimmunity, more autoimmunity and they’re suffering from it is gluten. That’s the answer or maybe it’s glyphosate or maybe it’s whatever like X, Y, and Z. It’s a traumatic childhood. You’re seeing people say The Answer, again, I caution people, there is no The Answer. There’s been a lot of changes. We live very, very different lifestyles from those of our ancestors. Our ancestors of a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago or 25 thousand years ago. We live very different lifestyles. Those changes while there are many very positive changes, I personally don’t want to go back 25 thousand years ago and live that lifestyle that our tough as nails ancestors lived back then. Along with the positives, not having to starve and not worry about a tiger eating me, there are a whole host of negatives. I think what we’ve seen in the past 50-year or so we sort of tipped over the line where those negatives have really compounded in so many ways. That’s why we’re seeing more autoimmunity, why we’re seeing more diseases in general and why we’re seeing diseases younger. I’m sure you know that type II diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes because it basically only ever happened in adults and they had to take away it’s not called that anymore because we see unfortunately so many kids and teens with type II diabetes these days.

 

[01:25:45] Ashley James: Yes, it’s just so sad. It’s so sad but luckily the listener here is enlightened and doesn’t go eat fast-food, basically do the basic American diet which causes disease. We have to think about this way that food is either causing disease or it’s healing our body. It’s either destructive or restorative. There is no neutral. It’s either building us up or tearing us down. It’s a fuel. People feel in general have disconnected from food and beverages that they look at this one little pill. We could get a pharmaceutical one tiny pill the size of a pea could give us side effects that could potentially kill us. That’s how powerful this tiny thing is the size of a pea. And yet we eat cups and cups ad cups of food and drink everyday not aware of their side effects. They’re molecules as well. That can either harm us or help us. So food, stress. I love that you point out that stress is so vastly important. That those people who lived in the cities that were studied. They became habituated. I think we become habituated to the diet reading as well. A lot of people say, “I’m not allergic to gluten or grains.” But you spent a month cutting them out, oh my gosh. I’m not allergic to them. I don’t have an autoimmune condition that I know of. My husband and I cut out gluten 8 years ago. We cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. What happened to us was miraculous. I lost 25 pounds of water weight and my husband, he lost something like 11 or something but what’s interesting is that our rings started to fly off our fingers. We had them actually made for our wedding. We have them made by a jeweler. We knew our wedding bands were properly fitted when we got married years before and they started flying off our finger so we waited a few months because I was worried that it would, this was temporary, right? This decrease in inflammation was temporary. After six months, we were still having our rings fly off our fingers. We went it to get resized reluctantly because my engagement ring is actually a hundred years old. It’s been passed down to my family. So I really didn’t want it to have it changed in size if not needed. So we went in and I went down two ring sizes and my husband went down one and a half, no sorry. I went down one and a half, my husband went down to two. Now I’m getting them mixed up. Either way, it went down significantly. I think I went down two because I lost more water weight. What’s funny is that we have our pictures taken for our driver’s licenses right before we went gluten free. We have this before and after. We hold it up to people when we meet them and they’re like don’t believe gluten makes a big difference. I’m like “Look we’re not celiac.” This is just pro inflammatory grains. We showed them the pictures and its like I look like the difference between Bert and Ernie. My face is round and puffy. I’m just so surprised when people go “I don’t have any problems with that. It doesn’t cause any damage.” Just try it. Try cutting out gluten for a month, try to cut dairy for a month. Then you go back to it. I had a friend call me up so angry at me because she’s Jewish and she goes, “I can’t eat bagels anymore.” She was so angry because she was habituated to gluten then she went off it for a month. She felt amazing. She got on some supplements and I gave her some health coaching. She got off foods that were pro-inflammatory. A month later her migraines had stopped but she went back to eating a bagel and she felt so sick she goes, “I can’t believe you’ve taken bagels away from me.” She’s in all just she’s very happy to continue to be gluten-free. Almost seven years later, she’s still doing it because we become habituated. We become habituated to stress. Even become habituated to sleep. I can’t tell you how many people have to told me “I only need 4 hours of sleep.” What’s up with that? Do you find that people that come to you, they just have poor sleep in general because that’s sort of one of the biggest factors that helps to set the groundwork for having autoimmune? Do most people tell you they can function on four to six hours of sleep just fine?

 

[01:29:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  It’s a mix. We get people saying things like they do definitely are people who say like “Oh yes, I sleep four to six hours and I feel great.” and you’re like, “Okay. Unfortunately, it’s design for if you will but that part of our brain, that monitors our state like our wakefulness and how we feel is one of the first to go down from lack of sleep. In the same way and this is very difficult. Again, sleep and stress we often find more difficult for more people than dietary changes. Diet is tough. Listen no doubt about it. Some people took it very easily some people don’t. Sleep and stress can be even more difficult and will often challenge people to do a two to four week challenge of getting more sleep. Whether that’s adding an hour or whatever is appropriate for their situation of getting more sleep. When they do it almost uniformly people go, “Oh my god, I have no idea how much better I could feel getting more sleep than I was.” Again, “I thought I was okay because I was used to it but I really wasn’t. I don’t have those crashes. My mood is so much better. My energy is improved, my inflammation is down.” So many of these pieces improve for people with, two things, better quality sleep is important. Like you mentioned, for example, having an old uncomfortable mattress can impair people’s quality of sleep. So you can sleep a lot quantity-wise but quality is bad, you’re not going to be getting the benefit out of it. You can simply for a lot of people, just not getting enough. A lot of people who come to see us reality admit that. “I’m sleeping six and a half hours a night. How’s that going? Well, I’m tired. I know I should sleep more. I don’t. Okay, we’re going to have to talk about that and see what we need to do to make some changes for you.” This reminds me of a point often when we’re taking someone’s history and we’re looking back through it, autoimmunity can feel like it came on overnight for people. One day I was fine. The next day I wasn’t. Sometimes things do happen. Type 1 diabetes, for example, is typically now not in the example you gave up the adult-onset, that is a little bit into type 1 diabetes but your classic type 1 diabetes, what is thought to happen is the child gets sick with a cold or a stomach bug or the immune system reacts to that stomach bug and there’s a cross-reaction that occurs. That the cells of the pancreas that produce insulin so we could control our blood sugar would close enough like that the gut bug that the immune reaction against the gut bug pivots and a start attacking the pancreas. Often that onset can be within a few weeks. The kid was sick and sort of never really recovers well and gets into the symptoms of having type 1 diabetes. But for most the majority of people, most autoimmune diseases they may say to us “Well, it felt like it just came on overnight” when we track their health back to their history often what we see are the roots and the stirrings of that autoimmunity years or decades before hand. Usually culminates what we call the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s often a hugely stressful event. That can be a divorce, job change, going to school, some big event travel or something else that was just kind of the last straw that tipped people over into a full-blown autoimmune disease. We often see that and they’ll say, “Well, it was this trip that gave me autoimmunity or whatever the case might be and almost never is that actually the case. That was just the final straw that kicked off the autoimmunity in earnest but often will see it going on for years or decades beforehand.

 

[01:33:50] Ashley James:  Got it. Very interesting. You talked about the paleo or the paleo autoimmune protocol. What about the GAPS diet? Have you had success with that? The GAPS diet being really about helping to restore the gut.

 

[01:34:07] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Yes. Again, not an all or nothing guide. I’ve seen the GAPS diet worked wonderfully of people it’s a little more of in my experience a little bit more of logistics kind of a complicated diet with different stages in it. I find a lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding how to do the diet. How to follow it. I’ve certainly used it. I was certified by the creator of the diet to work with it. I found it be quiet helpful for people. Again, just because of the logistic I often found that people do a little bit better with paleo diets or autoimmune paleo diets. It’s just a little bit more straightforward. Yes, found that gaps diets worked well. We’ve mentioned one called the specific carbohydrate diet. It’s been around for quite a long time. Had worked nicely for people before. My biggest thing is, not that anyone diet, in particular, is the right one and all the others are wrong. The question for me is several fold. Does the diet take away foods that are problematic for a person? If it does so then they’re good to be seeing improvement in what’s going on. Secondly, we have to say, along with that diet is a gut dysfunction. You know, a very common story. I’m sure some of the listeners have heard it before is that they remove some food from their diet. Say, for example, gluten. “Oh my gosh, everything got so much better when I took gluten out of my diet. But now it’s been a while and kind of seen some symptoms have been creeping back and things are a problem so now I need to eliminate more foods from my diet. Maybe that’s okay for a while. Everything got better again great. Then it came back again now this is a problem. Now that’s a problem.” So we’ve seen people get down to this three or four foods that they feel like they can eat safely. It’s a very bad, hard place to be in. That’s fundamental because diet is one component of healing a person’s gut. But it’s not the only. For some people when they take the food out, their gut is able to heal itself. Everything rebalances and they’re in a good place but for other people taking the food out can merely be a band-aid.  One of the places without actually addressing the underlying causes of the leaky gut and the sensitivity in the first place, one of the areas that I found that a number of more holistically minded practitioners really let their patients down. They run some sort of test to identify sensitivities to food or they put them on an elimination diet and they go, “Great Ashley, gluten is problem for you. Maybe whatever nuts are a problems, eggs are a problem whatever the food is that’s an issue for you. Great, don’t eat those foods. You’re all good. See you later.” It’s like we haven’t actually address the underlying factor. You have to get those inflammatory foods out to get the system to calm down. Some of those removed foods may be permanent. They may be foods you really need to stay away from or you should stay away from them. Many of those foods can be temporary. While the gut is dysfunctional and disorder the immune system is activated and inflamed, a lot of foods can be problematic. We commonly see that in the beginning, you need to take out quite a few different foods but over time as we heal the gut as things get to a better place for many people, many those foods can start to make their appearance back in a person’s diet and not be problematic for them anymore.

 

[01:37:58] Ashley James:  I love that you brought that up. That we can go down that road of eliminating things from our diet but people can get very restrictive and that’s a level of stress.

 

[01:38:12] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Absolutely. Yes, it is.

 

[01:38:14] Ashley James:  Right, so we have to find that balance. We have to address stress. We do have to help the person figure to what diet is, the most healing way to eat for their body at that time and then help them address sleep. When you help the patient to dial in this trifecta, how long do people get results? Is it immediate? Is it within a few months? I know you can’t say like a hundred percent of people everyone always. I know you can’t say that. Let’s just say that the people who are listening right now have autoimmune maybe also have some gut issues, if they work with you, in six months from now, could majority of them be in remission? Is there that much hope?

 

[01:39:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Again, please I know Ashley just did a good job with it, it does depend. Some people get very huge results very quickly. Sometimes, 80% of their symptoms can be improved within a month. That does happen. Is it common? No. Depends on what’s going on and all the rest.  But can it make that big of a difference for people very, very quickly? It can. Often it doesn’t. Generally, here’s the timeline that we generally use for people. When we think autoimmune disease, we typically think a year of treatment. We’re confident that within 12 months we could’ve made substantial and long-lasting changes for those persons. Again, some people move faster, some people move a little bit slower but we’re generally looking at that. Often by 3 months, again ballpark figure, we’ll often see 30-40% improvement in symptoms. People would be feeling noticeably better, digestion working better, pain levels down, skin improved, thinks feeling better. By six months we’ll often see somewhere around 70-80% improvement so massive. Big changes people are feeling very different than they were six months ago. Then that final six months as often what we’re getting at last 10-20% and also critically important is when we’re cementing habits for sustainability and the long-term. We used to aim for six months of working with people knowing that we can make really major changes. In those six months what we found where we really let people down is that we would say, “Okay, great. You’re good to go. You know what to do. You’ve addressed many of those factors. Keep up the good work. Follow up for your check-up and make sure everything’s on track.” We found there are still a significant percentage of people who would backslide, their habits would come loose with life stressors and things happening in their lives. Yes, diet was in really good shape. Then things got busy and the kids went back to school and this happened. Job changes or moved. Whatever happened and the diet kind of came undone and that trifecta we’ve talked about, the sleep, stress, and diet came apart and then people started to backslide and symptoms returned. What we found is by talking that additional six months of really making sure that all those changes are really cemented, the fundamentals have all been addressed, lifestyle changes have become permanent for people. We found that after 12 months the chance of recurrence of backsliding and having things come back drops really dramatically. So our recommendation for most people with autoimmunity is going to be a plan that encompasses 12 months or a full year.

 

[01:42:21] Ashley James:  I love it. I love that you get such great results and that you help people to sustain at themselves.

 

[01:42:29] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Right. That’s the goal, right? There is a place and obviously, I’m biased as a medical professional who does this for a living but there’s a place for medical professionals. I know many people out there who have horror stories. Really terrible experiences with doctors or the medical system. I hear them every week people tell me about those stories and I understand why some people just give the whole medical system a middle finger and say that they’re just going to manage their own health. Again, we come back to that pyramid there’s a place for self-management. Your doctor , your health professional, your health coach. All of these they don’t go home with you. They don’t cook unless you can have a professional chef preparing all your meals for you which some people are very fortunate to be in that place but vast majority of us we have to get our own meals. We have to eat our own meals. We don’t have a personal trainer to be there to force us to do the exercise we need to do. We don’t have someone mom or dad telling us to go to bed and make sure these things happens. We have to be responsible for our own lives and for our own health habits. By doing that we can take our health into our own hands and we can make big changes. But there’s absolutely a place for health professionals for people who do this, who’ve gone through the training, who’ve done the work, who do this on a day to day basis. We need both of those. We need a practitioner who will work with the person and we need the person to do their side of things as well. That’s how we get optimal results. Again, it’s not an either-or, it’s an and both type of situation.

 

[01:44:15] Ashley James:  I love it. You told me that you have some advice for those who have been maybe they like you said, have felt as though the medical system has failed them and they’re quite upset about it so they go to google and they try to get advice from great podcasts like this one, from blogs and from wiki, from all kinds of medical websites to try to help themselves. There are a million websites out there to tell you what to do. Many of them contradict each other when it comes to gut healing and autoimmune and then forms, Facebook groups. We could just go on and on. We are at a wonderful age of information and it’s up to us to dial it in and figure out what’s best for us. Unfortunately, if we are in a state of stress and we have autoimmune, we probably have brain fog because being in the sympathetic nervous response shunts blood away to logic centers of the brain so we’re not thinking straight so now we’re being overwhelmed with too much information and we don’t know what actionable steps to take. Can you tell us how can we figure out what’s best for us and what sources of good information versus maybe non information will best serve us?

 

[01:45:39] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Unfortunately, there is no super easy answer and just shameless plug here, my book called The Clear Path To Health was in large part me trying to lay that out this extremely common situation. Where someone’s gone to their doctor looking for help. They’ve got one of two different things that happened. They were either diagnosed with an issue, given some sort of treatment for it. If they asked, “Is there anything else that could be done beyond taking this medication or doing this thing?” They were told “No there are no other options.” Type II diabetes again, right, you have to take your drugs it’s a progressive disease it’s just going to get worse over the course of our life. “Is there anything else that could be done? Nope. Nothing else that could be done.” A lot of people wisely go, “Hold on. That doesn’t sound right. There’s got to be something else that I could do to help.” Of course, they go to doctor google to try to look for answers or unfortunately, we hear this very often people are feeling bad. They go to their doctor. They get some tests run and they’re told that, “Everything looks fine. Nothing’s going on” or maybe there’s something going on but it’s unclear what it is. What can we do about it? Nothing. Please get out of here. You’re clogging up the office.” and people are just thrown out left on their own and don’t know what to do. Again, completely understandable they turn to Doctor Google looking for some answers.

The key piece that I think is important to keep in mind is always start with the fundamentals. To make it easy, we’ve honed in on three starting places. Three fundamentals and we’ve talked about them. Diet, sleep and stress. Does that mean that just addressing those three things will take care of everything that’s going on for you and there aren’t other issues or things that need to be taken care of? No. It does not mean that. Like what we talked about before with the pyramid. These three are the foundation. If you aren’t eating well, you’re stressed out of your mind and you’re not sleeping well. You can be taking all the supplements in the world, you could be doing all the practices, all the mediations, all the other you-name-it-you-can-be-doing-it. Will they give you some benefit? Yes. But will they give you the benefit that you’re really looking for? No, they will not. To go back to diabetes, why do MDs say that diabetes is an incurable progressive disease? Type II diabetes again, just to be clear it’s because when you slap medications on it but you don’t address the fundamentals, the medications will help but hey cannot get the root of what’s going on and they won’t fundamentally stop diabetes. Similarly, with autoimmune disease. You can read all about the latest herbs, potions, pills, patches, therapeutics, all these different things. Is there some benefit in many of them? There are. But if you don’t have the fundamentals in play, you’re chasing shiny objects. One of the things we humans are cursed with is shiny objects syndrome. Like Kosar, we like things that are shiny, interesting, sexy and the problem with me banging in the drum about food, sleep and stress is people go, “Yes, yes, yes. I got that. I know that I already sleep fine. I already eat a healthy diet. I’m not stressed out.”

The majority of people that we work with when we analyzed those factors they may or may not done a lot of great work in their diet. Often there’s a lot of various that still need to be addressed and worked with. They almost always have not properly addressed stress. Again, I want to be really clear I don’t believe in shame or blame. This isn’t about telling people they’re wrong or bad or anything else. It’s just these are things that are not taught. They’re not reinforced in our society. We don’t recognize them and some of the cures for things like stress and sleep go against the varied values that we’re taught about. Always working hard and trying to get ahead and trying to do the things in our life sometimes that we need to be doing. These factors are important and if they’re not addressed first then we can get caught up in all the shiny objects and all the new supplements and all the latest greatest testing. It comes back to making sure that your foundation is solid. The base of that pyramid is there before we jump on to other factors. Then again, shameless plug finding a good holistic practitioner who can work with you. Again, I spent years and years researching and working with these materials. It’s fairly straight forward for me to look up something going to the internet and go, “That sounds reasonable” or maybe that sounds like maybe it’ll work for a few people but it isn’t going to be useful for the vast majority of people. Can be difficult for people out there struggling through on their own. So really finding a practitioner to work with who can guide you, can really shortcut and save you a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of years of your life. Finding a good one. Again, in the back of my book, The Clear Path to Health, I lay out the 11 questions that you need to think about and ask a practitioner that you’re considering working with to help you understand if this is someone who might be a good fit for you. Might give you the help that you need or unfortunately might be a waste of your time money and energy and you should keep on looking to find someone different.

 

[01:51:14] Ashley James:  I love it. Thank you so much and I know you’re doing a giveaway. It’s in our Facebook group. Listeners who would like to potentially win a copy of your book. They can go to the learn true health Facebook group. After I publish the show, we’ll do the giveaway and they can comment to enter into the giveaway. Thank you for that. I love that you have simplified things. It is very complex. There are I believe there’s over 200 different kinds of autoimmune conditions. Is that correct?

 

[01:51:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  I’ve heard varying numbers. The number I’ve most commonly heard thrown around is about a 150 but listen, we’re in a ballpark. There are many, many types of autoimmunity. Some of them are very common. They have common names. We know about them. Some others are much more uncommon or rare or even discovering that some conditions we thought that no autoimmune kind of basis are now being shown that there is autoimmunity involved in them as well. Unfortunately, for us, autoimmune disease is one of the curses of modern life. Thankfully we’re not getting chased by tigers, most of us are not striving to death anymore but we traded that for autoimmunity. Among many other things. The good news is that many of the things that are within our control that we can do can make a really big impact. For a lot of people, they need for immune-suppressing drugs, they may to need them. We’ve seen many people with a whole host of different autoimmune conditions either not need to get on drugs or be able to get off of them. Some people definitely do need them and we recommend that they use them. But again, use the whole pyramid. Don’t just start at level three the drugs ignoring steps 1 and 2. By layering in steps 1 and 2, we often need less drugs if we need them and we minimize or reduce the side effects that can happen with those drugs. There’s a lot that can be done and I hope people are taking this as the hopeful message that I’m intending it to be.

 

[01:53:33] Ashley James: Absolutely. It was very positive. It was wonderful having you on the show. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything you wanted to make sure that you cover before we wrap up today's interview?

 

[01:53:46] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Well, I think we’ve gone to a lot of really good stuff. I hope people have taken some notes or if they feel like it’s gone by in a whirlwind I hope they come back and give it a listen too. There’s a lot of good stuff here. Be aware that all of us we have the shiny object syndrome as an issue. It can be fun to research the newest latest greatest stuff but make sure before you waste your time, money and energy chasing over those shiny things that your fundamentals are being taken care of. Know that there are qualified, caring practitioners out there who can help you. We’re not anti-MD but recognize the strengths and the weaknesses of anyone you work with. No one will be able to do everything. So recognize what the health professionals in your life are skilled at and if they can’t meet a need that you have, then it’s time to get someone involved who does have that expertise who can help you make those changes.

 

 

[01:54:58] Ashley James:  Dr. Tim Gerstmar, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Dr. Tim’s website is aspirenaturalhealth.com. Of course, the links to everything that he does is going to be on the show notes of today's’ podcast at learntruehealth.com. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing with our listeners. I hope that it fills them with hope and it gives them the clear direction for them to know that they can take step by step. In a matter of months to a year, they can see great changes in their health.

 

[01:55:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes, profound changes for sure. If this has been helpful for people, please feel welcome, drop us a line on our Facebook page or send us a message. Just saying that you’ve found the podcast helpful. It always warms my heart, makes my day to know that this has made  a difference in people’s lives. If you’re looking for a practitioner if you’re local in the Seattle, the greater Seattle area. Feel welcome to give us a call or drop us a line or if you’re listening from somewhere else know that through the miracles of modern technology, we can do virtual consults with people all over the States and really all over the world. There is hope and please feel welcome to reach out and contact us. You can find all of our information at our website as Ashley said, aspirenaturalhealth.com and I hope you’ll check it out.

 

[01:56:24] Ashley James: Awesome. Thanks so much.

 

[01:56:25] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Thank you.

 

[01:56:28] 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 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 Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation 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 the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.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 would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. 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, doctor’s 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 with 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 and their success and 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 Integrated 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. 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 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 highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

 

Get Connected With Dr. Tim Gerstmar!

Website
Facebook
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Book by Dr. Tim Gerstmar

The Clear Path To Health

Recommended Reading by Dr. Tim Gerstmar

Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Music:

Music: Dreams by Joakim Karud
https://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
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Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/VF9_dCo6JT4

 

 

Become A Health Coach-Learn More About The Institute for Integrative Nutrition's Health Coaching Certification Program by checking out these four resources:

1) Integrative Nutrition's Curriculum Guide:
http://geti.in/2cmUMxb

2) The IIN Curriculum Syllabus:
http://geti.in/2miXTej

3) Module One of the IIN curriculum:
http://geti.in/2cmWPl8

4) Get three free chapters of Joshua Rosenthal's book:
https://bit.ly/2wgkLOU

Watch my little video on how to become a Certified Health Coach!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDDnofnSldI

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Jul 30, 2019

iThrive Series: https://learntruehealth.com/ithrive

Utopia Found: A Blueprint for Spiritual Renaissance and World Peace
BOOK: https://amzn.to/2yp74hu

www.troyreicherter.net

 

The Search For Truth In Science And Spirituality

https://www.learntruehealth.com/search-for-truth-in-science-spirituality

Highlights:

  • Know that it is possible to achieve world peace and it starts with you
  • Science, quantum physics and it’s role in the world and people’s lives
  • Spiritual and religious freedom while creating a tight-knit community
  • Multi-dimension understanding of the universe

 

Is world peace achievable? If everyone has their own voice and enforcing their opinions on other people then peace will never come. In a world where war is at par, today’s episode can help us further realize why we need to invest in the quality of life, respecting each other’s freedom and most importantly, what we can do to help each other achieve what everyone wants in their life- peace.

 

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to need to strap on your seatbelt for this one. It is quite a ride. I have a really great interview for you today. First, I want to make sure that you know about this free docu-series. It’s available this week only. It starts today and for the next 9 days. You are definitely going to want to check it out. It’s called iThrive. John has in the beginning of this docu-series, he is well over a hundred pounds overweight. He has type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and he is essentially is getting towards his deathbed. He’s only in his 50’s and he hits a brick wall emotionally and physically realizing that he’s going to be a statistic. He’s probably not going to make it into his 60s. That’s when he deiced to film himself going through his transformation. Now if you suffer from all those things you know how hard it is to turn that around. He decided to put cameras in his face and go to, I believe he consulted 44 holistic health doctors and worked with them and to pull the great information out of them and he followed a program that’s natural and that’s science-based. It’s wonderful are the results that you see. If you go to learntruehealth.com/iThrive. That’s learntruehealth.com/iThrive all one word. You can put your name and email in and then the next video it shows you is him. His before and after. It’s so cool and then, of course, the 9 days, every day they release another episode and you follow his journey and you learn from him. From his struggles and from him as he has his Aha! Moments with this holistic health doctors that showed him how to adjust his diet and lifestyle and how he can get his body back to be a hundred percent healthy and off all medications. That’s right. By the end of the docu-series, he’s no longer diabetic. He no longer had high blood pressure. He no longer has obesity. He no longer has heart disease. It’s all reversible. It’s wonderful to watch. It’s great to learn from. Please go to learntruehealth.com/iThrive. Check it out. That link will also be in the show notes of today’s podcast. Share that link to all your friends. We’ve got to get this information out there so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health. To learn what it feels like to their body to have true health. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview.

 

[03:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 371. Well, here we are again in the garden with Troy Reicherter. He was in episode 138 and more recently in episode 369. We discussed when you first came in the show two years ago in our backyard so we’ll continue the theme of having you out here. It’s such a beautiful day. You discussed a few projects you’re working on. At that time, it was the Seattle peace project. Where you were getting groups of different churches and different people from around the Seattle area to meditate and pray on peace to see if we could make an impact and the crime rate because there has been experiments done that I’ve shown that getting enough people to meditate and pray on peace that it can lower the crime rate. Another thing that you have been passionate about for the last few years is testing the toxicants in your body while you are doing detox methods like sauna, fasting, eating organic and taking different supplements and seeing how many pesticides and different toxicants you can lower in your body by using these methods. We just finished a follow-up interview episode 369. Now we’re going to talk about a book that you’ve published and this is, did you say 26 years in the making?

 

[04:42] Troy Reicherter: 26 years, yes. Started about the same time I started fasting it was 1993. I was a 23-year-old living in Taiwan. Oh, no this is after 23 but I got to Taiwan when I was 23. Anyway, the same group that introduced me to fasting. Well, they were psychics. A lot of psychic people. They had centers they were building around Taiwan including up in the mountains of central Taiwan and doing meditation and all kinds of purification methods. Their goal was to bring about world peace through a kind of a new religion exactly but just an understanding of all the different religions in context with one another so that you see it as one giant mosaic. When I was with them, I started to find a lot of answers to question that I had when I get to Taiwan, which led me later to study Chinese medicine. After understanding how these things work how chi and in and yang how they really work and what they really are. It led me to start writing it was almost like automatic writing. Where you just feel like my hand just wants to write. I wasn’t even hardly thinking of what I was writing I just started cranking at everything that I had written. Another thing that happened really soon on was after listening to them talk and talk about things that they saw and people’s auras and different colors and different symbols that were important, I started to I just went back and started re-reading the new testament. So all of these notes that I took, they turn into a paper and then I just felt the need to write another one and another one. I wrote one about science. One about Jesus. It just went from there. Then I needed to connect these papers together. It provided an answer to a question that I’ve been asking since I was a kid. How do we get world peace? How do we look at the world in a way that makes sense so that we don’t have to fight anymore? So that we could have a sustainable way of life, environmentally sustainable, peaceful. Do that so there’s no more wars with people looking at each other from different religions saying, “I don’t understand how you fit into this picture. I can understand my religion but I don’t understand yours and I don’t respect you and we need to have a war about it to see who wins and who loses.” Since having been studied history I knew that religion was one of the main forces pushing wars that seem to be a crucial part of the puzzle is to figure out how what is it the nature of reality at least to the point where we can agree on some common ground. Agree to disagree about certain things and then agree to agree about other things so we can be close to each other but still without surrendering our own beliefs. Then have world peace. I’ve been thinking about these questions for a long time. What will that look like? Then reverse engineer if you just think realistically about what we have to change for saving the environment? What we have to change to end the culture of warfare? What we have to do to be close enough to our neighbors of different faiths and ethnicities that we can end conflict. What does that look like? How do we do that? Where do we begin? I’ve been wrestling with those problems those questions for my whole life. The people that I met in Taiwan didn’t have all the answers but they had a lot of answers and they started me writing what turned into this book 26 years ago. That’s what I’ve talked about. The book is called Utopia found: A Blueprint for Spiritual Renaissance and World Peace. That’s exactly what it is. It’s unlike any book ever written. I think. It’s a little bit like a cartolase, a new earth but it is a blueprint for spiritual renaissance and world peace because it’s a plan. It’s a path of logic and then it reaches a point to where you can’t prove everything. We go beyond logic you might say go into the spiritual realm a little bit and yet we can observe similarities from around the world to come up with the points of agreement that we need to make communities of the future that will work for all the different parameters I just mentioned. Yes, so that’s what it is. I’ve been doing other things in the past 26 years besides just sitting in the room writing this book. I’ve been going to school, acupuncturist, teacher, couple of master’s degrees in Chinese medicine education but that has been, I consider my magnum opus really. Whatever else I do in my life that proving we can detoxify our bodies of cancer-causing chemicals or what not to belittle any of that but in my own mind. I think that this book is like a trunk of the tree and all the other things are branches of that trunk.

 

[10:20] Ashley James: Take us back to where you were in Taiwan. How long did you lived there? Do you speak Taiwanese?

 

[10:25] Troy Reicherter: Mandarin Chinese, I speak. My wife is from Taiwan and I didn’t really take the time to learn the dialect because it’s only when you’re there that you’ll use it. Sometimes I’d like to not understand what they’re saying I just want to tune it out. I was in Taiwan for about 5 years all in all. I’ve gone back to visit periodically. It was from 1991 until I left at the end of 1996 and I came back to the States a couple of times in that time period. I stayed in Mainland China for a period learning Chinese medicine. Taiwan is a very unique because they still use the full from Chinese characters and they never underwent the Cultural Revolution that they did in mainland china. You’d find a lot of very interesting cultural relics. It’s more like ancient china than anywhere else in the world. I would say. There’s nothing quite like it. Every street you go down is just temples. Like crazy. Temples of all different religions and mixes between traditional Chinese, folk religion and Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism. You find a lot of people there that are really into spirituality. A lot of psychics too.  A lot of people whom I’ve know had the same experiences in Taiwan. They’ll meet someone who’ll tell them something about the future that comes true. It happens all the time. You may have to go out of your way to look for it but it’s an amazing place. I was lucky enough to meet some really good teachers who I’m still in contact with. Although the group is no longer existing as it used to be. I think at the moment, they want their privacy. That’s where the answer started to come for me. My parents were a product of the ’60s. They started to question organized religion soon after they got married. By the time, I was born in 1968, they didn’t go to church. They didn’t believe. I was raised there’s just no mention of religion in our house. On my own growing up in American culture. I just got noticing what was in TV. Noticing what’s in the wind and the way people started to celebrate certain things like Easter and Christmas. I started to say, “Who’s this guy Jesus? What’s He all about?” My parents never talked about Christ and all. I went back and read the bible myself and actually joined a couple of churches in Sacramento area when I was a teenager. I went through the whole admission process and was baptized. Believed very strongly on it. Then when I became older then I started to question like, “Well, what about the seventh day Adventist? What do they have to say?” They have a pretty good argument. “What about this? What about that?” Eventually, when I was in college I had a lot of questions and I reached the point where I wasn’t so sure about my faith. Then as I got closer to the time I went to Taiwan I started to meet more and more people who are telling me things that I couldn’t accept but I really respected the person. It was mostly about reincarnation and miracles. They would tell me about just over and over that reincarnation is a fact. I couldn’t accept it. I didn't believe it. I thought it was ridiculous and yet it was very ironic because those were the people who I respected the most and yet I doubted what they’re telling me. People were talking professors at Sacramento State University, for example, we're talking about Indian religion, Hinduism, meditation. They talked about miracles that people could perform if they done enough spiritual practice. I started to open my mind to that possibility as well. So then when I went to Taiwan, that was kind of the frame of mind I was in. I was a history student at that point and had all these questions about how does that world really work? Are these things real? Are they not real? Can physics and chemistry explain everything or not? That was a crucial question to me because if they could, then that meant that there’s no afterlife, there’s no spirit. All those things that people in the spiritual realm are telling us. They can’t be true. Which isn’t. I not to say if those things are true the we can’t use science anymore, of course, we can use both. I really had a lot of questions about the fundamental nature of reality and I was trying to answer the question of how are we going to live in the future with this large population dwindling resources, pollution, wars, global warming. All that things that are facing us. What are we going to do? Seriously. Not just what am I going to do? How am I going to get by but we as a species going to do? We better do fast or we’re in big trouble as we can see. That was my guiding motivation the entire time. My girlfriend who’s now my wife at that time she was my girlfriend. I decided I was going to study Chi Gong. Energy control basically. Controlling your chi. She happen to have a person at their work who that’s just one of those things that were my karma matched the karma of the situation, it was like a lock and a key. She from some person she had never met before just got a note saying, “Why don’t you take your boyfriend to this place.” so I went. She said two things I thought were irresistible. One is, “These people are psychic and they know why you came before you come there. They know you’re coming. They’ll expect you and secondly, they won’t charge you any money.” I couldn’t say no to that. Sure enough, they said, “Didn’t I tell you there’s this foreigner who going to come down here.” Anyway, I joined the group and learned a lot from them. All those things from my earlier experience with the new testament, Jesus came to the fore because half of what they’re talking about was Jesus. And they weren’t Christian. They would describe his energy. They would say I can feel it right now. If you get to the stage where I’m at you can just feel it. You call out. You sense out that vibration, you can sense his energy. He’s omnipresent. He’s everywhere. I thought that was really interesting. It caused me to go back and read the new testament over and over and over. I started to take notes. It was funny because the things that I was hearing from my teachers in Taiwan were exactly the same things that Jesus Christ was saying 2,000 years ago in Israel. I started to look at the whole thing in new way. That becomes one of the components of the book. The book is laid out in a specific order. It’s a like a path you have to go follow to get to the end with the answer you might say or the pieces of the puzzle laid out for you to put together. Or you can think about it like a rubik cube. I got into an interesting debate with a science-minded friend of mine because he was saying that I was a critical of science in the first part of my book. He say, “Why did you even start talking about science?” it’s not the biggest problem we have. It’s not like science does do anything accusing a problem it’s in and on itself. I had to rewrite the beginning of the book to explain a little bit better that it’s like solving a rubik cube. I’m not good at rubik cubes but I see that there’s a set operation. A series of event of operations that you have to do. You have to begin with number 1 then go to number 2. So you can’t move certain colors to where you want them to be unless you do that first initial twist. It’s knowing when to do that is part of the key. The book starts out talking about science. There’s five sections of the book and the first part is science and the search for truth in the west. The way most people think is there’s this assumption that science and technology are leading to progress and that progress is going to make things better and solve our problems. In that first section, I go back through the history of the origin of science. Talk about the Greek philosophers briefly and how science started from a search of moral truth. In the beginnings, Socrates was trying to look for the right way for people to live. He likened it to a cobbler making a shoe he said, “If you don’t know what a shoe is, how can you know the right art to make a good shoe.” So we have to know ourselves. We have to know our spirits. And so he said the famous line “Know thy self.” Socrates was talking about things like this and he was coming after a long line of pre-Socratic philosophers who are always looking for the nature of reality. Then along comes Plato. Plato didn’t exactly say that the world as it exists is real. He says that we should study the world through abstractions and we should use things like geometry. We should use the Socratic method of question and answers but then we should also use things like geometry because geometry forces us to rise above the mundane and go to something that can be measured. We’re talking about number and abstractions like lines and points. We’re no longer talking about the real world which may for all we know be an illusion. So it’s very interesting that how that turns to Aristotle coming along and say, “Let’s not worry about the question if it’s an illusion or not. Let’s just assume it’s real and measure it and just be empirical about it.“ I can see this, I can taste this, I can measure this.” and don’t make any assumptions and just stick with the fact. This is the origin of science basically. Following on Thales and his ideas that things can be explained. Aristotle says, “Stop worrying about the world being an illusion. Stop worrying about some higher levels of consciousness that may make this seem like an illusion. Let’s just stick with the facts.” This is what later on in the renaissance and the enlightenment turns into science. It’s getting back to Aristotle’s philosophy. The first section of my book is talking about how this has led to amazing advances that we can all see but it has basically left behind the original quest of how people live.  Science can never really answer all the questions that we have. As Douglas Hoff Stetter said in his book because in order to do that you’d have to have a system that could make reference to itself. When a system becomes so big that it can have self-reference it can no longer be objective. There’s a trap there of logic. That we imagine that we’re going to go figure out everything there is to know through science somehow but it can’t. It is not necessarily leading us to a better world because every time we get a new technological invention like cellphones for example. Well, give me an hour and I could tell you about a lot of things cellphones are doing even just in the classroom that are very, very bad. Not to mention all the environmental effects and everything else. So the assumption that we’re making about science. That science and technology are leading us to a better world in and of themselves is not true. It could but the question is do we have the wisdom to use it properly? Because it’s really a tool. Just like a knife, a knife can be used to do great things like cut up these strips we’re eating here or it can be used to commit mayhem, right? It’s all in the way you use the tool. That comes down to something you can’t really measure we call wisdom. You can have the greatest scientific minds in the world and they can be employed to make weapons of mass destructions, or work for the Nazis or for Stalin or for Kim Jung-un. It doesn’t matter how smart they have or how much technology they have if their wisdom, if they’re building something that shouldn’t be built in the first place then there’s a problem. So that what I point out in the first section we shouldn’t be making this assumption that science and technology are solving our problems by themselves they could if we employ them the right way. That comes down to a question of wisdom and lifestyle. The second section of the book is – feel free to ask a question anytime you want there.

 

[24:10] Ashley James: Oh no, this is great. I’m enjoying the ride. I like it.

 

[24:17] Troy Reicherter: The second section is called towards a multi-dimension understanding of the universe. What I realized in my experiences in Taiwan and elsewhere is that there are things going on that can never be explained by chemistry and physics. There are those who believe that and there are those who don’t. The ones who don’t are in the realm of science. They don’t usually talk to the people that don’t believe that and the people who don’t believe that usually don’t talk to people that do believe that. I’m trying to bring the two sides together and make both sides understand what’s really going on and be willing to see the other’s point of view. Scientists would take this an attack may be to their position but it isn’t. It just fine-tuning our understanding of what’s really going on so we could use this tool of science and technology more rationally because right now we’re assuming things that aren’t true. When I had a physiology class before it thought it was really interesting in the opening few pages of a book they said, “There’s two ways of looking at the world. There’s the mechanist view and the animist view. Animist view assumes that there’s things like spirit, energy and intangible things out there that have something to do with the way the world really works. They pointed out really clearly, this book doesn’t believe that. This book about physiology believes that humans are biological machines. There is no spirit, there is none of this just forgot about all the idea, romantic idea. There’s anything else going on expect just anything that can be explained by chemistry and physics any thought you have is just synapses in your brain, chemicals. Something like that, something that can be expressed in some kind of chemical and physical formula. That’s called the mechanist theory. It’s that everything is mechanical. If you really believe that as most scientists do right now it would seem and I just heard someone he wrote a book about consciousness [00:26 Inaudible] just in the last year he was basically saying that as time goes by he thinks more and more that he’s not making any decision. If someone asks him where he wants to go that night, if he thinks of what he wants to do, everything that he’s doing is predetermined by everything else that happened up to that point. There is no free will. That’s kind of where you end up if you believe that. Through my experience, I’ve just been collecting. For the last 30 years, just been collecting anything that disproves that because I just saw more and more evidence as time went along that these things aren’t true. Some for the evidence is like, like the evidence that I know that my teachers in Taiwan were psychic. I can’t really prove that to you. I could tell you some stories and anecdotes and you could go through and say, “Well, that doesn’t really prove anything.” No, it wasn’t in a clinical setting but I know for myself and so I have been looking at those things that were so overwhelmingly persuasive those pieces of evidence that I can include them or else things that were a result of an actual study where there’s really no question about it. That’s the second section of my book. Toward a multidimensional understanding of the universe. I just present all the evidence that falsifies the mechanist theory because this mechanist theory doesn’t say that most phenomenon can be explained by chemistry and physics, they say all phenomenon, everything. All phenomenon the entire observable universe, everything that exists can be explained through chemistry and physics and I’m saying no, can't. They’re wonderful chemistry and physics. I was collecting things from the news, I was collecting things from my own research and I started out being the weakest part of the book but over time it basically becomes the strongest point because I have so many cool things that I go through. I think the first one is about near-death experiences. I won’t go through all of them you can read them on the book but near-death experiences have been researched by a number of researchers and everyone who’s looked into it has found this amazing degree of correspondence between what people say they saw happening when they were clinically dead. According to the mechanist theory, their brains couldn’t be working and yet they saw things, heard things. Even people who have been born blind could describe the colors of things. How could they do that? This is a so pretty impressive section with several researchers who were very skeptical of it and they look into it they came away complete believers because they couldn’t explain that they discovered. There was a big death study done, a dutch study [Inaudible 29:19] in 2001, I believe. The researchers said in the end, “There’s no physical explanation for near-death experiences and scientists may re-think their theories on the nature of human consciousness.” Was their conclusion.  That was 18 years ago and yet I don’t think there has been a lot rethinking on the nature of human consciousness since then. A lot of these conclusions are put out there and they’re not acted upon and the people like me collect them but the scientific community and the world at large needs to face the facts that this research has been done. There’s a reason to believe these things. Also, I found a lot of evidence about reincarnation which I came to believe in because of my own experiences but I found a number of other examples and some of them by researchers who described things that they could not possibly have known about and which were looked into. Including a case of a woman who claimed to have been killed in medieval England. She said she was Jewish and she was killed in this church, in the crypt of the church. The researchers looking into it and said, “Well, Okay. It could have to be this church based in what she said the problem is there was no crypt in the church.” A little later on some workman were doing some renovation they found actually there was a crypt that they didn’t know about underneath the church. I have a score of these kinds of things collected in my book basically proving as well as we can prove that people are able to say things in certain cases that they couldn’t possibly have known about previous lives. That prove to be true when you investigate it. There’s a couple of instances I found Dr. Ian Stevenson looked into about people who began speaking a language they had never learned. There was one where a Swedish woman started speaking German and a woman in India she took on the personality of a Bengali woman and suddenly started to read, write and speak Bengali. Language shed never studied. In the other case, the woman from Sweden she started speaking German and then she basically became the other person. Here is another one, in Hungary, there was a 15-year-old girl who suddenly started speaking Spanish and then she lost the ability to even read or understand Hungarian. There may be other things involved there like I don’t know phony’s word possession I’ll just call it unlearned language ability. Someone almost starts speaking a language that they never learned. Researchers investigators looked into his case they can find no explanation for it. Yes, this happened in 1933 but you know, people weren’t stupid then. They were able to do investigations. Sometimes we think before they had cellphones nobody could think. There’s a number of other things in the book including the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine including pulse diagnosis. Having gone through the curriculum for traditional Chinese medicine I have a number of accounts of people that I met. They’re miracle curers for things. Like in one case, there was a doctor at ACTCM where I went to school in San Francisco. She had a patient who was told he had to remove part of his colon because he had Crohn’s disease and there was no cure but after a year of acupuncture, he was completely well. Cases of people told they would never walk again, walking. People who couldn’t hear, hearing again. There was a famous study from the journal of the American Association where 260 pregnant women had breached presentation where the fetus was in a head-up position not ready to go into the birth canal. They randomly divided the women and one group just got moxibustion which is applying a heated herb. They light it on fire kind of like a big cigar to an accu-point in a little toe which is supposed to in Chinese medicine theory make the fetus go into the proper position. Sounds crazy, right? But in the controlled group, there were only 81 women who had a cephalic presentation at birth but 98 women from the moxibustion group did. The researchers said, “We cannot foreknow physical explanations for these results we can only comment that the mechanism of action is not clearer and more investigation is warranted.”

 

[33:58] Ashley James: When I was pregnant, 32 weeks I was breached it’s kind of normal still safe but definitely wanted to turn the baby. My midwife has sent me to an OBGYN who I thought for sure she’s going to be allopathic against good natural medicine. I nearly fell off the table she said, “I want you to go see an acupuncturist because your baby is breached.” and she said, “Yes, there’s a study. As OBGYNs would be a fool not to believe in it because they’ve shown most cases than not without any side effects reverse the breach naturally with acupuncture.” So I went and it was like aliens. My baby’s head pushed up and I could see him turning. He turned half the way during the one-hour session on the table with the moxi and the acupuncture points and then he turned the rest of the way in the next 24 hours. 24 hours after getting one acupuncture session my baby was ready basically presenting with his head down ready to be born at 40 weeks. He came out when he was already but it was perfect. It was brilliant. I totally believe in acupuncture.

 

[35:22] Troy Reicherter: I heard people laughing in the radio saying I’m sitting here holding this burning in my little toe and this was supposed to do something? Because it was in dama, people believed it. I don’t know if they’re still giving that recommendation but it appears to work. How can we explain such a thing? Chinese pulse diagnosis it doesn’t make any logical sense and yet I’ve seen again and again that it works so well that Brian Laforcia at a seminar I attended explained how he wants just by doing pulse diagnosis he was able to tell that a mitral valve of a woman’s heart had a problem. Or that someone else was developing a tumor on a particular lobe of their liver. There was one person who just by pulse diagnosis alone Dr. Leon Hammer was able to say, “You are locked in an attic when you are young.” and the person said, “Yes. How did you know?” He could tell from the pulse. Yet some people would say like author Liane Saytel who wrote a book about traditional Chinese medicine he wrote pulse diagnosis shows even though this is about traditional Chinese medicine he says, “Pulse diagnosis shows a disregard for modern knowledge about the structure and function of the human body.” See that is the mainstream attitude is that it can’t possibly work. This is ridiculous and yet it works. So there’s Chinese medicine which I have many examples then extrasensory perception many studies done, many cases of people knowing things they couldn’t know, predicting things they couldn’t predict. Experiments where Dean Radin calculated if you put all these ESP experiments together for a card prediction they were done between 1882 and 1939. You wind up with the odds against them those results being a billion trillion to one. It’s just fantastic remote viewing exercises and the stories there by Dr. Russel Targ describing how he and a psychic Pat Price were able to discover where the getaway car for Patty Hearst was put. He was describes how they walked into the Brooklyn police department and he just Pat Price said, show me your book of mugshots and flipped through it and said, that’s the guy who kidnapped Patty Hearst, Donald Defreeze. He had nothing to do with the case. So, again and again, we find all these amazing examples of the extrasensory perception isn’t just a myth but then it’s true. knowledge of future events many, many times people have made predictions which I’ve been collecting that we couldn’t explain another way except to say that somehow they could really see the future. Nostradamus I have quite a number of Nostradamus quotes that are actually quite impressive. I could read a little bit of it but you really need to get into the book to get in the heart of it. So many things. Nostradamus wrote in century 1 quatrain 25 he refers to Pasteur. He says the last thing will be discovered – Pasteur also means it comes from the word pasture. So some people have said maybe he was just talking about a field. He says Pasteur will be celebrated as a demi-god. A god-like figure and the last thing will be discovered. Then Pasteur shows the world that microscopic organisms were the cause of disease which seems to have been understood by Egyptians and even by pre-historic people because they were eating things off the trees that had anti-biotics in them. There’s one example. There’s quite a few of them. Nostradamus seems to have predicted the rise of Hitler. He says there will be a second anti-Christ. The first one he says was Napoleon. The second one he says is Hifter which is close to the spelling for Hitler. It’s also another name for the Danube river near which where Hitler was born and raised. He says he’ll be born of poor people and by his tongue will seduce many. He mentions what he translates as a crooked cross of iron in connection with the pontific sending his power to the Danube. Hitler, of course, have the swastika. His actions were condoned by Pope Pious the 12th. On and on about Nostradamus. I know Nostradamus is very controversial. A lot of people have said that you can’t prove, because you can’t prove everything then there’s no point at looking at those ones that seem to correct. The final one I had was century 1 quatrain 70 Nostradamus wrote that wars in Persia would not cease. Too much trust or faith will betray the monarch and the end commences in France. This seems come to pass when the Americans stalled Shah of Iran who’s overthrown on 1979. Too much faith could refer to the shah having too much faith in the US ability to stop the uprising and the strong fundamentalist religious belief of the revolutionaries. He says that the end commences in France. Well the shah, the end of the shah did commence in France because was in Paris [Inaudible 40:51] until the revolution was over. There’s many things if you read carefully about Nostradamus that he talked about the fleet traveling underwater, he talked about people traveling by air, he describes what sound like missiles, a dart from the sky. He says the world will get smaller. There’ll be peace for a long time, people would travel safely over land sea and air. Then he says wars will start again. Very, very interesting stuff. Telsomatics is where one person can suddenly feel what someone else is feeling. There’s a few cases of that recorded very carefully.

 

 

[41:27] Ashley James: I was just talking the other day to a naturopath who I’m actually interviewing tomorrow about that. Last week I’m was talking to him about that. I called my mom up when I was about 19. She was in Florida with my dad that time and I was in Toronto going through massage therapy college. I was like I have this pain and I thought I had thrown out a rib because I had pain radiating from the front of my liver to the back of my liver. My mom goes, I can’t remember which one of us told the other one first but, my mom said I have this pain I just did yoga class and I had this pain so we both thought we threw out the same rib the same day. It turns out she went to the chiropractor to fix the said rib. That chiropractor said I want to do an ultrasound I guess that chiropractor had an ultrasound machine for some reason. That night she flew back to Canada to Ottawa and was in an MRI machine that night. That’s when she found out she had stage 4 liver cancer. The pain she was feeling was her liver end of life liver cancer and I was feeling it. I called her to tell her I felt the same pain. I didn’t injure my back, I was feeling her pain. The same pain she was feeling. To talk about that and it was long distance she was in Florida I was in Toronto. I was going through college. To have that same pain I wouldn’t say fake but mine was energetic there was no psychological explanation for mine. Hers was real. Hers was physical.

 

[43:08] Troy Reicherter: It’s amazing isn’t it if we start comparing our stories and we could say, “Oh that’s just this, that’s just that.” We start to look at the sheer volume of these things and usually, we keep it all to ourselves but every now and then it gets documented and then we can compare. So just to summarize there’s other things in here like dowsing examples, magnetic field alteration, effects of meditation the unexplained reason of why people have religious faith seem to be more healthy, powers of healing that people have demonstrated over time, distance healing. Well, there’s the whole idea of disempowered spirits or what we call ghosts. I have many many examples of this kind of ting even one of my own. With my grandmother at my parent’s house where myself and others experienced the music box started playing by itself, we’d hear footsteps when there was no one there. It just so happens that one of my teachers from Taiwan the female teacher who I was halluting to earlier she was visiting in the year 2000. It was really strange because my father was going through this period were for a couple of years there he thought he was going to die. His energy level had dropped to zero. He’d been to see all the doctors no could explain it. My grandmother had passed away in the house in 1995. Well, my teacher spent the night there. The next day she at the end of the day she says, “Can I have some wine. Like what do you need the wine for you don’t drink?” She says, “I need to drink something so I can sleep.” I said, “Why?” then she says, “Well, I guess I have to tell you. There’s this woman downstairs.” I said “There’s no woman downstairs.” she says, “No, there is. There’s an old woman walking around with a walker. She got a pink sweatshirt on and she doesn’t have any hair. It’s your grandma’s ghost basically.” She’s in the house she hasn’t left. She can’t bring herself to leave the family. She said that my mother’s spirit was pointing at this thing on the wall, my teacher doesn’t know any English at all. Yes and no. That’s about it but it was a tapestry. My grandmother had woven it and it said to the tapestry “Reach out as far as you can and God will reach down the rest of the way” she says that all night long when the spirit starts to realize that she could see her. She wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s trying to get attention. She kept pointing in the tapestry. My teacher said it sounded like “Samy. Samy.” which I can only guess “Save me. Save me.” Because she didn’t know where she was and what was going on. It was kind of like the sixth sense. My teacher said, “Look, we need to talk to the spirit. Let’s all get together and my grandmother you need to go tell dad when he’s asleep communicate in his dream, go to him tell him you need to leave. We told her she had passed away, it wasn’t that we were ignoring her it was because she was dead. She needs to leave the house because she was sucking all the energy out of the living in the house and it was affecting my dad.” So we did that and then next time I talked to my dad he was fine after like two years having such low energy that he really thought he was at death’s door. He was fine. I’ve talked to other people who had the same exact experience about just the idea of being in a house with a spirit takes all your energy out of you. It all seems to correspond.

 

[46:30] Ashley James: Going back to what you said about having a connection with the people in your past. A listener of the show who became a client of mine had an experience where and I’m saying hi to her. I won’t mention her name but, hello. She was born and raised in the United States doesn’t know another languages. She was I think this happened in Ireland. She was walking around and a man behind her said something cheeky about I guess her butt or her breast or something and she wiped around and in Gaelic replied to him and everyone else all of the people that are with her, “What did you say?” she was, “What do you mean?” She knew what she’d said and she didn’t know Gaelic. She’s like, “what’s going on,?” she had that every instant like she understood what she said, in Gaelic, she spoke he was whispering to his friend about how good looking she was and she wiped around and kind of told him off and it was all in Gaelic. She’s like “what’s going on?” Then there was another time when she was driving around, she’s never been to Ireland but her grandmother was from there. Who had since passed. They were completely lost no GPS and she knew exactly how to navigate. She knew all the streets, turn left turn right, she knew everything. It turned out the whole area which felt very familiar to her was where her grandmother was born and raised. Little events happen to her like that that made her feel like her grandmother was with her. She was somehow connected to her spirit. But to be able to talk in Gaelic and understand it. It doesn’t happen to her all the time but to have that experience of knowing with no scientific explanation.

 

[48:27] Troy Reicherter: Yes, it is amazing. If only we could compare note wed find out a lot more. Although you could always say it’s just an anecdote but so many anecdotes put together it has force. There another thing about the effects of consciousness. There’s this thing called the global consciousness project. They’ve been doing for some time now. Where they’ve got this random event generators when something global catastrophe happens they find that they tend to what they consider the negative. It’s like an electronic coin flip but they’re doing thousands of time every second at centers all around the world and they’re recording and you’d expect them to be at a certain bell curve but they’re not. Overtime when something good happens like a whole bunch of people got together and pray, New Year ’s Day, interfaith events. You get things going more to the positive side. The results basically up until to 2015, it started in 1998 and so up until 2015 they calculated these results that they got as being about one a trillion. Less than one in a trillion.

 

[49:33] Ashley James: So you’re saying that the chances of every time a large group of people gets together and does something very positive that it, for example, affects the crime rate in the area, right? So you’re saying that if there’s just no odds that could possibly explain why obviously there’s something there.

 

[49:53] Troy Reicherter: Science, the idea’s that everything can be quantified. It’s very hard to do with social sciences like crime rates but they try. They try as best as they can. Like in that Washington DC study in ‘93 that I was trying sort of replicate here in Seattle having people pray for peace. Dr. Dean Radin has done some amazing work in he’s found that just having people basically focus on a laser light inside a closed box. They can change whether the light is a particle or a wave. So when you’re not observing things it’s a wave then when you start to observe it, it’s a particle but this observation in question is doesn’t from a distance. They don’t even have to be even in the same room as the box. People are doing this online in his website where they just focus for a few seconds and then they press the button as they’re focusing and he measures is it a particle more often than it’s a wave. The answer is yes. People are affecting it with their consciousness. He’s found basically he describes this as a sigma effect of between 4 and 8. Which is so great that there is really no possibility of this being due to chance. There’s a lot of experiences like this done like Princeton engineering, anomalies research program and other places where we definitely showed that consciousness has an effect which is not something we can explain with chemistry and physics. Homeopathy was studied and found to be effective in 81 out of 105 trials in Glasgow by Dr. David Riley. Then there’s getting back to epigenetic effects. Jock Benveniste, if I’m pronouncing his name right. This is in the book The Field by the way by McTaggart, very good book. She cites that the scientist in France found that you could take these antibodies and dilute them like a homeopaths would dilute their active substance. Diluted down to the point where there’s basically not a single antibody left in the vial but the water will still produce a response from immune cells. At a certain point, the response after the 9th dilution, the response gets stronger the more it’s diluted. Then in 1988, they published this with this big editor’s caveat saying that “There is no physical basis for such an activity and although he was discredited by a bunch of quack busters, Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast headed a large pan European study which showed that it completely validated his results. Except that was not trumpeted as much as the fact that this is a fake, this is a hoax and then they left it at that. Nature magazine never printed a retraction or the later research. Although it’s been shown that this is really happening. One thing I find really interesting is in 2013 at Emory University in Atlanta, they had a mouse where they conditioned him to dislike the smell of acetaphino smells like orange blossom and artificial cherries by giving him a shock after smelling this odor. The did basically test-tube babies for the 2nd generation and the third generation. They’ve never even met. The kids never even met their father, grandfather and then they check the mice and they also had that trait. This is not a genetic trait. The question is how did they get passed along? How is it that 2 generations down the road they’re afraid of the smell he was afraid of? No one can explain this. There’s a lot of amazing stuff going on. What scientists generally say when they don’t want to open their mind to this possibility that the mechanist theory doesn’t explain everything. They’ll say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and we’re still waiting for more evidence.” As I say in here if you really take a look at what we know now and have known for a long time abut physics. Quantum mechanics cannot be explained by anybody yet we know it’s true. If you go back to the arguments between Einstein and Niels Bohr basically what they’d covered is consciousness is forming the universe. When you’re not looking at the moon, the moon isn’t really there. That drove Einstein crazy. He says, “I like to think it’s there when I’m not looking at it.” Right? Because if we are in a mechanical universe then everything is just running on its own mechanically. But what we found is our consciousness is making things happen. There was a consciousness exercise from the body of this section I didn’t mention also where fascinating I thought they had random sounds that were generated on a tape or some kind of a recording device. It would make a sound completely random. Either on the right or left headphone of a listener for the next day to listen to. This is thing is generated completely randomly and if a person flipped a coin that morning as to whether they wanted to hear more on the right or left. In the morning after the recording has been made, they did studies and they found that the person sits there and focuses “I want to hear more on the right or the left” based on the random flipping of the coin the day after the recording was made. They’re actually influencing what happened the day before because they can actually either make the sound go more to the right or go to the left. That’s just numbers so they could look very clearly at the statistics and say, “What’s the possibility of this happening?” It is significant. We can’t change things from the past as long as no one’s seen it yet. The whole uncertain difference, right?

 

[55:40] Ashley James: It’s like when I hold on to my lottery ticket and I didn’t check the numbers that night. I’m like, I held it before I’m like, “Schrödinger's lottery ticket.”

 

[55:49] Troy Reicherter: Schrödinger's Cat. Yes, exactly. In the case of a cat, I don’t think it’s going to work because a cat is a conscious entity but if it’s a card from a deck and you flipped it over without looking and the next, “I want it to be queen. I want it to be a queen.” You’ll have more of a chance of it being a queen even though it’s already been flipped.

 

[56:05] Ashley James: The question is do we know somehow know that it is a queen or is the quantum physics it isn’t a queen until you flipped it over and it’s observed?

 

[56:16] Troy Reicherter: That’s true. Yes. Which came first? Is it the chicken or the egg? Quantum physics, light can travel through two slits and strike a surface to form an interference pattern. So it’s either a particle or it’s a wave. Its usually a wave but when you look at it, it become a particle again. It’s a totally different pattern. That’s called the wave particle duality of light and no one can really explain that. How it can go back and forth from one to the other. When we look at all this, we’re finding that It has huge effects on all kinds of things. Like in biology they’ve discovered that there is a particle called exyton. Its energized by a photon of sunlight and then it seeks the enters reaction center in the leaf. It’s spread out as wave but then when it strikes the nearest center that collects that energy then it becomes a particle at that point. It’ll be like one of us looking for the nearest gas station we become a wave and go on all directions at then same time then when part of that wave finds a gas station you appear at that point. That’s basically what leaves have been doing since the beginning of time and we haven’t known it. Things can’t be in two places at once. 

 

[57:28] Ashley James: I really like the movie about the book “Do we know?” I’ve talked about it in the podcast before. I highly recommend everyone watch that wan watch it twice. When I first watched it I was bawling my eyes out at the end and I got it and I immediately hit play again. It was back when DVDs. This was like 2004-2005 and I just immediately hit play again. Stay until two in the morning I had to watch it twice. I got it. It hit me. It really did. This how much control we have over shifting our reality. At that time, I was in Canada. I really wanted to go to the States and study NLP. It was going to cost a lot of money and I had no options for making that happen but after watching it, it hit me that I can change it. I know so many people go they put up a brick wall and go, “Oh, I can’t do this because I’m out of money or I can’t do it because I’m not skinny enough. I can’t do this because I don’t have a car. I can’t do this because I don’t have this or I can’t do that because I don’t have kids or I do have kids.” Whatever. Just people making a reason if it’s like that mechanical view of the world. “Well, I need this for this so I guess I can’t do it.” Then they just stop. They stop exploring how to create the life they want. After watching that movie with the book Do We Know. I went “I can change even though there’s no possibility right now.” There’s no logical explanation for me being able to raise this money. And I went into the “I don’t need to know how am I going to do it. I just need to know this is the sole thing I’m focusing on so I going to get this done.” In days, I had the money. It was like $25,000. Within days, I had the money. It’s a matter of shifting consciousness first. That’s where if you want to create if you shift your consciousness first. It was that exactly what you’re talking about that helped me to realize that the reason why I wasn’t creating what I wanted in my life was because I believed that I couldn’t. It was a really big wake up. So yes, I love what you’re saying.

 

[59:49] Troy Reicherter: Some other thing about quantum mechanics is that a particle go towards another particle and then instantly appear on the other side of it, it’s called quantum tunneling. No one could explain this. When two sub-atomic particles became linked close together, no matter how far apart they are after that, one particle instantaneously affect the other particle. This is called quantum entanglement. Two particles can be on opposite sides of the universe and they will instantaneously faster than light be going the exact same things at the exact same time. They remain twins forever. No one can explain this. And when you think about the fact that the whole universe came from the big bang. This infinitely small thing you realize at some level everything’s is quantum entanglement with everything else because we were all in that little microscopic thing. To freak out at the thought of telsomatics or ESP or clairvoyance or me being able to communicate mind to mind with you, it’s not that far. If you remember of course, again, that consciousness is the things creating all of these. Even as physicists are saying, again, the observer effect light behaving as a wave when it is not observed as a shower of particles when it is observed blow people away. Einstein didn’t like that at all. Max Planck the physicist wrote, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” That was over a hundred years ago. Consciousness is different from everything else in the universe. It’s not just chemical reactions in our brains. It’s unquantifiable, inexplicable thing. It’s the foundation of all reality. Physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote, “The atoms of elementary particle themselves are not real they from a world or potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or fact.” We’re all talking about finding a physical explanation for something that scientist have said doesn't exists. There is no such things as physical stuff basically. What they’re doing is kind of absurd. Einstein didn’t like this idea at first. He fought against it in 1935 he co-wrote a paper criticizing this idea of quantum entanglement saying it’s spooky action at a distance. Later he was forced to admit that it worked. Actually, I guess it was later that it was proven. In 1968, John bell the physicist he found a way to test quantum entanglement and by 1982 it had been absolutely proven that it was true. Einstein did change his way of thinking. By 1954, he said, “I must confess I was unable to find an explanation for the atomist character of nature. One must find a way to avoid the space-time continuum altogether. Although I haven’t the slightest idea of what kind of elementary concept could be used in such a theory.” A month before he died he wrote, “The distinction between the past, present, and the future is only an illusion. However the tenacious the solution maybe.” They’ve done a number of experiments that showed all kinds of crazy things like John Wheeler, he did maybe the most interesting one of all. He did one where he was looking like a giant experiment with the double-slit only he was looking at the light coming around distant galaxies. Light from a quasar it bends around galaxies. It either takes the right path or the left path to get to your telescope so he made two telescopes. One pointing to the right, one pointing to the left depending on how you chose to look at it, it changes back and forth from a particle to a wave. But the light was sent billions of years ago. So how was that possible that light from that star before we even evolved here before the earth was even here as going right or left based on whether or not we’re looking at it today. Yes, that’s what he came up within the end. It’s almost like it’s going back in time but remember there is no time. Time is just something that we’re inventing. It’s like Einstein said, “There is no difference between past, present, and future.” and in 1979, Wheeler had made fun of parapsychology saying, “It’s a pseudo-science we shouldn’t be studying the stuff.” By the 1990’s he said, “We live in what we call the called it a participatory universe”. Reality is created by the observer and he coined the term participatory anthropic principle to describe the way the universe is shaped by our observation of it. That’s completely repudiating the mechanist theory. It’s already basically been debugged. I’m just putting all the pieces together and showing you we need to stop acting as if it’s still there. Of course, I’m not saying we can’t use science and technology definitely we should. We should use it in a wise way. We should be aware that it has basic limitations of explaining the universe. It’s never going to explain everything. We have the power to change the universe by changing our thoughts literally. Not just by believing in yourself and trying harder but literally, you think something and that send ripples instantaneously throughout the whole world to the whole universe. Your good thought or to your bad thought. Your thought for someone’s betterment. That’s basically my section 2 where going the fact that there’s more than chemistry and physics. That leaves us in a funny place because where do we go from there, right? To develop wisdom you need to talk about spirituality. The third section is where I basically I go through and try to show what in the preface to section 3. If you just look at the mechanist view what it’s assuming you know there’s no such thing as free will, no such thing as ESP, metaphysical powers don’t exist, religious teaching is all just imaginary, there’s no purpose in life except just to go on living and to reproduce. There’s no reason to believe that there’ll be blissful or happy ending for any of us or the earth or the universe. The universe is just going to turn cold and dark someday and everything is just going to end in oblivion. That’s the mechanist theory but if you look at what I’m going to call the yoga world view which is yoga in an expanded sense the yoga of all worldwide traditions all combined. Of course, I used the word yoga because the Indian system is the most systematic and the first to put it all into one big ball of wax. The yoga worldview says everything happens for a reason. Things aren’t random. You have free will. You have a consciousness that is special and separate for the material world. The material universe is created by the thoughts of all conscious beings. Ordinary chemical and physical rules can be breached. Magic and miracles are possible. And on and on. It’s not just wishful thinking. This is really based on all those scientific things that we just looked at. I know this is hard for some people to. This is where some people in the scientific realm will have a hard time and they may have some personal experiences with some of these paranormal things so to speak before they can make a jump to accept this. From here on it’s pretty much just talking about spirituality. Section 3 is called Jesus Christ and the worldwide traditions of yoga. Where I’m going to explaining to I’ve learned about trying to put together all of the things that I learned about Christ and that I believed about Christ with all these other religions that are out there. I was in a situation where it was all or nothing. Either you believe in Christ and you go to church and you believe that everyone who doesn’t go to church and believe in Christ is going to fry in hell forever or you just don’t believe at all. You can just be an atheist. How do you reconcile? I couldn’t believe that Christ was just a regular man but on the other hand I couldn’t until I had my Taiwan experience. I couldn’t explain how these stories about Christ and his teachings and his miracles how they fit together with all the other religious teachings of the world. This section goes through and explains how if you adopt or brought a perspective and not just view Jesus within the Judea Christian tradition but look at Him within the context of spiritual traditions worldwide. His teachings and the powers that he seems to exhibit in his miracles. They’re not just unique to him but they common to other masters of yoga. And Christ’s message is fully in keeping with the message the philosophy of yoga. Yoga is a Sanskrit word it means attaching. Yoking yourself to the universe around you. There’s various forms of yoga abut the ultimate aim of each one is to control the fluctuations of the mind reach a state of transcendence and the individual self merges with the absolute infinite reality that we can call God. That’s what this book is about. This section of the book is about is where I go through and basically just take right out of the new English bible or the world English Bible right out of the new testament and some quotes from the old testament and say what Jesus said and then explain what he might have meant if you look at it from a brother perceptive instead of just maybe what you’re told n Sunday school. And how everything fits completely with the other teachers of yoga.

 

[01:08:58] Ashley James: One thing we haven’t talked about in detail, you’ve told me before we hit record and so I want to go through that is that your purpose was instead of which I think what our focus is right now is looking at what difference. Like what’s different between Christians and Muslims? What’s different between yogists and Christians? What’s different? We’re always so fixated on what’s different because what’s different is the threat. That’s why people feel threatened by other ethnicities, races, and religions because we’re afraid that they are going to take away our freedom. We’re afraid they’re going to this unknown if they have a difference than us then they’re going to impose their difference on us. It’s going to take away our freedom it’s looking at this fear. It’s a fear-based world that we’re living in. where people are afraid of other races and other religions because we’re afraid of what’s different. And what you’re doing in your book is looking at what’s similar. What are the similarities? Where do all religions meet? Where can we all have common ground? Through your book, you want to create a world where we can be close to our neighbors and instead of be afraid of the color of their skin or the religion they practice. We can see the commonality and go, “Wow we have so much in common and celebrate our differences and there is actually nothing to be afraid of because we have so much in common.” I’m hearing that in your book you want people to start to see and open their minds whatever religion they’ve been practicing or studied that they can actually see that isn’t wonderful that there’s commonalities that Christianity has commonalities in other religions? We can look for these commonalities in order to celebrate and grow our own spirituality? 

 

[01:11:05] Troy Reicherter:  Exactly, yes. I’m trying to be benevolent altruistic but it’s also very practical. We live in a world with other people. We’re not all going to convince them that our way is the right way. We may feel inwardly that we’re right but we have to learn to live with others. We just have to and our kids have to. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Man must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” Almost all I found was just similarities when I delved into it. A lot of people will say Christ didn’t talk about reincarnation for example.

 

[01:11:39] Ashley James: This is interesting you bring this up. I’ve talked to people one of which has been underneath the Vatican on the private libraries and what has been understood is that reincarnation was taken out of Christianity that it was actually believed but it was taken out because they didn’t want people to think that they had more than one chance at life because if you have more that one chance maybe you won’t be a good person in this one. Whatever. I’m just going to, I didn’t know what but they have this idea they could control people where it’s like listen, It’s like raising a freaking 4-year-old. I’ve got a 4-year-old. “Listen if you don’t do it right, you’re going to hell.” If you look at the they way they created Christianity it’s like, “If you don’t do it right you’re going to hell so you better do it right now. That’s like if you don’t clean your room you’re getting a time out.” It was very authoritarian but there’s multiple sources that are saying that reincarnation was actually a part of early Christianity.

 

[01:12:44] Troy Reicherter: Well, like in John 16:12 Christ said,” I have yet many things to tell you but you can’t bear them now.” There’s quotes like this from Him and from Mohammed also saying there’s lots more that I have to tell you people but you couldn’t deal with it so I couldn’t tell you we don’t know what ekes they wanted to say. As you say, yes, a lot of early Christians were Arians which means Arianism after Prince Arius of Alexandria, not the Arian race. They considered Jesus to have been just a man who then became Christ through practice. They didn’t believe that He was part of the Trinity. This pre-existing Holy trinity which that came later. The council of Nicea and the council of Constantinople they sat down this creed saying, “This is not right. Reincarnation is not right.” Reincarnation so many people believed in it. Yes, that’s right a lot of these early beliefs got snapped out into one flavor fits all religion. Then it just became the religion of the Byzantine Empire and the roman empire so then they used that to justify “well, in order to predict Christianity we have to have this war” even though Christ said to turn the other cheek, don’t hurt anyone, love your enemy. That’s nice but they went ahead and had their wars anyway and called it Christian. This whole idea of his was just like a guru in a forest in India. It’s not what it became later as a justification of every western empire that’s existed where we say we’re doing this to spread Christianity or to save Christianity or whatnot. Christ’s teachings were really no different from Buddhist teaching any important way that I can see. I have some of that in the footnotes here, in the end, some comparisons between some of the miracles of Christ and others and his references to fasting, of course, the importance of fasting. This is section 3, is pointing out how to view the teachings of Christ in a larger way so that you see it as part of a worldwide tradition to yoga not just limited to the Judea Christian interpretation of Abraham and the one God and the ten commandments all of those rules which basically tells everyone who’s outside of that circle you’re going to hell and you’re going burn there forever. I think it’s much more accurate all the more useful for getting along with other people. So that’s section 3. Section 4 is the biggest section of the book. It’s called the unified section culture.

 

[01:15:22] Ashley James: Before we go into section 4, you’re starting to tell me before you hit record about being in Taiwan and finding the book in the library.

 

[01:15:38] Troy Reicherter: Yes, thank you for reminding me. When I was basically researching what became this part of the book and the other part, I was praying constantly. I felt reinvigorated. Like I hadn’t felt since a teenager going to get baptized. Okay, if Christ is omnipresent if my teachers in Taiwan in a basement in Taiwan can feel his spirit why can’t I? So I made this call saying, “Christ, I know you’re out there and I really believe in you now.” After having believed and not believe and believed again. “I want to tell the true story about you, please help me find what I need.” Someone told me about a book which led me to another book. So I was looking for the book The Nag Hammadi library which turned out was in my school library at the National Taiwan Normal University. There was one floor at that time devoted to English books. I was looking for it. I found it in the card catalog. I went upstairs to get the book it was a reference book so it couldn’t be checked out. I went to the spot where it’s supposed to be but it wasn’t there. I didn’t go ask for help yet but I just thought what are the odds that I can find this book on my own. Unless someone has left it lying out. It’s like a needle in a haystack. It’s not the biggest library it the world but still considerable. As I was leaving, just almost felt - I didn’t hear a voice exactly but it’s like someone was tugging me saying “Come look this way. Come look this way” and remembering my prayer that I made. I just followed my instincts and I was walking around thinking I’m looking for something but I don’t know what and I’ll know it when I see it. I made several turns and I was looking at a big line of books, 6 feet high and one book caught my attention. It had nothing to do with the subject that I had been looking for and I don’t remember what it was. The very first book I reached for because it got my attention, I pull down, looked behind it and hidden behind it was the book The Nag Hammadi Library that I had been looking for.

 

[01:17:47] Ashley James: What is the Nag Hammadi Library?

 

[01:17:49] Troy Reicherter: It’s a compilation of gnostic texts from Egypt from about the 4th century. They were discovered right after World War II in clay jars in the town of Nag Hammadi. So they called it that the Nag Hammadi Library. I have the most amazing quotes from it in my book.

 

[01:18:09] Ashley James: What is it? What are these texts from the 4th century about?

 

[01:18:14] Troy Reicherter:  It’s a Christian sect that was basically stamped out. They don’t go into reincarnation so much but I can read you a little bit of it from my excepts. What I did with section 4 was, I basically realized in my studies of comparative religions that there’s certain number of principles and practices that are common to most religions. Not everyone has all of them. I came up with the number 30. 30 principles and 30 practices that I go through, I delineate, and that’s pretty much my systems for inclusion in this section. I go through beginning with indigenous peoples and then Jewish traditions mostly by the age of the tradition in question. There’s a section of each one just going through this 30 principal and practices which they’re basically yoga ideas that we could all agree on. Like, get to the right part here. Like the first principles is, for example, people should focus on love and compassion above all. These qualities are the basis of all yoga practice. They dissolve the imaginary divisions between self and other and motivate one to move forward so they can help all suffering beings. Number two, an omnipotent omnipresent force exists. No names or images can adequately describe this power because this is infinite and exist in dimensions outside time and space. Number three, multiple agents of God exists. These divine agents which could be called gods, buddhas, Bodhisattvas, angels. They can in one sense be viewed as independent entities but in another sense, they remain integral parts of God just as different hand puppets may be filed and animated by the same puppeteer. These agents exist around us and within us speaking with us according to how available we make ourselves them. Number four a spiritual force exists within all things. And so on. There’s the principles and then practices. 30 practices which begin with meditation and prayer. Number two, contact mindfulness to repel evil thoughts. Number three, constant control of one’s temper and emotions. So then in each section as I go through each different tradition I’m just highlighting things that fit from those. It’s way too complicated to put a footnote with each one because sometimes in a single sentence you’ll have connection to maybe four different principles and practices but if you got them all in your mind you can read through and recognize as we go. There’s a lot of things we’re talking about 26 years of research. Involved and studying everything from things that very few people know about. The Incas the way they look at the energy in the body almost like the way they do in India or China or the Nag Hammadi library from the Christian section. What I found also is that in the major religions or the major monotheistic religions there is an esoteric aspect to this one. In Judaism, they’ve got the kabala where they believe very clearly in karma, reincarnation, the whole idea of a bodhisattva, a being who keeps coming back again and again to help people. There are Jews who believe in these things. This is just not the mainstream Jewish version. There are Christians who believe in these things. In the Islamic tradition, there is Sufis who believes in these things which we would normally consider to be sort eastern religions. There is a hidden inner part to these larger religions that really are almost exactly identical what they’re saying one with another when breathing practices, meditation, the terminology that they use, the stories that they tell. It’s a very rich section. I enjoyed writing it although it took forever because of all the great stories that I’ve came up with. This section on Christianity is actually the largest because that is the religion that I the found most on that very few people know about. Like the sane gospels that might have been, you’re referring to about the hidden library underneath the Vatican. Couple other things like that. Get to it first then I could tell you the name again. Things about India and China more people know about eastern religions but the monotheistic western religions they generally keep those things more hidden. I would like to quote to you from the Nag Hammadi library a little bit since you’re asking.

 

[01:2319] Ashley James: I want to know what they had to say about Christ.

 

[01:23:23] Troy Reicherter: Yes, they were Christian but they call themselves children of the light basically. Each one is a different text. Here’s one called the prayer of the apostle Paul. Paul calls out for help saying that the ultimate truth is his mind and his repose. The disciple asked for the perfect thing that is beyond his grasp. There’s a text called the treaties on the resurrection. Where it says, “The resurrection is no illusion and is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion.” There’s a text called the tripartite tractate where they say “God is the form of the formless, the body of the body less, the word of the wordless and the wisdom of those made wise.” My battery just died here. If I could plug it in your house, I could quote for more of it. The Nag Hammadi Library has Christ also saying things that aren’t in the new testament that are quite interesting. The whole idea of it is that people should be constantly mindful and praying and saying prayer themselves at all times and that there’s an effect from every thought that you have. Just like what you see in the Islamic section with roomie and his teacher saying that every single thought you have affects everyone in the whole world. The principles and practices were used as the guiding principle for writing this section. It goes all the way from indigenous people up to I added an elven section for Bhai because it figured it a large enough to merit that. I hope that by reading it gives people the principles and practices aren’t just academic. Just to say isn’t that interesting that they have these similarities but it gives us a common ground that we could in the future. Make intentional communities where we by intention and design focus on spiritual living, focus on sustainable living, environmentally sustainable. Plan our communities so we’ll have much more interaction with our neighbors so that were close to them and have friendships with them and yet not go down that religious path of either making a new religion or having religious warship. On the actual living space so that it doesn’t become, its spiritual community but not a religious community in a sense that everyone has to agree on this is the right way. That’s been one of the main tricks in the world up to now as I see it because we have this fights over religion and yet we want to be friends with people of all different religions so we don’t. How can we live closely with them and still have common ground and yet have your own freedom? The fifth section of the book is called creating a spiritual renaissance. That is where we take all of the stuff that we learned up to now about the nature of reality. The fact that our consciousness determines our reality. The fact the science and technology are great but we need is wisdom to make a livable, sustainable, peaceful world. The fact that no one religion has all the answer but they’re all part of this larger whole, the yoga of worldwide traditions. If you look the boundaries, we draw on the map. The political boundaries are just invented by us and so are the boundaries between the religions. They really are all the same as the Sufi say. So looking at that way and using this principles and practices to guide us is something that we can just agree if employed the right way can be beneficial. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to use each one. For example Muslims and Jewish people they’re not going to use statues in their practice it's just against in their religion but one of the principles or practices is that statues can be used so that they can just agree that, “Okay, statues can be used. So my Hindu neighbor, my Buddhist neighbor, my Christian neighbor they might use the statues that they pray to. I’m not going to do that but neither am I going to insist that they stop doing it.” These are things that are reserved for each person just like we all have the right to freedom of expression but it doesn’t mean we have to go out and use it every day. Almost like a bill of rights that things people can agree on. From there, looking at the teachings of the sages that produce these traditions the first place. You look at the way they told people to live in groups. It almost always the same. Large groups are self-sufficient. Where the focus is on spirituality where they share common meals most of the time. Whether they have little or few possessions. At least to say they’re not materialistic, try to be as welcoming as they can. Each one has its own rules on what and what it cannot do. We design a whole new type of economics which I would call cooperative economics. Coops aren’t new and neither is cooperative economics but the way I’m talking about it is a new thing.

 

[01:29:00] Ashley James: I’m friends with someone that lives in a farming coop and actually a few people in Manitoba. It’s a whole community everyone has their own house or large building with several apartments. They all run a farm together and when you call everyone just has one phone number and there’s an operator with an extension and you tell what house, what family member you’re trying to reach and they have business hours because they run this whole farm and this whole coop. Yes, they live together as a community and it works really well because they save money together. The whole community gets together and will buy solvents in bulk or buy grains in bulk or something so they can get together and save money that way. They can all take turns cooking. It’s neat. It’s a level of community that we really have lost but we had it a long time ago.

 

[01:30:12] Troy Reicherter: Yes. Definitely. I miss it. I was in Taiwan and I grew up kind of like that. It was like one big family. Based on the success and the failures of the group that I was in, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Mine was a spiritual group and it had certain spiritual leaders and the group I’m talking about would be something three would be a spiritual leader per se but everyone would have to sign on to I think the way to build it as I say in my book is to start with associations. People could create associations with certain by-laws and the 30 principles and 30 practices would have to be something that would be agreed upon by everyone and then one of the goals of the association would be to build up coops. That you get a group of people together saying, “Okay, we actually want to live together in this way, on this piece of land. We’ll do what it takes to get the capital, to get that and to make it happen.” It would be an intentional community where I think looking at the lessons of the past, it should be as sustainable as possible, try to grow your own food, everyone should have a hand in growing food being close to nature and trying to eat more together more often. That’s one of the lessons that they found in kibbutz in Israel that’s like, when people aren’t eating together then they just start to stay at their house all the time but if people are eating together then it’s like a big family. That closeness is something we’ve completely lost. Most people have completely lost in the modern world. Where we barely know our neighbors and we don’t have much in common with them. When we do know them sometimes it’s scary. If you’re in a community like this but it can be multi-racial and of course, many different religious groups they’re all together. There has to be other rules which I’ve included in the book based on my experiences and thinking about it a lot. Like you couldn’t have a religious institution that coop property they would have to be on the periphery. If you have communities based on, a coop unit of I think 300 is a nice number. Larger than that you get to have so many people there that you don’t remember all their names. Then next door, you can have another one, another one with up to that number. Then for those people in that regions coops who are Hindu, they’ll set up some Hindu temples nearby but not on the coop. Of course, in the future the way I see it things are going to go ways that I can’t predict of cause. Just like Martin Luther King, he nailed his 95-thesis challenging the Catholic Church to a debate. He had no idea he was starting the revolution reformation. He wound up other people took charge and they just ran in different directions. Things will happen and of course, not everyone’s going to make coops the way I foresee. There could easily be Christian coop over here and a Muslim coop over there and an atheist coop over there. I think that for the future, if we want to really peaceful sustainable world then we need to live in some kind of close-knit communities where we can make decisions about the products that we buy, the things that we do to the earth rather than have it be all spread out so that you and I make decisions based on preference, convenience.

 

[01:33:36] Ashley James: Amazon rating.

 

[01:33:37] Troy Reicherter: Amazon rating. Once in a while, we try to do what’s best for the planet but most of the time we’re like, “Well, everyone has a cellphone I need to get this.” If we could be in large groups and say, “What kind of paper should I buy?” In the book, I make the example for toilet paper. Probably the best for the planet will be something complete recycled something brown, something rough, something that can go easily into a compost toilet and go back to the land. And yet we don’t see those on sale. What you see is nice fluffy bleach right with lost of chemical in it not good for the environment. Yet there’s no demand for the right thing because it’s not pretty. It’s going to be harder to make. Who wants something not wrapped in plastic because wrapping it in plastic seems so clean? Making those decisions about what to buy, how to affect our environment and our world. They need to be made in a way that is wise and that hold each other accountable. We can’t say this is the right thing to do but we're doing to the wrong thing anyway because no one else is doing the right thing and it doesn’t really matter and I’m only one person. We make all these excuses. Letting demand just guide things the way it is right now isn’t really working out. We need to have more thoughts and responsibility and accountability if were going to do what they say we need to do by cutting our carbon emission so quickly, so dramatically. There’s no real action taken around the world to do this. When we come out to the end of the tunnel and I’m very optimistic that we will do all of those one way or another. When we come out to the other end of the tunnel, we will be living in communities that are sustainable and that are peaceful otherwise we won’t be here. I’m assuming we will be here so I’m saying we will. So by reverse engineering what we have to do to get to that point that’s how I came up with all of these. I think in the future people will take them for granted they’ll say what took him so long to realize these things and to start living that way.

 

[01:35:43] Ashley James: Your book sounds fascinating. You’re talking about living in communities and that reminds me of a town in Italy where they couldn’t believe the heart disease was almost non-existent and compared to the rest of Italy, compared to the rest of the world. They were just one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the world in this one region of Italy. This American scientist went over to study them. And to figure out what is it their diet or they’re eating differently? Is it the olive oil that they get in this region? What is it that’s going on that has these people so healthy? Almost no heart disease. Almost just like a disease, rates are really low. He went over there and he watched them marked down what they ate. Him and his whole team went over amber and like, “Okay well, they’re eating the same meatballs. Probably the same recipes been passed down from grandma to grandma. The same meatballs, the same pasta, they’re drinking the same wine, everything was the same as the rest of Italy. What genetically different about these people and it took them a while to figure out that in this whole town was pretty poor as an area. They weren’t ever rich. Most of them worked in the factories but after a hard long day working in the factory they on the walk home they stopped off four different friend’s houses and sit around and drink wine together. He noticed that it was a totally different social pattern that they have. Everyone knew each other and they had a multi-generational families who’d have three generations in every household because they were poor so they had to. The kids were always around aunts, uncles, grandparents. There was a large support structure. Children always had loving people surrounding them and anytime you’ve had a stressful day you can rely on the friends you grew up with. You can go to their house and have some wine on the porch and then walk to your aunt’s house or walk to your mom’s house whatever. He figured out it had nothing to do with their diet nothing to do with their gene expression. Non-genetic but maybe gene expression is triggered by low stress. Even though they were very poor to our standards they had very little stress because they had the support of the community. If someone’s house burnt down the entire village would get together and rebuild. If someone fell in hard times, they would immediately have a support system. They had low stress but also a support system they always knew was there for them. As time went on, the world has become our transient and the people in the town moved away and jobs changed and within one generation, the disease rate rose to be the same as the rest of Italy. He figured out that it was, in fact, the community was the reason why they had such low disease rates.

 

[01:39:06] Troy Reicherter: Yes, it sounds like the Roseto Effect. It was a town in, I think Pennsylvania. Similar thing with research in it seems to be the lack of stress. There a book that came out recently I can’t remember the title right now. My computer’s battery died. We’re in a garden here but I think it was called lost connections. It was on democracy now. That was the author’s what he was finding was people were mostly unhappy about their lost connections with each other lost connections with nature and just the whole idea of always having to work over someone richer than you and being in a society where you’re not valued. Billionaires are valued and common people are just not. It constant stress and belittling feeling and isolation and when you put all those connections back together in a more sane kind of socioeconomic system, where you have those friendly loving relationships with all your neighbors and friends and family and you see them all the time. Your levels of stress drop way down, you don’t have to worry what’s going to me if this happens and that happens and you don’t always feel like I need to go out and do something and compete with somebody else. You know you just have time, they’ve proven just time and nature makes people feel better. It does all kinds of good things to your body. I think it’s crucial that people get back to farming themselves. We’re so used to just going and getting the food we need. Less than 1 % of the population think is farming right now in America. I really admire the fact that you’re planting some stuff back here. I have some beds in my house that I’ve been meaning to plant for a long time but I keep getting caught with these experiments of mine. It’s really important to teach people not just “Oh yes, this is what a tomato looks like but this is where it comes from and this is how to prepare it and to grow it.” If you’re every other food. Education should be a big part of the coop system. Valuing education above all. Above all the things that we’re doing and every kind of education. Moral education. Spiritual education. Yes, to self-sufficiency, environmental education. Teaching people how to appreciate all the ancestors who came before them and to live in peace with others and to pass it forward. Pay it forward. As we set an example if the elderly were totally focused on teaching the younger generation instead of going cruises to Alaska and you know then that will show them, “Oh this is what I’m supposed to do when I’m old. I’m supposed to take the stuff that I’ve learned and teach them to the younger generation instead of just flying around but that what our culture teaches people right now that’s the to do and if you go to a school and say can I help out they’ll just look at you funny and like you don’t really fit in here what are you talking about. We have to restructure so many things and I think a lot of those answers were common sense answers if we're able to sit down in a round table discussion with our neighbor and say, “Well, doesn’t it make sense to do things this way? Yes, it does. Why aren’t we doing this way? I don’t know” then well suddenly make that shift. There’s so many things we’re trapped in our current socioeconomic system that’s driving us into this massive defense spending so every country can be armed to the teeth against other countries. If we keep down this path, you see what going to happen. Not for a minute besides just the global warming aspect of it. China. What if China decided they want to have all the nuclear submarines that we have? Just so they can have parity with us. What if then India decided and then Pakistan decided they want all those. Look at all the close calls we had just with the United States and a few other countries having nuclear-equipped submarines. Then the long-range bombers. We can’t keep doing this every country can’t have all those stuff. We really need to tone our spending on military way, way, way, way, back and invest in things that really matter.

 

[01:43:06] Ashley James: Invest in the quality of life.

 

[01:43:08] Troy Reicherter: Quality of life, education commonsensical things like that. Infrastructure and above all I often think of it like that movie Apollo 13. Where those guys were stuck in space and they weren’t sure if they make it back or not so they made a little replica of the unit down on earth they said, “Here’s all you guys have to work with. Make it work just keep figuring out until we figure out how we’re going to make that space ship get back here.” Well, we're in a spaceship, spaceship earth. We’ve go to figure out how to make it with what we’ve got. They’re telling us within another decade or so if we don’t do something we may have passed the point of no return in terms of carbon emission. That’s just one thing. Look at the pollution we were just talking about earlier. Just think about in what is the last 40 years, sperm count has dropped to 50%, keep going at that rate who’s going to be able to have kids anymore? There’s a lot of things that were just getting worse exponentially and we need to stop it right away. As that teenager, Greta Thunberg said in Sweden the girl who’s refusing to go to school one day a week because there’s not being done about global warming she says, “You have to treat a crisis as a crisis and right now, we’re just not treating this as a crisis.” My book is many things. It’s philosophy, it’s an explanation of what we know about the way the universe really works. It’s an explanation of how all the religions relate to one another and they’re really all one big thing that can live the adherence which can live together in peace and should. It’s a blueprint for getting to work, make associations and one day cooperatives that people can live on to make that world peace start to come about. If that becomes a dominant model, it's spiritual based self-sufficient coops around the world instead of everyone kind of “every man for himself. I’m going to get a  job. I’m going to get that paycheck. Get a big house and environment be dammed while I’m driving my gas cars around and everything else totally unsustainable system. It’s not going to be pretty and so we have to think about not just today and tomorrow but our kids and our grandkids and our great-grandkids what are they going to inherit from us if we don’t start to thinking seriously about these bigger issues because the bigger issues are there right on our face now. The future is now. We can’t say, “Oh, we’ll do it in the 22nd century.” Can you imagine what kind of bad dystopian science fiction movie you’ve seen that look likes the world is going to look like? Like Elysium or one of those other ones where the whole world is basically just a giant or Wall-E, where the world is just garbage. That’s kind of where we’re headed unless we do something seriously to change. That’s what this book is. It’s a serious attempt to make a blueprint. So it’s called utopia found and it’s coming out just about 500 years after the original book. Utopia. Yes, almost exactly. It is as it says a blueprint for spiritual renaissance and world peace. So I hope you’ll give it a try. It’s on Kindle. The introductory price as we speak is $5.00. May change later. Oh, that book you can print that one up. It's $16.00 currently for a print version. I just ordered two so I can have one of my own but if you prefer the printed version it cost a little more to make them one at a time and that’s $16.00.

 

[01:46:56] Ashley James: That’s on Amazon?

 

[01:44:57] Troy Reicherter: Amazon kindle, yes. Amazon yes, kindles like that electronic version and the print version is also there.

 

[01:47:06] Ashley James: Yes, on Amazon. We’ll make sure the link to Utopia now? Found? I knew it. Utopia Found. I want to say it’s now.

 

[01:47:16] Troy Reicherter: Remember Eckhart Tolle’s the power of now. A new earth. It’s little like those but I’m not so focused on what each individual person needs to do like in their own spiritual practice exactly. I’m talking about the generalities of the big picture of how things put together. How each religion recommends you do the same things. How we can have a path connect the dots. A path moving forward to actually building communities is that they have to look like if we are going to survive.

 

[01:47:48] Ashley James: To allow each individual to have their own spiritual practice and not step on anyone’s toes and allow everyone the spiritual freedom, religious freedom. While creating a tight-knit community.

 

[01:48:02] Troy Reicherter: Yes. I think there will definitely people who will say, “Well, I’m Christian. I only wanted to be around another Christian.” that’s fine but not if we divide the world up into and if everyone did that and you just have Muslims over here and Christian over there then were almost down into like mini civil wars where people would be able to see eye to eye with each other. I think the best thing is that the majority of people or the center if you will, the center has to be able to see all points of view and be as inclusive as possible to other people. That was also in mind when I designed this.

 

[01:48:41] Ashley James: Awesome. It’s been so wonderful having you on the garden today. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:48:48] Troy Reicherter:  Well, again the book is called Utopia Found. I’ve spent 26 years writing it not that it was all I was doing this time. 26 years of research and thinking and experience. Some of my own experiences and at the end of it, there’s a lot of very positive prophecies. I’ve got over 2 dozen prophesies that I’ve collected for every inhabited continent about the future and they’re all very bright. They all say that there is this new age coming. It would appear some of them are very specific saying like right now in the 21st century this will happen. They all do say that we’re going to pass through a very difficult period but they all say that we’re going to come out of it in a great state where there will be world peace. I’m talking about from the bible to Nostradamus to Islamic to native American. I have many, many prophesies that I’ve collected. I draw my strength from that when times are tough. I do believe that they could see the future and they’re all saying essentially the same thing that all people from all races will be living together in peace as if they’re members of one big family and even one Chinese prophesy says, past and future will be joined as one and there won’t be cities anymore. As if everyone had gone back to the land self-sufficiently. People of all colors will be living together. I have a lot of hope that that will happen but we have to have a bit of sea of change in our thoughts. Thoughts lead the way and then our actions can follow. We can actually build this better future. So please check it out. It’s called Utopia Found. I’m Troy Reicherter. You can see my author page at Troy Reicherter. It’s R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T-E-R.net with links to the books and same information and links to my other projects.

 

[01:50:46] Ashley James: I’ll make sure all those links will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at the learntruehealth.com. Troy it’s been a pleasure having you here today. Thank you so much.

 

[01:50:53] Troy Reicherter:  It’s been fantastic Ashley, thank you so much.

 

[01:50:57] 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 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 Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation 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 the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.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 would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. 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, doctor’s 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 with 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 and their success and 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 Integrated 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. 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 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 highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Jul 26, 2019

 https://artoflovingcenter.com

 

The Art Of Loving

https://www.learntruehealth.com/art-of-loving

 

Highlights:

  • Get to know Michelle and Shane Eldston – The Art of Loving Center
  • The foundation of a good relationship is friendship
  • “Repair attempts”
  • Have an “affair” with your spouse
  • The difference between love and desire
  • Workshops and the Power Weekend sessions
  • The emotional bank account
  • The Six Hours A Week Homework

 

A good relationship starts with a good friendship. In this episode, Michelle and Shane Elsdon shares with us the secret of having a vibrant relationship. Get to know their workshop schedules and discover The Six Hours A Week Homework to rekindle your relationships.

 

[0:02] 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. Now it is for couples and couples who are married. However, they have some great information here even for people who are no longer in a relationship, in between relationships, or someone who hasn’t yet entered one. It’s just amazing advice. And for those who are in marriages, you will love exploring and integrating the advice that they give today, because it will intensify the love, the connection, the communication, the joy, the intimacy, the romance in your relationship. So you’re just gonna love today’s interview.

I want to let you know, I just got an email today from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. The IIN is the company that I graduated from, I took their online health coach training program to become a health coach. Now you can do this even as a busy mom or working full time. It’s online, they pace it so that busy people can do it in their spare time. Right now, until August 4, you can sign up risk free, zero down. Meaning for 30 days, the first 30 days you enroll, you don’t put any money down. And you can drop out if you decide to, feel like this isn’t for me, you can drop out no problem. So basically the first 30 days of being in their program and just trying it out for you is 100% risk free. So if you’ve been listening to the show, and you keep hearing me tell you how amazing their program is, now’s your chance to get a taste of it totally for free for the first 30 days. And not only that, but they’re taking in instant $1500 off the tuition. That is a huge chunk of the tuition they’re taking off. And that’s both for their paid in full, and for their payment plan option. I went with the payment plan and it was affordable, it was like the same as a credit card payment. So it was very affordable. I love that. When I enrolled, they said to me that because  after the first six months, you start working with clients, and you graduate six months later. So you actually start working with clients halfway through the program. And they told me that the the really successful health coaches have their program totally paid off by the time they’ve graduated. So it’s really that easy to build your coaching practice when you apply yourself. Now with this special, they also give a bonus, you get a course that is almost $1,000 it’s one of their advanced courses totally for free. It’s the How to Successfully Write and Publish a Book. And it’s a self paced book writing program. The second bonus is you get to be on to live group coaching calls led by an integrative health coach. It’s an excellent opportunity for you to experience firsthand what coaching is like and how the transformation process can help you to set your goals and to achieve them. And the third bonus is you get $100 gift card to the Thrive Market which is so awesome. So if you have any interest at all in learning the tools that the Institute for Integrative Nutrition teaches you to be able to be an amazing health coach to take your health to the next level, and to help those around you. Then Google IIN – the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, just Google IIN and it comes right up. Give them a call. They’re really amazing. I love how just kind their staff is, all of them are health coaches. So you’re going to be able to ask them what it was like for them. And let them know that I sent you, Ashley James from the Learn True Health podcast so that you get this special. I’m really excited for you guys and everyone that listens that gets this deal.

Any male listeners that become health coaches, I love mentoring. So if you’d like to also be mentored by me as you’re becoming a successful health coach, please reach out to me. You can write me ashley@learntruehealth.com. I would love to support you and your success, while you’re going through your program and after to help you help others. This is what Learn True Health podcast is all about. It’s helping as many people as possible to gain the health that they deserve.

Now this episode is not about physical health. This episode is about the mental emotional health that is so important when you’re married. If your marriage is not doing so well, the stress of that can drain your magnesium. As Kristen Bowen pointed out to me yesterday when I was talking to her about my interview. Kristen Bowen the magnesium soap lady that I love so much. When we are stressed out from being in a marriage that is unhappy, it can affect our health, our emotional health, our physical health, everything. And so you’re going to love today’s interview because it’s going to teach you wonderful lessons to creating a life full of love and joy. And you keep listening to the Learn True Health podcast and you’ll have a life full of health as well.

So go ahead and call IIN the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and just check it out, completely risk free zero down the first 30 days and dive into their program and see if it’s right for you. It really was life changing for me, so I know you’ll love it. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

 

 

[6:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 370.

 

I am so excited to be back in the gardens today. I mean, this whole week has been doing interviews in my backyard, in the garden. And a friend of mine who’s a Mental Health Counselor messaged me, must have been a few months ago. Time really flies. And she said, “You have to interview this couple. This couple is amazing. They help people have fantastic relationships, and they get such great results, you really have to interview them.” And so I’m here with Michelle and with Shane Elsdon, and their website is www.artoflovingcenter.com. It’s so good to have you guys here.

 

 

[7:05] Michelle and Shane Elsdon: Thank you. It’s so great to be here.

 

 

[7:07] Ashley James: I’m holding the mic. So we’re going to do our best to share it three ways. Who would like to start with sharing your story?

 

 

[7:17] Shane Elsdon: I’ll be glad to. So Michelle and I were married. And we live down in Southern Oregon. And I was doing therapy down there in Ashland. We have seven children.

 

 

[7:32] Ashley James: Seven?

 

 

[7:33] Shane Elsdon: Seven children. Yes.

 

 

[7:35] Ashley James: You look amazing, by the way.

 

 

[7:37] Shane Elsdon: Our last child went off to college. And when that happened, Michelle said, “Hey, let’s go live in a big city.” And so we started looking around, and we found Seattle. And we decided to come up here and take a look at it. And through our adventure, we found Bellevue and decided to make that our home. So when we came up here, we opened up the Art of Loving Center. And we decided at that time that we were going to try a different little niche. And we were going to approach couples counseling as a couple. So you know, most of the time we hear a lot of people when they’re coming, they’re trying to decide, “Do we want a male counselor?” “Do we want a female counselor?” You know, “Who do we want to have in the room?” And, “How do we want to do this?” And that in itself can lead to argument. So we decided that we would give it a shot to see how it worked with both of us in the room. So we started working together in Bellevue, in the room with our clients. And our clients really enjoyed it. They really liked having that dynamics of both of us in there. Sometimes we’ll do some role playing with them and show them how not to do things or how to do things. And then it kind of kicked off. And we had other therapists started calling us saying, “Is it true, you two are both in the room?” And yes, we are both in the room together. And so more clients, more couples started getting sent to us. At the beginning two years ago, when we first got up here, we were working with both individuals and couples. And we’ve just gotten so in depth with the couples that we primarily just do couples counseling, now we will see individuals over relationship issues. But it’s primarily just for relationship issues. And it’s usually because they either have just gotten out of a relationship, or they’re in the process of trying to figure out some of their issues about keeping into a relationship. So yeah, so that’s how we got started up here together. And the two of us started doing this, and it’s really taken off and we enjoy it.

 

 

[9:53] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Well, my friend who has a great marriage herself, said it wasn’t necessarily that she felt like she needed to fix something in her marriage. But that we could all benefit from tools of communication, we could all benefit from making it even better. There’s always room to make a relationship even better, even more compassionate, even more respect and understanding and appreciation for the other person and you know, setting boundaries in a healthier way. So there’s always room for these tools. And so she went to your, she did, she did some kind of workshop with you, where she was blown away, loved it and said it was wonderful. And she herself who has a great marriage has even grown further. So this isn’t just for people who have a rocky marriage, but look at the divorce rates, I mean, isn’t it like 50% of marriages are going to end in divorce? So you know, you’ve guys have an unlimited supply of clientele at your doorstep?

 

 

[10:58] Shane Elsdon: Well, I often joke… the joke comes from the fact that people who come into counseling typically are bringing a problem that’s been with them for about seven years. So I always joke and say, if I was king for a day, I would make it every couple has to come to counseling about every three and a half years, whether they’re in a great place or not just to do a little maintenance. You know, we do that kind of maintenance with our health, we go in for checkups with doctors, we take our cars in for general maintenance and checkups. I think it’s a good idea to take your marriage in. And that’s the nice thing about the workshops that we do is for those who, you know, “We don’t need counseling.” Or, “We’re afraid of counseling, and we don’t want to go in there.” The workshops are what we call psycho education. So they’re not counseling, but they’re teaching you the tools. They’re giving you some some new prospects to look into your life and see where you can gain some value and increase some connectivity with your partner that leads to better understanding.

 

 

[12:03] Ashley James: And you have a workshop coming up August 3rd and 4th. It’s called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. That sounds really powerful. How did you guys create this workshop? Was it like a light bulb moment? Or was it a long time in the making?

 

 

[12:22] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we we both are Gottman trained. And so we studied the Gottman methodology. And so The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is written by John Gottman. And it’s a book and then these workshops are based off of the book. So when the couples come to us to the workshop, they get a workbook and the book. And we kind of go through and just talk about starting at the basis really like we even have premarital couples that come to these workshops, you know, so that they can really get off on a good start. And when you think about it, it’s like you learn so many things in school and, and in your life, but you don’t really learn how to be in a relationship. And so we were really giving you just some basic tools on communication, but also like how to keep and build your friendship. And that’s one thing that a lot of people overlook. It’s like, they just think that, you know, we meet and we’re connected, and we’re friends, and then it kind of starts to wane a bit sometimes. And so staying cognizant of the fact that you need to be friends and work on your relationship by building it, by going on dates, and just having fun with each other like you did when you first met.

 

 

[13:48] Ashley James: Yeah. My husband and I will be celebrating our 11 years marriage next month.

 

 

[13:53] Michelle Elsdon: Oh, congratulations.

 

 

[13:54 ] Ashley James: Thank you. And he’s my best friend, we always say that, like we’re best friends. Like above all else. We’ve had that friendship grow deeper and deeper and deeper. And I see other couples that they don’t do anything together. They basically come home, maybe they eat together one meal a day, sleep in the same bed. But they have different hobbies. They spend most of the work day away from each other, maybe they spend some weekends together, but they’re not best friends. When couples work with you, do they become best friends, or best friends again? Are you looking to create that deeper relationship? Or you just want them to like at least like each other? Like, what’s the goal?

 

 

[14:36] Shane Elsdon: Well, science has shown us that the foundation of a good relationship is friendship. You know, one of the things when couples come into counseling, they come in with a problem, and they want to deal with the problems, just solve the problem. And I give an analogy that you know, you and I this is our first time of meeting. If we were to cut each other off in the safeway parking lot, we don’t know each other. You know, we could be flipping with each other, we could be rude to each other. And it’s just whatever at that time, because we don’t know each other. And we have no foundation or friendship between us and you know if we’ll ever see each other again type of thing. But if you and I were childhood friends that have grown up together, if we were roommates in college, if we barbecue every Wednesday together and we had this friendship, when we cut each other off in the parking lot, we may tease each other a little bit about our driving or something to be funny with each other because we have that friendship to do that with. But we would also be more empathetic of each other and more cautious about how we offend each other.

And it’s the same thing in a relationship. When you come into counseling, if you come in and you have lost that friendship and you’re not having that connection with your partner, it’s going to be hard to be empathetic with them, to be passionate with them. And to hear all of that aspect and trying to work through the problem. So oftentimes, when we get into this, we first learned how they’re doing in their relationship; is there a lot of positivity in the relationship or a lot of negative sentiment that’s going on in the relationship? Are they actually interacting and having a friendly relationship? If not, we start with the basis of building that friendship up, we try to get them interacting, being friends, connecting together. And it’s amazing when they start acting as friends. And when they start to build that friendship, then we can enter into the conflict and we can talk about the conflict. And it’s much easier to deal with conflict when you’re dealing with a friend than it is to deal with conflict when you’re dealing with someone that you’re no longer connected with.

 

 

[16:48] Ashley James: How can you start to build a friendship in a relationship when trust has been lost? When maybe for the last few years, there’s been fights, there’s been cattiness, there’s boundary pushing, and it feels more like a hostile environment? Maybe it’s a bit passive, but it feels more like a war zone or like dealing with like two different politicians fighting in the home rather than a friendship? How does trust and friendship start to become fostered when there’s that fear that the other person is going to revert back to hurting them verbally?

 

 

[17:35] Shane Elsdon: Well, first off, it’s a slow process. And oftentimes couples come in and they want to fix things today. And it’s not going to happen today, it’s going to take a little bit of time. So at first, what we do is we try to get the people to open up and start sharing. We also teach the people to look at themselves instead of their partner. So typically when couples walk in the room, the first thing is it’s, “I don’t have the problem, Michelle’s the one with the problem, you need to fix her.” And of course, Michelle’s over there pointing back at me saying, “I don’t have the problem, Shane’s got the problem.” And that’s how we look at this. And so the very first thing that I tried to explain to the clients is, we’re not here to fix your partner for you, we’re here to help you fix yourself, for you to become a better husband, a better man, a better brother, a better son, a better father, just a better man in the relationship. And for her to fix herself in becoming a better wife, a better mother, a better daughter, girl, just a better woman in a relationship. When the two of them start focusing on what’s going on and then they start to identify what their needs are in the relationship. And that’s one of the key things that we believe is a primary factor of getting us past and getting it started into being able to listen to each other. When we can just find a couple of little needs, and we can start making those needs happen for partners.

 

 

[19:01] Ashley James: Can you give some examples of needs that people express to their partner, when they’re starting to open up?

 

 

[19:07] Shane Elsdon: Well, a lot of times, they’re going to have just simple needs, like I need a hug, or I just need some alone time, I just need like an hour of quiet time to just gained my thoughts, I need connection. That’s a big one, I need the feeling of connection. And for this feeling of connection, it means that we have to put everything else aside and focus on our partner. So when we focus on our partner we focus on creating this connection with our partner through whatever it is. And oftentimes, you know, I tease our clients and tell them that we have a coupon for him to go get a tattoo and that tattoo we want him to get us across their forehead, and it says, “What do you need from me right now?” And if our partner asked, you know, the need is, “I just I need to connection.” The follow up question that I would ask is, so what does that look like to you? What does that connection look like to you? And that connection could just be you know, “I just want us to spend a little time together.” “I wants to take a walk.” “I want us to hold hands” “I need you to just listen to me.” I just need to vent, not to judge me not to tell me I’m wrong, but just to be an active empathetic listener to me and hear what I have to say.” So, you know, we start out with the basics like this, and trying to work with couples to help them to understand what’s going on and what their needs are in the moment. Okay, we spend a lot of times looking at what we call the ‘big picture,’ or this futuristic picture of something that is a narrative that we’re writing in our head. But it’s not really what our needs are, if we can identify what the needs are that we have right now with what’s going on, and our partners can help us to meet those needs, then we start to feel connected with each other, then we start to feel trust to start to build up again. And trust is one of those things that it takes. It takes a while. It takes not only just the words, but it takes the actions. And it takes that feeling of connection and that feeling that your partner is listening to you, they’re empathetic with you, they’re connecting with you. They’re not fixing you or shaming you, or guilting you, but they’re hearing you and meeting your needs.

 

 

[21:27] Ashley James: There’s so many different methods out there for family counseling, for couples counseling. Why did you resonate with the Gottman method the most?

 

 

[21:39] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we really like the fact that it’s science based. And so there’s 45 years of research in the methodology of the Gottman work and you know, they studied couples over 10 years and did 3000 couples in this what they called the ‘Love lab.’ And so they had these couples come in and they monitored them. It was basically like a bed and breakfast type situation and they would come in and they would hook them up to EKGs, and do blood work. And then they also had like these scientists behind like a two way mirror that we’re taking notes of their responses to each other, and how they were acting together. And they could leave, of course, and come back because it was a weekend that they did this. But I think from that research, it really built those seven principles of what was working for the couples. And so they kind of had what they called the masters and the disasters after this whole workshop or work that they did. And so the masters were the ones that they kind of pull these seven principles from. And so we really resonated with those. You know, Shane and I in our marriage, we’re doing a lot of those things. And so it really made sense to us that when we read about it, it was something that…

 

 

[23:12] Shane Elsdon: Something watching us.

 

 

[23:13] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah.

 

 

[23:15] Shane Elsdon: Some of the stuff we read was like, “Hey, this is what we said that these guys have been following us.” But you know, that’s the whole thing. Like Michelle was saying, that’s what the masters came from. So they didn’t have these seven things that they taught the masters to do. What it was, is in watching these couples, they found out that these were the seven things that they were doing. They didn’t know that these were the right things to do. They found out that these were the things that they were doing.

 

 

[23:41] Ashley James: That sounds a lot like neuro linguistic programming, where Richard Bandler and John Grinder looked at different therapies and tried to find what really works. Like Virginia Satir’s method and Milton Erickson, and they were looking for what really, really works and then they would model it. So what you’re saying is that Gottman and the Love Lab, was looking at amazing couples that had great marriages, and then they found the seven commonalities. And if they could model that and teach it to the disaster couples and disaster couples could transform their marriages. Is that what you’re saying?

 

 

[24:20] Shane Elsdon: And the idea is that, you know, just like we go through, and we show the six signs of divorce, that is written in the Gottman’s book, and a lot of times when we’re doing that couples will read through and they’ll think, “Oh, my God. We’re doing all six of these things.” Or, “We’re doing five of these things.” And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, and you’re going to be divorced and it’s there’s no hope for you. You’re doing the first step and coming to counseling or coming to a workshop and identifying that, wow, these are the things that we’re doing. These are the things that are creating these problems in a relationship. And so now we can look at, so what are the ways we needed to change in order to have a better relationship? How can we open up to each other in this new way? And again, if you’re 50 years old, and this is the first time of doing this, you’ve been living with this habit for 50 years. You’ve been doing these, this way. If you’ve been married for 20 years, you’ve been living for 20 years doing these habits. So to come into a workshop or to counseling and to think that you’re going to have a session, here’s the tool, now go do it, and don’t make a mistake, that’s not going to happen. Okay, you’re going to make mistakes, but the idea is you have the tools. Now we just need to practice the tools, keep using the tools over and over and refine them as we move down our relationship. Learning new ways to do things.

 

 

[25:52] Ashley James: I like that your method has each couple take 100% responsibility for themselves. And in looking at themselves and bettering themselves and also putting that tattoo on their head, you know, ‘what do you need right now?’ And if each couple can take 100% responsibility, then it feels really good. Because I think that’s concern over time it’s like, “I’m doing more than my spouse.” Or you know, “I’m putting more in and they’re not.”Or, “I’m loving them more, and they’re not.” Or, “My needs are being met and his or hers are.” And so going in and going, “Okay, wipe the slate, we’re both going to take 100% responsibility.” I really like that. That also helps to build that trust, I think if both can can say, “I’m willing to commit.” When you were talking about friendship, I was almost crying because I’m my husband and I have this thing that we developed early in our relationship where if one of us was upset, the other one would try to make the other one laugh. I mean, in a way that honors them, right? And in a way that helps to make light of the situation. And then once the person is not about any more than we can talk it through and work it out. And it’s just like that was part of our friendship.

 

 

[27:09] Shane Elsdon: Right.

 

 

[27:09] Ashley James: Right. Because you can do that with a really good friend. Like you said, the friend you went to college with and barbecue every Wednesday with, you know, you can do little jabs at each other and joke with each other. And if something heated happens, you guys can you know what I mean?

 

 

[27:23] Shane Elsdon: Repair attempts. So humor is a great repair attempt. Repair attempts are when; one, you can see your partners in a place. So you use a repair attempt to help them or when you and your partner get off track. Say you’re having a discussion or an argument about a particular subject, and you start to get off track. When you get off track with that the key to the masters is, is that they use repair attempts to get things back on the track, to bring it back to what the actual discussion was about. And the idea is to try to keep the problem about the problem and not about making it personal with each other. So that’s one of the things that we will oftentimes do with couples is we will ask them to remove the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ from their vocabulary when they’re discussing about problems. When you’re discussing an issue of what needs to be done, or what your feelings are, take those words out. First off, it slows you way down, you have to slow way down and think about how you’re saying this, and you can keep the focus on that. But one of the things I did want to go back to was, when it comes to friendship, we believe that friendship is the basis of a good relationship. But one of the things that we also really believe in our couples and this is going to sound, I’m going to make all the listeners out there kind of jump in shock for a second here. But one of the things that we like our couples to do is we like our couples to have an affair when they’re married.

 

 

[29:08] Ashley James: An affair?

 

 

[29:09] Shane Elsdon: An Affair. Yeah.

 

 

[29:11] Ashley James: Like a sexual affair with someone else?

 

 

[29:13] Shane Elsdon: No, we wanted you to have it with your partner. This is the thing that we feel is lacking. We fall into love with our partner, we get married and we become best friends and we count on love. Love is that safety. love is that feeling that we come together, you can come home, you know that your spouse is going to be there, you can count on them, you rely on that being there, you become complacent with it. Because it’s accountable. It’s just there. What happens though, is we have a tendency with this friendship – is we have a tendency to lose desire. Desire is the opposite of love. It is not stable, it is not safe, it’s just the opposite. It’s unstable. It’s passion. It’s adventurous. It’s spontaneous. That is what we need to keep alive in our marriages. And that’s the part that fall short. So we ask our couples to date each other. But when we have them go out on a date, we want them to take one date a week. And during that time we say when you go out with your spouse, I’ll say husband and wife here, when you take your wife out on the date, we want you to take her out as your girlfriend, not as your wife.

 

 

[30:40] Ashley James: So like, take the rings off?

 

 

[30:43] Shane Elsdon: You know what, it’s funny.

 

 

[30:44] Michelle Elsdon: If you wanna play that way.

 

 

[30:45] Shane Elsdon: If you want to play that way, you can. But when we when you go out, we don’t want you to talk about your kids, the bills, the house, you know all the things that are caught up in your marriage. Instead go out like you did when you first met. Go out talk about where you’re going to be in the next three years, talk about if you go anywhere in the world, where would you want to go and why? Be adventurous, go make out, go have a picnic. Do those things like you used to do when you first were together. Rekindle the desire in the relationship. And we all do have this kind of multiple personality and the way that we handle our relationships. I mean, you’re not the same person sitting here with the mic in this job as you are when you’re in the room with your you know, child or when you’re at home, being a wife and a mom. There’s a difference of how we do that, we put on our work clothes, we go to the office and we become the work person and we handle that. Well, it’s the same thing in a relationship, we get this complacency where we go back in and we become the husband or the wife. And that’s what we do. And we become, like I said consistent with that. And that’s great because there’s safety in that, that what makes us feel safe.

 

[32:01] Ashley James: But it’s not sexy.

 

[32:02] Shane Elsdon: It’s not sexy. And it keeps us feel safe. It keeps us in this spot to where we start forgetting about things and we lose certain parts of it. Again, we do have that safety love of each other. You know, we’ve been married for 20 years, we love each other, we have that. But we start to lose some of that passion and desire. So if we keep it alive, I personally think you should do one day to week where you are boyfriend and girlfriend for that date. And no, I’m not saying you have to take off your ring. If that works for you then go for it. But I’m saying that you act in that way. We’re going out, you court each other. You know, you send your husband a little note about your date that you’re going to have tomorrow night, you send him a flirt full little text and tell him that kind of stuff that you want to do. You know, and spend maybe a weekend a month where you take off. Michelle and I will go out and we actually will in a playful way we will go out to the car and when we start our weekend away date and we’ll act like we’ll do this little like striptease where we take off of our husband and wife clothes and we throw those in the garage and we put on our boyfriend and girlfriend clothes and we get in the car, we go away for the weekend. And we are boyfriend and girlfriend. We don’t talk about the kids. We don’t talk about the bills or the house or the office or any of that stuff. We just go and we have fun. We do the things like we did when we were younger, we explore each other in a new way. And we keep that part vital and new. And that’s what I believe husband and wives really need to do. And it’s amazing to me to watch couples when they come in and we give them the spice and just like your eyes got really big. When I said have an affair, you’re like what, wait a second.

 

 

[33:45] Ashley James: This is not that kind of podcast.

 

 

[33:49] Shane Elsdon: “I got an idiot in here, what is he talking about?” You know, but the idea is to have that affair with your spouse, have that moment where you let go of that and you keep that passion and desire going. And that’s what we want to do and we want to see. And when we see our couples, when they start holding that, when they start having that kind of fun and they start bringing things back together, we start to find that couples really start to interact better. And it’s amazing. You know, when we talk to our couples about having sex with each other, and we open up and talk about sexuality with our couples – when they start having those kinds of interactions with each other. And I’m not saying that sex is the answer to everything. It’s not. But it sure does help bring couples together.

 

 

[34:35] Ashley James: Why? Why is that? I mean sex isn’t sex isn’t love. And that’s something that women, I think all women around the world keep telling their husbands. Because I think men are very physical, and they associate love and sex but I could just be too serious, be me.

 

 

[34:51] Shane Elsdon: I joke and say women are like ovens. Men are like microwaves. Women need to be, like an oven they need to be preheated. Men are like microwaves, you just have to press the button. Okay. And the problem, I believe with sex and in general with the couples is, you know, typically when a couple goes into the bedroom for sex, they go into the room and the male is already excited and he’s there if he has an erection. He’s already at about a six on a one to 10 he’s at a six when he walks in the room and he easily gets to the 10 and that’s over. When the woman gets into the room, she comes into the room about a two. So she needs to be warmed up. She needs to be brought up. The idea behind this is to start… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Esther Perel. She often talks about this – foreplay. We’ll ask couples when does foreplay start in your relationship? And oftentimes, they say when we walk in the bedroom, or when we get into bed, and it’s those couple of activities that we do right before sex and as she stated, and I agree completely. Foreplay starts right after your last orgasm. That’s when foreplay starts. It’s sending each other the texts the ‘I love you’ the ‘thinking of you,’ ‘you look really sexy this morning when drool was running down your cheek onto the pillow.’ You know, it’s ‘you look good in the shower.’ It’s walking into a meeting and sending a text, ‘Hey, I missed you.’ It’s coming up behind your spouse and giving him a kiss and asking if you can help him cook dinner, do the dishes. It’s being flirt full, that’s the foreplay that gets things going, that’s what brings us up into that mood to go.

And that’s what’s lacking a lot of times, which I believe is why a lot of women feel the way that you were starting to explain. So the idea is, and again, I want to go back, I’m not saying that sex is the cure for everything. But I am saying that when you look at couples that come in, that are having sex, and who have a good healthy sex life, they come in with a good working format with each other to work with each other in a way that they can interact and get through a lot of their issues and problems.

 

 

[37:15] Ashley James: What about when one of the people in the relationship or both has had trauma – sexual trauma in their past? And that impedes them from having that deep connection with their spouse?

 

 

[37:31] Michelle Elsdon: Well. I think, first of all, we’ve run across some people who haven’t really shared that information with their spouse, and so then it’s very confusing to the spouse on what’s happening or why they’re avoiding sex. And so I think the first step is trying for that person to make sure that they’ve been able to work through it and get counseling and kind of understand why they feel the way they do and to kind of get better within themselves first. And I think that that’s been amiss on some people’s part where they’ve just tried to push it down and kind of stuff it way inside. And so they think that it doesn’t bother them, but really it does.

 

 

[38:16] Ashley James: And their spouse can then take it personally like they feel inadequate, but it’s really the other person has insecurities because they’ve gone through trauma. But that’s why, like you’re saying they need to share with their spouse.

 

 

[38:33] Michelle Elsdon: And some people think that it doesn’t bother them. Like it was a long time ago, it was in the past, it doesn’t bother me. But it is kind of spewing out in little pieces and in avoidance and not wanting to have sex. And they don’t realize that that’s really what’s happening. So that’s kind of the first step. And then the next step would be working with each other. I mean, you don’t have to have intercourse to be connected and have sex. So maybe you start out with some sensate or just cuddling, so that it’s not so dramatic for somebody who’s had that experience that they’re having a hard time with.

 

 

[39:16] Ashley James: What was the first thing you said?

 

 

[39:17] Michelle Elsdon: Sensate. So it’s like where you kind of touch each other’s arm and kind of rub in like circles. You know, it’s kind of like a massage technique in a way except instead of it. You know, typically when you think of massage, it’s like on the back. It’s more like maybe on the arm, you know, you’re just kind of lightly touching.

 

 

[39:38] Shane Elsdon: It can be over all parts. In the office, we will have clients that we will sometimes just give them, like I said, we’ll do a little role play where we’ll give them an example of where we just do it on the arm, you know, it’s just we learned to touch each other. So, again, when we talk about sex, of course, everybody wants to go to the you know, penile-vaginal intercourse, and that’s the sex. Sex isn’t just that. Sex for a lot of people can be a lot of different things. So first, it’s to identify what is sex to a couple. So we have couples and for instance, like the [inaudible 40:15] have the saucer cards. And if you look, there’s one, two, and three pepper and if you look at the one pepper is often for some people, sex to them and getting back into sex can be maybe, you know, sitting under a blanket holding hands while they watch Netflix together. And that’s their night of sex. And for somebody else, maybe it’s going to an adult shop and buying a toy and being playful with each other. Sex is to whatever it is, it’s you as a couple. So it doesn’t have its confinement of this is what it is to be sexual. And the idea is to identify what sex is between the two of you and then to start working from there.

The idea of just learning how to touch each other and talk about each other and to learn that. And this is something that we find with couples, and you were asking about, like somebody who’s had sexual assault or something in their past. We will do a sexual assessment with them and we will find out a lot of sexual history. And it’s amazing when couples start to open up about it and it really will change even the partner. The partner who used to feel that, “Oh, you just don’t love me.” You know, “I’m trying to do this, and you just don’t want to be with me.” And then when they start to understand what’s going on, they can have a whole new look at how to approach things, how to identify different ways of dealing with stuff. And that’s where you start to learn about your partner. It’s amazing to me at how much partners don’t know about each other. We have clients that have been married for many, many, many years. I’m talking many years, and still cannot ask each other for sex. They just don’t understand how to do so. They aren’t able to talk to each other about it. And interestingly, there was some studies done, we did actually a study few years ago. Public displays of affection. There you go, PDA. Sorry, I couldn’t think of the name. All of a sudden I went blank. During that we were looking at some other studies. And we found out that there were some studies out that showed relationship happiness. And relationship happiness was they looked at couples that had great communication, but horrible sex. And then there were couples that had great sex, but horrible communication. And interestingly, the study showed that the couples that had great sex and horrible communication actually scored higher on relationship satisfaction than the couples who had great communication, horrible sex. But interestingly, there was another group, the group that scored the highest of all was the couples that had great sexual communication. Those couples scored the highest on relationship satisfaction and think about it, if you can talk to your partner about your sexual needs, probably going to have a lot less hard time telling them you forgot to mail the Visa bill, you know?

So to be able to talk about those things, and we all have an erotic self, we all have an erotic person in us that drives us. And it drives us through our every day who we are. Again, I use the word erotic and we think in the bedroom in that, but who are you erotically in other aspects of your life? Maybe somebody you know, when they give speeches, they become empowered, they feel at their fullest. And that’s an erotic state that you’re putting yourself in. When you get into that erotic state, who do you become? And learn to share with your partner and how the two of you can then manifest that into your relationship, of having this good relationship together, where you’re sharing with each other.

 

 

[44:10] Ashley James: I want to know how long have you guys been dating each other?

 

 

[44:14] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we’ve been dating each other since the day we met, really.

 

 

[44:19] Ashley James: You never stopped? You never had a low time in your marriage or did you know about the Gottman method before you got married? I mean, has your marriage always been great?

 

 

[44:29] Shane Elsdon: Well, our marriage we feel has been great. We didn’t know of the Gottman method before but as I said, remember the couples that went through and became that were labeled the masters, they didn’t know what the Gottman method, either. They were practicing these techniques. And that was why I think it was kind of interesting when we were reading it. It was kind of like, “Hey, they’re following us.” It’s because they were reading things that we were saying like, “Hey, we do this.” “This is what we believe.” “This is what we’ve been telling people. “You need to be like this.” “You need to be doing this kind of stuff.” And that’s what the tools were. And that’s actually what they found in that Love Lab.

 

 

[45:08] Ashley James: So the two of you were the lucky couple that were naturally doing so many things right. So many things that make a marriage work. My husband and I have always felt like we were a team. We’ve been entrepreneurs together. So we run a business together like you guys, right? And we’ve been best friends and been married and it feels like marriage is more than just one level. Right? It’s many levels of intimacy and connection. Share with me before you guys knew about the Gottman method, you were just having a great marriage, did you look around and see that you were so different from other couples? It doesn’t sound like you had to work on it. Can you just share a bit about the quality of your marriage before you sort of consciously thinking about the things that you’re doing right to make a good marriage?

 

 

[46:10] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. I think for the two of us, we really take the time to listen to each other and we always have. And I think just having that presence of mind to listen to the other person and try to understand their point of view and to do some of those repairs like Shane was talking about. He’s really great with humor, which makes me laugh. Sometimes even in an argument, he’ll just pipe out like, “Give me a kiss.” And I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “Give me a kiss.” And it’s like, okay. Yeah, and it just changes my whole perspective. So humor and some of those things, I think just kind of came naturally for the two of us. And I think that that’s a lot of it. Just taking the time to listen, to have fun together, to not take life so seriously. And also, one thing that we teach in the workshops is keeping a positive perspective about your partner. And I think that that’s where people can kind of get in a problem – is when you start down a negative path. And so you start thinking of all the bad things that you don’t like about your spouse, or your partner, instead of thinking of all of the positive things of why you got together with them in the first place. And so when you get into that negative perspective, where that’s all you can think about is, you know, he never picks up his socks, or she never helps me with this, and then you build up this ugly resentment. And so remembering to stay positive with each other and think of all of those reasons why when you first met, like, why you fell in love with each other and to keep that fresh. It’s really important.

 

[48:04] Ashley James: It’s really easy to accumulate over the course of a marriage, sort of a tab of all the wrongdoings, all the things that they don’t do, kind of like having a bad roommate. Right? Because that’s what it is to a lot of people in a bad marriage. It’s kind of like having a roommate that doesn’t pick up after themselves in a way.

 

 

[48:30] Shane Elsdon: That’s one of the things that we do. Remember, I told you there’s those six signs where you’re heading towards divorce. One of the last signs is what we call ‘rewriting history.’ And that’s where you start going back in your relationship, and you start looking at details. And then remembering them in a negative perspective, you start remembering the negative parts. If you think about everything that you do, there’s a positive and a negative outlook that could be seen in all of them – even going out having a good time, someone can sit there and start to look at, “Oh, but it was so expensive.” And oh, you know… and you can find the things to look negative. And that’s when we get a negative perspective with our relationship. Like what Michelle was saying, when we get into that spot, and we start rewriting history, we start looking back at things where instead of seeing it as the fun we saw it, we see it as the bad parts of how it was. And when that happens, that’s the part where we have to change. We have to start using some tools to regain that positive change, and start having positive thought processes about our partner. About our partner and about our relationship. And I think, you asked questions like how are you guys in your relationship stuff? Part of it is we’ve always just kind of kept our relationship a priority. And it’s not something we work at, but it also just kind of sometimes we just have fun. We just try to have fun, even with the kids and as much chaos can go on, we just had fun with doing it. And that’s a big part of it, having fun, being spontaneous. Being spontaneous with each other, keeping things alive.

And again, remember, when I went back and talked about the affair, I talked about the difference between love and desire. And that’s where desire also comes in, is when you’re having that fun, you’re making each other a priority. And you’re you’re seeing each other from that other light. We’re always going to have the fall back to. We’re always going to be able to go home, and, “Oh, gosh. We got to get the dishes done.” “We got to get the kids in bed.” “We’ve got to get that.” But then we can look at the fun parts of it, where we can have the little funs along the way. And that’s the part where I think it’s really important. And that’s the part that falls out in couples, or quite honestly, we have a lot of couples that it’s not that it fell out. It’s that no one ever told them to do that. And so they got into the relationship, they start having a relationship, and they’re doing the work of a relationship. But they forgot about the whole idea about having fun with the relationship. And we get caught up because so many things divide us. We get married, we are together, we are right there together. And of course, we’re on the radio, so you can’t see the visualization of my hands coming apart. But we get married, we have a kid. And that separates us a little bit, it gives us a cushion in between, it gives us something to focus on. And we get a career and then we get a mortgage. And then we get car payments, and we get everything else. And by the time you know, 20 years goes by, we’re standing out here at arm’s length apart from each other, and we’ve had this cushion that we’ve patted each other on. But then all of a sudden we retire, the kids go off to college, or they go into their own relationships, and we’re both standing there basically like strangers. And it’s amazing to me how many empty nesters we have come in. Because now they don’t have that cushion, that focus that they always kept themselves on. Now, they’re just looking at each other. And they’re strangers. That’s why we believe you have that affair. You keep your girlfriend or your boyfriend – you’re husband and wife, but you keep that part alive as well. So that when the kids are gone, when the careers are over, you’re standing there with someone you know. Your girlfriend and boyfriend, you’re standing there together. And that means also that the husband and wife, the other personality in you also is familiar with each other. Because those different personalities are still in the same you. And so you have a better understanding of each other when those emptiness times come together.

I mean, Michelle and I are now empty nesters, that’s when we moved up here to Bellevue as we became empty nesters. And so now we’re up here and we’re having fun. We’re still doing all kinds of fun stuff, we go out together, we kayak and we do those things together. Now it’s important and it’s okay to have your own individual things. Michelle’s an artist, and she likes to paint and do stuff like that. And I can’t draw stick figures, you know, to save my life. But it’s okay to have things and to do things together… I mean, individually, but it’s really nice when you can do things together. Michelle loves art. She likes to see museums, to be honest with you. If I never set foot in another museum again, it wouldn’t be too soon. They don’t ever put those black velvet Elvis Presley pictures and dogs playing pool up, you know, so what’s the point, right? But, you know, Michelle and I went to Italy a couple years ago, and she has all these pictures of the art. I literally have like 600 pictures of Michelle taking pictures.

 

 

[54:08] Ashley James: You’re his art.

 

 

[54:11] Shane Elsdon: You know, I enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. And that, but I also got to enjoy seeing the art through her eyes. And that was what was really interesting. I enjoy riding a Harley, I like to get out and Michelle rides with me on the Harley, she gets to see the world through my eyes on that. And so we get to enjoy those things together. You know, I mean, if I was to pass away tomorrow, I doubt Michelle would drive a Harley. But we do it together because we enjoy it. And it’s not I have to, it’s because we enjoy doing those things and seeing our partner appreciate those things. And that’s the part that I think is important. You don’t have to, “Oh, great. Michelle likes to paint, I gotta go take paint classes, and I gotta learn how to paint.” No, I can still throw paint on the screen and not be able to identify what it is, but I can have fun watching her, and that’s what’s important.

 

 

[55:05] Ashley James: A friend of mine in marriage counseling said she felt like the therapist was always siding with her husband. And the two of them were kind of beating her up. And I imagine it’s a very different scenario working with you as a couple – the two of you, because you’ve got the male and the female, the wife and the husband perspective as counselors coming in and helping that couple so it’s more balanced. Do you ever find that, Michelle, you’re taking the wife side and your husband’s taking the husband’s side? Do you ever see that, like you just see totally different perspectives in an argument?

 

 

[55:40] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah, we do sometimes. And I can understand what the woman is saying, and Shane can kind of identify more from the man’s perspective where he’s coming from. But interestingly, sometimes it’s the opposite. Where the guy will connect with me more, and the woman will connect with Shane more. And I think sometimes that has to do with our personalities. I’m a bit more of an introvert and shades a bit more of an extrovert. And so in understanding that thought process when couples come in, and there’s situations where maybe the introvert is needing more individual time or quiet time, and the extrovert doesn’t quite understand, like I can understand better, because I’m a little bit more similar to that. So I think that’s another way that Shane and I sort of balance each other out is because we are a little bit different personality as well. And so we can kind of see our couples from that perspective as well.

 

 

[56:46] Ashley James: I definitely recommend listeners, if they want amazing counseling, to see you guys. Do you only work in person, or can people do Skype sessions with you?

 

 

[56:59] Shane Elsdon: We primarily just work in-person. We will do some Skype sessions with people in the state of Washington, like if they’re from Yakima or Spokane or something like that. We’ve had a few couples that have called us for Skype sessions. But primarily, we do it just in session. We like to keep things local. And we’ve had clients that have driven here from a lot of different places. We have clients that drive up from Olympia. We had one client that called and set an appointment where they were in Idaho, and they had called and came over for the weekend to see us. And the workshops that we do, this workshop that’s coming up, we have people coming from Canada, people coming from Oregon, people come from all over the place. We get some locals as well, but we get a lot of people from a lot of different areas. And we do it usually at a hotel, we’ll have the conference room where we do it and then we get rooms at the hotel where the people coming to the workshop can get a room there and be able to stay for the weekend and make and make a weekend out of it. Make a date weekend out of it and have fun and get away from the kids. So they can come in and learn on Saturday and have an affair with each other that night and then come back into session on as husband and wife on Sunday.

 

 

[58:27] Ashley James: I want to talk a bit more about your workshop weekends. And I also want to talk about your Power Weekend. They’re very different. I want to talk about both of those. And then I’ve got a questions about the Gottman steps. So first, how many times a year do you do these workshops?

 

 

[58:53] Shane Elsdon: We do them about probably six times a year. Yeah. Every other month? I mean, we kind of are practicing with them up here in the sense that we found that some months, people just don’t go to them, and other months that they do. So I would say we do about six a year. Yeah, that every other month. We have one scheduled in August, at the beginning of August. And I think our next one is October that we have set up. And then I think we also have another one in November afterwards. So kind of a back to back one.

 

 

[59:28] Ashley James: And my friend highly, highly recommends it. She loved it. How long have you guys been teaching these workshops together?

 

 

[59:36] Michelle Elsdon: We’ve been teaching them for two years now. So we’ve really had fun doing them. And our workshops are a little on the small side. And which we really enjoy because we’re able to focus on the people that attend and give some individual attention. So when we do the breakout, so we have like so much your time. And then we have, sometimes where we show you a tool and Shane and I will show you how not to do it, and then how to do it like a role play situation. And then everybody will do a breakout. And they’ll go with their partner and go into the lobby and stuff. And then we walk around and kind of help people learn how to use the tool, make sure they’re doing it right. And if they have questions or struggles then we can help them out. So it’s nice for us to have a manageable group that we are able to go and see everyone. So that’s really kind of unique, I think with some of the other workshops where they’re a little bit bigger, and it’s harder.

 

 

[1:00:43] Ashley James: Could you share some stories of success? Obviously, not talking about names. But can you share some outcomes that have really excited and surprised you from people taking your workshop?

 

 

[1:00:58] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. We’ve had some people that come to the workshop, and they’re there just really paying attention. And we never know, for sure what people’s thoughts are, while they’re there. Like some people are tired or, they’ve driven a long way. We’ve gotten emails and responses from people about, they go back home, and they start doing the tools, and they’re so excited, because it really is life changing. And we’ve helped a few couples that have come to the workshop that were it was sort of like their last ditch effort – where they were either going to get divorced, or they were going to keep… Yeah, even hired attorneys. And so I think that to me was really just amazing. That workshop was able to help the couple enough that they were willing to give each other a second chance and stay together. And some of the couples had been married 25, 30 years. I think that’s really cool that they were able to come and learn the tools and really make a commitment to each other to do them and have some happy results.

 

 

[1:02:20] Shane Elsdon: Several couples, the workshop was the opening that they needed to enable them to come to counseling. So we’ve had several couples that have went to the workshop, learn the tools, and then called us a month later and said, “Hey, can we come see you guys?” And then they come in and see us for counseling, and to continue on. And that is actually where you’re going to get your best results. Michelle likes to say when you go to the workshop, we put a lot of information out and she says, “You know, it’s like drinking from a firehose because you’re just being overwhelmed with a lot of information.” And the tools that you get, you get a workbook, there’s the exercises we go through with them, we help you. But then when you go home, oftentimes we will forget or will miss some of the more intellectual intent of the workshop, or of the tool that’s being used. It can sometimes cause more arguments or more fights, so then coming back to us. And and then sometimes, you know, these tools that we have, they’re great for getting us through there. But if you have some history that’s underneath and behind it, and sometimes we have to dig into that, and we’ll have to get into that history. But that’s where we change roles, though the role at the workshop is we’re education, and so we’re just doing psycho education, we’re not there as your therapist. When you come into counseling afterwards, then we’ve changed the roles and we become therapist. And that’s where we’ll change the roles in that part and move into that aspect.

 

 

[1:04:06] Ashley James: So you have these workshops, and then you do counseling individually, people can come to you on a weekly or monthly basis. But then you have these Power Weekends, and I find them to be so unique. Which one of you wants to talk about the Power Weekends?

 

 

[1:04:20] Michelle Elsdon: I can start. So the Power Weekends are really more of an individualized attention on one couple. And so, there might be a couple who lives out of state that wants to come and work with us for an intensive two or three day period. And so we set aside the time to work with couples in that format. And we go over a lot of these tools that we’ve been talking about, and also find out what’s going on, if they have some individualized things that they also want to focus on them, we can do that. And then we also have some couples who are just super busy, like they’re traveling all the time, their schedules don’t connect, and they have a really hard time coming in to counseling.

 

 

[1:05:10] Ashley James: On a weekly basis.

 

 

[1:05:10] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. On a weekly basis, just because of their work schedules and stuff like that. And so they asked to have just these intensive Power Weekends where they come in and really work on something that they need to work on. And then of course, we share with them, the tools that are maybe specific to their needs. And it’s really individualized to the couple. So with the workshops, it’s a little bit more broad for the people that are there. But for the Power Weekends, it’s really individualized to that couple and we set up like before we even do the weekend, we send out a questionnaire and have them fill it out. And then we have some assessments and then we do some individual phone calling or in-office appointments, depending on if they live locally or not. And then we do the weekend, and then we follow up with some sessions as well.

 

 

[1:06:14] Ashley James: Do you notice that you get better results, when couples do the Power Weekend versus just counseling over time, or is it really just depends on the couple?

 

 

[1:06:24] Shane Elsdon: It depends on the couple and the Power Weekends are kind of a specialty tool. I don’t necessarily see them as in place of, they’re because of a specific. Like Michelle was saying there either one, there are a couple that wants to come and work with us and they’re from out of state or something. So they come to us, or it’s that high task executive that does a lot of traveling, and they’re really caught part, where their schedules just won’t line up. And so we’re trying to give them, there is much more of an intense focus on what it is that they’re trying to work on. So that’s why we give so many assessments and questionnaires going beforehand to come into it. And you know, it’s not one that is going to be something that if like, say there’s affairs going on, or there’s some addictions or something that’s going on. Those we would probably not take them in for that kind of a Power Weekend, that’s going to take some more counseling besides just what we could do in that Power Weekend. So basically there’s like an interview process to find out that this will work for you. And there’s some people that it just won’t work for you, or I mean, it would be a waste of time, you know, really to come in and do that. And there’s things that have to be focused on before they can get to that point.

 

 

[1:08:01] Ashley James: Give me the format of what the Power Weekend looks like for a couple.

 

 

[1:08:05] Shane Elsdon: Well, that’s sort of individually. So it depends, again on what they’re coming in for. But on our basic, on our three-day one, it’s going to come in, we’re going to meet them Friday. Usually, the four of us go away somewhere. So we usually go to some type of retreat, we will go over the process of what it was that they are trying to get from there from this weekend. And then we start with them, let’s just say on Friday, we’ll start with them on Friday. And we will take them in the direction that the assessments and their questionnaires have shown us where they want to go. And then we incorporate tools that are needed and the counseling that’s needed for that. But the thing about the Power Weekend is each one of them is individual to the couple. So there’s not really a directive of saying like, well, this is how we do it, it’s because it’s really directed towards the couple and the intensity of what they need.

 

 

[1:09:11] Ashley James: So it’s not that they’re being in a counseling session the entire weekend.

 

 

[1:09:16] Shane Elsdon: Well, no. I mean, it’s it’s six or seven hours a day. I mean, we’ll take a break, we have lunch, there’s dinner, there’s homework that they do in the evenings. We are there so that we also stay at the same place. So if during the homework, if there’s some roadblocks that come up, then they can get us as well. And we’ll help them through those roadblocks. But it’s all three days. And like I said, there is a time where they’ll go to dinner, they’ll go on a date, they’ll go to dinner, afterwards, they’re going to go home, they’re going to work on some of the homework then we’re back in there in the morning again. And we work on it all day long. Taking a break here and there going to lunch, those kind of things, but we work on it, a good six hours every day.

 

 

[1:10:11] Ashley James: You know, and as Gottman deciphered the seven things that really successful couples do. As you’ve been doing these Power Weekends with couples, helping them to transform their relationships, what insights have you seen, or what like aha moments have you had that has strengthened your ability to counsel people and help them build stronger relationships?

 

 

[1:10:39] Shane Elsdon: So I think we probably get more insight from our counseling sessions than the power weekend sessions. Just because of the intensity of that we’re in, in a Power Weekend. A Power Weekend is pretty intense. The sessions that we see where we’re getting the C people that are working through stuff on every day, I think some of the biggest insight, is what you were asking, I think some of the biggest insight that comes from it is probably the intensity of what people are not willing to work on the relationship. It’s amazing to me to watch people come into counseling, and yet not want to actually do the work. That even though they’re they’re coming into counseling, they’re putting in the time, or they’re putting in the time of coming to the session, they’re still not putting in the work into what it is that they’re working on. It’s it’s kind of like taking homework, and yet you’re given homework, you go home and you don’t do it.

 

 

[1:11:48] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. We’ve seen couples that have come in that seem like a disaster. Those couples that I’m thinking of, they worked so hard with the homework, and they came in every week and talked about, what they were doing and how it was helping and it was amazing to watch the transformation. Where there’s been other couples that seemed like, “Oh, well, they just have a few little things that they need to work on.” But it didn’t seem to really get better. Because we would be like, “Well, how was the homework?” “Oh, we forgot to do it.” “Oh, we got busy with this, that and the other thing.” And so I think one of the most important things about coming to counseling is to really have that commitment to each other and that you’re putting your relationship first because that’s why you’re coming to counseling is to make it a priority. And if you can’t make it a priority, because you have the kids, things, and your work, and the house. Yeah, basically the excuses, that it’s sort of like wasting your money. Because like Shane said, it’s like going to college or something and never doing the work and then expecting to have a good result. You know?

 

 

[1:13:10] Ashley James: And that seems like not doing the homework sounds like a symptom of what they’ve already been doing which is which is not prioritizing their marriage. How do you how do you like slap them around and get them to prioritize their marriage?

 

 

[1:13:24] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we’re kind of like the teachers in the way of reminding them how important the homework is. And when they do the homework, maybe they have a week where they did it, and then we really can see a difference, and we talk about that. And wow, we can really see a difference in how you’re interacting with each other. It is amazing to watch them come into the counseling room, and they seem happier, and more connected. And then when there’s those weeks where they haven’t done the homework and some couples do really great. And then they just have a couple of weeks where they fall off. But you can really tell when they walk in the room, we’re like, “Uh-oh.” It looks like we haven’t had a good week, you know. So I think it’s the reward of the couple can see it themselves. When they do it, they’re like, wow, we can really tell a difference.

 

 

[1:14:23] Ashley James: It sounds like results based therapy.

 

 

[1:14:29] Shane Elsdon: As Michelle said, they can walk into the room, and we can just look and say like, “Yeah, they’ve been doing their homework.” You can just see it. And as she said, two or three weeks will go by and you’ll see him they’ll come in and it’s like, okay, they aren’t doing it right now. And you know, it’s that thought of like wow, it was working so good. We just decided we didn’t want to do it anymore. It’s kind of one of those feelings of like, Okay, what happened here? And again, there is that part of that commitment of where you’re making your priority something that’s going to be there, and relationships take work. I wish I could say they didn’t, but they do. Relationships do take work. You know, it’s like being a parent. It’s easy to become a parent. But it takes work to maintain and be a good parent, you have to be involved. And the same thing with a relationship, you have to be involved. If you want to maintain a relationship, you have to be involved, and you have to put in work to it.

 

 

[1:15:35] Ashley James: Well, now what about couples who are no longer together? I have several friends who are divorced, but that they have children, and they’ve chosen to be good parents and be good sort of team members to continue to have a friendship for their kids, because they have that common goal. Have you ever worked with couples that aren’t married anymore, but want to have good communication and be good parents?

 

 

[1:16:02] Shane Elsdon: We have had couples that have come in not quite to the extent I feel that the question is going with where they’ve been divorced for a couple of years, and they’re coming in. But we have had couples that have come in because they have decided they were done. They were getting a divorce, but they wanted to find out now how to do good co-parenting together. And so we’ve worked with them about that. We’ve worked with couples who as we said, they already had their Divorce Attorneys, when they came into us, they started working with us on their marriage. And as we have kind of point out to them – if you’re going to do this right, it’s going to take as much or more effort and work to co-parent apart as it will to parent together. Because if you’re truly going to be the parent you need to be for your child, it means that you still need to be respectful to your other partner, you know, we don’t want to be talking bad about our partners in front of our children, we want to be respectful to them. We want to teach our children how their mother or father should be treated so that they can have that same example set for them. And then it also means that when there’s additional parents get added into it, your partner gets remarried, you get remarried, now we have to have this same relationship with four of us instead of just two of us. So quite honestly, it’s just as hard or more work with getting divorced as it is staying together, if we’re really going to be co-parenting and good parents with each other. So there’s a lot of effort and work that goes into it in doing that. And in reality, when we add in the aspect of children into it, part of the thing is, is to understand that we need to teach our children how they need to be in a relationship. We’re giving them a good example of what it looks like. So we need our daughters to know how a man should treat them, and how they should treat the man. And we need our sons to know how they should treat a woman and how women should treat them.

And we do that by giving that as an example, as a husband and a wife. I have said this to many clients, we have never had a couple come in and sit down and say, “You know, my parents were so loving, and they got along so well. And they were always touching each other and kissing and laughing and talking and oh, I don’t even want to say what we heard coming from their room and all this kind of stuff. And I think that’s why I’m so screwed up.” We’ve never heard that. But we have had lots of couples come in that say, “Well, my parents shoot. I mean, I’ll be they had sex once because I’m here. I hardly can remember seeing them in the same room, let alone talking. They never talk, they were always arguing when they did talk and they fought, and I think that’s why I’m so screwed up.” We have seen that a lot. But we don’t ever see it the other way. And so, we try to help parents to understand that that’s the realm we have to be looking at too as we’re parenting – that we’re setting examples and teaching our children how to move into relationships as well.

 

 

[1:19:29] Ashley James: Speaking of which, I’d love for you guys to teach some or at least explain some of the steps of what Gottman discovered, what the disasters are doing. So we can identify it if we have that going on. And what are the, what was the other one?

 

 

[1:19:51] Michelle Elsdon: Masters.

 

 

[1:19:52] Ashley James: Disasters and masters.

 

 

[1:19:53] Shane Elsdon: So the seven steps that they were talking about is that what we find with the masters is that they build love maps. They share fondness and admiration, they share positive perspective, they have good conflict resolution, they know how to do conflict, they share dreams. And they also share purpose and meaning in life.

 

 

[1:20:26] Ashley James: What’s the love map?

 

 

[1:20:27] Shane Elsdon: The love maps are, these are the things that we have with each other. It’s how we know our partner, it’s what we know about our partners. So I like to think about like those Randy McNally maps, you know, think about a roadmap.

 

 

[1:20:42] Ashley James: Okay, the old school.

 

 

[1:20:47] Shane Elsdon: The old school. You know those paper things that we used to have? And even if you look on the GPS, so those bright red lines that are on the GPS on those maps, those are the big things, those are like I-5, the 405 – those are the big freeways. So those are the common easy things to think about. Those are knowing who your parents are, where you were born, what neighborhood you grew up in, what school you went to Then you have the smaller ones, the black highways, those are like Highway 2 or Highway 20. Those ones, those are a little smaller. Those are now I know maybe who your best friend was in school, what kind of classes you hated or didn’t like in college, what’s your favorite professor, those kind of things can we get down to this even smaller roads. And as we go, each one gets more personal; what your favorite foods are, what your favorite animal is, your favorite tree, favorite kind of flower. And we keep going until we get all the way down. And hopefully a couple has a roadmap that their love maps are so setup that they’ve got those dirt roads and back alleys. And that’s we know our sexual fantasies, we know what makes our partner tick and what turns them on, and those kind of things. And the thing about it is just like on your GPS or maps, they are constantly redoing them, your GPS constantly needs to be updated. And that’s because so does the love maps, things like where you were born, that’s not going to change, but your favorite food, I imagine your favorite food now is probably not the same as it was when you were in high school or the same when you were five.

 

So those things are changing; the things that you like, the things that you desire. Those are constantly changing oftentimes. We play the role play, we’ll do it like, “Oh your two best friends.” And your best friends can change. It’s like, “Oh, these are your two best friends.” “Well actually, no. They passed away a few years ago.” And as a partner, sometimes we don’t even know that because we’re not paying attention. So the idea is to constantly be touching base with each other, to check in with each other, keep familiar with each other. In relationships, it’s not the big things that have the biggest impact, it’s the small things. Those are what create the emotional bank account. And for some of us, we make a lot of withdraws out of the emotional bank account. I’m referring to myself there, you know, I can screw up real easy and, and really hurt that emotional bank account. So I constantly want to be putting into it. And those emotional bank accounts are the little things, they’re staying in touch with your partner, they’re keeping current on what they’re like, what’s going on in their life, it’s telling them I love you, it’s bringing them the little flower, it’s holding their hand when you’re walking down the street. Those are the things that add to that emotional bank account, that’s what really makes things happen in a relationship. Going to Hawaii, that’s great. It’s a big investmentment, it can have a real high payoff, but it doesn’t last. A week after your back and it’s forgotten. And and it doesn’t have that fulfillment into the relationship, like the little things do.

 

 

[1:24:15] Ashley James: What kind of little things do you give examples or suggest to couples who don’t really know where to start?

 

 

[1:24:23] Michelle Elsdon: I think it’s just paying attention to your partner and what they like. Maybe you’re going to the grocery store, and you pick up their favorite ice cream and bring it home as a treat. Or you stop by and get the dry cleaning that normally they get, but you do it as a favor. Or you pick up something around the house that you know will make their evening easier, or you draw a bath for your wife and have a glass of wine sitting there because she had a hard day at work. And when she called she told you on the phone or you know, so it’s just being thoughtful and paying attention to what’s going on with your partner. And little simple things like putting a sticky note on the mirror in the morning, if you leave before your partner and you put a little I love you or do a little hard in the steam and the shower. And it’s just sweet, fun little things. They don’t have to cost money. It’s just more about being thoughtful.

 

 

[1:25:30] Ashley James: And if both people are doing it to each other, then I can see how that would build the desire and make it more and more fun. Because it’s surprises, like you said, it’s these little things. But how romantic because they’re, they’re surprises. And examples are showing that the other person’s thinking of them. I’m sure you guys have heard of the love languages, this idea that some people need to be given gifts to know that they’re loved. And some people need to be touched to know that they’re loved. And some people need to be told. Have you seen that this is true? Do people know that they’re loved from all of these different things?

 

 

[1:26:09] Shane Elsdon: No. Definitely we see couples react with the love languages. And most people don’t know what their love language is and there are the five love languages. And that’s covered in the book that we talked about. And I think one of the important things,it doesn’t get in depth about on the love languages is knowing what your partner’s love languages as well. For instance, my love language is touch. And Michelle’s love language is words of affirmation. Okay. And so if Michelle wants to give me love, one of the things when she reaches out and holds my hand or when we’re in the car, and she caresses my ear, or puts her hand on my leg, or when we’re you know, sitting on the couch watching TV or something that she just puts her hand on me. I feel loved, that may make me feel loved. That really draws me into her. Now, if I want to give Michelle love, what do you think I probably do?

 

 

[1:27:08] Ashley James: You probably touch her.

 

 

[1:27:09] Shane Elsdon: I go over and I touch her. So I’m this pervert that’s groping her and hugging her and grabbing her. It’s like, “What are you doing? Gosh, why are you always doing this?” And until she understood that, “Oh, that’s his love language. Oh, he’s not being a pervert. He’s actually trying to share his love with me.” And then she can remind me, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. This is great.” But remember, my love language is words of affirmation. And so when Michelle is in a place, and I want to give her love, I need to remember to try to give her that love in her love language so that she can understand it, giving her those words of affirmation, touching her in that way. And it’s when we do that with each other, we’re more receptive. And it’s very interesting to watch it. Because when you do have those, identify your love language, and you do give your partner love with their love language. It’s interesting to watch how they react. It’s like, you go out and buy him some thousand dollar gift and they’re like, “Oh, thank you.” And then you give them this really heartfelt words of affirmation, and they’re in tears. It’s like, “Really?” I could have just told you that and saved 1000 bucks, you know? And for me, gifts is my lowest on the score. When I took the test. That’s my lowest. And quite honestly, when I get gifts, I feel uncomfortable. And it’s like, “Okay, how much thank you do I say?” “Did I say too much. Am I overdoing it? Am I not doing it enough?” I just feel awkward. And I don’t feel the love in it, you know? But like I said, when I’m sitting there and she starts scratching my head, it’s like, okay, what do you need? Well, what’s going on here? You know, it really touches. And so we do think that the love languages work. You were asking what are some of the small things, there is a tool that we use, and we teach all of our couples to do it, we teach them in the workshop, and we teach them in our sessions. And it’s a tool that comes out of the Gottman’s book also. And it’s the six hours of…

 

 

[1:29:13] Michelle Elsdon: Six Hour A Week is what we call it.

 

 

[1:29:17] Shane Elsdon: Yeah. Six Hour A Week Homework. And basically it’s a group of things to do that you and your partner are each responsible to do. And when you add it all up, it takes about six hours of time throughout the week. So it’s not any lump sum of six hours, it’s 20 seconds here, it’s six seconds here, it’s a 20 minute thing here. Doing those steps throughout the day really helps. And it’s amazing to watch couples, that you give them the assignment and we’ll just challenge and say, “Look, just go and do this for a week.” Just practice this for a week and come back and tell us that something didn’t change. And it’s amazing to see what it does.

 

 

[1:30:02] Ashley James: Can you share some of the homework with us?

 

 

[1:30:05] Shane Elsdon: So in the morning, we like our couples before you leave, in what we call the partings – before you part ways, so in the morning before you go off to work or your husband goes off to work, there’s three things that we want you to do. We want you to one, give each other a 20 second hug. Okay, 20 second hugs, releasing oxytocin in the brain. This is that bonding agent and this is what kind of draws us together. We want you to give each other a six second kiss. Now think about six seconds, that’s a real kiss. And then we want you to have basically a two minute conversation. But during this conversation we don’t want it to be while you’re brushing your teeth and he’s down making toasts in your hall or down the hall. We want you to actually stop. Take those two minutes time, stand in front of each other look each other in the eye. And it’s a simple conversation. What do you got going on today? Your partner shares for a minute what they got going on. Then they ask you, what about you what do you have going on today? This interaction with each other where the world stopped, you look each other in the eye and you share what’s going on with each other. Then we want you, when you get home after work within about a half hour after getting home. We want you to do another 20 second hug, a six second kiss and a 20 minute conversation where you’re going to de-escalate, you’re going to get rid of all the outside stress in the world. You know the garbage that went on at work, that horrible traffic on the 405, the stuff that you got in the mail, just all that stuff that eats on you or it could be positive you know you got on the 405 and it wasn’t a car you thought it was closed and it was such a great thing and then you won a lottery ticket and you got 500 bucks and you’re just bubbling with all this. If you think about like being a teapot, okay, a teapot, if it doesn’t have a way to vent it’s going to blow up. So that’s what we are. We’re like a teapot we have this this outside stress it keeps building in us and building us and we have to keep spouting it out and spouting out. But if that’s plugged up, it’s going to blow, so this de-escalating conversation just pops the lid off of it and let’s all of that pressure out. So you have this 20 minute de-escalating conversation and with our clients in session, Michelle and I will role play it for them. We’ll show them what not to do, how not to do this conversation and then we show them how to do it. We do this at the workshop as well. And then we want you to spend about five minutes a day sharing with each other affection.

We want you to share with each other sending each other little text, “Hey, thinking of you. I love you.” You know maybe a quick phone call when you’re walking, “Hey, I gotta walk into an office but I just want to let you know I was thinking of you.” As Michelle said, leaving a note on the mirror for your partner, leaving something in the lunch pail or something like that it’s doing that. And it’s not one partner doing it and another partner reacting to it. It’s one partner doing it, the other partner reacting. That partner doing and the first partner reacting – it’s you’re both doing this back and forth. It’s sharing affection with each other. It’s holding hands when you walk out to the car, it’s when you sit on the couch, as we said touch each other , a little pat on the butt as you’re walking down the hallway, the little kiss with each other,  the flirtatious things that we do with each other throughout the day. Spend four or five minutes doing that throughout the day.

Then we want you to take a weekly date, two hours a week, we want you to go out on a date. This is the part that we say this is a little different for us, is that we say we want you to go out as boyfriend and girlfriend. We want you to leave everything else from the marriage behind and go out as boyfriend and girlfriend, have fun. Chase each other around. You don’t have have to spend a lot of money, it can be a picnic at the park, it can be a walk. Stay away from the movies, because we want you to interact. You can go out to a nice dinner, you can spend money or you’re not. And some couples say you know like, “Oh, you don’t understand we have a toddler at home. Babysitters are so expensive, we can afford it.” Fine. Designate time as your date, set up a time, this is our date, the little one goes to bed, you know what, we are turning everything off, we’re having a special box of macaroni and cheese for dinner tonight. We’re going to play games, we’re going to do stuff. But we are designating this time as our date, where we’re going to do it in a special room and make it something different than what we normally do. And so you can do that even at home, you can be playful with each other however you want. And then lastly, we’re what we want you to do is check in with each other with the State of the Union once a week, we want you to check in with each other. And what are you doing right in your relationship? And what do you need to work on? What do you need to improve? Not what you did wrong, just what do you need to improve? And when you add all that up, you’ve spent six hours on your relationship that week, and you’ve done things that are going to really draw you together.

 

 

[1:35:27] Ashley James: Thank you. That was very well said. Could you clarify like how to do the State of the Union, the weekly meeting, how to do it and how not to do it? I can really see I mean, in my own head, I can see myself doing the blame game, “I didn’t like it when you did this, and you didn’t pick up your underwear or whatever. But I know that’s not how to do it. It’s not about blaming the other person. But you’re saying it’s about celebrating what worked that week, and also then acknowledging what’s not working, so you can work on it.

 

 

[1:35:57] Michelle Elsdon: Correct. So we suggest maybe designate a time each week that you’re going to do it. So you’re both kind of aware of the time. And you know, maybe it’s Sunday morning in bed, you have your cup of coffee, and sit down and kind of start off with like what you think worked. And from your perspective of what worked for you, what you really appreciated about your partner and things that you noticed. And I think that goes a long way by just saying, “Wow. You know, I really appreciated those little notes that you put in my lunch.” Or that, “You sent me extra text this week.” A lot of people don’t communicate all day long. So those extra things are really special. And then as far as what we have to work on, it’s really nice to talk about, from what you saw that you did. So instead of talking about what your partner did or didn’t do, it’s really better to say, “I really messed up this week about this and I’m going to really try harder to do XYZ.” So instead of saying you did this, it’s kind of like what Shane said earlier about not saying ‘you’ or ‘your’ in this particular situation. It’s really better to focus on what you saw, that you could improve on versus what you think your partner should improve on. And I think that’s a little bit better way to go about it. Because then your partner will also probably talk about the things that maybe you are going to bring up but it will be less critical that way.

 

 

[1:37:33] Ashley James: So I see what you’re saying. And what if someone has a boundary that their partners crossing?  How do they address it without the blame game? So I’m going to use the example of one partners leaving clothes all over the floor, because that’s an easy one. But the other partner really, it’s just their pet peeve, they really don’t like it, they want him to put in the hamper or do the laundry. Is that when they would bring that up in the State of the Union? Or should they bring it up just at the moment that they see it? Like I’m just, “I’d like to change this thing that you’re doing.” Or how can we change it? So how would they address that?

 

 

[1:38:13] Shane Elsdon: Well, the focus of what your question is, is you’re saying I need you to change what you’re doing. And what we like to try to do is focus on fulfilling what your needs are. So to identify what your needs are, and then coming up with a plan. So the idea of, we’ll use the laundry on the floor – I would come to Michelle and I would express to her that I have a need. And this is what my need is. And when we get into these kind of conversations, this doesn’t have to be during the State of the Union, this can be throughout the week, if this is something that’s becoming an issue or a problem where as you pointed out, you said you’re starting to feel discouraged. And as we bring it up and we like to use a three step plan in how we bring this up to our partners. So it’s, ‘I feel about what and I need.’ And the ‘about what’ is the problem. And we want to make sure that we keep it up. So the ‘about what’ in this case is the laundry on the floor. That’s the problem. Now what we have a tendency of doing is wanting to make it personal. So what I mean by this is, “Okay, so the problem is the laundry on the floor, you always put your laundry on it.” Now I’ve made it personal. It’s no longer about the laundry, it’s about you. Or, “I’m always the one that has to clean up the laundry.”

 

 

[1:39:40] Ashley James:  And then there’s that resentment, and possibly seven years of built up resentment.

 

 

[1:39:46] Shane Elsdon: And so I made it personal about me, I always have to clean up the laundry. Okay. So the idea is – the problem is the laundry. That’s the problem. So if we can keep the personal part out of it and focus on the problem, how do we come up? So I have a need. So I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overworked. I’m feeling discouraged. I’m feeling unheard about the laundry and the socks on the floor and you know, the clothes laying out. And I need for us to come up with a plan, I need for us to come up with a schedule of doing the laundry, or I need for us to get us to get a bigger hamper, so that it’ll hold all of our laundry or whatever the needs are to fulfill that. I’m sorry. Whatever the tools are to fulfill that need. And then we express that with our partner. So you notice in that example that I just gave at the end there, I never made it personal. I didn’t make this about you or about me. The idea is about the problem. How do we focus on getting rid of the problem and dealing with that? And those are your needs. What is your needs? And if you if the two of you are going to sit down together and hear each other’s needs and understand each other’s needs, then we can come up with; one, how to fulfill each other’s needs or two, how to come to compromise about those needs. And how we can come to what would be a working situation for us. And that’s ideally what we’re going to come up with.

 

 

[1:41:22] Ashley James: So it’s I feel about what I need. It sounds like it reminds me of nonviolent communication. Is that where you got it from?

 

 

[1:41:34] Shane Elsdon: This is a Gottman tool. It’s another tool that Gottman’s have if using conflict management.

 

 

[1:41:42] Ashley James: Got it. Conflict Management, of course. I think that’s a tool we all need in our relationship. That’s great. What’s your favorite out of all the seven? Do you guys call them steps or tools? Principles. Thank you. Out of the seven principles, which one is your favorite?

 

 

[1:42:03] Michelle Elsdon: I guess my favorite one is really probably the love maps and the friendship part of it. Because I think that’s the part that is so easily forgotten. Especially in not really the newer relationships, or maybe the premarital couples, you know, they may not quite get it yet – what we’re talking about, but for everyone else, I feel like that, that really resonates the most with everyone because it kind of gets lost in the shuffle of life. And marriage becomes a business instead of a relationship. And so getting back to the friendship and the relationship part of it is that’s really the foundation of the whole principles that we talked about. And so to me, that’s why it’s my favorite, because it’s really the one that I think is overlooked the most.

 

 

[1:42:57] Ashley James: And what about you? What’s your favorite principle?

 

 

[1:43:01] Shane Elsdon: You know, I like the fondness and admiration and I like the positive perspective. And I think primarily because I’m a positive person. And I like to focus on fondness and admiration, on the things that I like about my partner, on the things that I like about us doing, the fun. Keeping that positive perspective. When I catch myself in a bad place, I find that I am slipping into that negative perspective. And so I have to remind myself to be positive. And I have to remind myself of why I love my kids, or why I love Michelle, or why I like this relationship. Or why I like myself? Why is it that I do what I do? So I will remind myself of that positive part. And so in the seven principles, I think fondness and admiration and positive perspective is probably my favorite.

 

 

[1:44:11] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so interested in learning more and diving in. This has been such a great introduction into this. Can you paint the picture of sort of a couple that’s in trouble? The couple that’s in disaster, so those who are listening can go, “Uh-oh, I see a few of those symptoms in my marriage, it’s time to time to turn it around.” Can you paint that picture of the common things that they saw in the disaster couples?

 

 

[1:44:37] Shane Elsdon: Well, you know, first off in communication, it’s couples who they call it the four horsemen. It’s using criticism, using defensiveness, using contempt using stonewalling. When you’re using those conversation patterns, those are going to be detrimental to communication. The first initial just watching how couples start conversations, using harsh startups instead of softened startups. That’s something we see immediately what happens when couples come together. If we see that when they start talking and they start using harsh startups, that’s going to be something where the conversation’s gonna go bad. You can just see it’s going to go bad in those ways. Like I said, the criticism, contempt stonewalling, defensiveness, those are all big predictors in bad relationship problems. Failed repair attempts are a big one where you talked about your husband and it has a humor, but when he starts to use that, and they’re not being accepted, those repair attempts aren’t being accepted. That’s another sign that we’re going down that path where there’s those six signs of divorce, and that’s the next step in there. It’s the rewriting of history, it’s where we start seeing that negative perspective, start talking about things that are negative, start remembering the history of things that were bad, you know, just our whole thought processes is in that negative prospect. And then the last and final stage is just when we start living parallel lives. You know, it’s like we aren’t interacting, but we’re just kind of living together. And we’re running that parallel lives together.

And, you know, those are the signs where when you see the couples or the listeners right now, when they’re looking, and they say, “Yeah, we use these, you know, these are the things that we’re doing and stuff.” It doesn’t mean that it’s over. But it means that you need to get help, it means that you need to come in and change some things. You need to learn your conversation patterns, you need to start interacting and communicating. I would want to get into looking at how all of that is and then how connected are you? How is the erotic you and you as a relationship? Are you and your spouse, are you guys being intimate with each other? And whatever level that intimacy is with each other. Are you being intimate with each other? Intimacy is an enormous one. To me it is, like I said, it’s not the fix all, but it is huge in a relationship. And when the intimacy isn’t there, it needs to be brought up. And even sometimes people say, “Well, what if I just don’t feel like it?” Well, you know what, put on your Nike’s and just do it.

 

 

[1:47:47] Ashley James: But intimacy, like you said, that doesn’t mean penetrating sex, it can be touch, it can be you know, it can be soft words, it can be hugging, it can be cuddling, it can be holding hands. It’s putting the wall down, putting the defenses down, opening up, being vulnerable, being connected, and wanting to be energetically connected to the person.

 

 

[1:48:17] Shane Elsdon: Yeah. It is that connection at whatever level each couple. And we have couples that come in that have been married for 20 years, and they report to us, and when we’ll talk to them, and we’ll ask them how their sex life is, we’ll ask them the quantity and the quality and all of that. And we’ll hear things like, “Oh, no. We haven’t been intimate in 12 years, 14 years.” And you know, they’re not having sex, they’re not being intimate with each other. And they’re not even living as good roommates anymore. They’re now just kind of living as bad roommates. And that intimacy is something that keeps that roommate part of us away, keeps us together. It’s amazing to me, when you look at, like the normal bar study, where they look at couples who are reporting being satisfied and having great marriages and great sex lives, and that the things that they’re doing. They’re telling each other that they love each other, they’re being intimate with each other, they’re buying each other little erotic gifts for each other, they’re taking each other on erotic vacations with each other, they’re spending time turning towards each other instead of away from each other. They’re spending quality time constantly trying to connect together, that’s what’s going on with the couples that are having those relationships. And when we see couples that come in, that are having great sex lives, we see coming are intimately together and having great sex lives.

It’s funny when those couples come in, it seems more often than not that they are having situational issues that they need to get past. That’s what they need help with, it’s situational issues. We have this particular thing that’s going on, and we just need help getting past it. That’s what they’re coming in for is a situational. The couples that have no relationship, they’re not having intimacy, they’re not being sexual with each other, they’re not being close. When those couples come in, and are looking at, it could be there’s some situational things, but then we find there’s all these foundational parts of it that aren’t there in the relationship. And they’re basically just living as roommates. When they come in, and they have the conversation, we hear them talking to each other in ways that are just non-relationship ways. They’re just two strangers or two friends talking.

 

 

[1:50:57] Ashley James: I can see why your website is artoflovingcenter.com. I can see why now. I get it. It really is about fostering that love, that connection, and you’re taking away the blame. I think a person in a relationship that wants to fix it is worried that a part of counseling is going to be a blame game, or they’re going to feel very vulnerable, they’re going to feel like their ego gets bruised. And that they’ll get defensive. A lot of people feel defensive when you know, “Hey, let’s do some counseling. Let’s go to marriage counseling.” Then the other one gets all defensive. Like there’s nothing wrong with me, you need to get fixed. There’s nothing wrong with me. But you guys are gentle and loving. And it’s just tools you want to give the couple, it’s not about blame. It’s not about bruising the other person’s ego. It’s not about dragging them through the mud of the history of the relationship and everything they did wrong. It’s about what they can start doing right – right now. And it’s very practical. I like how practical it is. It’s so cool. It’s been wonderful sitting with you guys today. Is there anything left unsaid? Anything that you want to share with the listeners to wrap up today’s interview?

 

 

[1:52:19] Michelle Elsdon: No. I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered most of the things that we do in our work together. And I would just say, if you’re concerned about your relationship, and you’re afraid to go to counseling, then maybe try a workshop. It’s less threatening, and it’s kind of just a class. And a lot of times we hear that there’s one partner that really wants to get some help, and the other person really does it. And so I think that the workshops can be less threatening for that person that’s really not wanting to do it. And they come away with a lot of tools, and then maybe that helps propel them into the counseling that they need. Or maybe it just helps them on their own to kind of have a springboard to go forward.

 

 

[1:53:09] Ashley James: I love that your workshop is the Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work, and that it is psycho education. It’s not a replacement for therapy. It’s not counseling, but it is teaching the couple all the tools that they can apply every day, you’re giving them the homework.

 

 

[1:53:25] Shane Elsdon: Correct. Correct. And you know, one thing that I think it’s important, if in a couple, one partner says, “I think we need counseling.” And the other partner says, “No, I don’t think so.” – You need counseling. If a person is coming to you, and they’re expressing that they feel that they need counseling, they’re expressing to you that even though you may not be identifying a problem, that they’re feeling that there’s a section that there’s a problem. We get couples that come in all the time where they say, “Well, I brought this up before. I brought this up before. And now I’m at the point where I’m ready to quit.” So if your partner expresses to you that they need, they want help, take it serious. You may not see the issue, but they’ll see the issue. And you need to go in and talk to find out what these issues that they’re feeling are.

 

 

[1:54:22] Ashley James: Beautiful and that it’s not threatening, especially if they’re going to work with you guys. Because it’s all about fostering love and and for the men listening it could be great sex, right? Great love and intimacy. www.artoflovingcenter.com. I definitely urge listeners to check out your workshops. The next one coming up is August 3rd and 4th. So it’s just around the corner, but you do them every few months. So they can contact you on the website and see.

 

 

[1:54:51] Shane Elsdon: They can sign up directly on the website. They can call us to set it up or there is a signup page right on the website. There’s a few seats left in the August one and then yeah, we do them periodically.

 

 

[1:55:04] Ashley James: Wonderful. Thank you so much. You guys are welcome back on the show. Anytime you want to come teach.

 

 

[1:55:10] Michelle Elsdon: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been really wonderful meeting you and we love your show. So thank you.

 

 

[1:55:16] Shane Elsdon: And thank you very much for having us on and we do love your show. 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, 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 Ntrition.

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 lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I defnitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.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 sur 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 office, 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’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 gonna wanna 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.

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For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplemnts are best for you, go to www.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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The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Become A Health Coach-Learn More About The Institute for Integrative Nutrition's Health Coaching Certification Program by checking out these four resources:

1) Integrative Nutrition's Curriculum Guide:
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3) Module One of the IIN curriculum:
http://geti.in/2cmWPl8

4) Get three free chapters of Joshua Rosenthal's book:
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Watch my little video on how to become a Certified Health Coach!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDDnofnSldI

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Jul 23, 2019

Troy's detox experement results: https://hhresearch.org/current-experiment

Learn more about Sunlighten Saunas by listening to this interview with their founder, Connie Zack: https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas

 

How To Eliminate Cancer-Causing Chemicals

https://www.learntruehealth.com/cancer-causing-chemicals

Highlights:

  • Toxicants that bioaccumulate
  • The body is not able to recognize the chemicals in our environment
  • Activated charcoal and detoxification
  • Gene expression
  • Troy Reicherter’s experiments
  • Fasting
  • Re-feeding after the fast

 

Ever afraid to try fasting? In this episode you will learn about the benefits of fasting in detoxifying the body. Know what toxicants are and the damage they can do internally. Troy Reicherter will also share with us his fasting journey and reintroducing food after a long term fast.

 

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have a really interesting guest coming back on the show. In the last two years, he spent over $20,000 in lab tests to determine whether he was detoxing chemicals, like he calls them toxicants; artificial pesticides, you know, chemicals, environmental pollutants, basically, which are very hard to get out of the body – PCBs. These fat soluble toxins that accumulate in the body and that are now known to cause cancer once it reaches a certain threshold in the body. So in the last two years, he has done numerous things and experimented on himself. He’s done supplements, he did 109 sauna sessions, and several long water only fasts. Then he took his blood tests every six months to determine what works, what doesn’t work. And today, he’s here to share his results, his ongoing results, as he’s been on the show before, and he will come back every few years because he’s going to continue doing these experiments, and he has people who want to participate with him. So it’ll just keep growing into case studies. It’s amazing that no one around the world is doing this research. Because if you think about it, research dollars come from wanting to invent a medicine, right?

Universities so far has been willing to experiment on how to detoxify the body naturally of these horrible chemicals that get accumulated in our body and cause disease and wreak havoc on our health. And so he’s basically the first person that he knows of, that is doing these types of experiments. So it’s really cool to learn from him today. One thing he mentions, because again, he did 109 sauna sessions, and tested his blood levels to see if it was working among all the other things he was doing. I want to let you know that my favorite sauna, and I’ve been using it with great results for the last year and a half. It has been the Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it, I really noticed the difference.. And if you’ve been a longtime listener, you’ll know my story. I was having this toxic overload happen every time I went to lose weight. So as we you know, we store these toxins, these toxicants in our adipose tissue, and my liver was not able to handle it to manage it. And so anytime I went to lose weight, I would get very sick, my liver would become inflamed, I went and got liver tests and ultrasounds and blood tests and determined that it was a very, very angry liver, and my body would just become so sick that I would be almost bedridden from this toxic overload. So I got a sauna after being recommended by several Naturopaths that the best way to remove toxins from the body is to bypass the liver and the kidneys is through our skin. Our skin can sweat out even these fat soluble toxins. And so I’ve been using the Sunlighten Sauna successfully. I’ve been having amazing results. The first thing I noticed my skin became very soft. Because it has the anti aging properties.

The Sunlighten Sauna, which is the three in one sauna has near mid and far infrared and these rays will stimulate collagen production. So it’s great for beautiful skin. But I noticed that I slept better, I had more mental clarity, I had more energy, I was so much more relaxed, and my body started to shed weight without having the toxic overload that I had before. So I’m very excited to tell you that I believe in the Sunlighten Sauna, it’s ultra low EMF, it is non toxic. It’s very easy to assemble. My husband did it single handedly. And so you can get the wooden one or you can get the one that is a solo system, which you’re able to put in your closet when you’re not using it. I recommend that you call Sunlighten and talk to them, see which unit is best for you. And make sure you get the Learn True Health listener discount, you get free shipping, that’s about $500 off because these units are quite heavy. So you get free shipping. And right now they’re giving us an additional… It’s hard to explain but it is very relaxing. It’s it’s a machine that they put in the sauna and it uses light and sound to turn on the healing response in the nervous system. And they’re finding it works really well with people with anxiety, high stress, and even post traumatic stress. So that is something that is wonderful that they’re gifting us as well. So give Sunlighten a call. Mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James for those wonderful discounts. And if you have a Sunlighten Sauna and you’re having great results we want to share with me please feel free to email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, I’d love to hear your experiences. I’ve had dozens of listeners contact me and tell me that they’re having such wonderful results with it. And also because you can even sweat on lower temperatures. It’s great for kids, my back when he was three and now he’s four, he sits with me in the sauna till he’s ready to get out. I don’t keep him in there for a whole half an hour, but he will sweat in the sauna, which is so great to help the children to detox as well. Excellent. Will enjoy today’s show. As I know you will have yourself a fantastic day.

 

 

[6:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 369. Well, here we are in my backyard garden, sitting here with Troy Reicherter and we’ve had you on the show before you came over to my house for Episode 138. So listeners can go and check that out. And since then many things have happened. And I’m excited to uncover them here today. Welcome back to the show.

 

 

[6:45] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It was two years ago, wonderful to be back.

 

 

[6:49] Ashley James: It’s amazing how time flies. It’s pretty crazy. But that was just two years ago. So, what interests me the most when I met you at the Unity Church, you were doing an experiment, you like doing experiments. Do you consider yourself a scientist?

 

 

[7:08] Troy Reicherter: Well, I have a master’s degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Technically, that’s a Master of Science degree. But no, I’m not really a career scientist or anything. I’m kind of a citizen scientist, if you want to put it anyway.

 

 

[7:23] Ashley James: I like that citizen scientist. So you were experimenting on a few things, you were looking to form enough people to come together in the Seattle area to pray and meditate on peace over the summer, two years ago to see if we could impact the amount of crime or the crime rate in the area. And you’ve also been experimenting for the last few years on fasting, water only fasting and testing your different levels of pollution, chemicals and pesticides that are really hard to get rid off, to see if you could use fasting and a clean diet and some supplements even talk about today to help to eliminate the body of heavy metals and pollution. And so now it’s been two years later, you have some remarkable information to share with us.

 

 

[8:20] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Well, this experiment started back in 2015. When I had read a lot of articles about the things in the body, including heavy metals. I had to pick and choose what I could test for, I would have loved to have tested for heavy metals for flame retardants. But I finally had to narrow it down to two main things. So what I was testing for was pesticides. I think they measured 13 different kinds and then PCBs, of which there are I believe 207 different varieties. So it’s not exactly water only fasting, it’s a modified fasting, and I can describe the things that I did. And I started out just believing that there must be a way because mainstream medical science right now is telling people that there’s no known way, or no safe way to get these chemicals that do bio accumulate out of your blood. Now some chemicals don’t bio accumulate. And so like the phthalates, plastic softeners for example, within a few days they leave your system or the stuff that you get from those plastic water bottles or from receipts, you know.

 

 

[9:45] Ashley James: Bisphenol A?

 

 

[9:46] Troy Reicherter: Bisphenol A, yes. That leaves your body within a few days, depending on how it’s taken in, maybe a week. So some things do leave the body like arsenic, but then other things do bio accumulate like heavy metals, and DDT, PCBs. So those are the things I’m testing for, and decided to do this fast to see if I could get it out of the body. So that was my whole thesis is that there must be a way to do this. And actually, I am the first person to prove that this can be done. So this is pretty remarkable. Everybody said I was crazy to do it. Everybody said this, how is this going to work? These these things are so lipophilic. And that means that they bind with the fats in your body, and they’re just not going to be released. Because of my experience with fasting that goes back to 1993. I was just very convinced that when you’re fasting, so much of the fat is lost, and it’s throwing toxicants out into the body. And by the way, the word toxin is used by most people to describe these things. But that’s not actually correct. A toxin is actually a toxic substance, that’s made by a living organism. So like a spider’s venom, that’s a toxin. So I’m going to try to use the right word toxicant, which is either either an element like a heavy metal that’s toxic, or else a man made chemical. So these toxicants get thrown out into the blood and I was thinking they must be leaving the body at pretty large rate during a fast. So I was just sure that if we did this and measured, because these tests are very expensive. I’ve spent over $20,000 so far on the eight tests that I’ve done on my blood, and I could use some help pay for the rest. With the donations I have. I’ve set up a website and a nonprofit called Holistic Health Research. But these tests haven’t been done before, and the assumption was fasting wouldn’t work. So that’s what I was trying to prove. So in 2015, I began the whole thing with three-week fast. And you met me in 2017, I guess it was after my second fast. Yeah. So to go back to I guess, to just kind of recap what I knew then, when I saw you last time I had the results of the first four blood tests in. And they’re interesting, but they’re a little bit confusing. I discovered later a little bit misleading. Because what happens is more complicated than I realized. So my initial blood measurements for the PCBs was 71,000 parts per trillion.

They give some of these numbers in parts per billion, and I’m adjusting by adding, you know, adding three zeros. So 71,000 parts per trillion, was actually much lower than what most people seem to get. The other results that I’ve seen, for people’s blood is usually much higher than that. There was a test in a family in Oakland back in 2005. And the littlest boy in the family, he had 355,000 parts per trillion, a little girl, I think she was like eight; 207,000 parts per trillion. And then dad had like 200,000 parts per trillion, mom was the lowest she was actually a little lower than me, 67,000 parts per trillion. Can you guess why the mother might have had the lowest rating?

 

 

[13:24] Ashley James: I’m gonna guess because she breastfed. And so she gave the toxins to her kids.

 

 

[13:28] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. Yeah, that’s the theory anyway. We don’t know what she had before that. But that’s the only known way right now that scientists or doctors will tell you to get rid of these things from your body is to have kids and to breastfeed. Which, of course, is horrible, right? I mean, who would want to do that? You’d rather keep it all yourself, or even intensify your own levels than to give it to your poor child. And what’s doubly worse is the kids are more vulnerable to these chemicals as they’re developing. So it may be that they’re 10 times more vulnerable, we don’t really have a way to gauge that yet, you’d have to do all kinds of experiments. That would be totally unethical. But the funny thing is, we’re doing these experiments on ourselves right now. And there is no known way besides that to get rid of this stuff. So, so these were my beginning levels, which were pretty low compared to other people, 71,000 parts per trillion for the PCBs. And then for DDT, it breaks down into a bunch of smaller groups of chemicals. And the largest group by far is called 44DDE. So it’s basically DDT with a slight change in its molecular structure. And my numbers there were not quite as high, it was 56,000 to start out with. Again, which is about like one quarter, or one fifth of what the average person seems to have. And I can only guess that’s because I’ve tried to eat vegetarian for a long time. Tried to eat organic for a long time. And I’ve done a lot of fasting in the past. So that’s my best guess as to why my numbers are lower than other people’s. Because these these toxicants – they definitely are higher in meat, especially seafood, and dairy products, for sure.

 

 

[15:13] Ashley James: Right. And the understanding is that when animals consume, so let’s think of a cow, a lot of people eat beef. We now raise corn to feed the cows. It actually really disagrees with with the cow’s stomach. Some people have even said cows are allergic to corn. And so then they have to be put on a lot of antibiotics because they constantly get infections. So they’re eating all this corn that we’ve raised. This is not organic, just talking about standard, you know, fast food, hamburger kind of meat. We raised this cow on the corn that is latent with pesticides and heavy metals. It’s all concentrated in their fat and their meat – significantly concentrated through a few years of eating pesticide latent corn. And then we slaughter that animal and turn it into a hamburger and you go through the drive-thru. And you’re eating that patty and the fat in that patty is concentrated pesticides. And so no wonder when we eat meat that we’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating the flesh of animals, because we’ve been feeding them toxicant latent food for years.

 

 

[16:41] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, that’s right. I mean when you when you delve into the subject, you’ll really feel that we should take just a fraction of the money that we spend on the military or sports and do some real research into these things to find out how bad is it? What are the levels and all the foods that we eat and the animals and ourselves? What are the effects of these things on us? What can we do to avoid it? If every time you went to the store, there were numbers of PCBs and heavy metals printed on the food you bought. You think twice before you got that seafood. Because like the one of the articles that inspired me was the 2006 October National Geographic article about the levels of toxicity inside of a Bay Area reporter. And he just went out and had, was it swordfish, I think that he caught off the Golden Gate and his levels of some heavy metals doubled just from one meal. You know, so this is very dangerous stuff. But we don’t think about it. It’s not talked about much.

 

 

[17:49] Ashley James: You’re sharing with the numbers with us. I know they’re on your website too. What’s your website again?

 

 

[17:55] Troy Reicherter:  Well, there’s my author page is www.troyreicherter.net, and also there’s Holistic Health Research, it’s www.hhresearch.org.

 

 

[18:16] Ashley James: I’m going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast. But before we continue, I want to ask, in the last two years, I know you’re going to share with us your results of lowering these levels. Do you do feel a difference? Do you feel healthier? Can you noticeably say that since lowering your levels of these chemicals that there’s been a shift in your health or your life?

 

 

[18:46] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you notice it most the first couple months after the fast, you just feel like Superman basically. I just turned 51. And I remember last year when I turned 50 and I did that fast. It was grueling. I did a 40-day fast last summer, but I could have gone for another 10 days. And then when it was over and I got back into the routine of eating again, slowly. Like I say, I mean your human growth hormone levels they’re just through the roof. For a man, they may be 22,000% higher than normal. So I really felt like I was 20 years old. Really.

 

 

[19:24] Ashley James: You look early 40s. You don’t look like you’re in your 50s. I’m sorry. You said that the human growth hormone in men after doing a fast is how much higher?

 

 

[19:36] Troy Reicherter: I’ve read that it can be up to 2000 times higher. For women I think the number was about 1300 percent higher, depends on the person I suppose. But that’s linked directly to testosterone and tissue repair, energy, vitality, all those things that make you youthful and feel good.

 

 

[19:58] Ashley James: In Episode 230. Interviewed Dr. Alan Goldhamer. The whole episodes about fasting. But he talks about on on day five of a water only fast, you have a huge spike in human growth hormone. And that is linked to preserving your muscle tissue. Because people are always afraid they’re going waste away, their muscles going to waste away. But the spike in human growth hormone preserves our muscles. So you can do extended fast and not have that loss of muscle mass.

 

 

[20:36] Troy Reicherter: Interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more about that as well. And I need to talk to him. So what I discovered, I’ll just quickly tell you what I learned up to the point where I was basically blind for two years where I didn’t have any results coming in because this laboratory that I send my blood samples to, like I say they they do them in large batches and it costs a fortune. So I had to wait a while. I did my first blood drawing in May of 2015, and had those numbers that I just gave you the 56,100 parts per trillion for the DDE and 71,000 for PCBs. Now when I got my results back, first I did two tests. And the second blood drawing was January of 2016. So seven months later, I had only a 12% drop for the DDE and I had actually a little increase in the PCBs. 71,000 is it? I can barely read it there, 900 I believe. By the way, all my results, I use a snipping tool and I took all of them and I put them on my website. So you can see what I see. You don’t have to go through something that I’ve typed up and perhaps you know, made some kind of typographical error on. I mean they are the original results, they send me Excel sheets, then I requested a printed version, and they got kind of irate about it because they don’t usually do that. And then they basically just printed me the same thing that they sent me. So there is no difference. There’s no difference between the report that I got on paper and the report that I got electronically. So what you’re seeing is really all there is. And so I was disappointed way back in 2016, that it hadn’t been a bigger drop. But I’ve learned a lot more in the meantime, which I’ll explain. So all I saw then was it a moderate drop of 12.48% for the for the DDE, an increase.

 

 

[22:35] Ashley James: Let me just clarify 12% drop from doing two fasts?

 

 

[22:40] Troy Reicherter: This was from just the the 21-day fast.

 

 

[22:42] Ashley James: So you do one 21 -day fast and you drop which chemical at 12%?

 

 

[22:47] Troy Reicherter: DDE dropped 12% after seven months. These these are blood lipid measurements, by the way. We measure the lipids in the blood, because if you measure the total blood volume, that is very dependent on how much water is in your system, so it throws the whole thing off. So blood lipids are pretty constant. There is a whole other aspect of this, which is the fact that your fatty tissues – we’re not testing. That would require something else, you’d have to do liposuction or something and decide where you’re going to do it, which part of the body. And then you know, it brings up a whole lot of questions as to how that would be accurate. I’d have to check with the company if they could do this. But if you wanted to know a person’s total body toxic load, you’d have to consider the blood lipids as well as adipose tissue. So that’s a really good question as to what’s still in there. However, this was what I did get, I got the 12% drop after seven months and a slight increase in PCBs, because I assumed you know, the fat cells are throwing out their toxicants into the bloodstream, and it was still elevated. Now remember, my experience at that time wasn’t just fasting. I was doing saunas. I did over 100 saunas, I believe 109 saunas, it’s all in my book in great detail. And there’s a case study online. But I was taking supplements, like 30 different supplements, they’re all in my case, study online, Sam E and everything I could think of to try to make more of the enzymes that would get those chemicals out of my body. So I was doing all kinds of stuff. And it’s all documented there. I was meditating on it, I was walking in a circle, because in Chinese medicine, they say that there’s a way to get rid of, expel bad things from your body by doing that I and I recorded all of that stuff. So, that was an unknown how much that did along with fasting itself. I was drinking pretty much pure water during the fast and taking those supplements, along with the vitamin.

It’s all documented carefully. So I had hoped way back then that I was going to have this great drop and I’d be done with experiment. And then I suspected, I thought oh, I’ll get, I didn’t know what I get. But I was hoping for this huge drop. And then I could get some funding and do more experiments with simpler model so that we could really prove this intervention had this effect. So I realized I was going to have to go for at least another year. So I did not do a fast in the summer of 2016. I just kind of wanted to see whether or not the level would continue to drop on its own. I was thinking perhaps there would still be a spike in the toxicant levels in the blood. So I did a blood drawing and July 6 of 2016. And I didn’t get the results back till the next year. But that one was almost exactly the same level. So it was 49,100 parts per trillion for the DDE for January. And it was only 48,600 parts per trillion for that same chemical in July of that year of 2016. So almost no change at all. And then for the PCBs, there was a bigger shift. The PCBs had peaked after the fast at 71,900. And then they dropped down to 64,400. So from the baseline measurement, it was a 9.3% drop. But of course I didn’t have those results till the following year. Now in the summer of 2017 right before I met you last time I had done a 30 day fast. So yeah, let me see.So 30 day fast. But I had only had the results from prior to that fast. So in January of 2017, the toxicant levels for the DD dropped a bit. So they had leveled out and then they dropped a bit. But see, I had done one additional intervention. It was the one I wouldn’t tell you about last time because I wanted to see the results first. Do you remember what it was?

 

 

[27:21] Ashley James: Are you talking about the supplement?

 

 

[27:23] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, it was activated charcoal. So what happened was, I was troubling over my results, because I was disappointed that I didn’t have a greater drop. So in 2016, I went to the University of Washington, and I emailed all the professors of toxicology, and one person got back to me, a dean named Professor Eaton. So he met with me and he was saying, “Well, the reason why fasting doesn’t seem to work for this is because of the enterohepatic pathway.” And I only had basic physiology. So I didn’t really know what that was. So it turns out what’s happening is, inside your body, we talked already about how there’s some chemicals that can be removed from your body naturally. But then there’s others that bioaccumulate. Well, even the ones that bioaccumulate, like PCBs and DDE and PBDEs, all those things, your body is not blind to them. There are enzymes in your body that can detect these things. So what’s happening is, your body has enzymes, cytochrome P450 family, and specifically there’s one called P450 43A. It’s abbreviated to CYP3A4. And this enzyme, you can see if you type that number, and you can see a picture of it on the internet it looks this, it’s just a giant mess of proteins, just a big ball of proteins. It reminds me of the Borg spaceship in Star Trek the Next Generation. And so that thing, it’s the enzyme is like a biological machine, it goes around and it acts on the body, it speeds up or changes cellular processes in the body without being changed itself. And so it can recognize these chemicals that don’t belong. I don’t know how. But it can do that. When it finds one that doesn’t belong, it bonds it to hydrogen. And then it just kind of moves on and finds another one bonds into a hydrogen.

So as these hydrogenated molecules are passing through the liver next time, the liver has special cells, they can sense them. And they use that hydrogen as like an anchor point. And they can grab onto it and bond them in with water or whatever is in the bile. So they put them into the bile, and it goes out the bile duct into the duodenum and into the small intestine. So the body has this amazing tool that almost none of us know about or think about to catch these molecules and get rid of them. Problem is, we didn’t evolve with these chemicals present. We evolved millions of years ago in Africa mostly, right? So everything that we encountered back then we had a pretty good way to get rid of, you know, the toxins of animals and plants and whatnot, that weren’t in such great amount that they killed us right away, right? But we’ve never seen these chemicals before. So even though our body can recognize them, in terms of these enzymes, the small intestine has no way of knowing what they are, it doesn’t have any detection system. So once they get into the small intestine, where all your food is passing through. The gates are open, it just comes right back into the body.

 

 

[30:37] Ashley James: So to recap what you’ve just said. Because it’s there’s a lot there, I think we really want to make sure that that it’s understood. It’s a lot for me too. So going back to the Borgh shaped enzyme, there’s this enzyme, and where does it come from? How does the body created it? Do you know?

 

 

[31:02] Troy Reicherter: Good question. I should look that up again. It may be partly the liver and then other places in the body, other special tissues that make it. But the main thing is that it’s there. It’s like a superhero that’s constantly on the lookout for these bad guys, and it catches them and it throws them out the door. But the problem is the doors a revolving door.

 

 

[31:23] Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to talk about that. So our body, like you’re saying, 100 or 200 years ago, we did not have any of these chemicals in our environment. But this is very, very new. Having PCBs, and all these all these things that we’re facing now, I think there’s something like 30,000 new chemicals every year being created and put into our environment, and our body just doesn’t recognize them. But this enzyme, when it senses something that’s not supposed to be there, so a toxin or toxicant, it will attach a hydrogen to it so that the liver can identify – it’s like tagging something and because all the blood is passing through the liver, and the liver goes, “Hey, you over there with that hydrogen, come over here, I gotta put you in the bile. You’re not supposed to be here.” And so it just knows. So it tags to this little really cool Borg like thing in our body is tagging all that stuff that we don’t want in our body with the hydrogen and the liver goes, “Okay, come on over here. We’re putting you in the bile.” And then because bile is meant to help emulsify fat so that we can digest it, but it’s also filled with toxins to get out of our body, including hormones as well. This is one thing for women, is that all the estrogen once the body is done with it, puts it in the bile to be eliminated. And so it breaks it down and puts it into like a form and puts it into the bile. So now it’s getting, like you said, excrete it into the duodenum to the rest of the small intestines and going to go into the big colon. And hopefully we’re going to have a bowel movement. And the problem is that bile is also a very precious substance. So the body will reabsorb as much of it as it can in order to reuse it. And thus, all the toxins that it was eliminating, are going to be reabsorbed because the body cannot tell the difference between the toxicants because we didn’t evolve with them, like you said. And so we need a way to bind in the colon, or in the intestines to bind. And I know, people who eat a very high fiber diet versus no fiber, so the standard American diet are even more toxic, because the fiber helps to bind I’ve heard especially if someone has constipation, that then the toxins will get absorbed quicker and for women will reabsorb the estrogens that have become unhealthy. They’re unhealthy levels of estrogen, that will reabsorb them. So we have to make sure that we’re not reabsorbing these chemicals. So you’ve you’ve started experimenting with activated charcoal in an effort to bind to the toxicants. And you got this idea from this professor.

 

 

 

[34:11] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, he didn’t mention that part of it. But he told me about the enteropathic pathway, which is like the circular thing going from the enzymes to the liver to the small intestine and right back into your blood. So then I immediately thought, “Okay, this seems like the logical weak link in the chain that maybe I can fix.” So I started thinking of what I could do to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. I’ll call it EPI enterohepatic pathway interrupter. So I did a little research. And there’s a number of things out there, there’s some clays you could take that some people are saying will get rid of toxicants. Well, no one was talking about the enterohepatic pathway, though. It was known for quite some time that taking activated charcoal, which is an interesting product, it can come from different kinds of woods, coconut shells is one way, bamboo, all hardwoods, but it’s made in a very high temperature oven. And sometimes they use high pressure, high temperature steam. And it produces these tiny little granules that have incredible amounts of surface area. And so it’s not absorbing them, it’s ‘adsorbing’,  it’s adsorbing these little chemicals as it passes through. It’s been used in emergency rooms for people who have overdosed on drugs or alcohol, it will get a lot of things right out of your in your alimentary canal quickly. But again, no one that I saw on the internet was using activated charcoal for the purpose I was talking about. It’s kind of fashionable now to bake cakes or pies, or even put activated charcoal into drinks, you know, putting in all these food and drinks with the intent of getting rid of some of the toxicants that are in that food, it may do that too. But I think by far the largest amount you’re going to be finding is what’s coming out in the bile, my own suspicion, but tests will have to be done to really prove this. So after doing research, I started with the activated charcoal in 2016 in August.

So from that point on, that was my main other intervention. And I didn’t get my results back from my January 2017 blood drawing. And I got those results back by the time I saw you. So, there was a drop in the DDE, it was about it was a little over 7% from the previous. So if you recall, the DDE had dropped 12% and then it had leveled off for two periods. And then it dropped about 7% down, it’s minus 20.68% from baseline – 44,500 after starting at 56,100. So it looked like a very clear step, as if it had if it had plateaued, leveled out and then dropped again. And for PCBs, it was an added drop, it went from 64,400 parts per trillion down to 59,700 parts per trillion. So it went from 9.3% drop from baseline to a 15.92% drop from baseline. So I couldn’t really tell as much with the PCBs since they had dropped for two periods in a row. But with the DDE, it appeared that it was the added intervention of the activated charcoal that was doing the trick. But there’s more on that later when I get to my next results. So then I was blind as to the results for two years, because I had to wait until I had four batches of my blood collected to send in for testing.

So in the meantime, I did a 30-day fast in the summer of 2017, right before I met you. I started about the last week of school I think. I’m a teacher, so I try to time it around my summer break. And then I did a 40-day fast last year. That was really interesting. And you can see the YouTube videos from that. If you go to YouTube, it’s Holistic Health Research YouTube channel. I’ve got videos showing most of the days of the last fast. And right up till day 40 I was out and about doing things, shopping, able to function. And as I said, I really could have gone for another 10 days. I was getting pretty gaunt. It looks a little scary. But I felt like I could keep going. Yeah, you reach a point where you know what you’re doing. And it’s just mind over matter. As long as you’ve got fat to burn, you can keep going. There’s lots of prohibitions about fasting, I should say don’t go off half cocked, you always want to talk to your doctor first, you definitely want to be over 21 before you do any fast, read up on the subject, start small start with a two or three-day fast. I started with a two-day fast you can read about all this in my book. I think my book is a great place to start because I go through all of my experiences, as well as talking about the history of fasting, physiological research into fasting, scientific discoveries about the health benefits of fasting, I have references to all the other books that I’ve ever heard about fasting. So you can read those yourself to all the considerations you have to make before trying to fast, all my own experiences with problems that I had. It’s all in there. And at the moment it’s on Kindle for just $5.

 

 

[39:38] Ashley James: It’s nice.

 

 

[39:39] Troy Reicherter: Good introductory low price. So what I did for this period, since my thesis then was I was thinking that all those other interventions I’d done – the sauna, the supplements. I had no reason to believe that they worked at all. You know, so I thought I’ll simplify  the experiment from this point on and just restrict it to the fast which I just took some electrolytes and vitamins. I didn’t do all those other supplements to try to increase the enzyme levels, MSM and all those other things that you can take. They’re all listed on my case study, I think I had 30. But I didn’t do that this time around for the 30 and 40-day fast. I tried to keep it very simple, didn’t even do any saunas for a year and a half. And so I did blood drawings in June of 2017, December 2017, June 2018, December 2018, the first Saturday of those months. And I was hoping or I was expecting I guess, my hypothesis was based on all that I knew that I was going to see a big drop after the fast each time and then a smaller drop over the period when I just took the activated charcoal based on what I saw before because there was no big spike after a fast. There was a tiny little spike with the PCBs, if you recall, just like 1.27% the first time after the three week fast. And there was a drop of 12% with the DDE. So I was not expecting any spike after the fast. I thought it’ll be a big drop after the fast, little drop, big drop, little drop. I was hoping that all together it might wind up with a 90% drop.

 

 

[41:21] Ashley James: And during the fast you’re consuming the activated charcoal.

 

 

[41:25] Troy Reicherter: That’s right. Yeah, during the fast itself, I was taking activated charcoal. Another important point which I mentioned in my book, you have to do colonics if you’re going to do a fast of I would say over a week. I wouldn’t go more than a week without doing colonics and they’re easy. I use a Colima board and just follow the instructions. I would do it every other day. I used to try getting away with every fourth day. If you’re taking activated charcoal, that’s a really bad idea. Because the stuff, it accumulates down there and your large intestine very good at drawing things out. So basically, just imagine trying to pass charcoal briquettes kind of what you’re doing. And so you don’t want to do that, just every other day, I think is a good idea for for that. So yeah, I did. Because I was reasoning that the enzymes would be at an elevated state. When you stop eating and you start fasting, what happens, one of the many things that happens is your body stops producing digestive enzymes. And so all those little proteins that go to make enzymes, they get rearranged into different legos down there, and your body starts pumping out way more of those CYP3A4 to go and search and destroy and tag things for elimination and your liver is working overtime. It’s getting lots of energy to do this, you know, to filter through the blood more and get that stuff out through the bile. So there’s no food at all, your body’s kind of shut down that whole aspect of itself. And it’s just repairing things, all the cells are throwing out the toxicants for removal. So I thought that would be the perfect time – that time and then immediately after the fast. I was almost tempted to take an extra dose of the activated charcoal, but I just kept it the same every day for simplicity’s sake, because someone could always say, “Well, it wasn’t the fast that did it, it was the fact that you took more of the activated charcoal maybe.”

So anyway, I didn’t know until this year in April, what effect any of this had. So what’s really funny is everything I expected was backwards. But it was actually better than I expected. So the big shock was the time period in early 2017 between January and June of 2017, I didn’t do any fasting. I took activated charcoal. But you see, I didn’t take that much of it because I was waiting for my results. I sent in the blood sample in January and I didn’t get the results back until March. So I took a break from everything, because I was really sick of taking all the supplements. And I didn’t know if they were working. And I just thought I’ll just wait and see what my results are. So I really didn’t take activated charcoal. I think I only took it March, April and May. So it’s only about three months of it. The exact dates are in the book, and in the case study. But I had no reason to believe there would be any drop at all, or just I thought maybe 3%, maybe 5%? No, it was a huge drop 59.71% drop over baseline. So it went from 44,500 down to 22,600. And so that was for the DDE. And then for the PCB, it’s the same thing, it went from 59,700 parts per trillion down to 30,500 parts per trillion, it was a 15.92% drop from baseline down to a 57.04% drop from baseline. So it was humongous. So the only way I can account for this after thinking about a lot is gene expression. So we know from test on by Valter Longo at USC and elsewhere that the gene expression accounts for almost everything in your body.

 

 

[45:24] Ashley James: You’re talking about epigenetics, the ability for genes to turn on and off, right?

 

 

[45:28] Troy Reicherter: Well, I don’t know epigenetic, I think that’s a slightly different definition, something beyond genetics. It’s something we don’t understand about genetics, that’s for sure. And as a history teacher, I like the analogy or just a story about how they’ve recently discovered that the base pattern of DNA that makes your hand, or my hand or a dog’s paw, or a fish’s fin is the same. It’s the same base pattern. And what’s really affecting this is the gene expression. There’s big huge parts of the genome that we don’t understand at all. We used to think it was like garbage DNA. Somehow something in there is sending a signal to these patterns to say switch on and off here, switch this on, switch this off. So it’s like, just imagine the same piece of music, winding up being all the music that we hear, but it’s the same on the sheet. And it all depends on how the conductor chooses to play it. That’s almost what’s really happening with our DNA.

 

[46:25] Ashley James: Right. We have all the same notes. And you could have Mozart or AC DC, and it’s just all the same notes.

 

 

[46:31] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you could say it that way. Or like this, if I have the same recipe, and then just depending on which chef makes it, you know, it turns out to be all the different foods in the world. That’s kind of what’s happening. So we’re just at our infancy and understanding how gene expression works. But gene expression changes when you do most anything like if you stand in your head for a while your gene expression is going to change if you go hiking, get up and higher altitude flying an airplane, your gene expression changes. There were a couple of twins recently, there were one was in space and one was on the earth. And it was in the news that even a year after the one twin came back down, I’m not sure exactly how they can tell. But when they take your DNA out, they can analyze it, they can tell which genes are being expressed differently. And they said he is the same. And yet he’s not the same because it’s identical DNA, and yet it’s being expressed differently.

So the only way I can explain that big drop is it’s not the activated charcoal alone doing that. Because I was taking activated charcoal during that time period, not for a very long time only maybe three months, like I said. So for less than the previous period in which there was a smaller drop. So I think what happens is, when you do an extended fast like I did – the 21-day fast or a longer one, you’re making the cell gates open to dump the toxicants into the bloodstream. And they’re not really going back to their default setting of collecting it back for at least two years it looks like, somewhere in that last six months. And I’m not even sure if that was going to be the bottom. I mean, if I hadn’t done anything else, maybe it would have kept on falling. I don’t know. So this is a huge question. And I think I’m the first person to discover this. Because no one else has done these kind of blood tests along with fast, right? So this is amazing to think that the body has this ability to do this. So many questions here about what did the activated charcoal do? What did the saunas do? What did the fasting do? What did these things in conjunction do? Okay, so the next big surprise, almost as big as the first one was the second one, you can see all this on my website, www.troyreicherter.net or www.hhresearch.org, all the graphs are there. So for the December 17 test, this is about six months after I did the 30 day fast.

 

 

[48:45] Ashley James: And just to clarify. So the next results that you’re going to give us, what did you do in those six months?

 

 

[48:55] Troy Reicherter: Right. So I tried to keep it simple. I tried to eat mostly vegan, although sometimes I fall off the wagon. But definitely vegetarian. And I just did the fast. I didn’t do any saunas. I didn’t do any of those supplements and none of those other fancy interventions that I did the first time, I didn’t meditate on it, I didn’t walk in a circle, and all those all those many, many things that I tried. I did acupressure. You can see all the list of the things that I tried, everything but the kitchen sink approach. I didn’t do that. So it was just the fast and then regular eating without any trouble all the way through.

 

 

[49:38] Ashley James: So it was six months?

 

 

[49:41] Troy Reicherter: I tried to do it. Yeah, exactly every six months. So it was like the first Saturday of June and December for two years.

 

 

[49:47] Ashley James: So for six months, there was no fasting it was just eating as clean as you could and some activated charcoal. But what you’re what you’re looking for is how does the body respond over time even six months after a fast?

 

 

[50:00] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I had started the fast right after the previous blood test. So the previous one was the first Saturday of June. And it was later that month that I did that fast for 30 days. So the fast ended in July sometime. And then I had all those months. So here’s the funny part, based on my first fast back in 2015, I had no reason to believe there was going to be an elevation in the toxicants because I didn’t see it before. Well, this time I did see it. So it jumped up. So it went from 22,600 for the DDE parts per trillion, it jumped up to 34,200 parts per trillion for DDE. And for the PCBs – almost exactly the same thing. It jumped from 30,500 up to 51,900. So now, there was a spike. So the question is, was there a spike because I did a longer fast? Or probably more likely there had been a spike the first time back in 2015. But I didn’t see it because I did all those saunas, all the supplements and who knows what else? So to tease out what exactly is doing what will require a lot more experimentation. I mean, I did, I think it was 109 saunas. So when you think about it at the time, I was wondering, is this doing anything? I was hoping it was, but I think it was now, because I was just taking it for granted all the time. “Oh, there was no spike after the past.” I think there was a huge spike. But I reduced that all the way down through those other methods. And maybe the supplements had, maybe they had a huge effect. I can’t say for sure. But we won’t know unless we keep doing more experiments. It’s going to take a lot of people to experiment, and a lot of different places under a lot of different conditions and reproduce those experience before we really understand what’s doing what. But the way I looked at it was it’s a crash course, I had to figure out how to make those numbers go down as fast as they could and try everything I could. I mean, in this country, there’s over 4000 people every day that are being told they have cancer. And there’s over 500,000 people a year that are dying of cancer. And I can only imagine what it’s like. And if it were me, I would do everything I could, I would try everything I could to get rid of it. Or if I had a reason to believe I was at high risk, I would do everything I could to lower that risk. So I wouldn’t just try one intervention and wait 10 years and see what happened. And we can’t afford to just try one intervention at a time. I mean, sure, if you work in a big university, go ahead and do it that way. But since no one at big universities and institutions was doing this research in the first place, this is why I took it upon myself to do this. And they’re telling us that there’s no way to get these chemicals out of our body. So it is messy, it is complicated. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But the big, amazing thing is that I got these numbers to drop massively. And I’ve learned enough now to see that if you did these interventions within the first year and a half to two years, did them all up front, then within two years you’re going to see that adjustment, and then you’ll find out how much you got rid of.

And I am doing another experiment right now with a friend. I wish I had 10 friends and I could afford to have 10 blood tests. But a friend of mine, he’s just he’s doing nothing different all year, except he’s taking activated charcoal. So six months out or a year out and God willing, we will do the follow up and see what his numbers look like. So of course, it’s only one person, and what we need our clinical trials to do, you know, for men, for women, for older for younger, all different kinds of people. And then we’ll get some real, real hard data that we can use because different people could react totally differently to these things depending on their their genetic makeup and whatnot in their environment. But I’m trying to find that out as well about the activated charcoal and what effect that has all by itself. But that was my second big shock. First of all, there was this huge drop when I didn’t really do much of anything except the activated charcoal when I wasn’t expecting. So as I said, everything was backwards, I thought there’d be a little drop, there was a huge drop, then I thought, oh, there won’t be a spike, there was a big spike, which leads me to believe there probably had been earlier. But the sauna’s probably were very effective, and maybe the supplements and maybe something else. I mean for all I know, maybe the acupressure acupuncture that I did, might have added another 10% on top of it. All these things need to be researched.

So I think that’s the takeaway, I hope I can change culture to get people to start doing these things, and start researching these things and pushing other people to research these things. Because right now all the people with the big funding, they’re just, I don’t know what they’re doing. But they’re doing maybe drug tests, they’re doing anti cancer tests of this type, of that type. But this is your body’s main way to detoxify itself, heal itself and keep you from getting sick. And it’s being almost completely neglected, except for a few people out there that did you hear about every now and then. So okay, not to digress. But as I said everything after that was kind of backwards from what I expected. There was a there was there was a spike after the fast, then then the numbers dropped down to their lowest level but it wasn’t much lower than the June 2017, because it was still on the way back down. And obviously, you’re gonna have to wait a year and a half to two years after your last big fast to see that gene expression come to an end. Or you’re going to get your lowest reading, so it’s kind of frustrating, but you don’t see it right away. And now if we were doing like I said, the test right on the fat tissue itself, you will probably see a bigger drop right now before it readjusts and then you’d know, but that’s a whole nother kettle of fish. I didn’t start with that. I can’t jump into that now, because we don’t have a baseline measurement. I haven’t even talked to the lab to see if that’s possible, but I suppose it probably is. So then the numbers dropped down for the DDE. It spiked in December 2017 at 34,200 then it dropped all the way down to its lowest measurement of 22,000. And then the PCBs dropped down from a spiked high of 51,900 dropped down to 29,200. So this is the lowest measurement right there, was the measurement from one year ago before I started my 40-day fast. So remember I have these numbers in hand.

 

 

[56:35] Ashley James: Okay, got it. Let’s back up because I got a little confused there. So I want to make sure the listeners understand. So let’s, let’s tell it like a story. Because they can go look at the numbers, let’s tell it like a story. So the biggest drop that you had was after, I’m looking at the graph here that’s on your website. He’s showing me his laptop. We’re out in the garden sitting under a beautiful 10 by 10 tent that I once used with my husband to sell our handcrafted bat hoses at a farmers market 10 years ago. And it’s since been our our shelter, it’s our outdoor living room. So we’re in the outdoor living room, I buy the garden, and he’s showing me his laptop and I see this graph. And the graph is also on your website, which we’ll have the links to it in the show notes at www.learntruehealth.com. And here we have, I’m seeing the graph and it comes down and then the biggest drop is after – what did you do here to have the biggest drop?

 

 

[57:37] Troy Reicherter: Nothing. That was a surprise. I didn’t even take as much activated charcoal as I did the previous time, maybe only three months. And it was when I expected to have the least drop. I had the biggest drop. I think again, it was the gene expression coming to an end. That’s the only explanation I can think prior to this.

 

 

[57:52] Ashley James: But all the things you did prior, how many fasts were leading up to this?

 

 

[57:58] Troy Reicherter: Well, from beginning in 2015 till prior to the 30-day fast in 2017. I only did the one 21-day fast.

 

 

[58:06] Ashley James: So you did a one 21-day fast, a 109 saunas, took supplements, you meditated, locked in a circle, and colonics?

 

 

[58:16] Troy Reicherter: It was on the first six-month period.

 

 

[58:17] Ashley James: Okay, so you did a ton of stuff. And then you kept taking your blood every six months. So from here when you did all those things, how much time went by to the biggest drop?

 

 

[58:29] Troy Reicherter: About two years.

 

 

[58:30] Ashley James: Two years. Okay. So two years after the huge amount of detoxing, you spent a whole summer detoxing.

 

 

[58:36] Troy Reicherter: Activated charcoal began in August of 2016. And I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since except, as I said, I took a little break in 2017 because I was burned out. And I didn’t know what my test results were. I didn’t know if I was doing anything.

 

 

[58:51] Ashley James: You added the activated charcoal and you didn’t do much else and then you saw the sudden drop. But you really believe that that’s from the gene depression?

 

 

[59:00] Troy Reicherter:  It could be part of the activated charcoal definitely. But I took more activated charcoal in the previous period where there was a tiny little drop. So there’s something else going on. I think gene expression is…

 

 

[59:11] Ashley James: It makes sense. Because like you said, Yeah, you took activated charcoal, and you even stopped all those other things, and you weren’t doing much. And then you got the biggest drop, but you had done a bunch before. Saunas could change our genetic expression, and the fast can change our genetic expression. And so you’re looking at accumulation of all these things could have done it. So you’ve got this big drop and then six months later, it goes up a little bit. I mean, it’s not up like it was at the beginning, but it goes up a little bit. And then it comes back down. What happened here to have it come back down? What did you do in this six-month period?

 

 

[59:53] Troy Reicherter: Just the usual. There was no other special intervention. I think after the spike it just naturally starts to come back down.

 

 

[1:00:04] Ashley James: Why did it spike?

 

 

[1:00:05] Troy Reicherter: Because when you fast again, remember the fat cells are shrinking. And so they’re basically going into emergency starvation mode. So they’re throwing out everything that they don’t absolutely need. Your body is just conserving everything it can keep and it’s throwing away everything I can throw away, gobbling things up, catabolizing things, breaking them down and you know, your body has more enzymes to work on them, but they’re overwhelmed by the amount of toxicants being tossed out by the fat.

 

 

[1:00:34] Ashley James: So this spike right here in December 2017 was after a fast?

 

 

[1:00:39] Troy Reicherter: Yeah.

 

 

[1:00:39] Ashley James: And so you’re saying that it’s actually a good thing that you have a spike there, because your body was in the process of releasing the toxins?

 

 

[1:00:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. It would be wonderful if we could do this for every one of those chemicals out there. And also if we could do a separate test at each point in time from the fat cells themselves. So because you probably see the opposite. You know, if it goes up here, well, it’s probably because it just got dumped out from somewhere else where it’s mostly stored.

 

 

[1:01:07] Ashley James: Yeah. And so now in June of 2018, you have a drop again, what is this? Did you do a fast here?

 

 

[1:01:16] Troy Reicherter: The fast? There’s a tab at the top, indicating where the fast were.

 

 

[1:01:20] Ashley James: Oh, okay.

 

 

[1:01:21] Troy Reicherter: So this is between fasts, it appears that by a year later, that was June 2018, prior to the fast of 2018, it had gone back down slightly below the level from a year before.

 

 

[1:01:33] Ashley James: Now what I’m seeing here, I just realized, because you pointed out where the fasts are – I’m seeing that after every fast or at least after these fast, it looks like there’s a little bit of a spike, but it’s always lower. So it’s like constant, like little steps, but it’s constantly getting lower, which is cool.

 

 

[1:01:55] Troy Reicherter: That was my last big takeaway. So for the DDE, it went from 22,600 in June of 2017. Then after the after a 30-day fast, it spiked up to 34,200 in December, then it dropped back down all the way down to 22,000 and then after a 40-day fast. So this is a fast of an extra third in length, an extra 10 days, it spiked much less, it only spiked up from 22,000 up to 25,600. So you see, you would expect, if I had lots and lots and lots of fat reserves, or toxic reserves in my fat, like bottomless, you would expect a longer fast to make a higher spike. But the reverse was true, it was a lower spike. So that’s showing that I really am cleaning out the bottom of the barrel. And there’s going to be this huge, huge drop is going to follow almost certainly. I don’t know exactly how long since I did two fast within two years, or within one year, and I did a longer length of fasting. It may be the gene expression will take longer to go back to its default settings. I hope not. Because I’d really like to get the data out there. But I’m continuing to take blood measurements or blood samples, which I will send in when I get enough together for the lab to do it. And so I took blood in June of this year, I’ll take it in December, and then again next summer. I think looking at all these numbers, if a 21 – day fast caused about a 60% drop, then an additional 70 days of fasting, along with another two years of activated charcoal, I think we’re going to see probably greater than a 90% drop for both these chemicals. But we won’t know until we have the numbers. I mean these are not just speculation, these numbers are real from lab – an independent lab. They have no way of knowing what I’m doing. All they do is just do a mass spectrometer test, which is why it costs so much. You know, they’re testing individual molecules as they pass through and weighing them to tell you which one is what size and everything. And they couldn’t care less what I’m up to or what my results are, they’re just giving me the absolute fact on this. So I’m speculating that we’re going to have a greater than 90% drop in the end. It would have been nice if a 21-day fast all by itself had done that. But it obviously didn’t work out that easily.

A 21-day fast plus all the other interventions did over two years make a 60% drop, which is pretty astonishing by itself. The two year delay was a big surprise. I in the beginning, was thinking I should try to test as soon after the fast as possible thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to contaminate myself by eating stuff.” I was completely wrong in that. And the activated charcoal has probably changed everything even with no other interventions, seeing a gradual decrease over time, if the theory is correct. Which we’re not sure of now, we can’t really be sure of anything. So like the January 2017 drop from 13.37% from baseline down to 20.68% from baseline, which I assumed had been due activated charcoal. I can’t make that assumption anymore, because it could very well have also been due to the change in gene expression. We don’t know. These things have to be done separately and repeated over and over by different people and then we’ll know more. So I do believe the activated charcoal is working. But I can’t say for sure from the data that I have proven that it is working. We can’t say for sure that my blood lipid levels have dropped a lot as far as my total body toxicity, that would require more testing.

 

[1:06:05] Ashley James: And you’ve got your friend who’s now just taking activated charcoal. So we’re going to figure out whether just activated charcoal alone is going to help. Now how much is he taking? I talked to poison control a few weeks ago about… and that’s a funny story for another time, but I talked to poison control and they said you’d have to take like a cup of it a day to actually absorb, it’s not like just take two capsules. It’s a significant amount of activated charcoal someone needs to take to absorb toxins. How much do you recommend people take? How did you figure out how much to take?

 

[1:06:45] Troy Reicherter: Well, first of all, poison control is dealing with someone who’s just massively adjusted something that’s about to kill them, right? So they’re giving them massive amounts to try to save them, that’s an emergency situation. What we’re talking about is over prolonged periods of time taking activated charcoal probably as directed, and trying to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. So you can read my book about what we know about activated charcoal, you can do your own research, there are some downsides to it, it will interfere with certain drugs like birth control pills, things like that. Maybe headache medicine.

 

 

[1:07:23] Ashley James: Because it absorbs those toxins.

 

 

[1:07:25] Troy Reicherter: Right. It will absorb the toxicants that you don’t want, but it will also decrease the nutrients in your food, because some of those will get taken out, they won’t make it to your intestine.

 

 

[1:07:37] Ashley James: So you take it in between meals?

 

 

[1:07:39] Troy Reicherter: Personally I started out taking it kind of staggered throughout the day. And then after that I just simplified it and I take it with meals, or maybe right after a meal. The amounts I was taking in the types is kind of complicated to go into, you can read my book about my experiences. I tried to make my own capsules, I would not recommend doing that. The stuff is more powdery than you can believe. It gets in everything and you’re gonna have a hard time not breathing it in, just buy it already made, it’s way better. So I use different kinds. It’s all in my book. And one of the kinds I was using got discontinued. So I couldn’t take that even if I wanted to. Right now, the kind of that I believe my friend is taking, I think this is what we agreed on, is activated coconut charcoal. They’re 1200 milligrams per capsule. And it says to take two to three hours before a meal. And anyway, so I think he’s taking the recommended dosage. I’m pretty sure I took more than the recommended dosage myself because I was the guinea pig and I wasn’t too worried about it. I just wanted to get those levels down. It’s all in the book how much I took. But definitely there’s every reason to believe that it’s getting things out of your body. The question is, is there any harm in it? There’s some speculation that there may be some acrylamide in it. But from what I can tell the acrylamides are formed from incompletely carbonated substances like burnt toast, you know, meat burned on the grill, but you didn’t burn it completely. So those are cancer causing, very carcinogenic. So I think it’s probably not that way because these are baked at a very, very high temperature. And so I think it’s completely carbonized. That’s the whole point of it. Don’t try to substitute anything else for activated charcoal, it’s got to be real activated charcoal. It’s completely different from the kind of charcoal that we cook with. That’s a whole different.

 

 

[1:09:47] Ashley James: Don’t try to make your own activated charcoal with burnt toast.

 

 

[1:09:51] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. So I’ve had a few friends who I I asked about if they wanted to be my guinea pig and volunteer to do this. And they said no, not enough is known about activated charcoal. But I suspect that just eating falafel or hamburgers or french fries is probably way more dangerous for you than activated charcoal.

 

 

[1:10:09] Ashley James: I think it’s hilarious when people get freaky about supplements like a vitamin C. They just go, “Well, there’s not enough research.” And yet they don’t think twice about taking a pharmaceutical. No, no question about taking pharmaceutical. Just think of all the drugs that have been taken off the market for killing people, were all drugs that were first approved to be on the market and approved to be safe. So we have to like, really remember that. Yes, it is up to us to advocate for our health and to look into the research. Don’t go blindly taking drugs and don’t go blindly taking supplements. Do your Googling and look into it for yourself, you can look at NIH, you can see that there’s so many studies, I’m sure there’s so many studies about activated charcoal. There’s so many studies about many things that we can look into before we jump into it. But to just blindly go, “Well, there’s enough studies about this. So I’m just not going to do it.” But I’m sure that your same friends will go to the drugstore and take an Advil without questioning it.

 

 

[1:11:12] Troy Reicherter: Right. Yeah. And like I put in my book, those warnings with the drug commercials that we see on TV, they’re frightening. And yet they just say it as if, “Oh, it’s no problem. Maybe you know, you’ll die you bleed to death. Yeah, you might be suicidal and on and on.” And oh, but talk about fasting and people freak out. They just make it sound as if “Oh, it’s the end of the world you want me to die, I’m going to die.” You could die if you fasted long enough or in the wrong way, you could also die if you just walk across the street without looking, you know.

 

 

[1:11:45] Ashley James: Let’s talk a bit about fasting for those who’ve never done it. I’ve only done it for almost three years, like a 2.9-day fast. I haven’t gotten to three yet, and I want to do more. But one of my Naturopaths scared me, she goes, “My boyfriend in college, I had to take him to the hospital after five days because his electrolytes were off and I’d basically pick him up and carry him to the hospital.” So she was so afraid, she tried to talk me out of it or she basically said you need to find a different doctor to monitor you for your fast because I won’t do it. And that kind of put the fear of God into me, and I know fasting is healthy, but it’s also, we got to take precautions. So let’s talk to the people who’ve never done fasting. Give us some advice.

 

 

[1:12:35] Troy Reicherter: Well, I can’t give medical advice, per se.

 

 

[1:12:37] Ashley James: So maybe based on your experience.

 

 

[1:12:40] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I just want to be careful how I phrase it. So well I I’m a historian and history teacher. And so I have known for a long time about all the fasting that has gone on throughout world history. And in my book there’s one section about a brief history of fasting where I give an overview of this. So I’ve known people have done enormously long fasts, I mean 40 days is like the gold standard. You know, the Pythagoreans used to do it. They say Moses did it. You know, Jesus did it. The Buddha did it. It’s on my website. And so I have always wanted to try a 40-day fast. Fear is a huge, huge part of it and not knowing what’s going to happen and the strangeness of it all. Plus the fact that, well, your body produces a chemical called ghrelin and ghrelin makes you hungry. And we’ve all had the experience of maybe going all day without eating. And at the end of the day, you’re irritable, you’re frustrated, you got a headache, you just feel like you’re going to die. And it’s like give me some food right now before I kill somebody.

 

 

[1:13:41] Ashley James: It’s called ‘hangry.’

 

 

[1:13:43] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, right. So we’ve all been there. And then people imagine, “Oh, my God, when you fast, it must be like that only worse.” Well, it’s not exactly. It depends on how much you had to eat the day before. There was one time when I I’ve had a huge meal. Probably shouldn’t have. But I had a huge meal before I believe it was the 2015 fast. I didn’t feel anything the whole next day, I wasn’t at least bit hungry. It wasn’t till the second day, that I started to even feel like hey, I’m hungry. But generally speaking, the first day after you don’t eat anything, you don’t feel very good. It’s like the experience we’ve all had of having to help someone move and there was nothing convenient, and you just don’t eat until really late. But it’s that next day after that usually is the worst day. Usually that’s when, I just refer to it as hitting the wall. This last time even though I did a 30-day fast two years ago, last year I did the 40-day fast and I still felt that way. Maybe it’s not going to be as bad as the first time you do it. The first time will be the worst time probably. But I honestly felt like someone had just hit me right in the head with a sledgehammer, just right between the eyes. And I don’t recall if I took anything for it. But I mostly just laid on the couch all day and just moan and groan because I felt horrible. But the day after that, it passes – ghrelin, your body basically says, “All right, you’re obviously not getting any food. So stop making this stuff.” It’s just like, you know, you get a bad injury and after a while it goes numb, because your body’s to stop sending that pain signal. So you stop feeling hungry in the ordinary sense. There’s still a certain sense that, “Hey, I should eat something.” But it’s not that urgent need that you’re used to. And I’m not going to say the rest of the fast is fun or easy. But it’s not nearly what you think it is. You feel euphoric sometimes, you feel light, it has to be built up too though.

Like I said, begin with two days, or three days. I mean, if you’re going to go ahead and do two, why not do that extra third day, which feels a lot better than the second day. And that’s the day when your body’s really, I think getting the most work done to repair and rebuild and rejuvenate anyway. But I will just stick with that. What I did in Taiwan, I was reading a lot about fasting and I knew people that required me to fast before I went and did their meditation. So I tried to fast all by myself. And it was like abortive two-day fast and I thought I was going to die. Literally, I thought this is it. My parents are going to read about in the paper, where they’re going to get that call, “Your son died over here in this apartment in Taiwan.” What a bad way to go, right? Just you all alone. Scared to death, your hearts palpitating you’re thinking, you’ve never had that feeling of hitting the wall before and you’ve never gone for more than a day without eating. So fear is making all these hormones come out into your bloodstream and freak you out. But after that, I did another attempt and I made a three day fast. And I just did a whole bunch of three-day fast. I don’t remember how many, five or 10. I mean I did a lot of three-day fast before I dared to go for four and five days. And then you start to have some experience built up. You know what to expect. I think your body learns too. I can’t really explain how, but you feel like your body is just not panicked. Not just your mind, but your body kind of like, “Okay, I see what’s going on here.” And I think there’s a deep learning in the cells that takes place where you don’t feel that bad. You’re okay with it. Plus, you know, also the experience and the sense of not being freaked out. You start to really feel like you can do anything. You’re walking around after 10 days of not eating, 15 days.

Last year, when I did my long fast, I went to a Vietnamese temple, I actually put that on my YouTube channel. And afterwards, I was talking to the monks and nuns and the person who had invited me to the temple told an elderly monk passing by that I hadn’t eaten for however many days – it was 27 days, he just laughed and shook his head. He said I don’t believe it. And I said, “Look at how thin I am.” So people even in traditional like that where fasting is a big part of what they do, they still don’t believe it. It’s like you can’t go that long. You can if you have the fat reserves that it takes. And you know, if you’ve checked with your doctor, of course, you’re not pregnant or expecting to be pregnant, you’re not breastfeeding, you’ve checked with all the contraindications that there could possibly be with your with your physician, definitely do that. And then take it slow. As I said, as long as you have fat to burn and you’re a healthy adult, you can keep going lot longer than you’d think. It’s a great feeling. It’s a good feeling to feel like, well, you almost feel like you’re in heaven or something. It’s like, whatever happens in the world around me doesn’t matter. Because I’m okay, I’m up on this other plane floating around doing things just the realm of pure energy. It’s a pretty cool experience, but it is grueling. I’m not saying it’s easy. I mean, 40 days, every day, it was like, “Oh my God, I’m only on day 25. I’m only on day 26.” Time seems to fly ordinarily. Like my summer is flying by this year. I can’t believe we’re almost halfway through the summer. But when you’re fasting, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s like it takes a long, long, long time to get to eating again. And you have to try really hard not to think about eating. It’s not easy. You know getting up, sometimes it’s hard, you have to really just get up slowly so you don’t get lightheaded. You’re not going to get much sleep or at least I don’t, a lot of insomnia, weakness, you have to really plan what you do, you can’t plan to be doing heavy labor, or running a marathon. Walking is pretty strenuous, you can do that. But I wouldn’t ride a bike up a hill at that time. If you can do that, more power to you. But I wouldn’t recommend planning on it. Just doing the fast by itself is grueling enough, it’s hard to take a lot of willpower. But once you’ve done it, I mean, I’ve never run a marathon. And I’ve never given birth, you know, I’ve never done those 24-hour training things they do in the army. I’ve heard people talk about it. I’ve never climbed Mount Everest. And fasting is kind of like that, I think. When you’re done with it, you feel like nothing. If I can do that I can do anything, nothing can faze me. And then of course, you know the great feeling that you get knowing that you’re detoxing. And a lot of health professionals like to say there’s no proof that any detox works, well check my numbers, check my website, because I can prove that it does work. Exactly which components of my plan work to what degree it still remains to be seen. But definitely, it is working. And I think fasting is the main component – supplements along with it, activated charcoal I believe are making a big difference as well. If I was doing this without fasting, I don’t think you’d see these drops at all. I have no reason to believe that. It’s a great feeling. When you’re doing it, there’s there’s moments of feeling great, there’s moments of feeling lousy. And when it’s all done, yeah, you feel much, much, much better in practically every way. And read my book about all the research into fasting. I mean, it’s one of the only ways known to grow new stem cells, to rejuvenate stem cells. Definitely, it’s been found to grow new brain cells in rats. So there’s a dispute now over the growing of brain cells, how much is really happening when you do other things, but I think fasting definitely appears to be doing that as well. HGH levels go up, all kinds of brain chemicals that stimulate your brain increases, it appears to be helping with increasing longevity and a decrease in pathology in every way across the board. Yeah.

 

[1:21:54] Ashley James: Yeah, Dr. Goldhamer has a fasting clinic and so he studied well over 30,000 people. And he’s been publishing but he doesn’t study what you’re studying, which is to see the decrease of these toxicants. But he’s studying like, whether cancer goes away and heart disease goes away, and diabetes goes away. And he’s published and he talks about this in Episode 230. He published this one woman came in with cancer and 30 days later didn’t have cancer anymore. But they’ve accumulated so much information about the benefits of water only fasting. And he says that on day three, something really amazing happens in the body, and you mentioned this, the body starts digesting its own pathological tissue. So the body starts digesting cancer and cysts, you know, ovarian cysts go away and scar tissue and just the not needed tissue in the body. And even on a cellular level, they’re seeing that the cells kind of clean up. So it’s like a house cleaning for the body. And then on day five is when they see the spiking human growth hormone and they see the spike in stem cells. So even in adults, which, you know after you’re about 24 years old, there’s very little stem cells in your body. But after a five-day fast, the body has a huge spike in stem cells. So by day three it starts cleaning up the junk and then by day five, it starts to regenerate new healthy tissue. I mean, that’s how you’d clean your house, right? First you take out the junk then you sort everything and clean it. So it’s like Marie Kondo for yourselves. We’re just cleaning everything and reorganizing everything and you’re seeing great results. And I love your first big result, which is, you did everything. And now you’re like, “Okay, what worked?” Right? And you published it in your book. Of course, they can go to your website to get the link to buy your book, of course, we’re gonna have the link to it as well, in the show notes. What’s the name of your book?

 

 

[1:24:09] Troy Reicherter: Detox Fast.

 

 

[1:24:10] Ashley James: Got it. So simple, easy to remember. You had mentioned the family that was back in 2005. Back in 2005, you mentioned a family that took all of their levels of, was it PCB?

 

 

[1:24:27] Troy Reicherter: They mentioned the PCB levels and also the PVDE levels, maybe some other things. It was an Oakland Tribune article.

 

 

[1:24:34] Ashley James: And I remember seeing that on Facebook. It’s kind of a video that circulated around or a story that circulated around. They didn’t do a fast though they just went organic, right? Do you remember the results from just going organic?

 

 

[1:24:49] Troy Reicherter: Well, I think they had been eating organic, basically, you know, shopping at Whole Foods just as a custom. And they didn’t do a before and after, they just did the one measurement just kind of to see. I think the reporter was Douglas Fisher, and they just got some grant money to just see what’s in people’s blood around here in the Bay Area, an average family.

 

 

[1:25:11] Ashley James: There’s a different story, I’ll see if I can find it. But there’s a different story of a family. It was like in the Midwest, and they went from eating the standard American diet too and they did a blood test. And then I guess a month later, a few months later, they are just eating organic, they saw a decrease, not levels, like you’re seeing with everything you’re doing. But they saw a decrease. And it’s substantial, I mean, we need to as a baseline, eat organic, it just makes sense that it’s so easy to choose the cheaper option, the conventional grapes versus the organic grapes, because you can’t see the chemicals, the toxicants you can’t see them, but they’re there. So we have to choose organic because if you choose the cheaper food, they call it conventionally grown, which is silly. Conventionally grown should be organic, because that’s what it already always has been. But if we choose the cheaper option, we’re paying in our health, we’re still paying. My husband said yesterday, there’s no free lunch, you can’t get a free lunch in life. You’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul. So we’ve got to choose organic. That’s the number one thing that we need to do every day.

 

 

[1:26:21] Troy Reicherter: Try to be vegetarian.

 

 

[1:26:22] Ashley James: And try to reduce or eliminate meat as much as possible. Because again, what’s contained in the meat is all the toxins that the animal ate, right? My husband who went vegan just overnight, he was the biggest meat lover to all of a sudden, completely vegan overnight, which surprised me. I came kicking and screaming into eating whole foods plant based, but he but he did it overnight. And he said you know pigs don’t sweat like you know, like a dog pants, right? But we sweat, at least we’re sweating out toxins, but pigs don’t. Pigs – they’ll store toxins much more in their meat. So just considering it for those who eat meat. If you’re going to eat meat, hopefully you can eat less of it or choose more vegetables, choose organic vegetables or choose organic, free range meat. But just know that in the food, there are these chemicals, right? And then how we can get rid of them is by reading your book and experimenting ourselves. Doing small fasts working up to maybe bigger fast, sauna, taking activated charcoal. I really like chlorella. Have you experimented with chlorella?

 

 

[1:27:38] Troy Reicherter: It was one of the things I took that first. Yeah, the first year yeah, it would be great if we could do tests on all the different chemicals that are in us because there are so many that we know are there. There were some other results that I got back that were interesting. There were seven pesticides that had blood lipid concentrations high enough that they gave me a before and an after number. And they are a little bit uncertain because they’re in such small amounts. When the lab gives you back the results, they put a little marker J next to it saying that it is basically an amount less than the lowest calibration equivalent. So this is the best they could do though with a mass spectrometer there was six of the seven that were measured all went down.

 

 

[1:28:22] Ashley James: And what are these?

 

 

[1:28:22] Troy Reicherter: So one was called nonachlor trans. So this was 8,910 parts per trillion in my initial measurement. And then in the June 2018 measurement, it was 4,250 parts per trillion. So that one decreased by 52%.

 

 

[1:28:40] Ashley James: What is it?

 

 

[1:28:41] Troy Reicherter: Oh, these are pesticides.

 

 

[1:28:42] Ashley James: Okay.

 

 

[1:28:43] Troy Reicherter: Six of seven different pesticides.I think they tested for 13. Some of them were in such small amounts that they just kind of said can’t even detect it, or don’t even know what to say.

 

 

[1:28:52] Ashley James: Is that before? Because you you pretty much always eat organic.

 

 

[1:28:58] Troy Reicherter: It’s complicated because when they do these tests, they have to have a – what do they call it? A lab blank. So you have to pay for it too, the same amount is for your blood. Suppose I had two samples there, there’ll be your blood before or your blood after. And then there’s a third thing that they have to test, which is a substance where they put in a known amount, so that they can use that to calibrate the machine, and you have to pay for that the same as for your blood. So that’s part of why the tests are so expensive. And it’s better to do bundles of four instead of bundles of two. You know, then you’re paying for five measurements and four of what you want, instead of paying for three, only to have what you want. So sometimes the lab blank amount determines the detectability amount. So it’s complicated. And these were the ones, going through the numbers that I thought were impressive. There was the nonachlor trans, which went down 52.54%, hexachlorobenzene – you might have heard of, this one started at 7,840 parts per trillion, and then its lowest was June 2018 – 3,250. So that’s a 58.54% decrease. Then there’s chlordane oxy, started at 3,380 parts per trillion and it went down to 1,460 parts per trillion in December of 2018 measurement. That’s a decrease of about 56.8%. The halogen went up a little bit, it started out at 2,920 and it was 3,000 in the end. Maybe because the spike last longer, maybe it has something to do with the way the enzyme receptors act on it. And then HCH beta started at 1,840. It went down to 573, so a 68.85% drop. Chlordane alpha cis started at 1,540 and it dropped down to 833 for a 45% drop. And then mirex started at 1,230 parts per trillion went down to 517 parts per trillion, 57.96% drop. So these are some of those pesticides whose residues are not only on the food, but just scattered throughout the whole world now in the dust and we breathe everything. They don’t break down, they don’t go away.

 

 

[1:31:28] Ashley James: So you eat primarily organic, but we’re still exposed to them. You’re saying it’s like through water and air and contamination of soil sometimes. And what about glyphosate? Did you test for that?

 

 

[1:31:41] Troy Reicherter: No, unfortunately. I do have quite a bit on that in my book. But glyphosate, it appears that its water soluble. So what everyone is saying, although I’d like to see more proof of this is that it does not bioaccumulate, but that it passes through your body quickly. Recently, there was a study done, you can find online down in Southern California, where they tested people in the 90s. And then again recently, and they were testing the urine. So it had gone up dramatically, dramatically over the last 20 years, because there’s so much more of it in the environment, apparently. But it seems to be that it’s more like the phthalates, it’s the plastic softener is that pass through your body in a short period of time. I did find some evidence online that that might not be entirely true. And glyphosate is just one of the ingredients in roundup, although that’s the main one. So there may be other things going on there, probably it’s a much more complicated story. It’s been implicated in non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for sure. So it’s probably causing cancer, even though they’re still spraying it everywhere. I would love to see more testing on all kinds of things like that. And then like lawns, whenever you see a beautiful lawn with no weeds in it, almost certainly they’re putting down products that have 24D inside of it, which is one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange, you know, and if I said I’m going to come and spray Agent Orange on your lawn, you’d freak out. But if I say I’m going to use Scott’s organics and such as Scott, such and such product, and I have some of the product names listed in my book, then you’d say, “Oh, yeah, sure everyone’s doing that.” Why not? I want my lawn to look nice. I don’t want to go pull weeds, I’ll just put this down. And then all the things with leaves naturally just die. Well, they’re growing themselves to death because of this chemical, which is no good for people. And it’s been found in streams all over the place. It’s been proven that people who apply it, you know, it gets on the kids, because they play in the grass.

 

 

[1:31:55] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And the pets.

 

 

[1:33:45] Troy Reicherter: Pets.

 

 

[1:33:45] Ashley James: We have a big spike in cancer for dogs. I think it was like one in two dogs get cancer. I heard some crazy number. But just think about it, your dog basically lives in your house almost all the time and then when it gets out, it’s running through pesticides.

 

 

[1:34:01] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, exactly. So there’s so much stuff out there that we don’t think about, it would be great to test for all of it. And I don’t know what levels we would see. I don’t know if anyone knows that. Like, I was testing these because they’re famous. And we know they’re in the body in large amounts. But it could be the 24D is in my blood lipids to a higher degree than then PCBs. I don’t know. It’s all around us. But it’s been noticed in Canada. I think almost 200 municipalities have outlawed it. Whereas here, they’re just spraying it and not thinking anything about it. And those are just a couple of examples.

 

 

[1:34:38] Ashley James: Yeah, I had Dr. Stephanie Seneff on my show a few times. She’s a PhD, MIT top research scientist. And her background is not in the body and understanding the body. But she understands how to look at research. She is just like seeing the matrix, right. And she can see all the data and be able to understand it. And so her and a bunch of other researchers have been looking at glyphosate and its correlation with other diseases, Well, it’s interesting, and she talks about this in our interviews that glyphosate binds to heavy metals, and will release the heavy metals. So let’s say mercury or aluminum, right, it’ll bind into aluminum, and then it’ll release the aluminum when there’s a pH change. So let’s say we eat the glyphosate because we’re eating the hamburger, right, and the cow ate glyphosate, because it was on his corn that he was fed. And so now we’re eating concentrated amounts of glyphosate, which is bound to heavy metals. It gets into our digestive tract, and now we’re ready to urinate it out. When blood changes to a different fluid -so cerebral spinal fluid, or when blood changes to urine, it changes pH. So they’re finding that glyphosate releases heavy metals in the brain, and heavy metals in the kidneys. And in Sri Lanka, they banned glyphosate in the rice paddies when enough of the farmers got kidney disease from it. And that’s because there’s accumulation of the heavy metals and the kidneys as the body was trying to expel the glyphosate. So it might be water soluble, but what it’s leaving behind are the heavy metals, it’s depositing them in the kidneys and the brain. So there’s a little tidbit of information about glyphosate and one of the many reasons why we should eat organic and also advocate for our neighbors, and our schools, golf courses near you, but all the properties near you to not use these chemicals.

 

You know, I wish we could create a movement where weeds are beautiful, you know. I mean, they’re beautiful flowers. They’re nice and yellow. You’re looking across my lawn, you probably see about a million tiny little Buttercup flowers, and you know they’re beautiful. Why can’t we just love weeds and not poison our body by poisoning our planet. You know, if we think about our planet, and our body are one, everything we’re doing to our planet we’re doing to our body. You know it’s amazing that we have the separation of church and state in our head, we have this amazing like idea that we are somehow completely separated from what we’re doing to our environment. It’s just crazy. It’s, we are poisoning ourselves by poisoning our environment. So I love the research you’re doing. I love your passion about it. I love that you are an educator and an explorer, and that you want to help just give this information to as many people as possible. So hopefully we can start to create a movement around it. I urge listeners to donate because you take all those donations, and you pay for these labs yourself on a teacher salary. So there’s a Donate button on your website. Right? Can you talk a bit about that?

 

 

[1:38:03] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, yeah, the money would all go, there’s no administrative costs. It’s just kind of a side project, there’s no staff or anything like that. So it’s not like giving to the Red Cross, or you don’t know how much of your money is actually going to get to where you want it to go. It all goes in, that’s all I would pay for is just for more research, you know, I’ve got my blood tests that I want to do. My friend, just one person also doing the activated charcoal only intervention. And I’m interested to do clinical trials with all different aspects of this, and set them up with advice from professors that they could help, make sure that I don’t make any mistakes. And not just for toxicity, but also all aspects of fasting and holistic health, including, I think heart disease is a huge killer. And I would be willing to bet you anything, based on everything that I know that if a person does extended fast, and they do a before and after coronary calcium scan, which is a lot cheaper than these blood tests I’m doing. I think they’re only $200 each. I’d like to get a group of people to volunteer to do some… someone who’s got like a number of 50. Mine was zero, by the way. I was going to do myself, but I was already zero. So I think the fasting has a lot to do with that. And of course eating vegetarian and everything.

 

 

[1:39:31] Ashley James: My husband just did one, you know, he’s been vegan for a year and a half. And his was 02. And we’re like, oh, this is great. It’s pretty awesome what you can transform with this natural living, right?

 

 

[1:39:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. So I would love to do those kinds of experiments and then get in the news more and get more exposure and have more people start to donate. So please, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, don’t just trust that the big institutions are going to do this kind of research, because they don’t seem to be that interested in it. So it a little bit goes a long way. I mean, I was able to come up with two different chemical panels on my blood for eight different points in time for just $20,000. So if people were to give a few hundred thousand dollars, we could do quite a bit more than that.

 

[1:40:25] Ashley James: Yeah, and start getting volunteers to work with you and do a bigger study.

 

 

[1:40:30] Troy Reicherter: Definitely, yeah. Not just one person, because there’s going to be some  kind of a spectrum out there of responses, you’re going to get to any intervention. So, you know, the more times you reproduce the experiment with different people, the better then you can really tell – how men do it, how women, how women react to these interventions, how older or younger people have different body types, and you name it. And then we can start to fine tune it and experiment with other things that may be going on in the body.

 

 

[1:40:57] Ashley James: So at the beginning, I asked you how you felt, like what the difference is? You said you felt like a superhero, like Superman after doing these fasts. But how do you feel like today, right now sitting here versus two years ago? You know, what’s your date? I mean, you were already healthy, right? So it’s not like a huge night and day, but you have significantly removed these toxicants from your body in the last two years. Do you notice a difference in the day to day quality of life for you?

 

 

[1:41:33] Troy Reicherter   

I wish I could say yes, but I don’t know that. It’s that simple. I think what I would say is, I mean, I had been fasting for a long time, and I had been exercising and had been healthy. As you age, you start to notice aches and pains and maybe slowing down of energy. But I think that that’s happening at a much slower rate than it would be happening otherwise. And I think it’s not so much that, it’s just that I’m almost disappointed this summer that I don’t get to fast again.

 

 

[1:42:05] Ashley James: You could always just stop eating if you wanted to fast.

 

 

[1:42:08] Troy Reicherter: But that would throw off my experiment. Because you see I’m waiting. I’m going to wait a good two years from last year’s fast because I want to see those numbers drop. If I was to do it now, that would interfere with the gene expression and make a new spike. And you’d have to wait for all that to level out. So I can’t really do it.

 

 

[1:42:25] Ashley James: You’re making a sacrifice for us.

 

 

[1:42:27] Troy Reicherter: Well, not fasting is not exactly a sacrifice. But it’s just that I used to dread it. I mean, when I had to do that 21-day fast, I dreaded it and the 30 day fast. I really dreaded that. But then it got to be last year, and I was almost looking forward to that 40-day fast. And now I kind of feel like, “Hey, where’s my big long month of not eating?” I’m used to this now. And so it’s the first year and you know, for three years that I haven’t done a month or more of not eating. I have some Muslim friends. And when I hang out with them they do their Ramadan and you know I was doing my fast at the same time they were doing some of their Ramadan. And they were like, “So you’re eating at night, right?” I said no. Like, “Are you serious?” So they got quite a bit of respect for that. But of course, I was drinking all day, I’m drinking lots of water. But it’s like that. Even though it’s a it’s an ordeal, they look forward to it for the cleansing that they get from it and the spiritual satisfaction and I kind of miss it. I mean, I don’t know, it’s almost masochistic maybe. But but it’s pleasure and pain. It’s sometimes awful, but sometimes euphoric. And the whole process, you know, it’s just become a part of my life. And I think after this experiment is over, I might do a month a year of just no eating. I don’t know, because it feels so good. It feels so right.

 

 

[1:43:56] Ashley James: Yeah.

 

 

[1:43:57] Troy Reicherter: It’s not that everything changes for me and I was healthy before. It’s not like everything for me changed from night to day. But it could be that way for someone else who was pre diabetic and has all kinds of other issues going on. Definitely, it could make that kind of change for them. For me, it’s just been more of keeping things better than the average person, I guess. Yeah.

 

 

[1:44:23] Ashley James: And you’re preventing cancer, and other diseases from accumulated toxins.

 

 

[1:44:29] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, I like to think so. You know, scientists always say how do you know, where’s the evidence? So until we have a lot of people to do these tests, you get a number. Here’s that number 20 years later, but you know, 20 years later, how old will all of us be 20 years older, right? So we can’t always wait for all of that empirical data from all of these peer reviewed clinical trials to come out. Otherwise, it might be 100 years before scientists can agree, “Oh, this is a good thing for you.” In the meantime, we’re long gone, and our grandkids are alive, you know, or our great grandkids. So we have to make decisions based on the best evidence we have available right now. And a lot of times that flies in the face with what mainstream medical reputable people are saying, because they have to be careful of their reputation, and they don’t want to get sued. So they say what everyone else says, what seems to be safe, and they’re going to tell you fasting is dangerous. Don’t do that. How much training do they have in fasting? Zero, right. They’ve never done it. They’ve never seen anyone do it. They’ve never heard about it in med school. Of course, they’re going to say not to do it. But so that’s another caveat to the whole thing is pick a good doctor. I picked a doctor who’s into this kind of stuff. If you pick someone who’s not very open minded to it, you’re going to get told don’t do that. And, well, I’m not going to tell you to fast without talking to a doctor. But it’s up to you to choose a doctor. Just like choosing your own religion and choosing which church to go to, right? Choose a good doctor to go to. Well, I mean, if doctor says not to do it for a good reason, then yeah, if there’s something about your health, that definitely precludes fasting, then don’t do it. But if they’re just against it in general principle, then I’d say maybe you should shop around some more.

 

[1:46:13] Ashley James: You know, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the fasting doctor. He has this story he tells about his mom. He got her to eat wholefoods, plant based no salt, sugar or oil years ago, and she tried to convince her friends to do it. And they all said she’s crazy and they kept eating the standard American diet. And now she’s, I think, gosh, she’s in her 90s for sure. And just doesn’t look like it. She looks like she’s in her 70s, she has energy like she’s in her 70s, she’s just running around, and super healthy. And she goes, you know, the worst part about this is, is that I can’t tell them, I told you so because they’re all dead.

 

 

[1:46:54] Troy Reicherter: That’s funny. That’s kind of how it is. Yeah, it’s like, if you wait till the end to tell someone that, then they’re not going to be there. So you have to be the one that does the right thing. Even though you get flack for it the whole time, you get told you’re crazy. And that’s another thing about fasting is if you choose to fast in a house where everyone else is dead set against it. And you go through that period of fear where you hit the wall, you’re going to be 10 times more scared. So if you choose to try to do this, after doing the research and checking with your doctor, it’s good to be surrounded by people that are supportive of what you’re doing.

 

 

[1:47:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah.

 

 

[1:47:31] Troy Reicherter: Otherwise, it’s going to be very negative. Very scary. You’re probably going to get freaked out you’re never gonna try it again.

 

 

[1:47:36] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s why I like the True North Medical Center, which is Dr. Goldhamer’s place, because I think staying there’s like the cost of staying at a hotel. I think it’s something like $180 a night and includes all the lab tests, all the doctor’s visits, and they monitor you during your fast and then they help you refeed. That’s another thing before we wrap up the interview, how do you refeed safely?

 

 

[1:48:03] Troy Reicherter: Very stupidly, as you’ll see from my book. Yeah, I made some mistakes over the years. And and actually the worst mistake was last year after my 40-day fast. Yeah, it’s easy to sit back and say I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, this is the right way to do it. Even with all my experience, things come up and my son’s birthday comes up and we were taking a trip to Taiwan and so I was I was kind of in a hurry. And so it wasn’t that I ate too much, although I did. What really hurt me was too much salt, you have to be very careful about dry things, anything the least a bit spicy because your stomach lining is very thin. And as I learned to my pain and suffering, and a story about near death experience almost. Well, that wasn’t maybe that bad, but it it’s in my book. I ate, I forget how many days after I’d broken the fast but there was some chips that I bought. And I was stuck in traffic and I was really hungry and I had one and then next thing you know you’ve eaten half the bag. And later that day I had some Mexican food, some some salty foods. Well, when you finish it fast, basically, your body is holding on to any salt that it can. It’s just clinging onto it. And so when you stop eating your body stops producing insulin. But then you start eating again, it over produces because it hasn’t done it in a while. And that makes your body hold on to salt, like you wouldn’t believe. And the salt makes your body retain water. And so my feet started to swell up. And then my leg started to swell up. And if that had gone all the way up to my heart, well, yeah, I would have had to run to the emergency room. And the problem is you don’t notice it until too late. So it’s like hours and hours and hours after you’ve consumed the thing you start notice how it’s funny, my feet are a little bit swollen. And then and I had to get on a plane to go to Taiwan. So which is you know, you’re going to be immobile in a seat where people tend to get edema anyway. So it was a really bad, perfect storm. So be very, very, very careful about all of that. And that would be the gold standard, is to stay at a place like that where someone else will prepare your meals for you. Because I’m telling you, you think you have self control. And I have self control to do a 40-day fast. But it’s when you’re told you can eat but only this much.

 

 

[1:50:32] Ashley James: Yeah, the True North Medical Center, I have the printout. And they say like for every seven days you fasted you get one day of juicing. And then after that for every seven days you fasted, it was like one or two days of juicing and then one or two days of just soups. And then you do just raw vegetables. And then so it’s like this gradual process and it’s only certain kinds of vegetables. If you did a 40-days fast, you could spend like the next week, just just gently, slowly refeeding into it and they deliver the food to your room. So that you don’t have to go to  the cafeteria and then get tempted by the food. But that’s really important. The refeeding part is to be gentle and slow and have that level of self-control. And I love that you pointed out about salt. One thing that Dr. Goldhamer says is that you could quit salt after a fast because you have retrained your tongue, basically to taste salt. So now all of a sudden you eat some celery and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, the celery is so salty.” Or you just eat a salad with nothing on it, no dressing and you’re like bursting with flavors, because you’ve retrained your your tongue and your brain to sense the flavors in food that you never sensed before. So after a fast it’s like you get this reset, and all sudden food tastes amazing. You don’t add any seasoning to it. So he encourages people after a fast not have any salt in the house and don’t add salt to your food. Because you’ll be able to taste foods, I mean, no one can hear you’re nodding, but you’re nodding and smiling. Did you notice that after a fast the food tastes so much better?

 

 

[1:52:21] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, definitely. Your tongue is much more sensitive. If you just have a piece of bread, you can taste the sugar and the salt in the bread, you don’t have to put anything on it. I wish that I was as scientific as they are about breaking the fast. I I’ve had my own method, which is in the book, which is not advice to others, but just explanation of what I did and why and how it worked out for me and what I think for the future. I usually break it fast with a smoothie but a warm one, never cold. You know, that’s the Chinese medical thing, and then lots of soup, vegetable soup, I’d go very light on the seasonings. And then as far as the length for myself, I think my gut feeling was after this last time that I would basically take the length of time that I fasted in the future, cut it in half and add one day to it. So for a 40-day fast, I would take 21 days to get back to eating a normal meal. And then I divide that up into three parts where, you know, three different stages, stage one, stage two, stage three of equal length. Each one would be about a week long, if I was to do another 40-day fast, that would I think be very safe. And I don’t know if it would be as perfect. I’m sure a century from now, they’ll be so scientific about all of these things. They’ll know exactly what to do. And all kinds of new products will be available, but for myself doing it at home and not having someone else prepare things for me. That’s what I came up with for myself that I think will work well. And as I say, not not perfect by any means. Not something that won’t be changed in the future. But I wrote it down in the book, so I just had such a strong gut feeling that this is the way I will do it in the future. Even though I haven’t done it yet. I thought it would be important to mention to people that that’s what I’m telling myself for now. I should have done.

 

 

[1:54:18] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

 

[1:54:23] Troy Reicherter: Well, just to mention, you can read the case study online at www.hhresearch.org. But to really understand what it was all about in terms of the history of fasting, the physiology of fasting, scientific discoveries, about the health benefits of fasting, all the considerations you have to make before fasting, and then all of my experiences from my very first fast 1993 up till now including all the lessons I’ve learned the hard way, all the modifications I made in my fast, and then just what it’s like day to day, because I have a log for each one of the fasts, even going back to the fast in 2007 that I did – what it’s like every day, you know, from beginning to end, how much weight you lose, what you feel like, it’s a lot more than you can put into a simple case study. And then at the end of my book, there’s also a history of toxicity. It’s a brief history, but it’s everything that the average person needs to know. And there’s quite a few practical tips about avoiding toxins and toxicants in your daily life. So I think it’s a good place to start, that was kind of my whole intent is to take a person from zero to 100. In terms of their understanding of this, you know, you may know nothing about chemicals and how big they are, how they interact with your body and other chemicals, where they are. And by the time you’re done with my book, you’ll be at the cutting edge, you’ll be ready to read any other book, and you’ll be able to have a conversation with anybody about pretty much anything on this topic. And you’ll know things that very few people know about fasting.

 

 

[1:55:53] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us here in the garden, in the backyard to discuss fasting. I’m very fascinated with it. And I love that you’re doing these labs to determine how fasting and all the other things you’re doing to detox is helping. And this hypothesis about gene expression is wonderful. So it’s great. And we’re going to continue to follow up with you and hopefully, listeners will donate to help pay for the labs. And if anyone’s super interested in working with you, they can contact you. I’ll have all the information in the show notes of today’s podcast where they can reach out to Troy and then get your book also so for only $5 so that they can be well informed about detoxing toxins and fasting. So wonderful having you here. Thanks for following up with us. I look forward to hearing more interesting information in the future as everything unfolds.

 

 

[1:56:57] Troy Reicherter: Oh, thank you so much, Ashley. You know, I did think of one last thing I should have mentioned is that while we’ve seen a 60% drop in the blood toxicant levels for these chemicals that we measured, and we might see a 90% drop later, that doesn’t necessarily equate to the percentage drop you’re going to have in your chances of getting cancer, because it would appear from talking to the professors at UDub, that the way it works with these chemicals is not like other ways like asbestos and other types of things that induce cancer. What seems to be happening is there’s a certain threshold that gets crossed. And if you’re if you’re across that threshold, then there’s a chain reaction starts in the body, which basically creates antigens that make a chain reaction that cause – it’s as if you got stung by a bee and some people just pull up the bee and they’re fine, other people are allergic to it, and then they’ll have an allergic reaction and they’ll be unable to breathe, right? So it’s basically your body’s overreaction to detecting the presence of these chemicals in the first place. So when they cross that threshold, that your body detects them, not the enzymes I’m talking about, but different enzymes, then that causes cancer. So it may be that even a slight decrease. If you cross that threshold and get below it, then it may be that your chances of getting cancer, because of these chemicals has gone from 100% to zero percent, just like that. It’s like a light switch. It’s either off or it’s on. So you get below that level and stay there. And as far as cancer goes, it would appear that you’re not going to get it. So again, this is like the only way right now that is known to do something that that we’ve been told up till now can’t be done to reduce the level of these chemicals that are giving people cancer. So if you are interested in this, and you want to give it a try, or just find out more about how you can reduce the levels of these toxicants in anyone in your family, especially, especially the unborn, the babies that are on the way, you know how you could maybe get rid of some of this if you’re a woman of that age, before you have your own child, that could be all the difference to save them from some kind of problem later on.

 

 

[1:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah.

 

 

[1:59:18] Troy Reicherter: So that’s the bottom line that I think is so important. So thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful.

 

 

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, 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 lives 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 www.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 office, 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’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 gonna wanna 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 www.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 www.takeyoursupplements.com

 

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

 

Get Connected With Troy Reicherter!

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Jul 19, 2019

Jacob's site: Shiftsportswellness.com

The water filter that I love and believe that EVERYONE should have in their home and office: https://amzn.to/2XWElLe

This water filter makes your water taste amazing so you will love drinking your 4 liters each day!

 

SomaTraining

https://www.learntruehealth.com/somatraining

 

Highlights:

  • What is ELDOA and knowing the basics of it
  • Resolving symptoms using ELDOA
  • How all elements in our body are all inter-connected that one symptom doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the root cause
  • The complexity of the human body and tensegrity
  • Stretches and specific techniques using ELDOA

 

Improve your mobility and unlock the symptoms that you’re feeling using Kinesiology by Jacob Schoen on today’s podcast. Know about positions to target specific functional units in your body by learning about ELDOA. 

 

[00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 368. How did you get on the podcast? Did he reached out to you or did you reached out to whom?

 

[00:19] Jacob Schoen: No. That’s a funny story. I was sitting in the living room and my mom came in and she showed me this post that Ben Greenfield had made on Facebook. She showed me this picture of Ben Greenfield hanging upside down on an inversion table. She had known that I was a fan of Ben’s since I don’t know, probably since I was 17 when I first got into triathlon because he had his book beyond training and he was on triathlon at that time. I watched all his videos online. Anyway, she showed me this picture of him hanging upside down talking about the benefits of traction whether be pulled up float to the head or different types of decompression for the spine or making you feel good just in general or anything like that. This is when I was really, really excited about the Eldoa and I still am but I was just new into it so I was really passionate about it. I decided to message him in Facebook. That’s really what I did. I messaged him and I was like, “Hey Ben, my name’s Jacob Shayne and I have these exercises that I’ve learned. They’re pretty uncommon and you’re a pretty uncommon person. I think you might really dig them. They’re pretty holistic. They’re pretty badass like I think you might really like this things. I’d be totally willing to show them to you if you’re willing to have me teach them to you.” He responded and the next day, I booked my plane ticket to go up to Washington like 2 or 3 weeks later. That’s where he lives in Washington state. I showed up at his house 3 weeks later and taught him exercise for 8 hours for the course of 3 days. Just really got immersed in how he lives up there and what he does, him and his whole family, if he’s listening to this “Man, you’re a beast. Good job for you and your kids and your wife you are an amazing group.” I was to go up there to spend time and just kind of live in the greenfield household and really dedicate myself to training him everyday as intensely and precisely as I could and all the exercises that I’ve learned up to that point just try to give the best impression that I could.

 

[02:19] Ashley James: That is so awesome and during the time that you were training him over the 3 days, was he recruiting you and that’s how you got in the show? After those 3 days then you sat down and did a podcast interview?

 

[02:35] Jacob Schoen: Right. The second one. After those 3 days, he was like, “Hey man, I really enjoyed what you did. I think the best way I could give your exposure, the best way we can let people know about this is through the podcast.” He was like, “Let’s set up a time to get on skype and make that happen” that’s exactly what we did. I think maybe 6 weeks later, we are on Skype and we got into it. It’s interesting because there’s just like this person I had seen his books, he’s not famous like Brad Pitt famous but in the world of training and more alternative types of ways of thinking in health sphere he’s kind of the man. To be in his show and to be able to talk to him and really to be able to train him like that was pretty awesome for me. That was a definitely an experience I would never forget anytime soon. It’s still kind of unreal people ask me just like you did, “how did you get up on the show” it’s just like, “Well, I just messaged him.” It’s like a lesson of some way to if you just put yourself out there and say, “Hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen” he says, “No, or the best thing that could happen you know you get on his podcast and a whole bunch of other doors of opportunity open for you. There’s a good lesson to learn from that for sure.

 

[03:51] Ashley James: That is so cool. We have with us, Jacob Schoen. I was really excited to interview him especially because he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast. Of course, most people know he’s a really cool health podcast. People have told me I’m like the female version of him. I thought that was pretty neat. He was homeschooled. I’m homeschooling. I’m going to homeschool our 4-year-old. In fact, were going to do road schooling. We plan on getting an RV and traveling across Canada and the States and homeschooling there. I’m trying to figure out the logistics of how to keep ding the podcast and while doing road schooling. It’s going to be fun and hey, my idea is I want to travel and go to my guests and even like interview them or video them in person so I’ll have to come down to New Orleans and see you, Jacob.

 

[04:40] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come down to New Orleans. It’s a good place to be.

 

[04:43] Ashley James: I’m really excited for you to teach my listeners today some awesome information about how to relieve pain and eliminate pain both the chronic and acute injuries and how to prevent them. You specialize in that. You have a degree in Kinesiology. You’ve got all these amazing training. I’ve heard of it before but I don’t really know a lot about it. I know my listeners will definitely want to know more about what you do. Soma training and all the other things you do. Before we get into your credentials, id love to hear your story. What happened in your life that made you want to dive into Kinesiology and eventually want to help people become better versions of themselves?

 

[05:34] Jacob Schoen: Yes, sure. I think that starts from day one honestly of my life. Now’s the perfect time to give a big thanks to the main person involved without her, she’s my mom. She’s been my best friend for my whole life and she’s really the person that inspires me to do what I do. Without her, even coming down to just giving me my first client. Without her, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. So thank you, momma, I love you.

 

[06:02] Ashley James: I’ve never had guest do a shout out to their mom. I think that’s pretty awesome.

 

[06:06] Jacob Schoen: You’ve got to give a shout out to mom. She’s so important. I started like any kid. I grew up playing sports. Played any sport you could imagine. Baseball, football, soccer, basketball all those. I just loved being outside, I love playing sports. Also, I am unbelievably competitive. Competitive to the point where not just I would cry if I lost but I would cry for days and think about it. I was super, super competitive and then that brought me into sports into high school where I wasn’t the most naturally gifted athlete but I was really set on trying to work hard to try to find different ways to be better. Whether it was how to make my legs stronger so I could kick the soccer ball harder or jump higher or whether it was how much weight can I do for this to make me swim faster whatever it is. Being really competitive and being really curious and being really interested in trying to learn to find details about things to try to make up for any deficit I might have naturally was really my – on how to learn different things. When I was in high school I had an injury to my knee and later come to find out that injury to my knee actually probably gave me the injury that I have in my hip right now that I was still dealing with to this day. That injury in my hip is what really inspired me to start trying to figure out different ways to get the injury and the pain to go away because it would just bother me all the time. I was really competitive cyclist and triathlete in my late teen, early 20 years and anybody who know athletes who knows sports they know that when they get focused on something they just go for it. Like if you’re a cyclist or  a runner or a  swimmer you could look at the black line all day and just focus on that thing. I was really driven to try figure out what the heck was going on with my freaking hip. I couldn’t figure it out so when I got into college I know that I wanted to deal with something of the physical body. I was interested in performance. I was so interest on how to make the human body bigger, faster, stronger. Just kind of classic like most athletes are. I went into Kinesiology and the from Kinesiology, my senior year of college I got an internship at a holistic training facility in Baton Rouge which is where LSU is. During that semester, I was introduced to all different types of exercise techniques that I’ve never even heard of or thought of. Never even knew existed, because my initial interest was in the sports performance aspect, how to make a muscle bigger, faster, stronger. I’ve never really thought about the body in a holistic type of way. I always just really focus and super-concentrated on a particular level. I’ve never really branched out and try to think about like “what influence does the ankle have on the hip, what influence does the knee have on the shoulder. What influence does all the different parts of the body have on the bigger picture.” Once I got into this internship and started to have my eyes literally not just open but peeled back and just held up into all this new amazing information. I was so inspired to start to learn about this stuff and I was like, “Man, maybe some of the things can help me with the hip problem that I have.” My final couple months there, I got introduced to Eldoa techniques which are a group of exercises designed to create space joints. Whether hip, back, your neck whatever it is. They try to create space to give more room for the nerve so you could rotate and move and really just feel good. These exercises I introduced them and I was like, “Man, not only do they feel really good but they’re also really challenging and there’s academic aspect to learning about them.” I was just hooked from that. As soon as the semester was over and I graduated. I signed up with a couple of guys from the facility to take the first Eldoa one which was in Dallas that next April. Ever since then, I have been on the road to just really learning as much as possible but over time, it’s changed from just learning as much as possible just to be the best practitioner to learning as much as possible because I realized the more things that I learn, the more opportunity that I have for the people that come into my studio for me to help them. If I learn a technique, if I learn something more about the body that opens my eyes a little bit more to a problem that someone else’s is having then that makes me a better practitioner and give me the opportunity to help them. It’s really been all the way back from day one to trying to be good athlete to now, to try to use that same drive to get the people that come into my office out of pain or just to having a more functional life.

 

[10:58] Ashley James: It’s interesting. If you had never had that hip injury, do you think that you would’ve ended up in the same place?

 

[11:04] Jacob Schoen: It’s so funny you say that because I’ve been it’s a constant battle in life I think to try to garner perspective and to try to really appreciate the things that are challenging for you and how they put you in the place that you are. For example, like my dad died when I was young, if it wasn’t for him passing when I was young then I probably wouldn’t have that relationship I had with my mom. If I wouldn’t have that relationship with my mom, I wouldn’t have the respect for the work that she does. She’s also a trainer. I probably wouldn’t have been inspired as much by her to do what I do now. Just from that level also like the competitive nature of being a little boy trying to find his way. Everything that comes from that and then – it’s funny because I got the knee injury when I joined the wrestling team in high school. I joined the wrestling team in high school because my friends that were on the wrestling team kept beating me up. I was like, “I can’t keep getting beat up like that. This isn’t that much fun. I want to be able to handle this back.” I did it totally from a place, now I see there’s a place of lack of maturity but in reality, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had the knee injury. The knee injury wouldn’t have caused the hip problem, the hip problem set me on the path towards really trying learn about all this stuff. It’s a tough thing to do to have that perspective that the thing that causes you the most pain is probably the best gift but in reality, that’s really what it is. As much as my hip problem annoys me, I have to at the same time be thankful that I have it because without it, for sure I would not have the drive to really try to figure any of this stuff out. I guess I can thank my bum hip for that.

 

[13:00] Ashley James: You turned your pain into a gift.

 

[13:04] Jacob Schoen: Yes. Hopefully, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I guess. [laughter] People who have problem that they’ve been dealing with for a long time, a lot of times there’s a lot of layers of it. It’s complex, not just from the orthopedic level where now my hip problem has caused different things to happen in my lumbar spine and that creates little problems in my neck. I still have the knee problem, yes. All that stuff is connected but everting comes in layers like that. It’s definitely an interesting process for sure both mentally, physically and emotionally too.

 

[13:46] Ashley James: Now, you’re a Eldoa trainer. Can you explain what does Eldoa mean?

 

[13:54] Jacob Schoen: Yes, Eldoa. I like try to make it as simple as possible. I don’t if it’s Einstein that said it, “it takes a real master to or anyone can make something simple complex but it takes a real master to make something complex simple” something along those lines. Really, what Eldoa is it’s a group of exercises designed to create space at a joint. If you think about our body in a way that it’s organized, we can get into that a little bit more later too but it’s really organized in what’s called Tensegrity. Tensegrity is like those kids toys you see where there’s a bunch of rubber bands holding a bunch of sticks together. Those sticks are our bones those rubber bands are our connected tissue in our muscles. If you think about your body, if overtime you get dehydrated or too much stress or injury, those rubber bands start to get smaller, smaller and more and more fragile. The goal for the Eldoa is to re-establish the quality of those rubber bands and also to establish again better movement between the sticks it creates space at the joint. On a deeper level, it gets as complex as you want to make it. It means in French, it’s a French acronym. In English, it’s Longitudinal Osteo-articular De-coaptation Stretches. Which is not only a mouthful but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

 

[15:21] Ashley James: Okay, but I want to hear the French version.

 

[15:24] Jacob Schoen: Oh the French version? All right, here we go. Gosh, you know I don’t speak French right? [Laughter] it’s like Entirement Longitudinaux Decoaptation Osteo-Articulaire avec something, something.

 

[15:36] Ashley James: That was awesome.

 

[15:39] Jacob Schoen: You made me do it and I did it. there you go, I hope you’re happy. Yes, it’s a big, big word that is you really just boil it down, you have two structures, two bones and you want a little more space between them. What that space means is that space means freedom. That freedom gives you an ability to move, it means less stress on the artery and the vein that is associated on that’s space. It means better quality, better hydration, more ability to get nutrition to that area. Just in general, it means a higher quality existence for that particular structure that you’re working on.

 

[16:17] Ashley James: That’s really interesting because the first thing I think of when giving a joint more space is instability. The more space you give a joint the more and stable it becomes. Can you bust the myth or explain why giving the joint more space using Eldoa would not create and instability in the joint?

 

[16:36] Jacob Schoen: Yes, absolutely. If you were to for example lay down on someone’s table and they just yank your leg right, let’s say the goal was to create space between your leg bone and your hip bone. So your femur and your ilium, let’s say that was the goal. Let’s say they accomplished that goal where they now have 2cm instead of 1. There is going to be more instability at that joint now, because why? For one because it was done passively. The ligaments that support the joint, the muscle that support the joint, they didn’t learn anything. They didn’t have time to adapt, they didn’t have time to actively take part in it and also the nervous system which is what coordinate your reception and the awareness of your body no longer now has any feedback from that joint that it knows exists. Does that makes sense? When things are done actively, whether it be a kid learning how to write or ride a bicycle or someone learning how to do an exercise to decompress a joint in their back, when it’s done actively, the nervous system takes part, the brain takes part and then locally the muscles and the ligament and all the connected tissue around that joint, they all take part in that process. You become strong in that new place. As opposed as to just being put there by something someone else because you got there yourself. You learn how to be there and the structures that got you there or are there to support you, know what you’re doing. They know what your intent was, their ability to adapt to that new place is so much stronger, does that makes sense?

 

[18:00] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. If someone hangs upside down using an inversion table is that considered passive?

 

[18:18] Jacob Schoen: It is because the active component of that is just gravity. The active component in that is not intrinsic to their connective tissue or to their body. It’s an outside force acting on them and then them allowing that to happen. That is passive, yes, maybe they’re holding on to the pull-up bar. But at a more specific level or a more precise way of looking at it. It is passive. If you do an Eldoa exercise, trust me it is active. I’ve had athletes where for example, I’ve worked with a weight lifter who was, I believe he was 22 at that time. He’s like 160 pounds, he could clean and jerk 375. This kid was an absolute stud weight lifter. I had him do teen on teen Eldoa which is to be fair, one of the more difficult ones. He said, he was more likely to throw in the white flag, it’s a throwing the towel during the Eldoa exercise than he is in even some of his hardest squat workout because what it does is it not only in some way put you in a slide battle against gravity but also in a battle against all the tightness that you have intrinsically in yourself. If you’re really, really tight in your hips, if you’re really, really tight in your shoulders or in your neck and then I tried to coach you into a good position then you had to work against that tightness. The battle against yourself is the hardest battle. It’s super active when you do it but because it’s active your body remembers it. It ingrains it in your nervous system and the result last longer because you had to learn how to do it as opposed to someone just in some way giving you the answer.

 

[19:59] Ashley James: I’m trying to imagine it. Obviously, with the podcast, we can’t see you doing it. I’m trying to imagine it. Is it like stretching? Is it like doing a squat? I’m trying to imagine going against the tension of the body to open up the joints.

 

[20:22] Jacob Schoen: I’ll bring it to one of the most introductory postures. It’s really the ones that you learn when you first start doing the Eldoa. It’s the Eldoa for t67. I’ll try to describe it to you in a way hopefully make sense in the context of what we’re talking about but you sit as tall as you can possibly sit. Most people work at a desk nowadays or if you they don’t, they spend a lot of time on their phone or on the computer and they start to develop that rounded posture that everyone’s familiar with the my-head’s-forward-I’m-looking-at-my-cellphone kind of posture. That posture now you have to try to sit tall. Now you can’t sit rounded which is more comfortable for you. You try to sit tall now. Now you’re pushing the crown of your head to the ceiling and you’re pushing your sit bones into the floor. Your initial tuberosities down into the floor. What that is, it’s what called axial extension. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking the resting tension in the spine and increasing it to start establish the deepest level a little bit of tension so you could create some space out of a particular joint. Then with your legs crossed, you start to push your knees down a little bit. The way I think about that is it kind of anchors the lowest level and then you take your hand above you keep them above like you’re praying and you try to touch the ceiling. You don’t just hold your hands at a high point you’re actively constantly trying to touch the ceiling with your head and your hands as you keep your sit bones and your knees pushing down. If you really just take a step back and look at that, is the upper half is doing a tug-of-war to the ceiling, the lower half is doing a tug of war to the floor somewhere in the middle they meet and they meet at T67 and at that joint they create a little battle. They create a little tug of war. The top that’s above wants to go up, the art that’s below wants to go down and so in the middle you create a little bit of space.

 

[22:12] Ashley James: You said, cross your legs?

 

[22:16] Jacob Schoen: Yes. You cross your legs. For T67, you cross your legs.

 

[22:20] Ashley James: Does it matter what legs is crossed? Like leftover right or right over left. Does it matter?

 

[22:25] Jacob Schoen: No, it doesn’t because you close the kinetic chain at the two initial tuberosities. Whenever you start to cross the legs you don’t have any concern anymore for the balance of the pelvic floor and now you’re really just concerned about the extension above your head. That’s just particular for that posture. For the other ones though you have more concern for the different fascia connection down to the feet to the hips whether depending on which level you’re trying to target.

 

[22:54] Ashley James: That felt awesome. How long should I hold it for?

 

[22:57] Jacob Schoen: 60 seconds. Yes, I try to explain it a little bit like it’s a really, really fast jog. It’s not a sprint because you can only sprint for so long. If you’re just, “I’m pushing super hard. I’m holding my breath. I’m trying to make myself as tall as possible.” A lot of people when they first try it they go, “That was tough. Oh man, it’s only been 15 seconds.” The reality is to get the different type of muscle fibers that you are working with to totally relax, to shut off the Sherrington’s reflex. To get the fascia that you’re working with to actually start to respond because of it’s elastic nature. To actually start to respond you need to hold it under tension for a little bit longer. The base-level we say is just 60 seconds. There are adaptations to that depending which Eldoa you’re doing and also the state of the client that you’re working with. If they have a super, super toned nervous system, they’re under a lot of stress, under a lot pain, maybe you changed that a little bit but the base level is that you work for 60 seconds and that also gives you time to start to make modifications too. Let’s say you don’t have super good awareness of your head in space, if you only go up there for 10 seconds well, then you don’t really have time to correct the posture of your head or to really learn that it was in a bad way so you can move it back. That 6o seconds is both physiologically functional but also awareness functional. It lets you try to modify and perfect the exercise while you work at it.

 

[24:27] Ashley James: I like it. In your pre-interview form, you mentioned that you love to teach people how to have awareness of their body so they when they go to work out they can prevent injuries. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve injured and my husband too, I’m going to throw him under the bus, how many times did both of us have injured ourselves. I remember this one time we went back in the gym. It’s sort of like after we’re taking a hiatus, “Okay, we’re back it’s going to be awesome” the first machine we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to use machines because they’re safe. We’re not going to injure ourselves.” I think we we’re recovering from something. I remember my husband had fractured his ankle. We were working with the trainer and he was like, “Just push harder. It’s fine.” So we were like, “No, we got an x-ray. No, it’s actually fractured. Thanks for telling him to push through it.” When we got back to the gym, the first machine he got on, I guess he overdid it. He re-injured his ankle. I’m like, “How did you injured your ankle on a machine? That’s a stationary object. You’re moving your body in it.” I injured myself so many times at the gym and so the idea of having more awareness and just taking it slow. Making sure our bodies in the right space, in the right alignment. Yes, you’re in the right space. What can you teach us here to help us have better body awareness so we can prevent injuries?

 

[26:08] Jacob Schoen: Wow, that’s a good question. To be fair, it’s kind of tough to teach someone awareness without being there with them. I’ve worked with enough people now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not the most experienced practitioner. I’m only 26 but I’ve worked with enough people now to really appreciate that fact that not many people have awareness of their body. That’s why a quick sidebar, I think people should absolutely get their children involved in gymnastics or dance to really start to develop that awareness from a young age because gymnasts and dancers even if they’re not the most brutally strong or brutally fast athletes, they have a really good base of understanding their body in space that they can then transfer to any exercise or any sport that they want to. There’s stories of football players that their parents make them take gymnastic and you have these 6’5, 300-pound guys able to do backflips. It’s just unbelievable stuff. That’s a quick sidebar for that. To develop awareness I would say, one you have to have a reference. You have to have something you trust to be for example straight, so you can compare whether or not you’re straight. Your husband or wife to take a photo of you like, you pick a string, an example that people first tell me the how-to assess posture is that they use is that they have a string hanging from the ceiling, then they line it up directly in between the people’s feet and then they take a picture of them and they show them how maybe their nose is not directly in line with the string-like they would think if they were even or the other way you can do it is you can stand next to a wall maybe you have too much curve in your lumbar spine, you don’t know that. Maybe your hips really fall forward put your shoulders and head to the wall you’ll see how much space is between your lower back and the wall maybe you thought its going to be a little bit but it turn out to be a lot. You have that trancendal reference to know because you trust that the wall is built vertical, right? Hopefully at least if your carpenter was good. You have to have to have something that you trust to be your standard so that you can have that thing to compare against, right? From there, you have to start to develop movement practices. You have to start to really try to do movement with an intention. That intention can be anything as simple as when I wake up in the morning, I do a gentle routine where I just start my body a little bit. I roll my feet back and forth, left to right. I roll from front to back. I try to do a little figure 8 with my feet, little figure 8 with my knees. I really try to don’t it just to accomplish it, it try to do it at least when I was first doing it to see how it felt. Is it easier to do it on my right? Is it easier to do it on my left? When I move my pelvis, is it easier to stick my butt out? Or is it easier when to tuck my tail? Do I have a little pain when that happens? If move my spine, if I try to move it left or right can I actually move that? Another thing that your people can do at home which is an interesting thing to try do. I’ll try to explain it. Take your arm out to the side, so that your palm is facing the ground. Alright? You there with me? Okay, perfect. Now turn your hand all the way down so that your palm is facing backward. Okay, do you see that? Now I what I want you to do is keep your palm facing backward but turn your bicep to the ceiling. Were you able to do it?

 

[29:38] Ashley James: Okay. [laughter]

 

[29:43] Jacob Schoen: I like the way you’re doing that.

 

[29:44] Ashley James: My elbows bent a little bit. Was my elbows supposed to be bent a little bit?

 

[29:48] Jacob Schoen: We’ll start from the beginning again. Take your arm out to the side with your palm facing the floor. Turn your palm towards the back wall. If you look at your elbow now your bicep is facing more towards the floor. Right?

 

[30:00] Ashley James: My bicep is yes, floor and also kind of in front of me. 45-degree angle. Yes.

 

[30:12] Jacob Schoen: Exactly, okay. Now what I want you to do is keep your bicep facing that exact same place and turn your hand back flat. Now without moving your hand turn your bicep back to the ceiling.

 

[30:29] Ashley James: Oh yeah. Okay.

 

[30:31] Jacob Schoen: Do you see how your elbow and your hand can move separately?

 

[30:34] Ashley James: Yes.

 

[30:35] Jacob Schoen: Now what I want you to do the level is to keep your hand flat the whole time and now turn your bicep to the floor. Did you do it?

 

[30:46] Ashley James: Yes.

 

[30:49] Jacob Schoen: Okay, perfect. That is your body’s awareness of I know the difference between my hand and my wrist, my elbow, and my shoulder. A lot of people especially if they have an injury they go, okay they can turn it down then can turn it back but then when they try to differentiate the movement at their elbow from the movement at their hand. They can’t do it. It’s not because you and I are from a different planet that we can do it, it’s just because our brain knows how to move our elbow instead of move the whole thing. That is body awareness. There is different practices for that, for everything. It could just be inverting or reverting the ankle. Rolling the knees around, moving the lumbar spine, moving things left to right. A good thing that I’ve tried to teach people when they first come in especially if they have a lot of back pain is what’s called the Good Morning exercise. Essentially, all you do is to sit on your bum, you bend your knees to whatever they’re comfortable most people a little less than 90 degrees or sorry, little more than 90 degrees. Nice and relaxed kind of like a butterfly would be open. All you do is hold on to your knees, you lift yourself up really tall, feel your sit bones on the floor. Feel those hard bones like that would be if you felt those on a hard chair it would be uncomfortable. All you do is to tilt just your pelvis back and then roll your pelvis forward. That just to teach you, “Okay, I know where my pelvis is.” A lot of people when they do that they start to move their pelvis and then their head starts to move forward or their chest moves a lot. I have to educate them that your pelvis is here and not up there. Start to move just the pelvis and then you can increase it so you can say, “Okay, I’m moving my pelvis and more of my lumbar spine. Okay, now I know better where my lumbar spine is in my body.” Then you got from your lumbar spine to the thoracic and then you can go all the way up and down but that’s an education exercise that teaches them how to differentiate different parts of their body. When you’re doing exercise at the gym, really try to pay attention to what you’re doing. Be mindful of what you’re doing and if you’re really interested in learning more body awareness, you go out and you seek out a professional that’s going to be able to teach you whether it be yoga or I prefer, recommend doing the Eldoa because of how precise it is. You really learn a lot about your body and how to manage all the pieces at one time.

 

 

[33:05] Ashley James:  I learned about a Z health. Have you heard of that? It was developed by a chiropractor. He explains that when we have injury, the body’s compensating to protect it but when the injury’s healed it’s like we still have the neurological map of holding this pattern. Like that you just said, when someone has had an injury in the past, they might not be able to right away move their arms separate from their wrist and move their shoulder separate for\\rom their elbow then it might just all move in one because if they have elbow injury then their brain is still holding that injury memory. That in Z health he has people do small circular movements with each joint to reset the map. Have you heard of that system? Is this similar to it?

 

[34:08] Jacob Schoen: I haven’t heard of it. No. To be honest, I’m really a fan of anything that gets people more moving and in the context of moving gets them moving more mindfully. Anything that gets them to get to start to do that where they just pay attention to what it is that they’re doing is something I’m all on board for. I haven’t heard of that specifically.

 

[34:31] Ashley James: Intuitively, it sounds like you intuitively were doing what he also intuitively figured out. Which is sit there and roll each joint and just pay attention and go, “Wow this is how this joint feels. This is right wrist versus left wrist. Left knee versus right knee and you’re warming them up in the morning, you’re getting the synovial fluid going, but you’re also getting that body awareness and going, “Okay, let’s just come back into the body” which would also be very relaxing. It would turn off the sympathetic nervous system response. It would help the body like you said better circulation. Better circulation happens when we were in that rest and digest state. How many minutes a day would you say do that in the morning?

 

[35:15] Jacob Schoen: In the morning? Maybe just three. Nice and easy nice and quick. I’ll do that and usually hop in the shower and get my day started. It’s nice because unfortunately, we live in the world were most people are a little sleep deprived so they set up their alarm from the exact last minute that they would absolutely need to wake up to make it to work on time. They don’t really allow themselves that time in the morning for their body to really warm up to the day to day life. I try to give myself that a little bit of time, just allow myself just 3 minutes to move and not only open my eyes and wake up and but also get my body ready to go get the day is something I think really important. It’s also most people’s first instinct when they wake up especially if they’re busy and they have a lot of responsibilities, “Okay, let me check my email. What did I miss? Let me do this” its just nice to take that first couple of minutes to just say, “Hey body, good morning. How are you doing? How my knee? How’s my shoulder? How’s my head?” just kind of take that time for yourself. I admit I’m not always the best with it. There are some morning where I’m like, “Man, I’m just going to the shower I’m tired of doing this.” Most mornings I will try to make that time.

 

[36:28] Ashley James: You could do it in the shower.

 

[36:30] Jacob Schoen: I could do it in the shower but I don’t know if that’s slippery soapy environment is my best environment for body awareness. It’s definitely high stakes that’s always kind of fun but I don’t know if it’s the best place to do that. I think this reminds me of why I’m so pumped about – there are certain things that I feel like come to you, just like pop in your brain. You know, I can’t really take responsibility for thinking up. Here is this time when I thought of the tagline for my business or the slogan for my business whatever it is it’s called Move More Aware. I want people to move. I want people to move more. I want people to move more awareness. That awareness can be whether mentally, emotional, how you moving throughout the day, what kind of baggage you bringing with you, what kind of energy are you giving off to the people you’re interacting with. Also physically, how are you moving? It’s not just that you’re moving but what like what’s the quality of your movement? Most people especially in the western culture it’s more about go, go, go. I did 20,000 steps. I burned 6,000 calories at CrossFit class. I’m not trying to talk bad about CrossFit anything. I did 4,000 burpees today. Okay, good but how well did you them? What is that really giving you in the long term? What kind image and what kind of information are you sending to your brain about the quality of your movement and not just the quantity of it.

 

[38:08] Ashley James: I like that you’re pointing out the quality of the movement is more important than just the quantity of the movement because in the quantity of the movement is where we can injure our self but the quality of the movement is where we can heal our self.

 

[38:24] Jacob Schoen: Absolutely. That’s where all the power lies. I think it’s general life thing too. It’s really about the quality of your life and not necessarily the quantity. It’s so interesting to me I think a lot of times about people who are doing the longevity stuff. I also wonder say, “Okay good you’re doing all these stuff but what’s the quality of the life you’re living right now? How good is it?” If it’s good, I would like – one of the things I came up with is like, I want to live a little and live a lot. Do you know what I mean? A lot of times when you’re out having a good time and people say, “C’ mon, live a little.” its like, “Okay, I’ll live a little. I’ll do some things but also I want to balance that with living a lot. I want to live long time.” Trying to balance those two things. There needs to be, yes sure there needs to be some quantity on your life. I think it really comes down to most people would probably agree that it’s really about the quality of the relationships that you have, the food that you eat, the movement that you do, the sleep that you get. All of those things are really what create a balanced and beautiful life. It’s really about the quality. I think movement is no different than that. Especially in our culture, it’s about we were pretty short-sided in a lot of ways where we just say, “Okay, I want my muscles to get bigger. I want to be more ripped and lean,” it’s like, “Okay, I understand that. I also want to do that and wanted to do that when I was 16 but at the same time, how well do you move, how much pain do you have? How good is the quality of your movement and where is that going to bring you in 2, 3, 5 years?  If all of those answers are answered and you’re happy with those answers then you can just plug and go along.

 

[40:11] Ashley James: Right. I love it. looking deeper into what your motivation is for wanting to shape your body in a certain way is important because you point out there are those consequences that come down the road. We want to make sure we’re creating a quality of life and longevity in our life. Also having a great life right now while we’re doing it. It’s both. What is Soma training? That’s another thing that you do. Soma training and Soma therapy.

 

[40:43] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, sure. Those programs are programs that were developed by Dr. Guy VOYER who is also the gentleman who developed the Eldoa exercises. Everybody has that person, that teacher that they really resonate with and what they find to really provide message that they think is powerful and philosophically they agree with and also academically, you’re otherwise they really find to be true for them, he’s been that teacher for me. I want to thank him for that, thank you Dr. VOYER, you’re amazing. Those two programs are his programs for both trainings so soma training and soma therapy. What those programs are, I’ll talk about the training aspect. What those programs are they really try to teach you how to work with every single part of the body so that no matter who walks into your facility, you can at least in some way help and understand what they have going on because the level of the training you’ve gotten is so in-depth. One of the things that’s interesting about it and i respect so much about it is that it does break the body down into its smallest pieces. When you take a class you’re going to take a class for 3 days just on segmental strengthening of muscles in your legs. There’s a whole bunch of muscles in your legs and people might go “Okay, why do I need to strengthen this specific fiber of this quadricep?” Well, that’s really specific but if you take a bigger step back and you understand the global picture it makes a lot of sense to go after the link in the chain that you know to be the weakest link in the chain. Only with specific tools can I think you really be holistic in the way you approach things. Each ligament of the knee has an exercise for appropriate section. Each segment of the spine has an exercise for the Eldoa. Each muscle has segmental strengthening exercise. Then there is exercises to bring the picture all back together. The Some training what it really does is it divides the body into all of its functional pieces. Teaches you how to work with each individual one and then gives you the context on how to bring it all together in the bigger picture. For me as a trainer, it absolutely changed and really made my practice because I feel confident that anybody who comes into my studio I’ll at least be able to get them on the road towards their goal. Whether it be bigger, faster, stronger, whether it be no pain, longevity or whatever it is. I feel really confident the these exercises, because of their specificity and because of their precision can really move people towards whatever goal it is that they have.

 

[43:24] Ashley James: That’s soma training?

 

[43:25] Jacob Schoen:  That’s soma training exactly.

 

[43:27] Ashley James: It taught you how to work with all body style, body shapes, body challenges and the goals that people have.

 

[43:38] Jacob Schoen: Yes. It’s an exercise program, exercise curriculum that really teaches you how to respect the individualistic nature of each person. One thing and this is a good time to talk about what people call functional exercise. That’s a really big term that is used super frequently. The thing I would say first off start by saying is that it seems to me that most functional exercise looks the same. It has a similar style look to. Whether it be a certain type of kettlebell thing or certain type of TRX movement or if you’re not familiar with TRX, it’s just that suspension straps but I’m sure you know what those are. It’s just a specific looking type of movement. The one thing I would say about that is that “Okay, what’s functional for me is someone does manual therapy over a table and teach people how to train all day versus functional exercise for someone who’s sitting at a desk versus functional exercise for someone who does hair or is a car mechanic. These totally different functional exercise. The other thing is it’s like, “Okay, what’s your goal. If your goal is to build muscle then yes, a bicep curl is functional exercise for that particular goal.” I think a lot of times in the exercise field, we need to take a step back and we say a lot of people really get dogmatic and say anything that isn’t functional training is bad, or whatever it is. “Okay, functional for you and for me are two different things, otherwise what’s your goal for that?” The Soma training programs that really teaches you how to respect, what is functional in for that person. Also how to apply that to every single person because everybody is totally beautiful and unique and different right? You know, you’re obviously different than I am. Not only different but maybe you have a different way of thinking, a different type of emotional system, a different brain, and a different orthopedic history. The way that I teach you an exercise or how you execute an exercise might be different from how I execute the exercise based off our anatomy based off a whole number of factors and what the program really does is it allows you to take all of those factors into consideration and give the person the best exercise as opposed to just saying, everyone needs to be able to do deadlift or everyone needs to be able to do a kettlebell swing, everyone needs to be able to do whatever because the truth is that, not everybody needs to do the same thing because not everybody is the same.

 

 

[46:12] Ashley James: Right. I just imagine the challenges that someone was sitting in the desk all day versus if they’re doing hair or if they’re a machine. Their bodies in a different position all day. It wouldn’t benefit them to just do the same exercise, the same machines at the gym. You are looking to support them and understanding what their body does every day. You can support them in being balanced. That makes sense.

 

[46:42] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. If you have a chiropractor for example. Chiropractor is probably doing manual work and adjusting most of the day. Maybe he’s leaning forward over a top of somebody for 4 hours a day. That a totally different stress in his body than someone who like a hair dresser who’s arms are up by their head all day working on people’s hair or different than somebody who’s a car mechanic who’s laying on his back all day underneath a car. It’s three totally different classes of people just in those examples. To say that their training all needs to look and be the same is super reductionist and the goal is to be précised so you can help the person as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. To put everyone in the same box and say everyone needs to do a certain type of training is really narrow. When you have the tools to work with the body then you can apply those tools to anybody. Soma training is just somo which means body, so it’s body training. We know things about the anatomy, we know things about body mechanics we could just apply those if you understand it well to the people would walk into you and say, “Okay, Joe walks in. He has problems with his knee. Should he be doing this or should he strengthen his specific muscle around his knee? How do you strengthen that specific muscle? Well, you do it like this but you have to modify it to the fact that Joe has pain around this point. Everyone’s different. Not everyone is the textbook. If you only have the textbook to work with then you’re going to be really limited as a practitioner to how you can apply that to different people when they come see you.

 

[48:19] Ashley James: If someone come to you and they have pain and they want to work out. They want to strengthen their body but they have pain so maybe the mechanic or that hairdresser has a frozen shoulder or the person works at the desk all day has carpal tunnel, the chiropractor has lower back pain.

 

[48:41] Jacob Schoen:  Which is very common by the way, which I get because you’re leaning over people all day you know.

 

[48:46] Ashley James: Exactly. My chiropractor has pain in his hands from how he adjusts and he’s developed some kind of arthritis. He’s been doing it for over 30 years. He figured out amazing ways at still being a chiropractor and no wearing down his hands. If someone comes to you, they want to work out but they’re really afraid because they have pain and pain has stopped them from working out in the past, do you start by doing Eldoa with them or what do you do first to help get them out of pain so then they can train? Or do you train at the same time? How does that work?

 

[49:30] Jacob Schoen: It’s really a concurrent process. Most of the time it’s going to happen at the same time. That’s the beautiful thing that I really love about this exercise is that you can get someone who is afraid of exercise or hesitant about exercise because they’ve been hurt in the past. Every time they do something, it hurts more or they just don’t want to be in pain anymore but the beautiful thing about this exercises is that a lot of times you use the exercises to help or start to work on the pain. It’s like a snowball effect, you do more exercise you feel a lilt bit better. You do more exercise you feel better and better before you know it, you’re using the exercise as maintenance thing because you’re no longer in pain and then you can start back on the road of classic fitness training if that’s your goal. Most of the people that I work with, they come and see me because they either had a friend that work with me and they had results or they just tried everything else and they still are not really where they want to be. Most people it is concurrent process of a little bit of manual therapy and then a lot of exercise. I try to do as much exercise as I can in the context of that person because it really gives them the power. If I have someone that comes and sees me and I only see then to do manual therapy then yes, I’m healing them and I believe I’m helping them but it’s, not that its too much power on my hands but it’s not enough power on their hands. I really want to work the peoples that I work with their mentality that start to, here’s a plug, shift. That’s how I came up with the business. I was started talking to myself and I came up with that name. It’s really been great because it’s stuck and is made a lot of sense for me as far as the paradigm goes. Yes, its really start to shift because if they say, “Yes I learned these exercises from Jake. but I’ve been doing them I’m getting result by doing them.” I’ve only seen him once or twice. It’s not that I saw him that got me the result but it’s doing the exercise that got me the result. “Okay I can do this, I can do the change to myself that I want to see.’ To be a part of that s process is the amazing thing for me because you teach people realize they have power. You do it through exercise. Really, my main goal is to start people to exercise by themselves. That’s not an original idea to me, Dr. VOYER one of his best quotes is “You are your own best therapist” whether it that be mental, emotional or a physical thing, it’s really the power is in you. And so yes I have the tools to teach you how to do that but really it’s up to you to get the result for yourself. Most people that are successful with me are the ones who really take the responsibility to do the exercise by themselves. To follow the home program and to execute that by themselves and that how they get the result. Yes, its some manual therapy but I really try to use mostly exercise to get people back moving and start the ball down the road. I had a lady who come and see me she was so afraid to do anything even walk. We were doing some really, really gentle exercise like the good morning thing I was telling you about. She had pain during that. I know that her nervous systems is really guarded. I know mentally, emotionally, physically she’s really protective of what she was doing on. So I was like, “All right before you do any exercise all I want you to do is just go outside and do a nice easy 10-minute walk. Go get some fresh air. Maybe some sunshine,” in New Orleans it’s super hot you have to deal with that but “go outside and get a 10-minute walk” and she was afraid. She as like, “Well, walking hurts my back.” I was like, “Is there anything that doesn’t hurt your back?” she’s like “Well, if I lay down in this specific away.” and I was like, “We have to work together because if you’re going to get where you want to go which picking up your grandkids and going out to dance with your husband. We need to start somewhere.“ I got her to start to do 10 minutes  walks a day she’s like, “It’s a little painful but I do feel better after.” Now she’s walking 30 minutes a day during her exercises and everything is a lot better. It’s just that process. Really getting people to try to take power back into their own hands. Maybe they experience a little pain at the beginning but they feel accomplished after. There’s a whole bunch of factors that go into it to getting someone from a place where they are afraid to do exercise to back to a place where they’re going out and dancing with their husband.

 

[54:02] Ashley James: What helped her to get out of pain? Was it that not moving was continuing to have the pain or what was it that had her be free of it?

 

[54:13] Jacob Schoen: To be honest with you, I really don’t think it was anything that I did. I think it’s a little esoteric to say this but I think a lot of people’s pain whether it be at least initially or a lot of times chronic pain, is a mentally emotional adaption from any kind of stress or trauma that they maybe they store in their body. For me, I think hers was a mental-emotional thing mostly. I didn’t say that to her because she came to me for orthopedic reasons. I try to keep it as in that context as I could but I knew that if we got her in some way out of her own way that she would really start to see how powerful she was and how really the pain couldn’t hold her back. If you know what I mean. Getting her to move. Got her to see, “Oh, okay I can do this.” Yes, it’s a little bothersome at first but then she said, “Okay, I can do this. If I can do 10 minutes, maybe I can do 15. If I can do 15 then maybe I can do 20 and you know what, I’m doing 20. I’m feeling better. Okay, all right. I’m doing 20, I’m doing 25, I’ll do 30.” I think in reality she let her guard down a little bit and she started to get out of her own way to heal. A lot of people hold on to these problems that they have and they won’t let them go for any number of reasons. As a trainer, you do have to wear several hats. A lot of people come I and they tell you about their day or they tell you about their problem that they’re having with their kids. I love that because I love working with people. I don’t want to just work with a robot that’s covered with muscle. I want to work with human. A lot of people they have these problems that they don’t really let go. When they come to see me, part of my thing is working with the mental, emotional system. Start to get them out of their own way so that they can progress in the orthopedic system. A lot of times it solves itself over time.

 

[56:16] Ashley James: I love it. People who are in pain don’t want to be told that it’s all in your head. Because it’s real. The pain is real. There’s proof now that the body the mind can create physical pain that feels real. I believe it was John E. Sarno that wrote the book, Healing Back Pain and he discusses how he could see that when we had mental, emotional issues going on, especially that we were stuffing away and procrastinating to face that the mind would create an ischemia in a muscle would actually tighten the muscle so much that it would cause a tremendous amount of pain because there was lack of blood flow in the are kind of like trigger point. Where the blood flow is cut off in that muscles and just like trigger points would cause radiating pain too so it could mimic pinched nerve. It could mimic a lot of different symptoms. He saw it commonly that it was lower back pain that would be created when someone was having emotional issues that they were facing that the unconscious minds really wants us to resolve things. When we’re in the state of anxiety or panic and we’re faced with choices and they’re really hard so we procrastinate them that the unconscious mind will tense a muscle or tense muscle fibers and create ischemia and create that level of pain that is real. We can move and we can put hot packs on it that’ll give relief temporality but it’ll keep coming back until we look at it and face the emotional stuff. It’s real and physical pain but like you said, she freed herself up and she had to move past that fear of moving and to get that freedom in you helped her face that.

 

[58:26] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. I try to do my part in helping her see that and I think giving her a little bit of accountability with me as someone who’s going to check in on her and see if she’s walking and see if she’s doing these things was helpful for her but really it was up to her to make the decision to impart trust me and the other part trust herself. The other thing that I find so interesting is that a lot of people like you said they don’t want to be told that their pain it’s all on her head. The problem with that is that just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it’s not real. If I were to be extraordinary blunt with this lady and see, “Mam, I see that you have back pain but it’s all on your head.” She would’ve been totally turned off and she would’ve been like, “Okay, I’m leaving.” I would’ve understood because it’s pretty insensitive. The reality is that even if I do say it’s all in your head doesn’t make it not real. It just makes it not in the place that you thought it was which is it doesn’t mean its any less valuable or any less tangible or any less real. It just means that its somewhere else. That’s all that really important to take away from that. If you look at the hierarchy of your body, Paul Chek of the C.H.E.K institute did an amazing job with his graphic. He has this totem pole. At the very, very top of the totem pole is the spirit or the mind. The mind if you look all the way down of the totem pole you have the visceral system, have the breathing, you have the nutrition, you have all the stuff down the totem pole but really who’s in charge the big boss is the mind. If you think “Okay, I have back pain.” Yes, sure you have back pain and I agree with that but maybe the back pain is caused by something up higher down the line. It doesn’t have to be another physical thing down the line. It could be an emotional, mental thing down the line that you need to work on to solve the back pain that you’re having. The way I try to work with people is I give them exercises that I think will someway get the water out of the boat and will give them exercises to fix the hole. If you just fix the leak but you don’t take the water out of the boat then you can still have some residual pain. But if you just take the water out of the boat then you’re going to be taking the water out of the boat your whole life. That is a process that you have to work with somebody on is one getting the symptoms that have to go away then two getting the cause of the symptoms in the first place to be resolved. That could be, the human body is complex and the human organism is amazingly complexed. That’s why it’s a beautiful field to be in to work with people because it’s not just plugging numbers and doing spreadsheets. You’re working with dynamic diverse history of a human that walks into your office every day and so you have to treat them with that same respect if you just say, “Yes, back pain I need to go straight to your back and cut off of your disc and do this.” Then yes, you’re going to miss the picture. That makes me think about a gentleman that came and saw me last week, 2 weeks ago. He flew down from Colorado. He sent me all these videos of his neurosurgeon showing that in between L4 and L5 he had narrowing in the space for the spinal cord and how it was exactly 103 ml whereas his other space where 110. It’s like I get it there’s narrowing there but there’s also people that have severe narrowing who don’t have any pain. It’s not necessarily all the time that that ting is causing the pain. It could be multitude of factors that’s causing the pain and the weak link that you have because of your history or because of the structure is what’s pain. Someone who has that same narrowing maybe has no pain and has no pain for the rest of her life because they have better hydration or because they’re not at stressed because they didn’t play the same amount of sports that you did growing up. I really try to treat people as holistically as possible because that’s who’s walking into your office.

 

 

[01:02:36] Ashley James: What happened with the gentleman? You practice in New Orleans so people local to you can come visit you. I have a friend that lives in Houston and she said it’s like a 5 ½ hour drive or something like that. You could get people from Texas just driving to see you.

 

[01:02:53] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come on down Texas.

 

[01:02:55] Ashley James: Yes. Florida, Louisiana, Georgia. All that whole area could be coming and just drive to you but you had someone fly in from Colorado showing you the neuron surgeon stuff. He had pain for how long?

 

[01:03:10] Jacob Schoen: He had pain at this point for four months. He is a type a of a person, go-getter of a person that you’re ever going to meet. He’s an absolute stud. I’ll give him that. If I look and move like him when I’m in my early 60’s then I will be doing a good job. With that same context, he had never stretched. He had never taken time to stretch. He was severely dehydrated. You could just feel in his tissue when I had my hands on him. It’s like instead of feeling like soft and hydrated and well-nourished it was dry like leather. Of course, you’re going to have more pre-disposition to tearing certain things, you have less leeway when you have that quality of tissue. Part of the things I just started to get him to drink more water, starting to stretch. If you’re 6 foot tall but your connected system tissue think that you’re 5’8. It’s going to be pretty difficult for you to move well and then something is going to have to pay. So over time, he had just developed this posture. He developed an amount of stress in his body. He developed the quality of tissue that his body finally said “Hey man, we’ve got to do something about this.” Gave him exercises for the posture of his head, gave him exercises for his breathing, gave him exercises to get the water out of the boat in his lumbar spine, gave him exercise for the nerve prolifically. Now he just texted me the other day saying that his pain was an 8 out of 10 and now it’s 4 out of 10. He’s making progress by himself. He came down and we spent a lot of time together, got to know him. It was awesome. It’s awesome for me to work with people like that because whenever they come and see you, they’re really motivated and they really try to work on it and you get to really be in the zone when you work with people like that. I saw him for 3 hours a day for 2 days. Those 3 hours they go by in an absolute flash. Which is awesome because it’s almost like you get transported into another realm and you come back and it “Wow, it’s 5 o’clock already.” When you work with somebody like that it really awesome because you can see a change in their brain when they start to realize, “Oh, these things that I’ve been doing to myself or that I haven’t been paying attention to these might be the things that can help me.” Before this, he was scheduled to have surgery the end of July and as far as I understand he’s no longer going to have that.

 

[01:05:37] Ashley James: I’m so happy to hear that. I love it when people choose to try alternative methods before just jumping into an elected surgery. One of my mentors, he’s an old school naturopath. He’s yelled at someone who had something removed, some organ removed from their body and then they need help. I think it was thyroid. The doctors removed my thyroid and then they were asking for your help. He’s like “I can’t help you when your thyroids in the garbage. I can’t help you get your thyroid back. It’s been cut out of you.” he was more yelling like sheer frustration because he’s also a pathologist before he became a naturopath and he saw that like you can reverse so many diseases that surgeons just go, “Okay, let’s just cut it out of you, it’s time.”

 

[01:06:29] Jacob Schoen: Totally. That’s the thing that we have to work against as people who are offering alternative means to these things. It’s because fortunately or unfortunately most people’s disposition is that when they have problem they go to specialist. One of my favorite quotes is that “A specialist knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” That’s the thing that I really think about. If you go see a neurosurgeon, a neurosurgeon is great at what they do which is neurosurgery. They’re not going to be experts in all these other field that most likely are going to be the cause of your problem. Don’t get me wrong, some people need surgery, that’s a certain thing that you can’t fix with Eldoa. It’s just not going to happen. At the same time, you have to think, what is surgery? You already have a trauma to your body, well guess what, you have to create more trauma to go in there to fix the trauma. Are you doing anything before to repair the tissue for that type of surgery and what’s the quality of the stuff that you’re doing after to make sure that you don’t have another problem because it’s not so uncommon for someone to have a back surgery and then 6 months later be like, “Oh man, that didn’t really work. I need another back surgery” or for someone who have fusion in her neck and be like, “Oh geez, I still have the same neck pain that I had and now I have to go get another fusion to now fix the problem because something was mechanically stuck in my neck and then now everything above and below has to compensate for that. It’s not so uncommon for that. Then as a quick change, the other change is when you go see a specialist, they specialize and they spend a lot of time specializing in that thing but whenever you have your blinders on to focus on one thing, you do miss the things that are around you. A lot of times, for example, people will have problem with their cervical spine, guess what’s right below your cervical spine, your rib cage and your thoracic spine and then your shoulder and then what’s above that is your head. The connections are unbelievable. People who are really interested your pericardium, you have a series and your fibers are pericardium which is the fascia of your heart has connection forward to your sternum below to your diaphragm and above to your cervical spine. If you have bad posture for your neck, guess what, then there’s differentiating tension in the pericardium. Maybe your heart doesn’t work so well as it needs to. Okay, your heart doesn’t work as well as it needs to. Well, now there’s differentiating tension on your sternum, which is where your rib is attached and on your diaphragm. When your diaphragm goes all the way down and attaches to your lumbar spine and into your pelvis. Guess what, there’s no distinction between those connection, if I pull on one end of the chain, the other end of the chain is going to move. Where you have the problem is just dependent on the person.

 

[01:09:18] Ashley James: Have you helped someone get lower blood pressure, better heart health from using Eldoa and the soma therapy?

 

[01:09:29] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely because one, if you start to drink water most people are severely dehydrated. I think that’s what I’m meant to say. First off, you introduce more water so now you have less resistance in the tube and the water flows [Audio Gap 01:09:48-51] blood is viscous so it moves more easily. The other thing is that now you have better water in the tissue so the tissue is more malleable. When the heart has to push, doesn’t have to push against as much peripheral resistance so now the blood pressure can be lower. The other thing is you start to work on the posture. The posture in quotes of the vein and of the circulatory system is off the better alignment. Now it doesn’t have to work as hard to move blood to the periphery so now the blood pressure go slower. The other thing is whenever the posture of the head is in the better way, there’s less tension on the heart, the heart is organized in relation to gravity in a more perfect way. The way that it was intended to be. Whenever you work on all of those factors, the blood pressure a lot of times goes down. The other thing is when you work with these exercises not only do you affect mechanically the bone but on the front of the spine is the sympathetic chain ganglia so the autonomic nervous system sits directly on the spine and it doesn’t just sit there because it’s glued there. It sits there because the fascia holds it there. The fascia integrately holds it to the bone. If you affect the bone, you affect the fascia, you affect the sympathetic nervous system, blood pressure going down baby, everything’s looking good. All of this factors go together to really holistically start to help the person.

 

[01:11:16] Ashley James: I love that. A few years ago it was 2010 my husband singlehandedly carried all of our furniture into a 26 foot Penske. We moved from Las Vegas to Seattle. We didn’t hired anyone to do it. It was all him. I was busy packing boxes or something, a few days later and he’s a carpenter for 20 years so he’s used to carrying heavy loads. He’s pretty big guy, 6 foot 7.

 

[01:11:44] Jacob Schoen: That is a pretty big guy.

 

[01:11:46] Ashley James: Right? We were under a lot of stress. Big move. Lots of new changes and he woke up one morning and his lips were blue and he’s like my heart’s doing something funky. I freaked out what’s going on? It took me a bit that I’m driving him to the hospital. That’s when we found out that he had AFib. Every chamber of his heart was just spasming. That’s why his lips were blue, he’s having problem breathing. They had to reset his heart which was again really scary. The cardiologist said, “This is holiday heart.” Probably because you’re under a lot of stress. We were at that time, we just bought an espresso machine. We thought, we’re living in Seattle, we need to do the coffee thing.

 

[01:12:37] Jacob Schoen:  Get the coffee culture going. I love it.

 

[01:12:38] Ashley James: Yes. Exactly. We got the coffee culture going a little bit too much. So he was overdoing it with that espresso and that time we were still drinking alcohol, not that we were alcoholics but we don’t partake in poison anymore. Back then we were not into health as we are definitely now. The cardiologist was just like “between the stress of the move and your new lifestyle and excessive caffeine and alcohol, it’s right around Christmas” so she was like, “this is the most AFib I’ve seen it’s right around Christmas and new year’s. This was just totality normal.” Totally normal okay, great. She’s like, “well, you know, we should do stress test just in case and you’re fine.” It happened again a year later. He as carrying a 6-year-old child on his shoulders who was jumping because she’s excited so she was jumping, as we’re going for a walk. We’re walking with a friend and her daughter and the next day he woke up with AFib again. Not as bad as the first time but it is definitely scary. At this point, we were seeing a naturopath and the naturopath said something really interesting, the naturopath said when there’s compression on the thoracic spine I think it’s T67 but I could be wrong. That there’s a nerve that comes out your be able to correct me one of the nerves that innervates the heart comes from the thoracic spine and so when its’ compressed it can send a full signal to the heart and the heart is completely healthy but the compression on the spine is what’s triggering the AFib. That made sense now that we were thinking to ourselves, “Okay, this is the second time that’s happened” and so the naturopath said I want you to rest. Get an inversion table and do hydrotherapy. Hot cold showers and just rest and see your chiropractor. It went away on its own. It was scary 3 days and his heart was beating irregularly and it just reset and everything was good. We’re like, “Okay, that’s a little scary but now we know. A few years later we’re doing CrossFit and he’s learning how to do deadlifts and the next day not only wakes up but he faints. He wakes up and he faints, he hits the floor and he has AFib. We’re like, “Whoa” That was again that was his first time lifting heavy objects since the last AFib occurrence. He’s only had 3 but 3 acute AFib attacks it makes you a candidate for pacemaker. If we had never worked with a naturopath and we had just seeing a cardiologist he would’ve gone in for a pacemaker which they have to burn the nerves to the heart and then put in a machine –

 

[01:15:48] Jacob Schoen:  Which is terrifying by the way.

 

[01:15:49] Ashley James: It’s terrifying , yes. Put in the machine that beats your heart which sends a signal for you instead of your body. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with the nerve at his heart. It’s the compression on his spine. We did the exact same thing the third time. We had actually gone to a naturopath and they did an EEG and determined yes, it is AFib. “Okay, great. See your chiropractor. Hang upside down, do hot and cold hydrotherapy and just lay down a lot.” It reset again. Thank goodness. That was the last time because since then, he’s been doing exercises and supplements and seeing the chiropractor on a regular basis all to keep his thoracic spine super healthy and decompressed. Sometimes when he gets a little off or he gets a little tight, he’ll just start to feel it and his heart starts to just do a little bit of a skip and he’s like, “Oh.” I’m like, “You’ve got to get back to the chiropractor. What are you doing? Or do the exercise your chiropractor gave you.” Listen to the whisper. Listen to the symptoms as they’re coming in gently. Don’t ignore them and just push through.

 

[01:17:02] Jacob Schoen: Exactly. Don’t let the little hearts turn into big hearts later.

 

[01:17:03] Ashley James: Right. But if we were to see a traditional MD it would’ve gone surgery. They’re amazing doctors. They specialize like you said they’re doing more than 8 years of higher education. They’re so intelligent and they’re passionate about their field and yet they’re not taught that the compression the spine can cause AFib. It just maddens me.

 

[01:17:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. There’s only so much time in a day to learn so much stuff. I am definitely not an MD and there’s things about pathophysiology and immunology and things like that that they would absolutely blow me out of the freaking water with. That’s definitely not my area of expertise and if someone has a disease like that I for sure would send them to an MD. When it comes to a lot of other things unfortunately, they’re not really given the tools to be effective with the complexity of the human body that is walking into their office. They have a subset of tools, they have the parameters that they have which is only a certain amount of time with each person because they’re super overloaded with patients. They only have so much time to make a guess and to give a certain type of treatment for that and unfortunately, most of the treatments the we have especially in the western culture is just cut and burn or whatever they do to people’s bodies.

 

[01:18:36] Ashley James: Cut, burn and poison.

 

[01:18:37] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. Cut, burn and poison. I’ve had people who come in and it’s funny because they call certain surgeries minimally invasive. If you ever watched video of minimally invasive surgery, I have seen various things in my life that are more invasive than minimally invasive surgeries. They have to go inside of the body especially for the lumbar spine, they have to go inside your body, cutaway bone, slip away disc, burn the disc, sew you back up. I don’t know about you but that’s pretty invasive. All qualification for what it means to actually have remedies for this things are so skewed to this unbelievable procedures. If you want to freak yourself out, go watch a hip replacement surgery. It is absolutely freaking brutal. People say, “You know my hip hurts maybe in a couple of years I have some arthritis and I’ll probably have to get hip replacement” I was like, “Are you kidding me right now? Have you seen a freaking surgery like that? Wouldn’t you just rather do some stretching and exercise?” but unfortunately, this is kind of where I get into my soapbox. Unfortunately, we live in a culture right now where people would much rather give away their responsibility to someone else than have to take the responsibility themselves. They say, “Oh my doctor said this, this, this” it’s just like listen to your body. Give yourself the opportunity to heal yourself. Then if that doesn’t work and you know you’ve tried all the other options then you can get surgery. But for your first instinct to be to get surgery or to get your fourth surgery or whatever it is, it blows my mind but that’s a philosophical thing that is different between where I am now and where I was. I definitely was on the other side of the coin a couple of years ago before I got introduced to these things and where most of the population is because “Oh, you have a problem with your knee? Go see the orthopedic.” What does the orthopedic say, “Oh, we took an MRI. You have a problem with your meniscus. What we can do about that is that we could cut out a piece of meniscus.” It’s like, “Maybe you can do something else?” it’s just crazy what we turn to and what we think is or we think is very valuable therapy but you know. That’s a philosophical thing that is different amongst practitioners. Not good or bad just different.

 

[01:20:54] Ashley James: Just to add that story, recently I mean, it’s been the last 4 years I thought I had a hernia. I gave birth and so they say it’s common for women after giving birth near belly button I’m like, “Wow. Something is pretty funky feeling in my belly button. I better get this checked out.” I got to the doctor, naturopath of course. He feels around and he goes “You know what that really feels like a hernia. I’m going to suggest that you go get a surgical consult.” I looked at him like dead in the eye. “Surgery is the last option. I will try 100 alternative therapies. I will travel to Tibet and rub I don’t know, Tibetan berries on my tummy before surgery is an option. It’s just my last option.” Luckily, I heard this old school naturopath again mentored me he says, “Anytime that there’s a hernia, go to a Bowen therapist. It’s a Bowen technique. It’ll a massage therapist likely who would administer it.” I found a woman who’s been a massage therapist since the ‘80s and been doing Bowen therapy for 15 years and she’s 45 minutes north of me. I went in and visited her. Very interesting. She spent most of the time doing ranger motion tests to determine where my fascia was. She goes, “First of all, I’m not a doctor. I can’t tell you. I can’t diagnose” like cover her butt. Yes, exactly. There’s a disclaimer but hint and wink-wink, she’s like, “This is not a hernia. This is diastasis recti.” So many people will go in and get a surgery when it’s not needed because the abdomen has separated and she did some very minimal technique. I kind of was like “Are you kidding me?” She just touched me a few times in different places to adjust the fascia and then I started feeling like a new person. It was really cool. She recommended some exercises. I went to see her like 4 times. Again, if I was on the just the MD route even if my naturopath told me I should get a surgical console. If I had just given away my personal power. I would’ve been under the knife the next week and have all of the consequences that come with that versus seeking out other types of therapy. The problem is, people don’t know there’s other therapies. I love that you bringing up that. Now people know that there’s Eldoa which is spelled E-L-D-O-A. There’s this soma training, the soma therapy. You do other stuff too but there’s this techniques that are very effective. Even if they don’t get 100% results, they’re going to get some results. Even if they get no results which is rare I understand. At least they could rule out trying something before they get permanent surgery. Right? I love that it gives people those options. Do you have any stories to share? More stories to share of people who come to you with issues and have had really great success?

 

[01:24:32] Jacob Schoen: I mean, I just have so many I didn’t even know where to start. I’m just kidding. I just had a gentleman leave a review for me on google because I just trying to get into the – what I’m really bad at, to be honest with you is business, what I’m good at is training and work with people, what I’m bad at is business. I had him leave a review and he had back pain for 15 years and he’s been working with me for 3 years now. He’s’ now a great friend. He hasn’t had any single spell of back pain for over 3 years now. He’s an older gentleman. I’d like to think I helped him changed his life a little bit whether it be just his quality of movement or even just drinking more water, taking more time for himself things like that. It’s funny because when I first got started, to be honest with you, I look back at who I was and the trainer that I was. I have to laugh because you look back at where you were and “Man, I didn’t know a single thing. I didn’t know what I was doing at all.” I know in 10 years from now I’m going to look back at myself now, “Yes, I thought I know so much. I don’t know anything.” I had this lady come see me and she had a lot of people used the terminology but she had thrown out her back. She was all slumped over. Her back was totally wrecked. She couldn’t really do much of anything without feeling a lot of pain. I was a little inexperienced so I tried to get her to do just a little gentle warm-up. Even the warm-up just absolutely lit her on fire. I just laid her down on the floor, had her do some breathing exercises. Taught her Eldoa for L5-S1, which is the pillar of all the Eldoa exercises. Your last lumbar vertebrae, your first sacral vertebrae, it’s really an important area because of how important the pelvis is and the amount of stress that that area takes. I taught her how to do that any gently. She hasn’t had pain since then. She’s text me she like my biggest fan just because she was dancer. She was super active, super healthy lady and now she gets to go back and do all her stuff and she does all her exercises. The amount of people and that I’ve been able to help is pretty awesome to look back on that. In reality, like I said before, it’s really those people helping themselves I gave then the exercise but the people that have the most success with me are the ones that commit themselves to doing the hallmark that I gave them. If you see me for once a week, you see me for an hour or an hour and a half a week and then there’s all hundred something hours left in the week for you to manage what we do and for you to improve on yourself. If you do those exercise if you commit to that, really that’s when you start to get the result because you need consistency to those things. Your body has learned through thousands of bad reps and thousands of days in pain or whatever it is to adapt to a certain posture so to unlearn that takes a little bit of time and that time takes consistency. That consistency takes dedicated effort on your part to do the exercises. I mean, I’m trying to think if there’s really a groundbreaking one that I’m just super stoked on. Honestly, anybody that I’ve helped that had pain I’m pretty pumped to be able to help them out. Let’s see. It was funny because I was working on this lady the other day. I was treating this lady and she had a carpal tunnel in her left hand for 4 years. She was a painter so she really enjoyed painting and she just couldn’t do it as enthusiastically as she wanted because it hurts her hands whenever she would do it. She went to a surgeon the surgeon recommend carpal tunnel surgery. I had worked with her on her neck before of course, –

 

[01:28:14] Ashley James: With a surgeon that would be like, “I think you should go get a gentle massage.”

 

[01:28:20] Jacob Schoen: Right. Exactly. She came to me and her hand was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. Are you familiar with that? Yes, it was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. She sat them down on the table. I did a bunch of work for the fascia of her hand. I pumped. Pumping is just a terminology thing for getting the joints to move better, more nutrition, all those kind of stuff. Did all that for her shoulder, her elbow then her wrist then work on the fascia of her hand. I moved to the other side because she had small problem with her right hand. She laid her left hand down on the table, I didn’t say anything because I want her to notice but her hand had opened almost completely on the table without her trying to force it because all of the connected tissue of her upper limb had just relaxed. I waited 2 or 3 minutes and she looked over she goes, ”Oh my god, look at my hand.” I was like, “Yup. Check it out, pretty cool.” Just things like that. You have people get on your table. You work on their sacral joint or work on their knee and all of a sudden their back feels better. It’s just like yes, I’d say magic because I’m trying to be funny. The reality is if you respect the connectedness and the holistic nature of the body, you could really achieve some amazing things. Just things like that. Pretty cool.

 

[01:29:34] Ashley James: What caused her fascia to be tight in the first place do you think?

 

[01:29:38] Jacob Schoen: For her, I think it was just repetitive nature of holding on to a brush for 5 hours a day for 10-15 years.

 

[01:29:47] Ashley James: Not taking a break.

 

[01:29:50] Jacob Schoen: Yes, not taking a break. She was passionate about she loves painting. She loves, loves painting. Just that and then also, I’m pretty sure before she retired, she was not a secretary but she was someone who worked on the computer a lot. Lot of stuff with the hand being in that kind of closed claw position. Kind of gradually chronically shortened everything in that hand when that happens the posture just adapts to it. The posture of the hand affects the wrist. The wrist affects the shoulder, the neck and all that down the line. I think it’s just a chronic thing for her. Some people its hydration, some people it’s stress, some people it’s any number of factors. The superficial fascia of your body covers your whole body except for your face. If I were wearing a bodysuit, just kind of weird to think about. If I was wearing a bodysuit and just scrunched up the fabric by my hand, it would get tighter by my toes, tighten about my knees and my back and my neck, it wouldn’t be as obvious as it is by my hand but for sure it still gets tighter. The body’s connected in that way. For her, I think it was chronic, for other people it can be any number of things. That any number of things is why this job is so cool is because it’s not a cut and paste thing. For anybody that comes in as a new puzzle to try to solve. That always keeps it interesting.

 

 

[01:31:20] Ashley James: I love that you keep bringing up that hydration was so important. I was a massage therapist in Canada ages ago and it’s really interesting how tissue does feels different depending on whether someone’s hydrated or chronically dehydrated. Even cellulite and you could correct me if I’m wrong, cellulite is the puckering of the fascia when it’s dehydrated. People always think, “Oh, cellulite is just fat or something” but it’s the fascia adhering because it’s dehydrated and getting all sticky. Is that correct? Is that a good way of explaining it.

 

[01:32:01] Jacob Schoen:  I believe that. To be perfectly honest, I’m not super sure about cellulite but it makes sense to me because a lot of people – the fat that you have at least above the orthopedic system is located inside of that superficial layer of fascia. If that fascia contracts it makes sense that it’ll create some dimpling effect for the cellulite. Absolutely.

 

[01:32:21] Ashley James: There’s aesthetic reason why we should hydrate. What do you recommend? Let’s say everyone who is listening is dehydrated on some level. They’re drinking coffee or black tea instead of water. They’re not drinking the 4 gallons of water a day or whatever.

 

[01:32:41] Jacob Schoen: That’s quite a bit a lot of water. [Laughter]

 

[01:32:42] Ashley James: I’m from Canada. I keep on forgetting quarts. Quarts, not gallons.

 

[01:32:46] Jacob Schoen: We use liters.

 

[01:32:47] Ashley James: You guys use liters. Okay, two liters is a minimum, right?

 

[01:32:51] Jacob Schoen: Yes, we need to switch to the metric system without a doubt. I hate dealing with ounces and gallons. It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s be honest.

 

[01:32:59] Ashley James: You drink at least 2 liters of water a day but okay, if everyone is somewhat dehydrated how much water should people drink and how can we help dehydrated tissue to become hydrated again? Are there any exercises or movements that or just moving the body is that going to be adequate enough to rehydrate?

 

[01:33:21] Jacob Schoen: Yes. That really takes time. The way I think about it is like filling an Olympic size swimming pool. It’s going to take some time. Your body is 70% water certain structures are more or less depending on which one you’re talking about. If you want to think about it, yes, I dumped 4 liters of water into my body today. Okay, that’s good. But how much of that water is needed to work through the kidneys so it can cleanse and detoxify? How much of that water is for biochemical processes and how much of that after is actually going to make its way into my orthopedic system so I can start to rehydrate the structures that we’re talking about. I don’t know what the numbers is. It might be only be a 100ml of that 4L that you drink. If you’re missing 15 kilos of water in your body then it’s going to take a little while for you to get rehydrated. A lot of people say “Oh I need to drink water. Yes, but I’ve been drinking water for last week and I don’t feel any different or I’m just peeing a lot.” I was like, ”Hey, sorry to break it to you but it takes a little while to do that kind of thing” I would say it also depends of what kind of climate you live into. If you live in a super dry climate, it’s different than you live in a humidity, if you live in an altitude that’s different. If you live in New Orleans where I live where it’s just hot as a mother every day, then it’s a little bit different. I like to say that if, I’m going back to ounces look at me talking about how much the metric system is good, I’m going back to ounces. Your bodyweight in ounces of water a day is a good place to start. You also have the thing about the quality of the water. Hopefully, it’s not tap water. I’m crossing my finger for you. It’s not tap water. Nice quality mineral water that has different effect than just distilled reverse osmosis water like with the minerals and things like that. Whether you drink it with food or without food, that’s getting into fine details of it. A lot of people that they think they drink a lot of water and then you really ask them and they go, “Oh, I drink water.” I was like, “How much do you drink?” “Oh, I don’t know couple of glasses. Yes, I drink 4 glasses or 8 ounces a day.” “That’s only 32 ounces mam, you need to drink like a hundred. What are you doing?” People are in some ways surprised that they have these orthopedic issues but that the same time they’re dehydrated. That is the base to base level of nutrition for your body. If you don’t have water you can’t do anything else. Yes, you can’t do anything else. If you want height in the disc for your lumbar spine so that the nerve isn’t so compressed, guess what, the disc is 85% water. You need water in the disc to make a change. You need water in the muscle. You need water in the fascia so that things could actually move. A lot of people – my teacher loves to say this, I think it is such a great idea. There’s the age on your passport then there’s the actual age of your body. We all know somebody who’s in their 80’s but looks vibrant, feels young and moves really well. Then we also know somebody in their 30’s that is like, “Oh my back, every day, oh my knees.” There’s a difference between the age in your passport and the age on your body. Water is the answer. Drink more water. As far as movement that’s going to solicit the water, just moving is good place to start. As far as particular movement, you just move the water around your body. I don’t really have answer for that, unfortunately.

 

[01:36:45] Ashley James: Just drink and move and your body’s will take care of itself.

 

[01:36:58] Jacob Schoen:  Think about your body as any other body of water. If you look at a pond that doesn’t have any freshwater moving in and out of it guess what, it get stagnant, it gets stale, it starts to stink, it starts to rot. Guess what? You’re not moving and you’re not getting new water to your body. No wonder that you have this pain or that pain or that ache that just will not go away. You need to manage those things on a more consistent basis for you to really make any change. That takes time too. The gentleman who came saw me from Colorado. He’s been living in Colorado. He’s super active. He’s a super active guy works out on the heat all the time. He’s only been drinking about a liter to a liter and a half of water a day. He’s about 180-170 pounds. That is 50% of what he needs to be drinking and he’s been drinking that for 25 years. There’s no adaptability. There’s no leeway in his tissue because there’s no water in his body.

 

[01:37:58] Ashley James: I love it and it’s going to take time. Like you said, in 2 weeks working with you, his pain went from 8 out ten to 4 out of ten. I imagine in the coming weeks, he’s going to see even better results but it does take time. He flew down to see you and he flew back and he’s continuing to do the exercises you taught him and getting result. I love it. I love that.

 

[01:38:23] Jacob Schoen: That’s the hope at least is that it he keeps- unfortunately, it’s easier for us to have a short term memory loss where we go, “Oh, I forgot how much pain I was in. My pain is gone. My body feels good. I don’t have to do my exercise anymore.” Then they try to go right back into the gym, pick up right where they left off deadlifting, how many pounds and they go, “Oh crap, my back hurts again.” it’s like, “Well, sorry brother but you’re not quite back to the place where I need you to be before you can really start loading your body again.”  

 

[01:38:55] Ashley James: Right. I had that happen with my clients where I get them off of the foods that are causing inflammation, get the mono great holistic diet that’s anti-inflammatory and get them on some supplements to aid in rebuilding their body if they have certain nutrient deficiencies. They started feeling amazing and they called me up and they’re like, “Why am I in so much pain?” I’ve had it more than once. It’s so funny. Just one that’s come into mind, this grandma and she’s like, “Why am I in so much pain,” I’m like, “Okay. Well, what’s happening?” she’s doing everything, right? Everything I laid out for her she was getting really great results and all of a sudden she’s just totally flared up and I’m like, “Okay, tell me what you did this week.” “Well, I gardened and then hiked with my grandkids and then I played with them for 4 hours in the yard.” I’m like, “Were you doing any of that before we work together?” like, “No, I was sitting watching wheel of fortune all day because I couldn’t.” so when they start getting really good results take the pain away, all of a sudden they’re living like half their age and they’re go, go, go, and then some pain comes back because they’re pushing their body way beyond what they were used to. We have to always remember that, when the pain is gone we need to ease into it. Like you said, move more aware. Have that awareness and have that patience to baby your body a little bit, as we build up endurance. While we’re creating, we’re building upon a foundation you helped set for them.

 

[01:40:27] Jacob Schoen:  Totally. You’ve got to take your time unless you’re an elite athlete and there’s a competition you’re getting ready for. Maybe you’re a weekend warrior and there’s really something you want to do. Yes, maybe you can push it a little bit but you have to take that into context that that’s a risk that you’re willing to take. But for most people, take your time, you got nothing to rush here.

 

[01:40:52] Ashley James: I have a few more questions before we wrap it out because you did say you were going to touch on explaining more about the tensegrity but before we do that we kept talking about water is. We live in a well and the water has been amazing the last few years but something happened also in our well. Water stared tasting funky and were like “Oh my gosh” we started buying bottled water while we waited for the lab results to come back to tell us whether our well water was safe or not. It’s something that I keep forgetting as you should, if you live in a well you should have it tested every year. It’s important you don’t want to die from E-coli. I finally made a purchase of a gravity-fed, this doesn’t require electricity so it’s great for emergencies. A gravity-fed water filtration system that’s really affordable. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about 12 years. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t need to buy it. It also has a way of filtering fluoride for those in the city. We are drinking even more water now because of it even though we’re well water for whatever reason just started it went back to normal. It was like this weird flu I don’t know what happened. Well, water still tastes great and we put this on this water filter that’s on our counter. It’s amazing. It filters out all viruses, it goes all the way down to viruses but like you could basically put sewer water, you could put water from a puddle or a pond, creek and it filters out everything. It doesn’t filter out minerals. It makes the water taste amazing. It’s now my new favorite water filter. I think everyone should own it. I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes.

 

[01:42:47] Jacob Schoen: What’s it called?

 

[01:42:49] Ashley James: I forget the size. There’s different sizes, it’s a Berkey.

 

[01:42:55] Jacob Schoen:  Berkey, yes. I was going to say, Berkey. It’s awesome.

 

[01:42:57] Ashley James: I did it. I read a bunch of people’s comments about which size to get and I was like, “Oh we should just get the travel size.” I read a bunch of notes you should actually get one size larger than what you think you need because you will want to cook with that water. The whole family wants to drink it but then you’re going to also find that you want to cook with it. Once we start doing that, we realize that we still fill it up everyday. We got the 3rd largest size. I’ll put it in the show notes. This is my absolute new favorite kitchen gadget is the Berkey. Like I said, you can get the filters to filter out the fluoride because a lot of people go, “I don’t like the taste of water.” It’s like you know what, this stuff makes water taste amazing especially if they live in the city, right? Even bottled water. I had a problem with buying bottled water. I’ve had a guest on the show, doctor on the show teaching this. They’re finding now that if you drink bottled water, basically any water from plastic any water that’s been stored in a plastic they’re finding micro-plastic has been leeched into your water. What’s your kidney and liver going to do with microplastic?

 

[01:44:1] Jacob Schoen: Throw their hands up in the air and complain. I guess

 

[01:44:19] Ashley James: Right. Exactly. It’s an endocrine distractor, it’s an obesogenic. It’s not healthy in anyway. So many people resort to drinking water from plastic bottles that is why I love the idea of getting the Berkey for everyone because it makes your water taste great. It’ll take out the chlorine and the fluoride and all that stuff from tap water. It makes it taste great so you drink more. It doesn’t require any electricity so if there’s a problem you could still filter water if there’s an emergency.

 

[01:44:52] Jacob Schoen: I’m actually probably going to buy one for my studio honestly. I definitely should.

 

[01:44:58] Ashley James: The trick I found is you want to get one that is big enough to feed everyone for the day but only for the day. You want to fill it up at the end of each day maximum at the end of two days but you don’t want to go longer that because if the filter gets dry and air gets in it, it becomes very slow. You want to get one that’s big enough to give enough water so it doesn’t run out during the day but the small enough to still need to put to fill up the top chamber once every one or 2 days. That’s my tip for knowing what size Berkey to get. I highly recommend it. I think everyone should own a Berkey. I’ve seen a lot of people in RV have travel Berkey because they literally go to a pond or a creek and put it in. It’s pretty cool. Yes, okay. That was my plug for – I’ll make sure the link to my favorite size and put the Berkeys in the show notes of the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Of course and the link to Jacob Schoen’s website as well is going to be in the show notes of the podcast which is shiftsportwellness.com. We’re going to talk about how people could work with you but first, tensegrity is that like a mixture of tension and integrity?

 

 

[01:46:25] Jacob Schoen: That is exactly what it is. Good for you. That’s awesome. Yes, it was actually originally a term developed for more architectural structures. Buckminster fuller back in like I want to say maybe 1970’s, 1960’s, don’t quote me on that. There’s a lot of big structures across the world that are using tensegrity principles to be built. If you think about a building that is – they’re going to try to build a building I think Dubai or Qatar that’s almost a kilometer high. You can’t build that building by stacking one brick on top of another. It just wouldn’t work. You have to build integrity into the building intrinsically by creating tension across the pieces. You think about the golden gate bridge, you think about I think it’s the Olympics dome in Montreal, there’s another building in France. Classically as you can think about it. It is islands, this is a strict way of saying it. Islands of solid pieces so an island in a sea of tension. What that means is if you look at your orthopedic system, there no place where you should say that “this is supported by that” right? Because it’s not a brick on top of a brick. When I stand up, my head is not attached to a hook in the ceiling or by a rod in my back unless I’ve had surgery. When you look at a skeleton in the classroom, it has to be supported by rod or else it would just fall to the floor. How does it maintain its structure? It maintains its structure by taking this piece and pulling it tight and then attaching it to that piece and then attaching it over there, back and forth back and forth and before you know it, it’s like a spiders web in your whole body that pulls you together and keeps you together but allows you to move and be dynamic at the same time. That tensegrity system is really how we look at the body. If we want to understand how different pathologies or different problems can really be connected because if you look at it from a Newtonian kind of way it’s just this brick is on top of this brick on top of this brick then it wouldn’t make any sense that the brick at the bottom is affecting directly the brick at the very top. If you look at it in the way that this one is connected to that one to that one then it makes a lot of sense how you can have a problem at your ankle which affects your knee which affects your hip which affects your lower back which affects then your neck. All of these pieces together come together to make the tensegrity model. When you have your body it is being held together by the tension and the tension, its base of support or its foundation is this decompressive element, your bones essentially. Through that, you create the beautiful and amazing organisms that you are as a human. Which is how we are able to walk upright and how we are able to do all the things that we can do. If you just took a brunch of bricks held them on a stack and then drop them on the floor they would all fall apart. For me if I stand up and jump when I land, my heart doesn’t hit my pelvis there’s a reason for that. It’s because it supported by all the ligaments that we’ve talked about earlier. There’s a reason why my sacrum doesn’t fall to the ground it’s because it’s supported by the sacral ligaments, the disc in the lumbar spine, all of that stuff and the muscle and all that. Really that goes back to the fascia which is what gives our body the ability to have a tensegrity structure. If you don’t have a tissue that connects all of the pieces, then you don’t have tensegrity structure. You just have brick on top of brick and we know that we don’t have that because a skeleton can’t hang by himself. To respect that we have to use exercise and therapies that respect that organization which is why I think that these programs are so amazing is because they do respect that. Yes, they break it down to pieces but they talk about and teach you how to assess why the ankle might affect a problem with the head or why someone who’s had a concussion needs to have work done on their coccyx. Things like that is just why it’s so freaking cool. To be honest with you. That’s why it’s so complex and so difficult. That’s why a lot of people they can spend their time spinning their wheels, it like “You know, I had a back problem. I went to the surgeon I got my back operated on and I still have back pain.” It’s like, hmm that is interesting maybe it’s because your knee or maybe it’s emotional system or any of the other things. The tensegrity is a biomechanical philosophy but it’s also a global way of thinking because it’s a more complex way of thinking which means that you respect the complexity of a human not just a robot with muscle on them walking into your office.

 

[01:51:27] Ashley James: Yes. I love it. I’ve got these amazing experience where my chiropractor gives me an exercise for my upper back and my lower back all of a sudden stops hurting. He adjusts my neck and my hip stops hurting or he adjust my assai joint and my thoracic spine stops hurting. I’m like, “What did you do?” It’s cool because like you said, it’s about respecting that integrity of the where the tension needs to be in that balance. I like that your type of training with people, your exercise and also the therapy you do is looking at how you can support that body and having that optimal balance. That makes complete sense.

 

[01:52:13] Jacob Schoen:  Absolutely. It’s back to the specialization quote. If you only specialize in one thing when someone comes to you for that thing then that’s what you’re going to do. But if you at least have the foresight to say that, “Okay, the thing that they’re coming to me for might not actually be their problem. It might just might be where their symptoms are” then you can really open up the doors for them to actually get the result that they’re looking for which is pain or a better performance or whatever is. Now I’m at the point where I’m just like I’m not even having convinced myself anymore because being classically educated in western culture where most things are reduction is down to this specific thing or the problem is where the symptoms are. I had to work really hard to think in this way and I think in a more complex way and to take myself out of the more linear way of thinking. Now that I’m on the dark side if you will, it’s just so obvious to me. Of course, it’s all connected. Like how simple do you think a human being early is although we can’t be simple sometimes. How complex do you think somethings really be it can be with? It can be tremendously complex. Of course, the muscles of your eyes that help you orient yourself with where you’re looking can affect your lower back. Of course, the concussion that you had when you were 7 because the dura mater envelopes the brain then goes down and attached to the coccyx. Of course that can explain some of the pelvic problems that you’re having but until you take a step back and really see it that way then you don’t really have an opportunity to fully help someone to their potential because you’re limited in the philosophy that you have towards or least you used to approach them.

 

[01:54:00] Ashley James: Right. There’s a big difference between the hubris and the humility. You have so much humility that you’re willing to say “I don know but I’m not going to impose my belief system in my client. I’m going to be open-minded and be the detective to help find the root cause and help my client come back into balance and be open to learning new things as I go.” Versus other practitioner will have that hubris to believe that they know better. Right? That’s where we really hit a brick wall when it comes to our own healing. When we give up that power especially to practitioners that have that hubris.

 

[01:54:52] Jacob Schoen: Totally. To be perfectly honest with you, that was not how I started. I’m a person when I was in high school I couldn’t translate Latin to save my life so I would memorize hundreds and hundreds of words of Latin for a particular translation so that when I got the test I could just write from memory. I am a go, go, go type like, “All right. You want to beat me in this contest? Well, good luck.” kind of person. For me to admit that I don’t know something definitely took some time. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s almost freeing to say that I don’t know somethings because then the pressure of having to know isn’t there and also the opportunity to grow from not knowing and having the opportunity to explore and to challenge myself by thinking in different way is now open. It just makes me think of the quote that my teacher always says which is like, “With the body, always possible.” that is just I think so beautiful and powerful. Yes, I’d like to think of ourselves pretty highly. As humans, we kind of dominated the planet and all the stuff that we do to the world but like as an organism, as a creature we are pretty spectacular. The emotional capacity that we have, the physical capacity that we have and all of those to be in the world that we are. We are amazing, amazing creature. I think we have to adopt different kind of thinking to respect that organization. For me as far as an exercise goes that’s what I’m passionate about this makes the most sense.

 

[01:56:30] Ashley James: I love it you have mentioned that you worked with a woman recently where you did a fundamental exercise to release L5-S1. Is that something you can teach us through the podcast?

 

[01:56:46] Jacob Schoen: Verbally? No. Before I kind of to but it isn’t something – It’s difficult to do when you’re with someone because of the amount of awareness that it takes. For example, you have to simultaneously coordinate specific movements with your hands, your neck, your eyes, your lower back, your feet, your knees, your hips. I mean your whole body has to be coordinated because what you’re trying to do is I use an analogy like the golf swing. If I want to hit a golf ball at the hole, well then I can’t hit it anywhere else, I have to hit it at the hole. To hit it in the hole, I have to have my hand, my elbows, my shoulder, my hips. Everything needs to be going well. I need to judge the wind all those stuff. All those pieces needed to come together and if they come together, I can hit it the hole. If they don’t come together, maybe I hit it off into the bunker or whatever it is. To be able to actually specifically target L5-S1, the connected tissue around L5-S1 and that joint by itself, it takes a coordinated effort of your whole body. To do that, especially if you are not super aware of your limbs or you’re maybe not the most coordinated person is different to do in person and over audio like this without being visually seeing someone. I’d say impossible.

 

[01:58:04] Ashley James: Got it. We want to hit it in the hole. That’s why people should come see you. You are willing to talk to people on Skype but you mostly work with people in person and clients have flown to see you. What does it look like to work with you? How people work with you and could people let’s say a listener in Australia work with you through skype?

 

[01:58:33] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. It just depends on what they’re really looking to accomplish. If you have someone who is in Australia for example who wants to learn the basics of Eldoa, wants for someone to introduce it to them to see if they like it to see how they feel I do skype sessions like that all the time. People connect me just because they want to work with me. They like that approach that I have and they want to learn some of the exercises. If you have a really specific thing that you haven’t been able to resolve in months or years or weeks or whatever it is and you have the means to come down and see me, I set up blocks of time for people to come down get the training and work on the exercise and they go home with the full exercise program based on the problems that they have and then how much time they have. You don’t want to give someone an hour of exercise if they say they only have 10 minutes because they’re a busy mom or executive or whatever it is. Then I’ve also had people who had organized little courses where they bring me to their facility for their athletes or for their practitioner and I give them an Eldoa rundown. I teach them some of the basics of the Eldoa. I call it a workshop. I do a workshop for them where the goal is to introduce them to the exercises, to teach them some of the basics that they can start to do for themselves and to start to integrate that in their daily practice or movement practice and things like that. If you’re within driving distance of me come on down and see me. I have my studio here in New Orleans and I take clients everyday except for the weekends. I take off on the weekend for a little me time. Come down and see me and then the process is relatively the same. Have the assessment try to figure out what I see in your body based off your symptoms and all those things to give me as much information I can have about you, your lifestyle, nutrition, stress all that type of stuff. To start to develop a program and a plan of attack if you will, to get you to where you want to be and then either put you back in the car and send you back to where your home and you work on that for a couple of weeks and then you come back depending on your means. Or if you’re an out of town person, maybe we spend instead of just 1 or 2 hours together, we spend 2 or 3 days together. Do a whole bunch of work. Give you a big program like the gentleman who came from Colorado and then you go off. You work on that. You report back to me. You get feedback and then we work from there. It’s really a process for those types of things.

 

[02:00:58] Ashley James: I love it. And your clinic in New Orleans is called shift sport wellness?

 

[02:01:04] Jacob Schoen: It was. I did call it shift sport wellness but then I changed to shift training and health because people didn’t know what support and wellness meant so I changed it to training and health which made it hopefully more obvious for people.

 

[02:01:18] Ashley James: Got it. Okay, awesome. But if they go to shiftsportwellness.comthey can find out more information in your clinic and how they can work with you and how they contact you?

 

[02:01:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. I am on there. That’s is going to be the best place. I’m on google. If you search shift training health on google, you’d find me and there should be link to message me on there. Then my email is also on my website. Anything that people want to send me with questions, I try to help with over email as best as I can but the reality is that if I really respect the complexity of the person, if someone tells me that they have back pain for 10 years what can they do. My answer to be honest with you is I don’t know because I don’t know who I’m working with yet. I try to be as helpful as I can but also respect the idea that each person is an individual and I can’t give cookie-cutter answer for people really looking to help themselves.

 

[02:02:18] Ashley James: I love that. It comes back that you have the humility to respect everyone as an individual. Of course, if someone has back pain for 10 years they should come see you in person so you can do an assessment. Like you said, you do an extensive assessment to figure out if you can see the Kinesiology of the problem. Then, of course, like you said, you asses their nutrition and find out if they’re dehydrated or not and their lifestyle. You can determine what’s going on and you take it from there. I have really enjoyed spending the last 2 hours with you. The time has just flown. It’s easy, so awesome. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything left unsaid or any last words you want to share with our listeners?

 

[02:03:08] Jacob Schoen: If I hadn’t already said it then I’ll make it explicitly clear. I think when it comes to these types of problems that we’re talking about. I think you really have two options. Those two options are one, you can offload the responsibility and the work and the problem to someone else or you can take the responsibility yourself. Just because you go and see someone doesn’t mean that you’re offloading that responsibility but if you can find a way to use exercise, I mean I see a counselor every week just to because it’s nice to talk to somebody. Like if you can start to work with people that help you help yourself that’s really going to be where the power is. If you continue to do things that in some way start to wheel away at that power that you have. I think in the long term you will find that you won’t be as successful. My really advice to people would be start to bring the power back to yourself and to try to make the change for yourself because in my experience, you can do it.

 

[02:04:18] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Jacob Schoen, for coming on the show today. The links to everything that Jacob does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. His website again is shiftsportwellness.com. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show and sharing why we should all learn Eldoa. I think we should all learn it. This is amazing because we want to keep like you said, the integrity and the tension in the right space, in the right alignment as the demands of our body changes throughout our life that we make sure that we are coming back into balance. It just makes sense to work with you. People take their car to the mechanic more than they consider taking their body to the mechanic, right? You’re like the mechanic I want to take my body to. That’s pretty awesome. Jacob, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you today.

 

[02:05:12] Jacob Schoen:  Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

 

[02:05:16] 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 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 Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation 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 the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.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 would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. 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, doctor’s 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 with 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 and their success and 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 Integrated 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. 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.

 

[02:08:24] Ashley James: 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 highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

 

Get Connected With Jacob Schoen!

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Recommended Readings by Jacob Schoen

Gray’s Anatomy 1901 by Henry Gray

 

How To Eat, Move, and Be Healthy by Paul Chek

Jul 16, 2019

Listen to my interviews about Sunlighten Saunas and detoxification: https://www.learntruehealth.com/?s=sunlighten

 

Get Palmer's free Optimal Food Guide to help people dial in the best foods for them; you can download it at PalmerKippola.com/gift

 

How To Beat AutoImmune

https://www.learntruehealth.com/beat-autoimmune

Highlights:

  • What is MS and some most common auto-immune diseases
  • One of the key factors that helps to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress.
  • Reasons why we need to on a daily basis have a routine that decreases our stress levels
  • For autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle
  • Find out how FIGHTS can affect your health (Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress) 

 

Feeling stressed lately? Find out how to build a foundation of health by addressing (FIGHTS) Food, Infections, Gut Health, Hormone Balance, Toxins and Stress in today’s podcast.

 

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. This woman Palmer Kippola had MS. Multiple sclerosis for 26 years and she figured out how to no longer have MS. Have it completely reverse and heal her MS. In this today’s interview she shares her story. One of the key factors that helped her to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress. We talked a bit about the physiological reasons why we need to, on a daily basis, have a routine that decreases our stress levels. Decreases the cortisol that puts us in the parasympathetic neuro-system response of rest and digest. It’s very important and we don’t do it enough especially if we have an autoimmune condition. I want to share with you something we really recommend. If you’re a type of person who’s battling a chronic illness and you want to heal, you’re going to love this suggestion. I’ve talked to in the past episodes about how much I loved Sunlighten Saunas I have one myself. It’s really aided me in my healing journey. I know that dozens of listeners have also purchased the sunlight and sauna and shared with me their personal story of how it’s been a great tool for them. This summer, Sunlighten Saunas giving my listeners a free chromotherapy device installed into their sauna and it aids with relaxation. Being in a sauna, number one is very relaxing. It does turn on the healing response, it turns off the stress response in the body. It incredibly healing and it decreases that stress from them. In addition, to just being in a sauna and all the benefits that they provide, this is a low heat sauna, they do have options for high heat but for those who are in chronic stress or having chronic autoimmune condition, you might not be comfortable of going in a sauna because you think it’s just going to be very hot. I start sweating in my sunlighten in about 119 degrees and the air is very comfortable. It’s almost like slightly above room temp. I feel really good. All my muscles totally relaxed and my body is expelling toxins through my sweat. I stay in there about between half and hours and 40 minutes. It’s very relaxing. When you have the chromotherapy in there, it adds both light and sound to decrease the stress. They are able to prove that it sends your bring into these relaxing waves. It takes you down out of that stress response and they’re showing that it is really helpful for those post-traumatic stress and with high chronic anxiety and those in chronic stress states which often people with autoimmune are. I highly recommend checking out sunlighten you can just give them a call. Google Sunlighten Saunas. Give them a call. Tell them I sent you Ashley James from the Learn True Health podcast. You get free shipping and you get this free chromotherapy added to your sauna. That’s worth several hundred dollars there. They do have a type of sauna that is called the solo system and it is portable. You can lay in it. Its ultra-low EMF and nontoxic. When you’re done you wipe it down and you put it in your closet. They do have that option for those who don’t want to have a big wooden sauna in their house or condo which I have and I love it. It only takes up a corner of the bedroom. It’s wonderful. I definitely recommend Sunlighten Sauna. It has been a great tool for me in my healing journey so many listeners have shared with me that they’re having wonderful results with it. As you listen to today’s episode and you start to understand why stress is a very important thing to learn how to manage on a daily basis, know that Sunlighten Sauna has a wonderful solution for you and as a learn true health listener, you definitely have a great discount by going with them. If you’re interested in learning more about sunlight and why I chose their company over dozens of other sauna companies out there, please go to learntruehealth.com and type in sauna or type in sunlighten in the search box, listen to my interviews. I did two interviews on the sunlighten sauna with the founder and one of the employees there who I absolutely adore. Both of them have wonderful stories and explain why sunlighten for me is the better option. I took about 2 years in researching all these different companies and contacting all these diff companies and talking to naturopaths and talking to other doctors until I finally decided that Sunlighten is my Sauna company. I’m really glad I did it. I’ve had only amazing experiences with their saunas and with their company and their customer service. I highly recommend them as a healing tool that help you both detoxify, sweat out those toxins and bring down the stress. Decrease that stress. Also, being in the Sunlighten Sauna help decrease inflammation as well. All wonderful healing tools that we need to help us on our healing journey. My goal for you is if you have autoimmune disease that you learn today how to beat it by listening to today’s interview and following all the wonderful advice that Palmer gives today. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Please continue sharing these episodes with all your friends and family so we can help everyone that we love to learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.

 

[06:18] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 367. Today we are in for a big treat. We have with us, Palmer Kippola who is a functional medicine certified health coach. What has impressed me is much is that she overcame her 26-year battle with multiple sclerosis. She went on to design a formula to help everyone with autoimmune condition to no longer have it. She explains, she teaches us today. She’s going to explain why we can permanently and forever reverse autoimmune disease. If you go to a typical, traditional MD, they’re going to say that you need to be on drugs and manage it. That maybe they’ll even say that your autoimmune disease can go into remission but anytime it could sneak up on you and come back and flare up so they want to get you on drugs for the rest of your life. Not Palmer’s experience. Her experience is that you can epigenetically shift your body so that you can longer express, no longer have autoimmune and you’re 100% forever in remission. I’m so excited for my listeners to learn from you today, Palmer. Welcome to the show.

 

[07:41] Palmer Kippola: It’s an absolute honor to be with you, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me.

 

[07:45] Ashley James: Absolutely.  Well, this is going to be really exciting. Right off the bat, I want to say congratulations, your book is number one Amazon bestseller in 8 categories. You launched it a few months ago and it is just selling like hotcakes. Congratulations.

 

[08:03] Palmer Kippola: Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

 

[08:04] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, your book is called Beat Autoimmune: The six keys to reverse your condition and reclaim your health and it has a foreword with Mark Hyman. I’ve had him on the show, I absolutely love him. What does it feel to have an Amazon best-selling book?

 

[08:22] Palmer Kippola: It’s a little surreal. I have to tell you. It just had exceeded my expectation but what it says to me, is that people are seeking real solutions and that is so exciting to me. People actually know it’s possible or believes that it’s possible to completely heal. They are looking for these answers.

 

[08:44] Ashley James: It’s number 1 in 8 categories including immunology, alternative med, lupus, MS, chronic pain. You cover a lot of really great content in your book and of course, you’re here today to teach us some of that content. Before we get into that though, I really want to hear your story. Can you take us back? What happened in your life that led up to you having MS for 26 years and ultimately discovering how to no longer have an autoimmune condition?

 

[09:15] Palmer Kippola:  Yes. This a story that starts when I’m 19 years old so I need to take you back just a few years. I was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 19-year-old young woman. I was home for the summer after my freshman year of college. I’m just working a summer job, doing my thing. One morning I woke you and the soles of my feet were just tingling. That feeling that you get when you’ve sat on a limb for too long and when the blood flows back it’s all tingling. I thought, “You just shake your legs and the blood’s going to flow back. Only this particular morning, the blood didn’t flow back even when I was jumping up and down. I thought, “Get up, this is just going to go away.” Off I go to work but the tingling just crept up my legs like a vine. By the time the tingling reached my knees, I knew something was really wrong. So I called my parents and they called the family doctor who said, “Get her over to the neurologist at UCLA.” I don’t know how we managed it but we got it that the afternoon, by the time we sat in the neurologists’ office, the tingling was all the way up to my tummy. The neurologist had me do this very cursory exam, heel-toe across the room. She tested my reflexes, the knees, touch your fingers to your nose with your eyes closed. I think it was a 5 or 6 minutes visit and she then pronounced, “I am 99% certain that you have MS. Multiple sclerosis. And if I’m right, there’s nothing you can do, except go home and wait it out.” We had never heard of MS. This was before the internet. There was no Dr. Terry Walls. We just left her office with very little information. Very little hope and went home and by the time we got home that evening, the tingling was all the way up into the collarbone. By the time we got into bed, my mom crawled in with me and she was holding me and crying and I was crying because by that time I couldn’t feel her holding me Ashley, my whole entire body had gone completely numb and would stay numb from the neck down for a full 6 weeks.

 

[11:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that must’ve been so scary.

 

[11:35] Palmer Kippola: It was absolutely terrifying. We just didn’t know what to expect. We couldn’t just go and check out doctor google. Really, I was relegated to the couch for those 6 weeks. We didn’t know how long it’s going to last. I’m just so grateful that I was at home at that time with my parents and they were tremendous supporters. My mom was quick to empathize, hug me and start planning what we could for we don’t know what. My life permitted being in a wheelchair and going to school locally. My dad was also very quick to motivate me and my can-do spirit. He would often say, “Honey, you can beat this thing.” Just I understand him he was a former fighter pilot so he had a very strong can-do spirit and he always fired mine up. I had the empathy, I had the motivation and a lot of time to just contemplate and be on the couch. I will say that during those 6 weeks, I am so grateful that friends came by and they weren’t too scared off by this mysterious disease. One friend came, a family friend who is into things metaphysical, in retrospect I can see that this was a gift, but at that time I was very offended. She asked me “Palmer, why do you think you got the MS?” “What? You think I caused this? What do you mean why do I think I got this?” I was offended. I didn’t have much to do or very far to go. I was like a dog with a bone with that question and I just lay on the couch thinking about this. “Why do I think I got – Did I bring this on?” I will share with you what I came up with this, my intimal hypothesis for why but I need to take you a little bit farther back in time because I had been adopted as a baby I was 3days old, my parents’ very loving parents. My dad who I mentioned who was also a fighter pilot had very strong opinions about things and very definitive views on how things should be. He didn’t liked that my mom was overweight and she really struggled with that. He would yell quite a bit. My earliest memory about age 3 or age 4 is, my dad is yelling at my mom who had shut her bedroom door, she probably crying behind her door. I am standing up to my dad with my little dukes up saying, “You yell at my mom and call her names, I’ll suck your lights out.” Whatever words to that affect. In lying on the couch there at age 19 completely numb, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that the reason for MS was chronic stress. I had become a child warrior. The hyper-vigilant, always scanning the environment for safety or danger and catching knives under the air vigilance, right? That is what occurred to me and I didn’t know anything about the immune system. I had no basis for any kind of knowledge about this but I envisioned my immune system as having become hyper-vigilant too that if there wasn’t a real battle going on, like a virus or some sort of bacterial threat that it could create friendly fire. It would turn against my own body. Much of this still rings true for me today that chronic stress is the root of the MS even though I know there’s a lot more to this story.

 

[15:25] Ashley James: I love it that you have that as you’re lying on the couch, you have this insight into that how the stress was affecting your immune system and how your immune system was responding. While you’re lying on the couch, did you start to do things to try to calm down or calm down your immune system? What did you do with that information once you had it?

 

[15:49] Palmer Kippola: Yes. I did. The first thing we did, another family friend brought a book, Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness and in it, Dr. Cousin’s recounts his own experience healing from some mysterious autoimmune condition with high doses of laughter and vitamin C. I didn’t know anything about nutrition but the laughter made perfect sense so every night my family and I made it our mission to watch funny things on TV. That was definitely a good distraction at the very least it gave me an oasis of calm from the fear. That was one thing and I did start doing visualizations. If you think about Pacman, it was that rudimentary when I was envisioning my immune system like shooting laser beams at these little critters that were in my body that shouldn’t be there. Guided imagery and laughter were two of the first things that I used but it took a couple of years for me to really put this into practice if you will. I am very fortunate that at the end of 6 weeks the numbness were treated enough for me to go back to college. I went back for my sophomore year. I intuited since chronic stress was at the root of the MS then I needed to learn how to relax. That drove me for the next 26 years. That I needed to put relaxation practices in place to calm that hypervigilance. The first thing I started doing is yoga. I noticed that when I did the practice, did the deep breathing and actually did the poses, I noticed a reduction in symptoms. Conversely, when I was really stressed like there were exams at school, conflict at home or later in the workforce, when I might have been overwhelmed with work-related stuff, I noticed flare-ups of the MS. That was really, really easy for me to see the cause and effect of stress equals symptoms, relaxations equals no symptoms. No, not at all but a reduction in symptoms, I should say. The next thing I started doing in the early 90’s is to meditate. I noticed once again if I did it, things would calm down and if I didn’t, I would experience more symptoms. But still the MS still persisted, it didn’t go away just because I started to relax more it was always there to some varying degree.

 

[18:30] Ashley James: How many flare-ups would you have? Would it be just little symptoms like if you were under stress you’d wake up with tinging numbness or pain? Would you have major flare-ups where you would be in a wheelchair?

 

[18:45] Palmer Kippola: Fortunately, I’ve never made into to a wheelchair. I don’t know how to say that. I never ended up in a wheelchair, I did have an experience once probably the most dreadful was aside from that 6 weeks of total body numbness was a flare-up of optic neuritis. This is a striking before and after. I was working for AT&T network systems in New Jersey. A stressful marketing job, I went on vacation to a really relaxing Caribbean island fantastic time and I came back, and the moment I set foot in the corporate building under those florescent lights, I was struck blind in one eye and had this searing pain that would last about two weeks. That would take two visits to an emergency room for the pain and them not figuring out what it was and finally a trip down to John Hopkins in Baltimore where there’s an MS specialty to be diagnosed with optic neuritis which is, in fact, a hallmark symptom of MS. For the most part, your question about feeling symptoms, there was tightness like rubber bands around my torso, there was numbness and tingling. There was no rhyme and reason to where the symptom would show up and there was also this general profound fatigue that I felt.

 

[20:13] Ashley James: The catch22, when you have these symptoms, it causes more stress. It’s just feedback loop because you don’t know if it’s going to get worse, you don’t know when it’s going to get better. You’re feeling it in your body so it’s real. You’re constantly worrying about which is creating more stress, which is creating more symptoms, the symptoms creating more stress and worry which is creating more symptoms and on and on, how do you take a breath and do a break state?

 

[20:47] Palmer Kippola: That is a great question. It think it’s so important to understand that the stress itself, create such a downward spiral to a vicious cycle of stress and symptom, stress and more stress and insomnia and you can’t sleep and you’re stressed about that. I think inherent in that question too, I think you mentioned taking a deep breath. Anything that you can do to cut that cycle and you’ve practiced, I understand that you do NLP, one thing that I have found super helpful is just to do the deep breathing. Taking maybe a total of 6 rounds of 5 breaths in really slowly deep belly breathing is some way to just get back centered in the body and not to let your mind spiral out of control because there’s no sense creating more stress. There’s what is and then there’s the story that you start telling about what is. Just to stay present with what is and breathe into it and get centered and back in the body. Whatever you can do to center yourself has been in my experience the most helpful.

 

[21:59] Ashley James: You say that it reminds me of landmark out. Did you do any landmark or did you do that somewhere else?

 

[21:05] Palmer Kippola: I don’t know if I learned it from landmark but you’ve caught me. Yes, I’ve done landmark through their advanced program. I guess, SELP which was very helpful. I can’t remember what it stands for but maybe you do.

 

[22:18] Ashley James: Self-Expression and leadership program.

 

[22:21] Palmer Kippola: There you go.

 

[22:22] Ashley James: Yes, I did landmark when I was a teenager. Then after my mom died, I ended up taking a lot of their advanced courses and then they hired me and I was on staff in Toronto at the Toronto center. I love Landmark but they got a little miffy when I told them I wanted to study NLP because they just wanted everyone to do Landmark and not look at where landmark got their original stuff from. They copied NLP and so I went basically to the source. Coming back to what you said about story. This is really important. I was just talking a friend of the wall and was very stressed out about something. She was exacerbating her symptoms so much so that she was unable to walk. She was really exacerbating her stress. It’s hard to tell someone, “You’re causing this.” She has health issues but stress exacerbates the health issues and the only time she has flare-ups is when she’s’ stressed. It’s hard to say, “By the way, you have control over this” because people feel like, ”Are you telling me that I’m doing this on myself and it’s all on my head?” it’s not. It’s not saying that at all. It’s very real and that emotional, mental and physical stress both from internal emotional and mental and external stressors, like what we eat and our environment are – if you are in an area where there’s high pollution in the air and you have asthma that’s an external stress on your body but if you are not sleeping at night then you’re worrying a lot. That’s exactly same as breathing in pollution for someone who has asthma. It’s just a different kind of stress but it’s going to do the same thing to the body. It takes the body out of the healing mode and into the fight or flight mode. If we are in fight or flight we’re not healing. Whether we’re healing or we’re fighting to survive in the moment. Like you said, taking those deep breaths is going to give us that break state where we can bring our body back into healing mode and calm it down. When we’re worried about something we’re throwing fuel in the fire and I love that you brought up the idea of the story because that’s exactly what I had to tell my friend which really helped her. She was having symptoms in her body. She has some emotional stressors going on with her life with her family. Her symptoms came up and then she started worrying about the symptoms “Oh my gosh, does this mean I’m going to have to go to the ER? What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be able to walk? Do I need to go get my walker? I don’t have anyone to take care of me.” So she starts making a story about the feeling. All she had was a sensation in her body but her mind wanted to predict the future so she could be prepared but the mind goes to worst-case scenario, the doomsday. Her mind started thinking about all the worst things that could possibly happen be she’s feeling the sensation in her body. Then that exacerbated her worry and her stress which then created more symptoms and that was the feedback loop. She started feeling more symptom then she started worrying about them thinking, “This means that I’m going to be this, that I’m going to be that. “ I had to say lest focus on what’s so right now because all the this-means that the brain does, all the story that the brain creates is not necessarily true. It’s just trying to predict the future based on the past but were not living our past right now. We need to do a break state. Catch yourself when you’re in story. Story meaning when you’re trying to predict this negative future based on what you’re currently feeling in your body. You felt the searing pain in your head and you couldn’t see at one eye your brain probably went, “Oh my god, I’m going to blind for the rest of my life.” That’s the story that you probably created because I would. I would, possibly in that moment. And then that feeds into creating more and more stress. Like you said, we have to come back to what’s so. What’s so in the moment is I’m having these feelings and that’s it. That’s the only things that so. What can I do right now to help me to trigger the healing mode and to de-escalate the stress mode. I love that you do the deep breathings which immediately helps. Then to manage stress in a daily basis, you’re doing yoga and meditation. Obviously, you’ve discovered more things to help because this was just helping to manage it but it didn’t helped it to completely go away. So after you discovered that the optical nerve,

 

[27:29] Palmer Kippola: Optic neuritis.

 

[27:30] Ashley James: Yes, the optic neuritis was a common symptom of MS then what happened?

 

[27:37] Palmer Kippola: I just kept on this path of stress reduction because I thought that that was going to be my path to freedom. In fact, it was big part of it but in addition to that, I did a bunch of other experiments over the 26 years. I intuited that food had to do something with the MS. I didn’t know what and at that time there was very little information available and I came across the swank diet book that purported that a low-fat vegetarian diet was in fact the best for MS. That was the next experiment I did. For me, it didn’t work. I didn’t notice a reduction in symptoms and in fact, when I added more healthy whole grains into my diet I noticed that I started having more tummy trouble and no reduction in MS symptoms. Every time I ate, I would notice some gurgling not like IBS symptoms that were debilitating but this kind of gurgling sensation that you can just feel something going on that doesn’t feel great but I thought it was normal. I thought everybody felt this way after eating. I didn’t think anything of it. I just kept eating the whole grains at every meal. I grew up eating great big bowls of cereal, I had my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread, and for dinner there’s was either pasta or sometimes pizza or beer. Every time I ate, I felt that grumbling. That was my first experience with food and I must say that all different types of vegetarian is for me, didn’t seem to make anything better. In fact, I discovered that I had more tummy issues as a result of adding more grains to my diet.

 

[29:33] Ashley James: Right. Not many people get that there’s a connection between gut health and other systems of the body. Did you feel that disrupting your gut health with grains played a role in affecting your inflammation, affecting the MS, the autoimmune, did you take that correlation?

 

[29:58] Palmer Kippola: I didn’t make any correlation whatsoever. Again, I thought this was normal and it just seemed like a failed experiment to me at that time. It wasn’t until 2010 when I actually discovered my lynchpin trigger which I will talk more about. I just wanted to add one more failed experiment to this equation before telling you what my eureka experiment was. The third experiment I tried was medication, which for me was not beneficial. I, in fact, developed more people know of them as side effect, they’re not very side effects they’re very direct effects that medication causes but I think the drug companies want us to believe that these are just little tiny side effects. I actually developed heart attack symptoms about 15 minutes after injecting myself one night with this medication purported to help the MS. That was a terrifying experience. They just assured me that this was a normal known side effect of the mediation. I developed a wound that wouldn’t heal for 6 months. I developed lipoatrophy, which is a disappearance of fat where you inject yourself in all the fatty places, they don’t talk about a that. If the medication worked, you overlooked those. It’s a question of balance. Is it doing more good than harm? For me, it ended up more harm than good. I was already managing well with the stress reduction. I was modeling along with the diets trying to figure it out on my own again, not having the internet, it wasn’t until 2010 that I decided to finally I need to go see a nutritionist. I found a functional medicine nutritionist who lived pretty close to me. She ran a bunch of tests and it turned out that I have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. In other words, I didn’t have celiac disease but I was very sensitive to gluten. One of the proteins in grains notably wheat. This functional medicine nutritionist educated me on what gluten is doing to my body. How that was what was causing this gut symptoms. Remember I shared that I was eating gluten at every meal for as long as I could chew food. I had no idea what was doing to my body. She educated me on how it was inflaming the lining my gut creating leaky gut and she led to through gut healing protocol that included a 30-day elimination diet so that’s what I did in October of 2010. I remember the date because this was really notable for me. Within a week of removing gluten, I stopped having tummy trouble after eating. Within one month of removing the gluten, I stopped having any and all symptoms ever again. Like end of story. I really quick to footnote Ashley that your experience might be different. Everybody has a different reaction. I’m not suggesting that reversing MS is as simple as removing gluten and you’re done because our root causes are different and we’ll go into the FIGHTS categories that I’ve came up with to look at all the things that need to be looked at. Gluten happens to be the number one biggest baddy when it comes to food and autoimmune conditions. I just wanted to get that said and I would also like to add that I was so excited about this fact that by January of 2011, I thought I’ve got to go tell my neurologist because over 26 years I’ve seen 6 neurologists, this 26-year period where I’ve lived in different places, 6 neurologists who all had done MRIs and office visits and everything who have said, yes this is MS. This one that I was seeing in Palo Alto, I told him this is what I did. I removed the gluten and I don’t have MS anymore. I can’t feel it. Prior to that, I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket 24/7. I could feel this humming in the background all the time. I knew it was always there. When I went into his office really excited he gave me one of this pat me in the head condescending remarks and said, “Palmer, gluten sensitivity is a fad, your MS must’ve been benign after all.” There’s no acknowledgment of anything that was done. Fast forward now to last year when I went back to the same neurologist. To close the story, 8 years later, I thought it would be a good time to go back and get a follow-up MRI with him just to check-in. He wondered what I was doing back and I said, “I was actually really curious what his thinking was on MS and autoimmune conditions and the first thing he said to me was, “Palmer, we now know that gluten sensitivity is real. I bet more than a third of my MS patients are sensitive to gluten.” There was a recognition and acknowledgment that about 10 years later, he had come to another understanding maybe he had read the science for himself. He had me do the follow-up MRI and I came by sat side by side with him and we looked to the results the before and after. He showed me that pattern of MS and how there was a dozen finger pattern that was very much consistent with MS patients lesions in their brain look like and how my brain showed that the lesions had disappeared or were fading. He just looked at me and said, “This could’ve been a better story.” Ashley, I tried to partner with him saying, “You know, I’m a functional certified health coach.” and he said, “I can’t give you my patient list but maybe I can send people to you. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great just to have 2 or 3 clients that we work on together like a one plus one equals three kind of thing?” I pursued that a couple of times and I never heard back from him again.

 

[36:34] Ashley James: That is so frustrating. Why are they so threatened with getting people off of medication and a hundred percent healed especially when it comes to partnering with holistic health practitioners. Why? Why can’t they drop the ego? Also the ego, this just drives me crazy. MDs and this is part of their training, I know as individuals, I know there’s probably MDs listening right now because they write to me. I’m not bashing individual MDs, I’m saying that their training, it’s like when you get a soldier to go into the military, they put them through hell week or whatever, or hell month whatever their training is in order to mold them, in order to shape them, if you look at how they develop the training their MDs, it is to mold them into a certain kind of thinking. They do 24-hour shifts, this kind of things where it really does shift how you act and how you think. Their entire education, they spent eight or 9 years being molded to believe that they have been taught everything. That new information is really hard to come by because they’ve been taught everything. Their immediate reaction when they hear something like, “Oh, I cut out food and my diagnosis is going away or has gone away” is to scoff at it. It’s to put it down without looking for information to prove or disapprove. They just tell the patient that’s incorrect. That’s their ego. That’s their huberous. Instead as a scientist, they would say, “Interesting hypothesis. I do not know.” Most MDs can’t say “I do not know. Let’s go look into this together. I’m going to put my bias. My personal human ego and bias aside and lets go look into this together and see if there’s other studies, see if there’s validity to your claims.“ No. Most MD’s do not do that. If you find a doctor that says, “I don’t know the answer but let’s find them together” that is a potential keeper. It just frustrates me. Especially, women, I have heard story upon story of women who have not been listened to by their doctor. It’s like they’re brushed off “That’s just hysteria. That’s just your hormones. That’s normal. Whatever your symptoms are that’s just normal,” and they’re not listened to. There’s so many cases of people coming to their doctor and they feel like something’s wrong. It turns out, years later, they develop cancer and it’s like they knew something was wrong but because the doctor just writes it off and sends them home. They’re basing things on their ego and not as a scientist. Let’s see if we can prove or disapprove this hypothesis. It’s frustrating to me because people go to their doctor because we put them on a pedestal and we expect answers and then if they don’t know the answer that’s treating to their ego so then they just makeup one instead of actually looking into the science. That puts the patient down and disempowers them. We want to empower people to advocate for themselves and thank god, there’s the internet so we can – and thank god there’s podcast like this and interviews like this so we can go and empower ourselves and seek information. We have to remember when we bring this information to our doctor, they’re not putting their ego aside. We have to get whatever they say if they’re not willing to go and look into the research then don’t give up, go to the next doctor and the next doctor and find one that’ll partner with you. Be okay with you advocating for yourself. I love seeing naturopaths. Many naturopaths I’ve seen are excited when I bring research from the internet saying, “What about his, what about that? can we look at this can we look at that and they’re excited to not know all the answers and to learn with me because they’re better at reading the science than I am. So if I can bring them something to look at and to research and look at all the studies then great, they’re going to do that for me I’m just going to point them in the direction that I want them to go to help me because I’m advocating for myself getting my doctor to look into what I want. I love that you noticed and you listened to your body those 26 years and you kept experimenting. Obviously, you never gave up because that’s your quality of life. You advocated for yourself. Just because your doctor said, “This is who we eat. This isn’t real.” you did not go, “Oh, I’ll just go start eating cheerios again because my doctor says that this is who we eat.” You know, you still listen to yourself. People I know who their doctors have talked them out of a healthier lifestyle because the doctor just didn’t believe in it. That is so sad that sometimes people put the opinions that their doctors give them as higher than their own ability to listen to their body.

 

[42:26] Palmer Kippola: So beautifully said, Ashley. I want to thank you for saying all that. I am with you. This is not us coming down on doctors but it feels like when there’s not a curiosity that’s demonstrated even in the face of evidence that’s everywhere and will get into this now with epigenetics and now there’s actually an autoimmune equation, we have the knowledge but not being curious, it’s a little bit baffling but it really speaks to the need that we all have to become the CEOs or the captain of our own ships, speak of our own health. We really must do that and I know that that’s daunting because that seems that the doctors supposed to be the one who educates who know all of this. Sadly, my understanding is that in medical practice often follows about 17 years behind science and that’s just because the medical schools can’t keep up with what’s coming. The textbooks are out of date, they are really, really busy people and of course, insurances involved, that further limits what they can actually talk with patients about and get paid for. The bottom line is we need this root-cause revolution. We have the information today to show us that it’s not just about putting this autoimmune conditions into remission and I love how you said we’d be getting like its lurking there in the background waiting to pounce forward. It’s not that way with cancer either. We’ve read Kelly Turner’s radical remission for the stories of people who’ve overcome cancer. There are things that people put into practice that actually matter greatly in terms of changing your health outcomes. I just wanted to say thank you for really advocating on behalf of each of us becoming the CEO of our own health and well-being. Feeling the confidence to step up and say, “You know that just doesn’t seem right to me” because food apathy said food is medicine 25 hundred years ago and we know this to be true just because the doctor didn’t have nutrition training doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Anyway, I do want to say that western medicine is fantastic for acute illnesses. For broken bones, for surgeries and these acute conditions but this gray area mysterious diseases that don’t have a clear beginning and end are really not – that’s not the purview of medical doctors, they didn’t get trained in this stuff. So many systems are interconnected. For the most part, doctors get trained in their xylode approach. Works like I said for those acute illnesses and that’s when you want to see a doctor if I want a heart attack I want to got to the hospital but if I have MS, maybe not the best place. They don’t have the right toolkit.

 

[45:47] Ashley James: They’re not looking to heal the root cause. They’re looking to manage symptoms, they’re really good at managing symptoms. It’s up to us to heal the root cause because it keeps coming back to, it’s our lifestyle that is the cause of this. Lifestyle being the nutrition, the food we eat and don’t eat the amount of stress we have, how we move our body, all of that. Our environment, all of that triggers the genes to express in a certain way. Let’s jump back to your story so we can discover what you did then. After you leave your doctor 8-10 years ago, you left your doctor’s office and you knew that cutting out grains, was it all grains or just gluten grains?

 

[46:43] Palmer Kippola: Well, I eventually cut all grains. I started just with gluten but I found that for me I have naturally high blood sugar. For me to manage the blood sugar, just not having grains at all or starchy carbs was a better way to go. I’ll just say for autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle, it’s better for me to avoid all grains.

 

[47:11] Ashley James: Got it. After you left the doctor’s office and he have purported going gluten-free, you knew in your gut you’re on to something, then what? Where’d you go from there?

 

[47:24] Palmer Kippola: I just have this cognitive dissonance. The feeling that you have when you know something in your bones and yet I have been old for 26 years by this 6 neurologists there’s nothing I could do. It just didn’t compute. Right? How in the world was it possible that a woman like me, I was in sales and marketing for high tech companies, I was not in the health industry, but I decided I needed to learn for myself. What had actually happened. I dove into the research, you probably know PubMed. It is probably the largest database of biomedical research, I think owned by the NIH it’s just endless. I started doing research upon research and looking for studies on the cause of autoimmune conditions and I found just an incredible amount of evidence that talked about things like low vitamin D is associated with autoimmune conditions. Low DHEA which is another hormone associated with autoimmune, high mercury associated with all – I’m thinking oh my goodness, there are so many things that we can control. These environmental factors seem to be associated with developing autoimmune conditions, it wasn’t just MS. I thought MS was going to be some different animal or some different beast but it turns out that any of the 150 or more autoimmune conditions all have similar root causes. I just started putting the puzzle pieces together. I started writing down these categories and it turned out it spelled the word. Fights. Which stands for Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress. I just was super excited that now, we had information that wanted to share with the world. I knew that people needed to know about this. It wasn’t okay with me that a doctor didn’t know more about this and I felt like, I really wanted to help people so I finally decided that I needed to share this with the world in a form of a book and not just keep this for myself because honestly, I felt like it should have been front-page news and it wasn’t.

 

[49:47] Ashley James: Each time you came across a study like the high mercury, did you look into what you can do to detox mercury as you go through each one, “Oh vitamin D. I should get my vitamin D checked, oh vitamin C.” each time you came across one did you address it in your health?

 

[50:07] Palmer Kippola: Yes. Well, first thing I did is I wrote it down and I had what I called my root cause reversal checklist. I just wrote everything down. I saw that poor sleep, for example, only getting 6 hours a night was enough to turn on inflammatory genes and getting restored of sleep, on the other hand, turned on the nourishing genes and dim down those inflammatory ones. I learned that dairy can be very inflammatory for people with autoimmune conditions. So I did. It was self-experimentation first but writing them all down on this sheet of paper so that I could see the full array of different root causes and there were many of them which I ended up putting in categories so, yes.

 

[50:53] Ashley James: I am fascinated. 6 hours or less of sleep epigenetically turns on the expression of inflammatory genes?

 

[51:02] Palmer Kippola: Yes.

 

[51:05] Ashley James: Think about all the people. Does that include disrupted sleep?

 

[51:09] Palmer Kippola: The study says even a few hours of lost sleep can lead to turning on inflammatory genes

 

[51:15] Ashley James: That’s huge

 

[51:16] Palmer Kippola: Yes, it is huge. I’d like to if this is an okay place to talk about it, introduce the topic of the toxin bucket. I know you’ve talked with your audience about this before but I think this is really an appropriate place to include it because we each carry inside us this metaphor of a toxin bucket into which all of these lifestyle factors go. Those things that I was researching the mercury, “I had a mouthful of mercury fillings, I had an addiction to sugar growing up. I not only had my cheerios, I put tablespoon upon tablespoon of sugar and added my non-fat milk to it. So I ladling in dairy, I’ve got the gluten, I’ve got the chronic stress from childhood, I’ve got a mouthful of mercury filings.” All of those things, individually your body deals with. We have a certain amount of resilience as a child or teenager as an example. Theoretically, our bucket can hold a certain amount of toxins and the bottom of the bucket should have holes metaphorically where those toxins get excreted. Through our skin, our colon, through our kidneys, etc. we want to make sure that the detox organs are functioning perfectly. Things are flowing but it turns out, that in my case, I was adding more things to my toxin bucket than I was excreting. It just gets to the point where once things starts spilling over, the whole system just goes tilt. This is when the leaky gut develops, this is when we start to experience symptoms because leaky gut is the gateway to autoimmune conditions. I finally figured out in doing all these research that all of those elements that I was studying, the poor sleep, minimal exercise or minimal movement, eating a sad diet, even infections like Candida and chronic Lyme disease, all of those elements are adding to the toxin bucket and it’s our job if we want to stay healthy or get well. To examine those things that we’re putting into the bucket or might be to our knowledge and to do something about it. We can start by emptying the toxin bucket and I think that’s a lifetime’s work because we want to practice daily detoxification and not just do a few quick cleanses a few times a year. That was what I decided. I had my toxin bucket head overflowed and that is how the MS developed and so to heal from the MS and any other autoimmune condition, we need to examine what our own buckets are filled with and see if we can remove those element so that we can get back to balance.

 

[54:12] Ashley James: To go to your acronym, food, infections, gut health. What were the other?

 

[54:21] Palmer Kippola: Hormone balance, toxins, and stress. Those were the big categories.

 

[54:27] Ashley James: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. You started discovering as you went through your research that certain nutrient deficiencies were associated with autoimmune and then toxins, the toxic overload like mercury was associated with autoimmune. Where do infections come into play?

 

[54:49] Palmer Kippola: Infections are a very insidious contributor to autoimmune conditions. They are there often lurking in the background. Like Epstein-Barr for example is a herpes virus. It may be you had childhood mono and it’s not until you’re hit with a major stressor maybe later in life. Maybe a loved one dies or maybe you lose a job or something happens that knocks you off balance. That hidden or latent infection gets reactivated and that can become a major contributor. It’s usually some combination of factors and with infections, it’s both a cause and hitchhiker I’ll call it because sometimes it’s the chronic Lyme disease that is the root cause of an autoimmune condition or Epstein-Barr. Sometimes when your immune system has taken a hit and it’s dealing with an autoimmune condition, your defenses are down and it’s more likely that people with autoimmune conditions will pick up an infection because people with autoimmune conditions typically are hypometabolic meaning their metabolism are low and slow. There’s usually low thyroid involved and when we’re at a hypometabolic state, we are our environment our milieu is more attracted to infections, that’s another conundrum with infections and autoimmune conditions. They seem to go hand in hand.

 

[56:31] Ashley James: I’m thinking, Lyme disease often has co-infections and the people I’ve interviewed on the show about Lyme all say, these experts help people reverse Lyme disease, they themselves have had them and helped people reverse it and they say that it’s the environment of the body that became optimal because like an entire family could be exposed to ticks that have Lyme but only one person in the family develops chronic Lyme disease and everyone else just gets over it. It’s not like a hundred percent of the time people develop Lyme. It’s at the environment of the body was perfect meaning their toxin bucket was full and their immune system was somehow compromised and the body became this perfect host for the chronic Lyme disease and all this co-infections. So all the experts on the show keep saying, it’s the environment of the body that invites these infections to live in us. When I say infections, it can be parasites, it can be bacteria or viruses. All of them. Right?

 

[57:47] Palmer Kippola: Right. Absolutely.

 

[57:48] Ashley James: You’re looking to help the body become an environment that’s inhospitable to these infections.

 

[57:59] Palmer Kippola: Well said. Absolutely. It’s all about the terrain. What I have found is that we actually need a two-prong strategy to address these infections. It’s not just about kill, kill, kill. The Lyme co-infections as an example, it’s not just a killing strategy. Like with chemotherapy for example, if you have cancer and you get chemo, it might kill the cancer cells but if you don’t do anything to address the root cause of why you got cancer in the first place, the cancer often returns with a vengeance. It’s a similar kind of story here. The two-prong strategy that I talk about is first, we’ve got to unburden our immune systems. When you’re dealing with any kind of autoimmune condition, MS is not a brain problem. Hashimoto’s, thyroid is not a thyroid disease. Rheumatoid arthritis is not a problem with your joints. It actually may manifest that way but these are all immune system problems. When you help unburden your immune system, you’re actually helping resolve the autoimmune condition and you’re doing the best you can do and help clear infections. We want to remove all sources of inflammation. That would include those inflammatory foods that we talked about, the gluten the dairy the sugar and for some people they have challenges with things like eggs, soy, corn, some with nuts and so forth. You need to discover for you what your sources of inflammatory foods are because that’s the best place to start when we remove the sources of inflammation when it comes to infections. They love sugar. Infections like candida as an example thrive on sugars so when you take away their preferred fuel, their sugar you’re creating an environment that’s inhospitable to those infections. That’s why that’s a very, very good way to start it’s addressing the sources of inflammation that you’re putting into your system and then the second piece which is very much synergistic with the first is to raise your metabolism and the way we can do this is to help ourselves. I have found three things that work really well, one is to go low carb because carbohydrates convert to sugar in our body, high glycemic ones. We want to do what we can to minimize the high glycemic foods, and starches and processed foods and I also find that intermittent fasting is an excellent strategy to remove those sources of even digesting is metabolically really high energy for the body. When we can give ourselves a break or digestion a break, we can actually focus our energies on healing as an example. Finally, cold showers. At least the last 30 seconds or a minute of a shower can be another great way to raise your metabolism. These are all strategies to help you become an inhospitable place for infections.

 

[01:01:24] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. I love this approach because you’re looking at correcting the train of the body and looking at it from all the different angles. How long have you been teaching the FIGHTS method to help people no longer have autoimmune condition?

 

[01:01:44] Palmer: Kippola I have been coaching people for the last couple of years. I got my certification to be functional medicine certified health coach. It’s interesting Ashley because the first book that I set out to write was a book of healing stories. I wanted to not just share my own story of healing from MS, I wanted to make it an exponential good news story to share other people’s stories and I have an agent and she tried to shop that around, it’s disappointing to me that I learned that, and the quotes where “healing stories don’t sell.” I couldn’t believe it. I know. I find healing stories very powerful and I share it on my website. But in fact, the publishers weren’t interested in that, instead of having 12 doctor’s perspectives on healing, they wanted my perspective. That’s when I thought I actually need to package this up in a way that is digestible, pun intended so that people can really get their arms around what they need do to. That’s when I really started coming out with more information on FIGHTS as a protocol and not just throwing things against the wall to see what would stick. I actually now have a framework for healing.

 

[01:03:09] Ashley James: So you have been working for the last few years and getting results, can you share what kind of results? Can you share some of those stories of success?

 

[01:03:19] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely. Here’s an example, one of my clients is a – she’s probably 50 years old now. She has a couple of kids. She’s a single mom. She works and have had IBS symptoms so bad that she couldn’t leave the house. She used to be an athlete. She used to run and participate in races. When she developed these IBS symptoms, she was terrified as you can imagine to leave the house to go for a run and not knowing whether there’s going to be toilet. She also had a long commute to work and that made it nearly debilitating for her. She also had celiac disease and she had Hashimoto’s, thyroiditis. I have given a talk at the end of 2016 for an organization called Silicon Valley health institute. SVHI. They recorded a 30-minute video of me sharing my MS healing journey and what I’ve learned to help others. This woman saw my video and she was across the country so it was great that we have the internet now to share this healing stories. She reached out and she became a client. At that time, she was also losing her hair and had real hormonal imbalance and dysfunction with very, very heavy menstrual cycles. That was what we started with. We talked about my methodology and she was just eager and ready to do what she could to change her lifestyle. We came to find that she was eating a lot of these foods that were actually interfering with her immune system including gluten, corn, tomatoes, dairy, all of which she was reacting to but that she craved. As difficult as it is to consider doing an elimination diet and giving up your favorite foods, I told her that “Look, it’s only 30 days. For me, it’s the most empowering experiment that I ever did. We’ll go through this together.” Sure enough, she did. She removed all of those foods including eggs and coffee and so forth. At the end of the 30 days, she felt fantastic. Then she tried to add some of those foods back in, she just found immediately that when she added back in the tomatoes, she loved her chips and salsa, that is just an absolute inflammation bomb, she had a very bad outcome with that but this was so empowering for her to actually see that what she was eating almost on a daily basis was causing so many of these problems. Over time, we’re able to balance her hormones, get her blood sugar balanced. Get her feeling great. She dropped, I’m going to say nearly 25 pounds of inflammatory water weight and weight that she wanted to lose, by the end of working with her after a couple of months, she was feeling good enough to start doing 5ks again. I forgot to mention one of her symptoms at the outset was she was falling asleep at work. This is not a good situation. You don’t want to be I don’t know if it’s official narcolepsy or I’m not even sure. I know narcolepsy is an autoimmune condition but her fatigue was so great that she was falling asleep. After this her energy returned, her hair stopped falling out. She was able to get back to more regular cycles and honestly Ashley, it was astounding that it was mostly removing the bad things that were harming her and just adding a few supplements like getting her vitamin D levels up, getting her magnesium balance and up. Avoiding those favorite foods and she was really, really amazed with how she felt.

 

[01:07:36] Ashley James: No longer has IBS?

 

[01:07:38] Palmer Kippola: No longer has IBS. Doesn’t associate herself with having Hashimoto’s or celiac. She’s really clear on what she can eat or not. She’s just decided some of these foods are going to stay out. She knows if she chooses, which is empowering because now we have choices, right? Now we know cause and effect and we know if we want to add something back in and she knows what will happen if she does and that’s that.

 

[01:08:05] Ashley James: Just to clarify, she was diagnosed with IBS, hashimoto’s and colitis?

 

[01:08:12] Palmer Kippola: Celiac.

 

[01:08:13] Ashley James: Celiac, okay. Got it. That is so cool. I love it. How long from start to finish did it take for her?

 

[01:08:23] Palmer Kippola: I want to say two months of being diligent with her diet and working with me and adding back in the nutrients to really deal with some of the deficiencies like vitamin D and magnesium and vitamin B12. She was able to get back to life and in fact, she’s running 5kms now with her daughter. It’s super empowering. What happens is it is not just about her, this is the ripple effect of healing when somebody is able to overcome these health challenges they become a role model for their family and friends. So it becomes a ripple effect in the family and then in the community and you can just see the ripples in the pond going out. That’s super exciting.

 

[01:09:15] Ashley James: Super exciting. I love it. You mentioned magnesium. I want to let you know that I’ve been on my health journey healing, I had multiple problems, you listen to this show so you know but for listeners who’ve never heard. I had many health problems. I was very very sick. I had spent the last 10 years finding my own health solutions and something I really believe in, supplements. Magnesium is the most important mineral. Everyone thinks calcium is but magnesium actually is more important. They’re all important but magnesium, the body needs it so much and it’s so hard to get enough magnesium especially if someone has a gut issue. If you’ve been eating gluten grains and it has caused inflammation in your gut it’s very hard for your gut to absorb enough of the minerals, right? We have this catch 22 where our gut can’t absorb enough and then there’s not enough minerals in our soil anymore because of the farming practices of over a hundred years especially the pesticides that have been used in the soil. Even if we buy organic it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we’re getting enough minerals. So we have to take supplements. Magnesium’s very hard to take orally either as a liquid or as a capsule and get to full self-saturation because if we do take a lot of it orally, magnesium just causes the smooth muscles, the bowel to go “wee” and then we’re running to the toilet which is the nicest way I could possibly say it causes diarrhea. Great for people with chronic constipation but if you have chronic constipation you need to look to that too. In my discovery of figuring out how to get full self-saturation because I have lots of magnesium supplements that I’ve enjoyed them all but again, couldn’t get the full self-saturation. There’s a 50-dollar blood test you can get when you go to walkinlab.com called magnesium RBC. It’s between 40 and 60 dollars because they always have it on sale. In the United States, you buy that test online and then you go to, they’ll tell you where your nearest lab is. They’ll draw your blood and they’ll send you the results. You don’t even have to see a doctor to check your magnesium levels. It wasn’t until through a friend of mine I discovered this magnesium soak that within one month of doing it every day gets – 76% of people reach full self-saturation. We absorb about 20g of magnesium every soak. I know. It blew me away. I did it and I’ve had a miner’s push before which is where they the naturopath will inject you with magnesium straight into your vein. You feel really drunk and kind of happy for a few minutes because it’s very relaxing. I felt that same feeling after my first soak. I went, “Oh my gosh, this is real” we can’t absorb magnesium readily from Epsom salt. It’s just not the right molecular size to absorb into the skin. This woman who I’ve had her on my show. She was like 70 something pounds in a wheelchair with 30 seizures a day and magnesium was one of the biggest things that helped her to recover her health. She ended up getting the magnesium from the Zechstein Sea and then shipping it here and then selling it in jugs. You basically soak a quarter of a cup in a basin of water, you put your feet in it and you soak for an hour and you absorb about 20g every time. Like I said, 76% of people get to full self-saturation within one month of doing it. It’s been really cool because you mentioned magnesium while you know and everyone else listening that they can use that. If you’re having problems absorbing through your gut then absorb through your skin and we can bypass that. It’s so cool, right? The website is, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com I know it’s a really long website to type in, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then the coupon code she gave all the listeners which gives them 10% off is LTH as in learn true health. If you want Palmer, I can connect you guys. You guys can chat because I think that you would love to, as I know all holistic health practitioner would love to connect directly with her, chat and learn more about her magnesium and her healing story. You mentioned that and I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to tell you.” My intuition said that you would really like to know more about that. Since that, it’s one of the clogs. Right? It’s so great that you cut out the grains and had such an amazing response. You were, however, for 26 years doing healthy things. It wasn’t like you walked out of a McDonald’s and with a coffee in one hand and having cigarette in the other. It’s not like you had this really unhealthy lifestyle and you just cut out grains and all of a sudden you didn’t have MS. You spent 26 years building a foundation of decreasing stress and eating healthy and looking for answers and that was the last, for you, that was the last hole in the bucket that made it just exponentially healed. Makes your body exponentially healed. For others it might be correcting sleep, dealing with infections, healing the gut, it might be hormone imbalance, toxins stress or it may be all of them. That’s why I like that you’re addressing all of them because you’re building a foundation of health by addressing all the FIGHTS together. I wanted to make sure that we touched on the fact that food being the F in FIGHTS that you have a free gift for the listeners because everyone goes, “Well, what should I eat?” I know that there are some people out there who no longer have MS because they’re vegan. It’s not necessarily that eating low carb high fat would work for everyone because for some people it’s like just eating a ton of vegetables and cutting out the meat was what their genes needed we don’t know. Doing the elimination diet and figuring out for themselves what they should eat for their better health is key. You’ve come up with a free gift that teaches people what they should eat by listening to their body. We’re going to have the link to that in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com the link is Palmerkippola.com/gift. We’ll make sure the link is there in the show notes because I just want to make sure that listeners who are at this point going, “Well, what should I eat?” Great, go get the free gift and it’s a guide to teach you how to listen to your body so that you can dial in what is best for you. Like I said, I know people who are vegan who reversed their MS and you sounds like you do a bit more like of a Paleo diet. Is that correct?

 

[01:16:57] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. I don’t purport to know what diet is best for everybody that’s why this optimal food guide would be – I think of really good resource for people to find out what’s best for them. In my case, I’ve sort of landed on what I’ll call a paleo template diet where I eliminate grains, dairy and sugar and the meats that I do eat or the fish that I do eat or the poultry that I do eat is either going to be 100% grass-fed that means grass-fed and grass-finished. The chicken and turkey are happy free-range and important note about this, we’re not just what we eat. We’re whatever we eat ate. Super important to pay attention to what do those cows eat? When we digest and ingest that food, that profile of the meat of a cow that’s been fed corn, which by the way cows are allergic to corn, you really want to make sure that you’re ingesting something at is biologically a match for you. If you are going to eat meat do opt for 100% grass-fed. I have heard it think it was Dr. Pozorno say that meat is one of the most important foods, Dr. Lee Cowden said this because meats can concentrate pesticides and herbicides three times more and maybe even greater than that than any other source. If you’re eating vegetables that are conventionally grown yes, you’ll get the pesticide and herbicide. Meat becomes more important to find the wild, the free-range, the healthy pastured version of what you eat. We do try to find poultry from farmer’s markets where the chickens are eating bugs and grubs. Organic chicken just means that those chickens are eating organic corns and organic soy. If you have a problem with grains or soy, you might still have issue and not know what the problem is. Until you’ve removed the chicken. That was very surprising to me. I just want to mention that to listeners that you have to really put your detective hat on. Just be really curious about that’s going.

 

[01:19:24] Ashley James: That’s very interesting. My son was colic and we figured out that there was a handful of food like broccoli, onion, garlic. I’m dairy-free anyway. I’m allergic to dairy. My husband’s allergic so we just assumed our son was and sure enough, he definitely was when we tried formula. When I was breastfeeding, he would have horrible reactions to the foods that I ate. It’s just like what the chicken eats, if you’re allergic to what the chicken eats, don’t eat the chicken. I had to cut out the foods. I wasn’t allergic to those foods but my baby was allergic to those foods. I had to cut out those foods when I was breastfeeding because it was giving him really horrible pain and gas. I just makes sense that we need to be diligent. Be a food detective. I like how Dr. Mark Hyman talks about, “If you’re going to eat meat, make it be a condiment.” It okay if that’s 12$ a pound, you’re not eating a pound of it. You’re making it a condiment. We don’t need the giant steak, we don’t need the meat to be the centerpiece of the meal. It’s more of a condiment for the nutrient.” I myself don’t eat meat right now. My husband went vegan a year and a half ago. I’m experimenting myself. I went from pescatarian to vegan. I’m just experimenting. I’m going to see. I’m getting my bloodwork this week from my naturopath. We’ll see how it’s going for me. It’s about experimenting and be willing to try different things see how it feels and if you have cravings. I love that you brought up it, someone allergic, your client is allergic to these foods but craving them. Craving sometimes can mean that we are nutrient deficient and the body is seeing those nutrients but it can also mean that it has that dopamine addiction to it as well. Those hyper-palatable foods of salt, sugar, and oil are a bit addictive. The brain lights up just like cocaine and heroine that we need to recognize that the body’s become addicted to these hyper-palatable foods. Do those deep breaths. Those moments of food addiction where my body is going towards the cravings and it’s like, “Wait a second, is that what my body really needs? Does my brain really want dopamine?” and I have to do those deep breaths. I like that you help your client address that the cravings especially when you’re doing food eliminations those craving come back with a vengeance. We have to catch ourselves and realize that, “Yes, my body might be nutrient deficient that why it has craving but it also might be dopamine deficient so let’s go watch some YouTube videos that make us laugh and get dopamine somewhere else.”

 

[01:22:21] Palmer Kippola: That’s is great. I can add to that just a moment. You mentioned addiction and craving the opposite of that is aversion. Things that we don’t like and don’t want. I have found that people sometimes who have an aversion to meat, they don’t care for the taste it just turns them off or sometimes deficient in zinc. That is something just to pay attention to, you can do a zinc challenge and taste it. Just do a little bit of zinc after eating so you don’t get nauseous. That’s sometimes clears up that aversion to meat so just wanted to add that.

 

[01:22:59] Ashley James: That’s fascinating and zinc is so important for our immune health. Very cool. Awesome. All right so we talked about the food and we talked about infections. Let’s talk a bit about gut health. How do you help people restore their gut health? Do you recommend they eat a bunch of fermented foods and avoid grains? Or is it more about listening to the body and seeing what helping, what not helping?

 

[01:23:26] Palmer Kippola: Yes, such a good question. I just want to step back a tiny bit because the gut is so central in the development and healing of autoimmune conditions that we can’t talk about autoimmune healing without talking about the gut. It turns out that in the early 2000s, Alessio Fasano and his team at Harvard found the final element in the autoimmune equation that is the leaky gut or scientifically known as intestinal hyperpermeability. When we’re eating these sad foods or taking medications in some cases or even having stress, those factors can all cause our guts to become leaky. That had been proven to bet the pathway or gateway to developing autoimmune conditions. The exciting part about having an autoimmune equation is we can flip it to heal it. Meaning, if we remove the things that are causing the inflammation and the leakiness and we heal and seal the lining of our gut, we can as Dr. Fisano says, arrest and reverse the autoimmune condition. This is no longer conjecture and myth or wishful thinking that we can reverse these conditions. We now understand that there is science behind this leaky gut. That scientist for year purports that this is not being real. Well, it is very real and we know many things that lead to it. We also know what we can do to restore it. When it comes to repairing our gut the first and foremost we musts top putting things in that are harmful. Those would be the inflammatory elements that we’ve talked bout. There might be suspect foods that are toxic to some and are helpful to other. I have one problem with eggs or nuts as an example but for somebody else, their kryptonite might be eggs. That elimination diet can help you define and refine your foods at least for maybe 6 months those are what you’ll enjoy, you need to get rid of some for short term while you’re healing your gut because if you continue to eat things that are causing your gut to be permeable, so if I wanted to bring the MS back, I might start eating gluten again, sit down to sandwiches, pasta and so forth. We now know that there are many medications that create permeable intestines. There are actually Ashley, I think there is a study that says that there are 90 medications are known to induce Lupus by creating a permeable gut. It’s really known information. This is not hidden information, this is out there. So whatever you can do to minimize unnecessary medications, to eliminate those sad foods and get rid of toxins in your environment. I only recently understood that stress creates a leaky gut like getting ready to do public speaking, for example, creates intestinal permeability. Some things are not all stress is bad and some of it is growth-oriented but we are stuck in that always-on, stress response, that is when our gut stay open and permeable. The first step in any kind of gut healing program is to make sure that we’re minimizing the things that are causing harm.

 

[01:27:04] Ashley James: Right, yes. Just like inflammation is a good thing when it’s acute but not when its chronic and always turned on. I know that Advil or Ensets I’ve been told increase gut permeability and also harm the liver but they do increase gut permeability causing leaky gut. I had a neighbor once, this is just a few years ago, 21-year-old woman who is going through chemo not for cancer. The doctor decided to give her chemo for lupus. That just blew me away because I even knew back then that cutting out gluten and cleaning up diet played such a huge role in autoimmune. I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years with my husband and just to see that she was suffering so horribly going through chemo for what – just that MD could’ve looked into the research and seen what you saw but instead he chose to give her chemo. Chemo’s the one medication that doctors actually get kickback from something like 2500 dollars every dose. They get a kickback. It infuriates me this young woman’s potentially her entire youth has been destroyed because she’s suffering greatly from chemo which was obviously not helping the lupus. We have to be diligent. We have to advocate for ourselves. You always have to get 2nd or 3rd opinion, don’t put the doctor to the pedestal. Obviously, always seek a doctor of I never recommend someone especially if you have symptoms that you avoid medical attention. It’s just get more opinions and do your own research and be willing to keep seeking answers especially when it comes to a surgery or treatment like we should really, really make sure that it is the best option for us. Food, infection, gut health, hormone balance. Now, you are a functional medicine practitioner, health coach that you can get people to do blood tests. Tell us did you do labs and blood tests? How does that work? How do you help people to balance their hormones?

 

[01:29:47] Palmer Kippola: I partner with functional medicine practitioners that’s how I can get the lab work done. One reason why hormones is last in the book in terms of a core chapter, the book is not in the same order that FIGHTS is spelled. We start with food then we go to gut health which we’ve just talked about but hormones is last strategically because often times when you deal with the other root causes, your hormones can fall back into balance. That really is the goal to do whatever we can from a lifestyle perspective first. Some of the biggest hormone imbalances that we see with autoimmune conditions are high insulin, high cortisol. Insulin again that’s going to be when you’re eating high carbohydrate foods. We also see the diabetes increase through the environmental toxins. There are the two things you can control and if you remove the toxins from your environment, you go lower carb, you can lower the insulin potentially. High cortisol being one if you address stress we can bring cortisol into a balance. Low thyroid is very common. It is probably one of the most common hormonal imbalances we see and that is something that can also get regulated when we do everything else for ourselves including removing the sugar and addressing stress. High estrogen, estrogen dominance. This is something that’s both common in both in men and women.  It doesn’t just mean that your estrogen is high. It’s relative to progesterone. Progesterone is the calming hormone. We want those hormones to be in balance. The two other final imbalances we often see are low vitamin D and low DHEA. In the book, because hormones is such a complicated category each chapter is a little book onto itself. I give people tips and strategies for how to address things naturally. If you need additional help, how to find a practitioner who deals in bio-identical hormones which are not the hormone replacement therapy, which are the synthetic hormones but rather, if you’re going into the route of hormone therapy, you want to make sure that they’re bio-identical in nature. From my experience, I dealt with all six of those hormonal imbalances. So I offer a story from my own perspective on how high levels of sugar and high levels of stress created a hormonal mess for me for many, many years.

 

[01:32:39] Ashley James: How much did your hormones come back into a balance by just shifting food and gut health?

 

[01:32:40] Palmer Kippola: I wish I could tell you like a wimble that wobbles but it doesn’t fall down when you take your hands off. It just goes right back to balance. That wasn’t the case for me. Part of my personal story is that my hormones were so imbalanced when I was 15 years old. I had excruciating cramps and actually had to miss school on occasion because they were so bad. I had a gynecologist who put me on a birth control pill very, very, early and told me to stay on the pill until I decided to have children. This is the same gynecologist who ran my blood test for a while. Why would I doubt her? She’s the expert, right? For years and years, I just did what she told me to do and she ran my blood tests and told me that my total cholesterol of 104 was excellent. This is opening a can of worms.

 

[01:33:44] Ashley James: For those who don’t know, that’s way to low. For those that don’t know. There’s healthy cholesterol and we need it, we want it to be high. The body needs a certain amount. The cholesterol is so important that the liver makes it. How cholesterol medication works, it bruises the liver to the point where the liver ceases to function correctly and liver can’t make cholesterol. What drives me crazy is that doctors will put people on cholesterol medication but don’t tell them to stop, like stop eating fried food, stop eating the fats that are damaged. They have oxidative damage on them which increases unhealthy cholesterol. They’ll give you a medication that damages your liver so your liver stops producing good cholesterol and then they won’t tell you to stop eating bad cholesterol. It just drives me up the wall. There’s a balance. We need to have healthy fats. It’s so important that the liver makes it. The myelin sheath on your nerves are made from fat and MS is when the myelin sheath is destroyed and then the nerves are inflamed. Hello, of course. You are set up for having MS if you didn’t have enough healthy fats from the body. They are the raw building blocks for the body to produce myelin sheet.

 

[01:35:04] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. That’s beautifully said. I’ll throw in a little factoid here that just completely floored me. The countries with the lowest cholesterol, in other words like my gynecologist that 104 was excellent, die the fastest. Highest all-cause mortality and the countries with highest cholesterol lives the longest. That’s research that is available for anybody that wants to find that. Cholesterol it turns out is essential for our health and it’s the foundational building blocks of our hormones, our cell membrane, and our brain health. Our brain is 60% fat. We need healthy cholesterol. It’s all about the balance of different types of cholesterol that is, what I’ll say about this is I was a hormonal mess that I didn’t just regulate back to balance by getting everything else in line and I opted for bio-identical hormones and now my hormone are finally in balance. You know I never felt better. It can be done and if I was suffering in all six of those hormonal imbalances. I’m doing great now than I know that you can heal.

 

[01:36:18] Ashley James: Beautiful. I definitely want my listeners who have autoimmune to get your book, make sure the links to your book is on the show notes of today’s podcast of learntruehealth.com. Tell us a bit about who should read your book, is it only people with autoimmune or is it people that want to just generally be healthy? Tell us a bit about your book and who it serves.

 

[01:36:44] Palmer Kippola: I wrote the book with the intention to – it’s the book that I would’ve wanted at 19 when I didn’t know what to do to my younger self. I wanted a step by step but for anyone, the first audience would be people who are suffering, who are actively seeking healing and don’t really know what to do next. That would include people that are finding it difficult to afford a natural medicine or naturopathic practitioner. I really urge people if you can to work with somebody because they will help you shortcut your time to healing. It was so worthy investment in yourself if you can do that. My book is actually quite popular now with integrative and functional medicine ad naturopathic physicians who also wanted to help their clients so they’re actually buying it for their offices which I was thrilled to see that happening. That would be the first level, is people who are actively seeking to heal. I have clients who I’ve worked with who are seeking to prevent an autoimmune condition because it runs in their family, everybody has a thyroid problem. Their father had MS and they don’t want to go down path. They just want to know what they can do to prevent something. If you put those two categories together that’s basically everybody because I don’t know what the actual stats are Ashley, maybe you know better than I do. At least one in five people is dealing with an autoimmune condition that may be diagnosed. Many, many more people had mysterious symptoms from joint pain and brain fog to profound fatigue to insomnia to infertility to numbness and tingling and migraines and all of those mysterious symptoms are messages from your body that something is out of balance. Anybody that’s dealing with mysterious symptoms, who has an official diagnosis or want to prevent one, this is who is book is for.

 

[01:38:51] Ashley James: I love it. So many people have mystery symptoms and they’re seeking information that’s why they’re listening today. I hope they get your book and they apply all the lessons to helping them figure out the foods that are most important for them and reducing the inflammation and the infections, helping their gut health, reducing toxins and stress, of course balancing their hormones. That’ll help a hundred percent of the population everyone could benefit especially those who are beating autoimmune. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I wonder, do you have any stories of success or have you heard from people who have also reversed their MS using your protocol?

 

[01:39:37] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely, yes. In fact, most of the people who follow me who are MS warriors themselves who are actively seeking to heal from or have beat MS. I will end with this story one of my favorites is a client who was diagnosed with MS actually the information the letter came to her in the mail from Kaiser Permanente saying the results of her MRI are in and it seemed that they were consistent with MS. She experienced the loss of vision in one eye, numbness on one side of her body, almost stroke-like symptoms and she was in her mid-30s, had two young kids and a husband, waking up one morning unable to function and to see properly. Just was absolutely terrified. When to the neurologist and got her results as I’ve said by mail. Somebody who knows us both connected us and I was able to talk with her before her second appointment because the neurologist was insisting that she go on injectable medication immediately and he wanted to do a spinal tap which I’ve never have done but I can’t imagine was pleasant. I got in the phone with her and was able to transmit the certainty that I have based on all my research, my personal experience working with other clients that if she was willing to work with me, give it a couple of months, try the elimination diet, work with me about reducing her stress, would she be willing to let the neurologist know, “Look, I know where you are and I will schedule my follow up appointment with you after I’ve tried these lifestyle interventions. If they don’t work, I know where you are.” and she said yes, she was willing to wait. So I worked with her, coached her for probably 6 weeks or so where we talk every week. We still talk maybe not as often maybe once every 6 weeks. She found out what her trigger food were, removed them and her big issues he felt were chronic stress also growing up in childhood. She had a really difficult situation both parents either had alcoholism or drug addiction and were not able to care of her so she grew up with her grandmother. She has a lot of stress that was manifesting with her current life with her kids. A lot of it she felt was driven by her past. Once she was able to feel better after removing those foods, after about 6 weeks she stopped having any and all MS symptom. Nothing was noticeable anymore after she removed the foods and healed her gut. Then she was able to have the energy to deal with those profound stressors from childhood and she started a forgiveness practice. She started doing gratitude journaling every night. Now her family, her kids no longer ask her for sweet things. She has actually become a role model for health and other people look up to her for information. This is another one of those ripple effect stories. Her husband revered symptoms of type II diabetes. Her children are off sugar. She is an icon for healing with food. That’s not an isolated incident this is most people when you take the bad stuff out, it’s been one of the most profound surprises that I’ve experienced. It can be way more simple than you know if you’re just willing to put your detective hat on. Give it a try, get some testing done. Yes, there might be an infection to clear up. Yes, there might be mercury poisoning that you need to deal with but the end result is this freedom and it’s just been a super good news story.

 

[01:43:49] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much, Palmer for coming in the show today and sharing this awesome information. It definitely fill people with hope to know that yes, they can completely reverse their autoimmune condition. They can improve their health. For those who have mystery symptoms, following the keys in your book will help them restore their body. I think everyone’s going to get some great information for your book. I highly recommend people buy it and try it out for themselves. If they have any questions, they can go to your website, Palmerkippola.com. Especially go to palmerkippola.com/gift and get the free guide. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything that you would like to share to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:44:39] Palmer Kippola: I would like to invite people to get still within yourself and allow your own intuition to come forth and to maybe ask yourself the question that that family friend asked me many, many years ago, “Why do think you got this blank?” Whatever it is. If you’re dealing with something that you got a diagnosis or if you’ve got mysterious symptoms. Why do you think that is? Allow time for the answer to bubble up. Really acknowledge that because chances are pretty good, you already know what’s out of balance in your life. Maybe it’s you really wanted to do something different in your life and you didn’t take that path or maybe you’re in a situation where you’re not happy at work or your relationship is not working. I believe that these autoimmune conditions are really an invitation to us to wake up to who we truly are. We may not see the gift at the moment when we’re going through the middle of these awful symptoms but I just want to invite people to dig deeper and really know that you can get to the root of what’s going on.

 

 

[01:46:02] Ashley James: Beautiful. Excellent. Thank you so much Palmer Kippola for coming on the show today. It’s been a pleasure to have you share this information that I know will help to transform people’s lives. I feel honored that you are here to share this information and I am so thrilled for the potential of how many people you’ve just helped. So thank you so much.

 

[01:46:28] Palmer Kippola: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been an honor and a delight.

 

[01:46:31] 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 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 Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation 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 the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.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 would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. 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, doctor’s 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 with 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 and their success and 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 Integrated 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. 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.

 

[01:49:39] Ashley James: 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 highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

 

Get Connected With Palmer Kippola!

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Book By Palmer Kipppola

Beat AutoImmune

Recommended Reading by Palmer Kippola

The Last Best Cure by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

 

 

 


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Jul 11, 2019

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding

 

Grounding And Earthing

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding-and-earthing

Highlights:

  • What is grounding / earthing?
  • Grounding and inflammation.
  • You are creating free radical damage when you’re ungrounded.
  • The human body is electrical in nature.
  • How to prevent electromagnetic interference in the body.

 

Have you experienced feeling fatigued even if you just woke up? In this episode we will talk about the connection of our bodies to the earth and the amazing benefits of grounding / earthing. Clint Ober will share his products that help the body to stay grounded and reduce the risks of immune related conditions.

 

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast today, I think will be the most important and interesting interview you have ever heard.

This information to me is absolutely crucial essential for everyone to know. So I’m very, very excited that you’re here to listen to today’s interview, Clint Ober is doing a giveaway. We talk about it near the end of the episode, but I want to make sure you know about it. Since sometimes people take a few days to listen to a whole interview, especially when it’s as long as this one. So you want to join the Facebook group Learn True Health, just search Learn True Health in Facebook or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group, and it’ll take you to the Facebook group.

We’re doing a giveaway and Clint Ober is going to be giving away several of his products for free as a big giveaway. It’s so exciting. He’s giving away so much – their grounding mats. And the one that I’m using right now, my feet are on right now are pretty much either at cost or they’re putting all the money back into helping people. So he’s mission driven. He’s heart driven, I really really enjoyed interviewing him. I also watched his documentary which something we talked about, we talked about a lot in the interview, and they’ve given me permission to play the documentary for you right now. It can’t be a public documentary, because it is being played at film festivals around the world. And it just won a bunch of awards in Hollywood at a film festival. So in order to be in compliance with the film festivals, it has to be password protected. Well, they gave me the link and the password. And I’m going to be sharing that in the Facebook group as well. You’re going to want to watch this documentary, it is fascinating. We sat down and we were glued to it. In fact, I’ve been wanting to go back and watch it again. That’s how interesting it is.

Now as you listen to today’s show, if you decide that you want to try one of his grounding mats, I absolutely recommend you do it has made a big difference. I’ve tried other stuff from other companies, but he has so much science behind it. I really love it. So you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And there you can find the mats. One thing is if you want to try it and have your whole family try it then there’s a little kit that you can get –  the patch kit. And later on in the interview, I asked him to explain each product and the reason why he created these products was out of a need because he wanted to do studies. So he’s done 26 peer reviewed studies. And he had to create a product in order to do this grounding.

When I first got into this, I really thought that it sounded like a lot of woo woo, it sounded really hippy dippy, like, you know, “Oh, what are we going to go dance barefoot in the grass?” And that little skeptical part of me was like, “Are you kidding me, there can’t be any science to this. This just sounds like a bunch of placebo.” Well, the documentary goes through the science and explains how the immune system works and how these electrons that are built up in our body because we are not grounded anymore. With the shoes we wear, the carpets we walk on. Throughout the day, we are not grounded. And so we’re collecting electrons that you can actually hook yourself up to a meter. And you can prove that we’re being like little batteries. There’s this positive charge that’s occurring. And through the process of earthing which is connecting directly to the ground or grounding, which is using a device in your home. Sometimes it’s easier to do grounding, especially if it’s like February in Montana, and a lot of people want to go walk in the grass right now it’s summertime. So we all want to go out and walk in the grass barefoot, but there are parts of the country that we don’t want to do that in because of heavy spraying of pesticides. So in that case, the devices are amazing for helping you.

I love that it calms me, it makes me happier. And our son who’s using it on his bed is sleeping in now. We’ve done really well with sleep between the magnesium and changing our mattresses, and all the little health habits that we do. But since we added the grounding mat, he is sleeping in more. So I thought that was really neat. And I also noticed that we’re getting even deeper sleep, I didn’t think that was even possible. And that’s because when you do grounding or earthing, it significantly lowers inflammation in the body. And he talks about that both in the movie, in the documentary that you’re gonna have access to by going to the Facebook group, and also in this interview that you’re about to enjoy.

So I’m so thrilled that you’re here to learn from this information from Clint Ober. He is quite a character quite fascinating and such a wonderful soul. It was a true blessing to interview him today. And I know you’ll really enjoy what he has to share. I just want to make sure you know, to join the Facebook group and participate in the giveaway because you could win one of the awesome mats and I’d love for you to do that. I’d love for you to win it. That’d be great. He’s giving me I think like five of them. And also definitely come to the Facebook group so you can have access to the documentary and watch it. It is amazing. And if you have any questions, please come to the Facebook group, Learn True Health in Facebook and ask them. Our community is super supportive. So many people not just me, I’ll definitely be there to answer your questions. But the whole community comes together to help each other. So it’s a really wonderful place to be. Wonderful. Well enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 366.

 

 

6:10 Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guests. Out of all the interviews I’ve done and it’s been over 365 interviews. I feel like this one today is going to be the most important interview that you listen to. We have with us Clint Ober. I’ve watched the documentary with him recently the Earthing Movie. And it has completely blown my mind. I feel like you know that little nuclear explosion that went off in my head. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most important thing my listeners need to know.” Clint, I’m honored to have you here on the show today.

 

 

6:51 Clint Ober: Well, Ashley, I’m honored to be able to visit with you and present what I know about earthing and what we’ve learned over the last 20 years and hopefully help some people.

 

 

7:03 Ashley James: Absolutely. Now I first heard about this, I want to say about maybe a year and a half ago, I was interviewing I believe was a naturopath. I’ve heard about a dozen naturopath and holistic experts on my show, telling me that grounding or earthing is vital  – is absolutely essential to someone’s healing and it kept coming up. But the first time I heard it, I was asking one of my guests to share some homework for the listeners, what would be one thing they could do to really change their life, like what one thing that 100% of the population can do to change your life. And she said, the first thing I do with my clients is I get them a grounding mat on their bed. Absolutely essential that every one of her patients have one. And I thought, wow, if she says that it’s that important, then I need to look into this a little bit. And so I told my husband and he got really curious. And that’s he actually found you through searching through YouTube videos. And he came to me he goes, “You have to have this guy, Clint on your show. He’s amazing. This stuff is amazing.” And yeah, and so we started to do things like walk barefoot outside, when we could and hug, I was hugging trees. You know, just to feel –  do I feel different? Do I notice a difference when the electrons are leaving my body? And then my husband got into trying to build our own mats because he saw some videos online. And I don’t recommend making your own mats, it was kind of messy and, and it just didn’t work out very well. But your mats are amazing. In fact, I have my feet on the grounding mat right now for the office. And when I have my feet on it, I actually don’t want to leave the office, I start feeling so good. Have you heard that before, people say they don’t want to get off the mat?

 

 

9:03 Clint Ober: Yes. You don’t want to get out of bed.

 

 

9:06 Ashley James: Right. Well, what’s really interesting is that we put the grounding mat that we bought one from you and put it on our bed. And and we noticed a difference, we’re like. “I wonder if our son knows the difference?” He’s four and so we didn’t tell him but we put him on one. And he started sleeping in. And that’s like a miracle for us because he’s been our alarm clock for the last four years. And he was sleeping in, we’d wake up and he’s still sleeping. And that would never ever happen in the past. And it’s the only change we made – was putting them on the grounding mat. I thought that was really interesting.

 

 

9:46 Clint Ober: It is. Absolutely love it.

 

 

9:49 Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to get into your story. I know definitely we picked some people’s interest. What is this? What is this grounding or earthing? It sounds so woo, whoo. You know, “Oh, go hug a tree, go walk barefoot in the grass.” Well, when we started telling my mother in law about this, she thought it was fascinating because her nanny growing up was her grandmother from Germany. And every morning she would go out as the sun rose, and they would walk barefoot in the grass, in Pasadena, California. Every morning her whole childhood, her grandmother made her do that. And and so when we started talking to her about earthing or grounding, she said, “That’s what I did my whole childhood, my grandmother made us do it.” And I thought that was really interesting that we, as humans knew to do it. And we’ve lost that way in the last few generations. So I want to get into your story. And then we’re going to dive into the science of why earthing or grounding can remove inflammation, pain, depression, it has even helped women lose weight, and balance the systems of the body. It’s it’s very fascinating. But first, let’s get into your story, Clint, what happened in your life that led you to discover earthing or grounding?

 

 

11:18 Clint Ober: Well, I never really know where to start. But probably the best place is to – I spent 30 years in the communications industry, primarily cable television, broadcast television, satellite distribution and things like that. And in that industry, we have to ground everything to the earth, in order to maintain electrical stability throughout the system to prevent noise, electrical glitches. It’s like if you see a TV set that has lines in it then flicks and you know any kind of electromagnetic interference. So we have to ground the system to maintain it at earth potential. So that eliminates all the static charges. And if there’s any atmospheric electrical events, a lot of times people think of lightning, but there’s lots of other rises and ground potential and all of that thing. So But anyhow, the main thing is, everything had to be grounded to the earth in order for safety and for electrical stability. And I learned that when I was quite young, prior to that, I grew up in Montana. And we were barefoot all the time, most of it. And a lot of my friends were Native American. And so we were a very earthy group of people. I mean, we were more nature oriented, it’s like, in nature, everything is connected. It’s it’s all systemic, and we’re a part of it, and so on. After I had a health event, before I had a root canal, as a result, an abscess in my liver, and I had to go in for surgery, and they had to remove a lot of my liver. And at the time, they didn’t know how much they could remove and habit grow back. And I was young enough to get a new liver at that time, I was like 49. I’m 75 now. The problem was, I didn’t have time, because of the condition I was in. And so I did recover from that. It was kind of, I think, a little bit of that was touched on in the movie.

After I went through that traumatic experience. I woke up one morning, and I looked out doors and the world was just very different to me, I couldn’t go back to work yet. But anyhow, I looked out the window and everything was vibrant, it was electrical, it was like there was energy, the pine needles, the sky, everything was vibrant. For some reason, I looked around the room that I was in, my bedroom. And I was looking at all of the art that I had there, plus I had lots of other things. And I just had this epiphany that, you know, I almost died and I spent my whole life just acquiring all these assets and almost died. And so my kids would get part of it, most of it would be auctioned off or thrown away. And I realized that, you know, my life, that I didn’t really own these things. They owned my soul because I owned them. So I had to take care of them. I had to provide, and the environment, the home, all that stuff. And and in the end, I almost died and so what’s the point in all of this? So anyhow, as I came through that I, I just had this feeling came over me that I didn’t own any of this stuff. So I gave everything I had away except for what I could put in a couple of suitcases and an RV. And I didn’t go back to work and the company that I owned, I turned it over to my employees and let them have it. And it was a fairly large company. But I didn’t want to make my life about working anymore.

The main thing that went through my mind was, I knew that I almost died, because I went through all the processes. And when I recovered, I was different. I knew that this time, if I’m going to die again, I want to be able to be happy. I want to be able to look back on my life, not for anybody else, or for any rewards or anything but just look back on life and say, I was worth being here. I was a contributor, I did something good. And so I disengaged from everything in my life. And I spent about four years driving around the United States in an RV spending most of the time with my kids, grandkids and in national parks. And I spent a lot of time alone. So I ended up down in Key Largo, Florida. One night I felt like was nature talking to me, I was looking over the bay. And here’s some manatees hosing them down a bit and playing them for fun. But anyhow, I was standing there and watching the sunset over the bay, over the gulf, I just had this feeling that I had to go do something. So I went into the RV and I wrote on a piece of paper, become an opposite charge. And I didn’t have any idea what that meant.

An opposite charged me would be no gotten. Stir up the troops charge everybody up, get them excited, get them moving. And then the second thing I wrote down is status quo was the enemy. And again, I didn’t really understand that other than, you know, change. So I didn’t think too much about that. And I just kind of put that away. I just had this feeling and I had to get back West. So I unplugged, loaded everything up, stop to see a couple of my daughters on the way and I ended up back in California. And I started driving around, I was looking for a place that I could just settle. And I didn’t feel comfortable. So I went to Tucson, that wasn’t right. So that night I was driving in the afternoon, I was driving up to Flagstaff because that’s more like Motanna where I come from. And on the way I stopped in Sedona, Arizona, and I pulled into an RV park late at night, couldn’t see what was going on. Just pulled into a space and park. Woke up in the morning and I looked outdoors and I said, “Well, I’m not leaving here.” This is like living in a national park. And because of all the beauty and the energy and the feeling and it just felt good.

So I spent about two years there. And in that process I started doing, when I was a young kid, I did a lot of stage lighting and things like that, for fun. So I started doing some lighting and for all the galleries in Sedona and Scottsdale. I would just go in and help them light up their shows. And in many cases you would have to redo their circuits or move the lighting around. So that kept me busy. But one day I was working on my computer and it kept crashing. This is back in 98, 97. And I knew that it was from static electricity. So I went in fix the outlet. So it was grounded. Then I put a piece of conductive tape across my desk and connected it to the ground. And so whenever I would touch the computer, I would touch that first. So I wouldn’t have a static charge on my computer.

After I resolved that I was just finishing up a job, and so I went out doors, and I sat down on a bench and an RV full of tourists pulled up. I was at an art gallery area where I was fixing some stuff. And I just sat there and I looked at them and they were getting off the bus. Everybody was wearing these white tennis shoes, athletic shoes. I don’t know whether they’re Nike or Reebok or whatever. I think they were Nike. But anyhow, I just intuitively asked the question. I wonder if humans no longer being naturally grounded, it could be affecting us. I mean, affecting how we feel our affecting us. I didn’t know. So that night I went home and I got a meter and I grounded it to the earth. I walk indoors and put a patch on, just started going around the house and I noticed all of the elevated EMF charges on my body, and then I started to measure the static electricity, which is more DC and the huge static electricity that builds up and that every time you take a step, you’re creating a static, if you’re wearing shoes, rubber soled shoes, and you’re walking on a carpet or a vinyl or some kind of flooring. Then every time you pick up your feet, there’s contact separate. I mean there’s separation of electrons, so you’re creating charge on the body. If you do a lot of it, then you’ll get the little shock when you go touch a doorknob, but forever in a home you are you have static electricity build upon your body. And in many cases, you have high levels of these electric charges, electric field charges on the body. That night, I said, “Okay, it’s getting late, I needed to go to bed.” So I laid some metal duct tape that I bought earlier in the day. And I laid it across my bed, connected an alligator clip to it through a round wire out the window, connected into a ground rod through a second wire out the window and connected the electric meter to a little separate ground rod. And then I measured them together and I knew that the tape was grounded because the meters went to near zero. So then I laid down. I measured the body voltage and all that stuff on my body. And then I laid down on the tape. And as long as I laid flat on it, and I saw the body voltage dropped to zero. But the most important thing that happened that night was that I laid down on the bed normally for me to go to sleep, I had to take Advil, because I had a lot of pain I was a cowboy, I’m a skier, I played tennis, I’ve done everything and back at that time I was in my early 50s. I’m pretty tough shape. But I had to go to sleep, I had a lot of pains and a lot of issues, so I take Advil to go to sleep.

That night, I was laying on the tape, I had the voltage meter lying on my stomach and I was measuring the voltages. I just kind of laid it on my chest. And the next thing I knew it was morning, and the voltmeter was laying down beside me. And I stayed flat all night long. I was excellently grounded for the first time in my life. And I woke up and I said, “Wow, there’s something to this, I need to learn more about this.” So I started to look around a little bit on the internet, which is really difficult back in 98 to 99, there just wasn’t a lot of data. So I went down to the university in Arizona and I went to their medical libraries looking for anything I could find on grounding. The only literature on grounding had to do with, if you know if you’re going to perform surgery, and then the patients need to be grounded. And in many cases, the surgeons have to be grounded in order to prevent static sparks. Because if they cut the skin and there’s a static spark, it can trigger a heart event. So that made some sense. But anyhow, I couldn’t find anything about grounding for help – Grounding for to reduce static electricity, to protect chips, to protect computers, to protect software, to protect against gasoline events, fireworks, all of those things. Grounding is a huge industry.

It’s a multi billion dollar industry in the commercial area and it’s 100 years old. I mean, ever since dynamite and gasoline, people have to wear grounded shoes. They have to be grounded and everything has to be protected from that sparks. And then I went back to Sedona and I started grounding a few of my friends, a couple buddies that I hung out with a little bit. One of them had severe arthritis in his hand, and I didn’t think anything about it. But I told him, “You gotta let me do this. And you got to experience and make sure I’m not crazy.” So I went to their homes, and I grounded them like they I grounded myself. And both of them said they had real results. First of all, it was a joke, it couldn’t possibly be whatever. But the third day, the fellow who had arthritis, he says, “Do you think this could have any effect on arthritis?” I said, “I wouldn’t have a clue.” And he said, “Well, my arthritis is coming down.” And so that piqued my interest. So I kept playing with it and playing with it. And then I recognize that, yes, this affects me, it affects my friends. So there’s something here, but there’s no information on it. And it wasn’t till after we wrote the book, all of these people from around the world – from Germany and all of the Native American populations throughout North and South America. And all of these I mean, grounding, or barefoot was a known thing. But the science behind it did not exist. So the thing that happened, I want to make sure I’m on track here. But the thing that happened, as time went on, I came out to California and I went to UCLA. And I asked them and they said, you know, they pretty much told me that you know you’re you’re crazy. So anyhow, I took that, and I went and found me some researchers that were in the meeting there, and they helped me do a study. And then we saw that, yes, there’s some dramatic effects going on here. Anecdotally, we could see it, then there needed to be some quantifiable studies, then we did the cortisol study and all the others ones. And I can kind of come back to that. But the real event that happened was in the late 50s, they invented plastics. And then by 1960, we had the plastic materials that we could create carpets with, we could create soles of shoes with. And so the whole world, this was a real benefit. Because now the poorest people around everybody, no matter who you are, you could afford shoes now. Because the leather soled shoes that we had before. Before 1960, this is an important thing. Before 1960, 90% of all visitors to a practitioner were for infectious disease, acute injury and childbirth, 10% for stress and whatever, today over 90% of all visits to a practitioner for a stress related health disorder. Meaning, it’s about something’s affecting the immune system sufficient that you can maintain health. And now we know that that’s inflammation. Before 1960 when I was a kid, we had leather shoes that we had to wear to school, or go to church, and for weddings, or real special events. Other than that we were barefoot. And if we were going to church on Sunday, and it was raining, we carried our shoes in our hands, walk barefoot and when we got in the church would put the shoes on, we couldn’t walk in the water or the rain with leather soled shoes, because that would ruin them. And they were expensive back then. That’s the world I come from, now it may be different in the bigger cities and other populations of the world and in Europe. But everything was leather sold, which is a semiconductor. So even wearing a leather soled shoe, you’re somewhat grounded. But when we invented the plastic soled shoe, then that’s like putting a jacket around an electrical wire – it insulates. It insulates us from the earth.

Now, that takes us to what is ground? Ground is the earth itself has an electrical surface charge, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, but you can feel it. On the average, the earth, it will vary between midnight and 12 noon, at 12 noon, the electrical potential of the Earth is higher because the sun’s hitting the earth directly. And it excites electrons on the surface. At night, everything calms down. It’s quieter. But it has a 24 circadian profile that absent flows and so on. But you know, when human beings stand barefoot on the earth, the earth has a negative surface charge. And the word negative – a lot of people would know this word because in a battery, it has a negative side, it has a positive side. On a little battery one hand is positive, the other hand is negative. How batteries work is you store electrons on one side. And then if you connect to wire to the other side, than the electrons will travel from the negative side to the positive side. That’s how batteries work, but the earth is a huge battery being charged by the sun. But it’s has a negative surface charge of about 20 to 50 millivolts on the average. So there’s a lot of free electrons stored on the surface of the earth that can move and reduce charge. Now go back to the cable industry, TV industry for a minute. The reason we connected everything to the earth, was so that a conductive cables, and everything electrical could be held at earth potential – meaning as soon as we connect them to the earth, the cable system, then it goes negative 20 to 50 millivolts, the surface wires. So if there’s any charge or static, they’re automatically absorbed by electrons coming from the earth, up on the wire and neutralizing charge.

 

28:54 Ashley James: So when the cable wires which we’ve seen they’re up by the telephone wires, in these poles, are they collecting a charge because they’re having the sun beat down on them, because they’re in the positively charged environment of above ground? Like what’s charging them?

 

 

29:20 Clint Ober: It’s mostly wind.

 

 

29:22 Ashley James: Oh, interesting. So the wind is carrying the positive charge?

 

 

29:26 Clint Ober: It’s the friction of the wind hitting the cable, and then you have the atmospheric charges. If a cloud passes over, then it’s going to have a pull on the electrons on the earth and kind of well up. Temperature, wind, dust, all of the pollution, all of these things, but it really comes back to wind. Wind is the primary thing because the wind is constantly blowing and there’s a lot of friction being created between the wind. And the air and the atmosphere is positively charged.

 

 

30:14  Ashley James: So the reason why I asked that question is to compare our bodies to those cables. If those cables, which are just standing like they’re staying in one spot, can collect a positive charge, then what happens to us we’re moving around, we’re out in the wind, we’re at our desks in front of electronics, and we’re not grounded, we’re insulated. Our entire life has become insulated, as you pointed out starting in the 50s. Because we are wearing our Nike rubber soled shoes or whatever, a Reebok rubber soled shoes, and all of our shoes now have that rubber. And we barely ever touched the ground with our bare feet or our bare hands, very few people do. In fact, I had a guest say, “You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that we had to wash our hands with the faucet, we would probably all die because we accidentally ground ourselves at least once a day by touching the faucet.”

 

 

31:13  Clint Ober: Yes. And that’s very true. For instance, most of the diagnosed autoimmune disorders, which we know are related to this are female. Men have a lesser amount, but men live in different environments. They golf, they work on cars, they are outdoors, they do the lawn, they do various things, they accidentally, incidentally get grounded.

 

 

31:41 Ashley James: Oh, I see.

 

 

31:42 Clint Ober: Women get up in the morning, they’re on a carpet, go take a shower, they do get a little ground there in many cases, then they put on, a lot of times you have clothes that has poly in it and put on shoes, then you walk on carpet or indoor insulated type of flooring. And then in many cases, they’re handling vacuums, and hair dryers and all of these things. And then when they go to work, they get in, they walk to the car in insulated shoes, drive the car to work, get out of the car, go sit in an office that they are totally ungrounded in static or whatever, sitting in front of computers over the electric fields in the static electricity, and their bodies are just totally electrified.

 

 

32:30 Ashley James: You mentioned DC charge, that static electricity builds up inside us, all the electrons have built up inside us. These free electrons, which are free radicals, it’s causing free radical damage, right? That they’re built up inside us, like a DC battery, on the Earthing Movie, it was mentioned that someone could have up to 20 volts stored inside them because they don’t ground.

 

 

33:03 Clint Ober: Voltage is a measurement between two points, the electrical potential between two points. Like the Earth would be zero and your electric lights would be 120 volts. So what they’re talking about in many cases, let me explain something first. The body when it’s grounded to the earth, it’s identical to a cable, or a TV tower or your refrigerator or your computer, if it hasn’t grounded. For instance, your refrigerator is grounded, the metal housing on the refrigerator is grounded. So it’s identical to earth potential, I mean, it has the same amount of electrons per square inch, as the earth itself does. And the reason that you ground that to earth so if there’s no electrical event, you know, broken wire or anything ever happens, that refrigerator is grounded, so the human being will not get shot. So the electrons from the earth, switch up the wire and the breaker gets blown. That’s the safety side of it. But what happens to a body, how does a body get voltage? If a human being is standing in their living room or laying on their bed, and they are grounded, then their body is an antenna for electric fields, and electric fields radiate from all electrical devices. These are lamps, some computers, if they’re not grounded computers, TV sets. But electrical wires – anytime you see a lamp or an electrical wire anywhere, it is radiating an electric field. The only way you can remove an electric field or prevent an electric field is to unplug the lamp. But if you are in the proximity, or close to it, the closer you are to the electrical cord, then that electric field is being radiated from that wire. It creates a charge on your body. And you can take an AC voltmeter, you can connect it to the earth on one side. And then you can put an electrode patch or anything on the body with the other side of the voltage meter and it will measure the AC charge that is on your body. And you can walk close to a lamp, it will increase. You can walk further away, it will decrease. You can stand barefoot on the grass or on a grounded device, and it will go to zero because the pad is at earth potential. When your body stands on the earth or the mat, then the electrons from the earth come up the wire, the negative free electrons on the earth, they come up the wire, they bring pad to earth potential, then anything that touches that pad, if it’s a human body then the human body is going to equalize with the earth. You will maintain the same negative charge as the earth. And what that means is there’s an abundance of free electrons on the body that are able to move and reduce charge. Does that make sense?

 

 

36:24 Ashley James: Uh-huh.

 

 

36:29 Clint Ober: Okay, so over a period of 60 years, we started wearing rubber soled shoes. And there’s an exponential curve that is still climbing. It was about 2010, 2011 when we had about 90% of the shoes sold in America were plastic soles. Back in 1960 10% were plastic soled shoes. So we’ve had this complete reversal of leather soled shoes versus synthetic soled shoes. But if you look in the book, The Earthing book, there are charts that show the growth of,for instance, rubber soled shoes over a 58 year period. And here’s the growth of autism, lupus, MS, diabetes, and so on, and so on, and so on. So, now in the early days, when we started investigating all of this, we did not understand what the mechanism was. How could grounding the body reduce pain? That’s the only thing we knew at that time. And this was back in, I think in 2001. I was at a conference in California, trying to talk to people that might know something. And we ran across Dr. Stephen Sinatra who was a cardiologist and I started talking to him. Because cardiologists deal with electrical, they know the body’s electrical first chemical second. But no one else did at that time. And more importantly, Stephen said, “Clint, if you are affecting people’s pain, then you need to be looking at inflammation. Because pain is a byproduct of inflammation.” You have to have inflammation first before you can have pain. So that’s, I went home scratching my head, because inflammation to me was, I was playing tennis, and I slipped and twisted my ankle, and it was who would swell up, it got red and heat. So that was inflammation. That was what I knew. But along the way, we began to learn. And we kept doing studies, and we began to learn that when we ground the body, it would reduce the pain. And then we went on and did some tests on hormones, especially cortisol. We wanted to know if it calms the body when you ground. So we needed to understand that. So we did a study on cortisol, we would measure cortisol every four hours for 24 hours, and ground them for a few weeks, and then do it again. And it’s just dramatic – the change, the shift, because before their circadian cortisol profiles were all over the place. And then after grounding for a few weeks, they all synchronized. And these people lived in different parts of southern California. So we knew it was connected to earth rhythms and so on. So we learned about cortisol, and I’d like to come back to that later. Then I started investigating inflammation and then I learned one day that neutrophils, macrophages and many of these white blood cells, what they do is – how the immune system functions, is if you have a damaged cell, or pathogen in your body, then it sends over one of these white blood cells, which have many different many purposes, but they encapsulate the damaged cell or the pathogen, and they release reactive oxygen species. As soon as I saw the word reactive, then I knew that this is an electrical process.

 

 

40:46 Ashley James: That’s so fascinating.

 

 

40:50 Clint Ober: So it was an accident.

 

 

40:51 Ashley James: So just to illustrate for the listeners, a white blood cell, it needs to attack a pathogen, or maybe the white blood cells need to digest a, like a cancer cell or a cell that’s damaged. And it comes along the white blood cell encapsulates the cell, and then it releases reactive protein, which what it’s actually doing is releasing free radicals, it’s releasing lose electrons, that magnetically tear apart that cell, so then the white blood cell can continue to digest it, is that correct?

 

 

41:28 Clint Ober: Right. That’s how the immune system destroys pathogens, and damaged cells – by stealing electrons from their structure and killing them.

 

 

41:36 Ashley James: Uhm-hmm. And if we have too much of that, so the inflammation comes in, when we have too much of that going on and we have too much of a buildup of these electrons in our body because we don’t ground, then they start to attack. The electrons start to attack the healthy tissue creating more inflammation.

 

 

41:55 Clint Ober: Yup. What we have to do is go backwards now. In 1960, before then we were all semi grounded, or we spent a lot of time grounded. People who didn’t spend any time – you know, there’s a few of those. But these autoimmune diseases, inflammation related health disorders started to climb in around 1960, late 50s, and the 60s. So when the body is grounded, it has ground, earth potential – ground potential. What it has is a reservoir of free electrons, the body is negatively charged. So those free electrons are not just on the surface of body, they’re in the body, they’re everywhere. They don’t have free range. I mean the body gates – everything in and out and all that kind of stuff. But basically, when we did our grounding studies, it was like 2008 or 2010 when I met with Stephen Sinatra back in Essex, Connecticut, and there were about a dozen doctors got together. And we’re all trying to figure this out. So what we did is they drew blood from everybody and looked at the blood under a microscope, then grounded everybody for 30 to 40 minutes and looked at their blood again. And what we saw was a complete separation, automatic, perfect profile of the blood after they were grounded. But before there was real low formation, like static electricity, and peanuts, you know, the blood was all stuck together. When it’s stuck together like that, can’t get in and out of the capillary, so soon as you ground and the blood can get in and out of the capillaries, then everybody’s face started to pink up and so on. As soon as you ground the body, then the red blood cells, we found out through further experiment, that the negative surface charge on red blood cells increases by a factor of almost three. So now the red blood cells being more negative, they can’t stick together, and they repel each other. That’s how nature maintains normal blood viscosity, the thickness of blood. But more importantly, is as the blood circulates throughout the body, and the negative surface – so if you have negative increase negative surface charge on red blood cells, you have increased negative surface charge on every cell in the body. So now when the white blood cells come over and release reactive oxygen, and destroy a cell, if there’s any remaining radicals – free radicals, then the blood can give up an electron here, there or adjacent cells, there’s plenty of ground free electrons on the cells in that area that can absorb and reduce and prevent, the blood can give up an electron to a free radical which prevents damaging the blood or damaging the cell.

So by grounding the body, in the past, the immune system was dependent on us maintaining a negative charge. A quick side note is if you look at the animals who live in the wild, the elk, deer, coyotes, all the animals that live out there, cancer doesn’t exist out there. They don’t have plaque on their arteries, they don’t have plaque on their teeth, they don’t need to go to the emergency room, when they get hurt, they can just go find a piece of ground bury themselves in they heal up. But the animals who live indoors with their owners, they all manifest autoimmune diseases, just like their owners. And they have a death rate of approximately 50% from cancer – indoor, domesticated animals. Now a lot of people could say, well, it’s the food, it’s this, it’s that and so on. But the simple corollary is, the animals in the wild are naturally grounded 24/7. They can’t have inflammation in their bodies.

 

 

46:14 Ashley James: And what fascinated me was  the understanding of how the immune system works, like you said, how the white blood cells work to attack and digest pathogens or damaged cells. To destroy them, they use the free radical charge.

 

 

46:15 Clint Ober: Yes.

 

 

46:16: Ashley James: And if we have too much of a buildup of that charge, then it attacks the healthy cells, and then we get inflammation because now the body is having to clean up the damage from these free radicals running through our body. And my listeners have heard about free radicals. We talked about how when you consume rancid oil or if you eat anything that’s fried food, it’s proven. I had Dr. Joel Fuhrman on my show, and his latest book, which is called Fast Food Genocide, he talks about the studies where they proven that if you consume fried food on a regular basis, like once a week is a regular basis, that you have cut 10 years or more off your life. So that’s free radical damage from eating fried, like fries once a week. Let’s say you go out and have some fish and chips once a week, meant you’re now going to die in your 60s instead of in your 70s or 80s from that one choice. That’s how bad free radical damage is from fried foods. And we think about free radicals as in, we can get them from our food and we need to consume antioxidants, which is all the fruits and vegetables to neutralize those free radicals. But no one thinks that we need to ground ourselves to release the free radicals because the free radicals are just these lose electrons, right?

 

 

48:07 Clint Ober: Let me try to straighten this out a little bit. If the body is grounded, then it is negatively charged, and you can’t have inflammation in the body when it is grounded. Pathogens I mean, free radicals, every time you take a breath, you’re breathing in all kinds of particulates. And they create problems in the lungs and the immune system has to clean all that up. If you have asthma, you know it for sure. But even when you’re healthy, when you’re breathing bad air, you’re breathing in radicals. And so the water – it’s definitely food and all these issues that are going on in our environment. But what grounding is all about, is when you ground to the earth and your body is negatively charged, then our working hypothesis is and that’s what we’ve kind of proved, is if you get grounded and stay grounded 24 hours a day, and you saw the movie. And you saw a lady with MS. I told her, “I can help you. But you got to do this, you got to ground 24 hours a day and stay grounded until you get well.” And you saw her story I believe so. Anyhow, if you get grounded and stay grounded 24/7 here’s what happens to the immune system. If you’re ungrounded the immune system, you have the build up of these radicals, whatever source they’re coming from; food, all of it, and from metabolism, just the body itself creates a lot of radicals.

So when you’re grounded, the immune system provides free electrons everywhere in your body all over the place. Okay, radicals that are produced, or reduced – radicals from a white blood cell, it produces reactive oxygen in order to reduce and tear apart that pathogen. Where inflammation comes from primarily, is if there’s any remaining radicals, they don’t build up. They will only last for 10, 20 nanoseconds, at the very most. They’re going to reach and grab and steal an electron from something in the vicinity. And the only real thing in the vicinity is another cell, another normal cell in the body. So they reach over and attach to and grab an electron from a healthy cell and damage it. And so that neutralizes those radicals. But in the meantime, now we’ve damaged another cell. So metaphorically, a message goes out to the immune system, “Hey, something has got me. It’s still here.” And so it sends another neutrophils and neutrophils, if that cell can’t be repaired, depending on the damage, then it destroys that cell. So then if there’s any reactive oxygen left from it 10, 20 nanoseconds later, it’s going to steal it from another cell. And so that’s like burning along. That’s oxidation. So the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue. You’re not storing free radicals, what you’re doing is you’re building up free radical damage. So now the immune system rather than do what it would normally do, like take care of the pathogens from breathing, or water or, or food or some of these other things, and you can overwhelm the immune system with any of them. But let’s just say in a normal situation. So now the immune system can’t fight things that it would normally do during the day, it has to go and spend all this energy and resources, trying to manage the free radical damage and to stop the burn. But it’s creating more burn as it’s trying to fix it. And so it’s stressing the immune system sufficient that the body can’t maintain health.

 

 

52:32 Ashley James: And then doctors say under a microscope, “Why is it the immune system is attacking supposedly healthy tissue? This must be an autoimmune disease.” When pathologist look, pathologists are like, “Well, there was nothing wrong with the thyroid, why is the body constantly attacking the thyroid?” for example. And what you’re saying is that it is this chain reaction that we we’re not grounded. It’s a chain reaction, that’s happening at the size of an electron, the size of an oxygen molecule. And so of course, a pathologist with a regular microscope can’t see that that supposedly healthy tissue was damaged. Because of the immune system could not do what it’s supposed to do, because they’re that we’re not grounded. So we need to ground ourselves constantly as much as possible need to. It’s not just go out once a day and walk barefoot for five minutes, it’s all day long. We need to ground ourselves so that we are at earth’s potential which is releasing all that positive charge so the white blood cells can do their job, because otherwise the white blood cells end up damaging the body in the process of trying to do their jobs.

 

 

53:57 Clint Ober: Yes, collateral damage.

 

 

54:00 Ashley James: So autoimmune disease is collateral damage of not grounding ourselves throughout the day?

 

 

54:06 Clint Ober: All autoimmune diseases are related to a dysfunction immune system because the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue.

 

 

54:13 Ashley James: Have you seen people cure their own autoimmune disease by grounding themselves throughout the day?

 

 

54:20 Clint Ober: Thousands.

 

 

54:22 Ashley James: This is why I said at the beginning that this interview is going to be the most important interview that everyone’s listened to. I’ve done so many interviews and such great information, but my goal has been to help people get to the root cause.

 

 

54:39 Clint Ober: Right.

 

 

54:40 Ashley James: And this is the root cause.

 

 

54:41 Clint Ober: It’s ground meaning it’s its base, it’s at the very foundation of health. You have to have this throughout all the time. The human body was grounded like the animals are in the wild now. And autoimmune disease was not the problem, infectious disease, acute injury, childbirth, war and famine and so on. But environmental inflammation related health disorders, autoimmune diseases are 100% I believe, related to loss of ground. The body has lost its electrical ground, it lost its ability to neutralize positive charges. In this case, reactive oxygen species. Now you can drink a glass of water, it’s going to help and if it’s more negatively charged is going to help. But you can’t drink water all day long. Every day all day long. There’s not enough free electrons and a glass of water. Blueberries, certain types of berries are much more beneficial than others, but you would have to have a blueberry drip.

 

 

55:54 Ashley James: My husband would agree with you. He eats two pounds of blueberries a day. It’s his favorite food.

 

 

56:00 Clint Ober: Exactly. It’s really, really simple and that’s what’s complicated about this, because the body is electrical first – everything in the body functions electrically, then chemically. You have to take an electron from here to there in order to create energy, life. That’s how we know when a person is dead, because they have no more electrical potential. I mean they’ve lost their electrical capacity. So how do I Where do I go from here?

 

 

56:40 Ashley James: Well you just bring up a really good point. If we go to a cardiologist they’re going to read the electrical, they hook us up to the EKG or these other machines that will read the electrical signals from our body, we have to remember that every part of our nervous system has electrical potential, has an electrical charge that in between each synaptic gap in the nervous system. We keep thinking we’re a bunch of chemicals but beneath that, it’s actually electrical information that is happening in the body as well. We’re bio electrical beings. And when I think about it, think about a machine where the electronics are not grounded like a computer that it’s getting static, your TV gets staticky, it crashes, the hard drive burns out, it doesn’t work correctly. And that’s just a machine, which is an electrical being. It’s a machine that’s not grounded, it can’t function. And now we look at us, a significantly more complex being because we’re bio electrical beings and when we’re not grounded, the circuitry is blowing out.

 

 

58:00 Clint Ober: Right. But you also have to recognize that every cell in the body functions electrically. You have an electrical surface charge on the cell and an internal electrical circuit charge, and how it takes information or nutrients in and takes other things out is through repolarization. So anytime there’s a difference of a few bolts on a on a cell, then they’ll depolarized, repolarize – so everything is electrical first. The body is the most electrical thing in the environment. There’s nothing on earth that’s more electrical than a human body.

 

 

58:41 Ashley James: I want to talk about some of the studies that you have participated in, because where we left off on your journey was that you had gone to universities and they kind of threw you out, laughed you out at the university. And since then you have conducted 24 peer reviewed studies that are monumental. In the earthing movie they talked about one study where they hooked preemie babies up to basically becoming grounded. They grounded these preemie babies in the NICU in their little oxygen tents. And and they had outstanding results. Can you share the results from that study?

 

 

59:24 Clint Ober: Yeah. Basically, babies in these ICU units – they’re ungrounded and their little bodies and nervous systems are all electrically charged. And there’s a lot of EMF around, but there’s a lot of static electricity because they’re in plastic things, and there’s people coming in touching them. So anyhow, I think there were 24 preemies and these were babies that were prematurely born by some number. These studies are all available on www.earthinginstitute.net for detail. But just to give you a general concept, what they did is they put a simple electrode patch on the babies, and grounded them to the earth via the electrical ground, and the babies, they’re totally stressed. Their heart rate variability is really significantly challenged. And you know, they’re they’re just in this wired state, and it causes all of the cholics and a lot of the problems that these babies experience. So what they did, when they grounded them, then they measured everything, of course. And what they found was that there was a, you know, like a 60 70% increase in normalization of vagal tone. And vagal tone is the calmness of your balance of the parasympathetic versus sympathetic normalizing and normalizing heart rate variability, then the babies would calm down, circulation would normalize, and all of these things. and it was universal across the board. And so that was the first study. And that was done, I think, at the Hershey Children’s Clinic in Hershey, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania. So that was a really, really good study, because here we find that grounding normalizes and vagal tone. What that means is, you have a parasympathetic nervous system, you have a sympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system responds to anything in the environment – noise, wind, cold, somebody breaks something, just whatever, or stress, you know, whatever is going on. So the sympathetic is on one side of the body pushing, and it’s like a fight or flight mechanism. If you see there’s a bear in the woods, so cortisol spikes.

In the beginning, that’s not a problem. But as time goes, on the parasympathetic, it’s releasing hormones to modulate the response of the sympathetic so that you will stand still for a split second to determine if you really need to run or if you’re really need to fight, and that calms down the response. But eventually, if you live in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, that means you got noise, everything chaos going around you in your life all the time, then what happens is, the parasympathetic has limited resources. So it’s going to run out of hormones, and whatever, and then all of a sudden, the sympathetic will start over driving. And that’s when you get this, what’s going on with these babies, I mean, this challenge, I mean their bodies are just screaming. And it’s the same with adults, I mean, people who are wired, and take a look at our kids, especially in classrooms, they’re wired, they’re just jumping in their skin. So by normalizing vagal tone, what you’re doing is, to me, you’re giving the body itself a reference. It’s connected to the earth, it’s got a reference. So the inflammation that is created by the sympathetic over responding, the negative surface charge of the earth, the negative electrons come into the body, then they’re reducing the positive charges in the body, and that calms down the system, and then the parasympathetic can recover or begin to recover. And for people who have chronic fatigue, adrenal burnout, all of these issues, this is what it’s about.

So here we have a, you know, a class A study showing that just simple grounding puts out the fire of inflammation, calms the nervous system, and stabilizes the heart rate variability. That’s powerful. And now we just have to convince people that babies and adults and children are all the same. Their nervous systems are all the same. So if a child in school gets up in the morning, puts his tennis shoes on, and then he spends his whole day insulated from the earth, that’s why we have a lot of this high anxiety, and irritability and chaos.

 

 

1:04:53 Ashley James: I’m just seeing it with our four year old son. We don’t feed him sugar, we don’t overstimulate him with TV or anything like that. And yet, and he hasn’t had any trauma in his childhood. He’s just average healthy, happy, but he, he hasn’t been grounded a lot, you know, we always put his shoes on, and maybe once in a while he’ll play barefoot. In fact, when we’re outside, he usually throws his shoes off. It’s just his instinct to do so, which is great. He knows he knows to ground himself. But just putting him on the grounding mat to sleep on, and it couldn’t have been placebo. He didn’t know he was on it. He was asleep by the time we put him on it. And he started to sleep in, you know, two hours more than he normally does. So we get him to bed by seven, he usually wakes up at 6:30 or seven, and he’s been sleeping until nine. So his nervous system just went, ah (sigh), and relaxed, because he was grounded from using your grounding that while he was sleeping.

 

 

1:06:08 Clint Ober: Right. That’s that’s what it’s all about. These kids need lots of sleep.

 

 

1:06:12 Ashley James: Yeah, they do. They do. Absolutely. So tell us about those people that you said that were in different parts of California that all had cortisol issues, that were all under stress. And that you said within a matter of weeks that they begin to connect to the earth’s rhythm.

 

 

1:06:32 Clint Ober: Yes, what we found and again, it was really interesting. No, this isn’t brand new, people in the communications industry knew this. Back in the early days of before telephone when we had Western Union, those kind of ground wires. So they had to know different times of the day, they could only send messages because the sun affected the signals. If there was no sun, then you’re not going to get a telegraph message, and so on. And so on, we knew that the electrical potential of the earth, from the communication industry plays a big role in everything, traveling on the surface of the earth. So what we did is we took a handful of people, I think there were eight or nine people in the study. This was done by an anesthesiologist, and what we did is he measured their cortisol every four hours, for 24 hours; 8pm, midnight, 4am 8am, noon, and 4pm. Now in the book, these charts exist there, and they’re also on the institute under the cortisol study. But anyhow, if you look at it, the first chart looks like spaghetti. I kind of knew these people not personally, but by age, the younger people were high stress and they had elevated cortisol. And the older ladies had low cortisol exhausted adrenals. But to look at them as a group, they did have a peak coming in around 4am and peaking at 8am, and then dropped off. But as soon as we grounded them, they all synchronized and they’re all identical on a tight little band, and they all kind of went to normal. And when I say normal, what that means is at 4am, first of all, if you’re not sleeping at night, if you’re there’s only one reason I believe that people can’t sleep, they have elevated cortisol. Because cortisol is a fight or flight hormone it’s not, it’s not going to let you sleep, because you’re worried about a child, bill, work problem I whatever life issue that’s causing you stress, and causing you to think about or worry, or whatever. And that’s causing the body to secrete cortisol. And it’s really hard for the body to go to sleep as long as the cortisol is elevated. Sleep is autonomic, but you cannot sleep if there’s a bear in the woods. So anyhow, what we saw first of all, was the cortisol normalized between 8am and 4am, where before it was kind of spaghetti. And then at 4am, we saw the cortisol rise from, I can’t use the word milligrams here. But anyhow, to give you an example. They, they rose from let’s just five milligrams, all the way up to 50 milligrams, or about 40 milligrams at 8am. So you have this at 4am, then the body starts producing lots of cortisol. And that cortisol is to create the energy that you’re going to need to get out of bed. A lot of people will have heart attacks, because of low cortisol in the morning, morning heart attacks. So anyhow, the main thing that we saw was one, the cortisol circadian profiles, the daily profiles synchronized amongst this group of primarily women. But more importantly, in the original study, three of them, they were outliers, and we couldn’t figure out why because their cortisol would peak, I mean start climbing at one in the morning, and so they couldn’t sleep. What we found was these were stewardesses. These were three stewardesses that were based in New York, but they spent half their time in San Diego. So they were on the nonstop flight San Diego. But the majority of their time they lived in New York. So when they come to San Diego, and their circadian cortisol rhythms are off three hours. So that’s what you call jet lag. So what we learned is one, jet lag is real. But more importantly, what we learned was if you go stand on the earth for 15 minutes, after you fly from East Coast to West Coast, or vice versa, you stand on the earth for 15 minutes, it resets, or your ground – it resets your circadian cortisol rhythms.

 

 

1:12:00 Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so amazing. When I was 16, I flew with my parents from Toronto to Honolulu, Hawaii. And the first thing I did, you can imagine that was a long day of flying, but it was like the middle of the night for me. And the first thing I did at the airport was kick off my shoes and stand in the grass. I just had to, it was like a calling. And I didn’t have any jet lag that entire trip.

 

 

1:12:28 Clint Ober: Your body knows what to do you listen. We’d get out of our own way.

 

 

1:12:33 Ashley James: Yes. That is so cool. Well, my husband, when he first got into this, he had built our own mat and it was a really big pain in the butt. And so I can I can tell people that yeah, you could go out and buy all the materials and try to make your own but I don’t recommend it. It was a big pain in the butt and the thing fell apart. And it was kind of expensive for how not professional it was, but that your mats, I am in love with. They’re very low profile, you don’t even notice like you’re sleeping on them right now, my feet are on the one in the office one. But when we’re lying on the one on our mattress, it’s not bulky. I I really feel it, it’s just, you know, people might say it’s a placebo, but there is a difference. So my husband, the plug is on his side. And because it’s plugged into the ground, and you have a device that comes with the kit that you test the electrical outlet to make sure that it’s safe. And that it’s it is in fact a safe ground. I want to talk about that next. But I can tell when it’s not plugged in and when it is plugged in. So he’ll do like it’s just been a little bit of an experiment, but he had it plugged in. And then he had it unplugged. And then he had it plugged in again, over the course of a few days. And I noticed a difference. So I didn’t know when he had it plugged in and when he didn’t, but I could lie on the bed and I could feel whether or not we the grounding mat was plugged into the ground or not.

I do have some questions about this. So we did try, put a wire out the window into the ground. And not everyone can do that, because a lot of people live in condos. And you know, that’s kind of a pain in the butt, because you have to figure out how to get around your screen on your window. I like your system much better. It’s cleaner, it’s low profile, you just plug it right into the ground. I appreciate that. But I do have a question about electromagnetic fields. So if an outlet is there beside your bed, isn’t giving off an electromagnetic field. And when you’re plugging into the ground, would that also bring the electromagnetic field of the outlet onto the grounding mat?

 

 

1:15:12 Clint Ober: Well, the EMF industry, that’s their big story from an electrical point of view. And the reason we ground everything in the communications industry, and ground all of our equipment and put up shielding to prevent all this stuff. But basically what happens is, when you are grounded to the earth, the earth is infinitely large, bodies infinitely small, relatively speaking. But when you’re at earth potential, you have the resources of the entire earth to hold your body at earth potential. If you are grounded, then you are antenna for electric field charges.

 

 

1:16:02 Ashley: Because the atmosphere is positively charged?

 

 

1:16:06 Clint Ober: No. We’re talking about electric field, static electricity is different. When you’re grounded, it dissipates static electricity. I mean, that’s the industry. I mean, that’s a huge industry. Now electric fields, EMFs. You have an electric field and a magnetic field, magnetic fields you or nobody else can do anything about whatsoever. Because they go through bricks, they go through everything, you can’t shield them, you can with new metal, but nobody could afford it. So magnetic fields are not the problem, we have done enough work that we know that the active agent with EMFs is electric, the electric field. And the electric field is kind of like the bear on the wood. I mean, the bear is radiating an electric field. You have an electric field, the bear has been electric field. This is a fact. And when you sense his field, then it’s going to fire your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol is going to spike. And you’re going to run or you’re going to fight. So here’s my take on all of it, I have a huge background in all of this. And it’s really hard to teach everybody electromagnetism or the basics of electromagnetism. But the reason everything is grounded is to prevent electromagnetic interference. That’s the real term here. So what we’re trying to do is prevent electromagnetic interference in the body. And how does an electric field create interference in the body? First of all, you have to know where they come from. Everybody is worried about what they can see, they can see a lamp, they can see an electrical outlet, they can see a cord. But what they can’t see is when your house was built, before the wallboard went up, all of the studs and everything were put in place, then an electrician came in with a drill. And he drilled all the holes going across the timbers at waist high to an electrician. If he’s short, it’s a little lower if he is tall, they’re a little higher. And then he ran all the wires through those holes up and down to the outlets to the switches to the ceiling, whatever, and around the whole house. So then, if you see a house before they put the wall board up, you’ll know and recognize that it’s a cage wire. There’s electrical wires running everywhere. But that isn’t so much the problem, it is a problem. But that isn’t so much of the problem. The problem is, now they put the wallboard up, and the carpets down, and they bring in the mattress and the box spring. And they bring in the nightstands and the lamps and whatever else. So you would think that the lamps probably is the biggest problem. But in fact – I hate to tell people these things, because if I don’t like to tell people something they can’t do anything about. And that’s what the state of California Health Sciences told me, they said do not go out and bother these people and tell them that they have a problem unless you got a solution. And the solution has to be no cost or low cost. And that’s another little story here for me to tell. That’s why these products are low cost and, and why I preach barefoot, it’s no cost. But anyhow, I’ll go ahead and I brought it up, so I have to finish it. But anyhow, so you put your mattress up against the wall, then you put your pillow up at the end of your mattress, then you go to bed and and everything’s beautiful and whatever. But there you are more affected by the electric fields radiating from the romacks in the wiring, at the head of your bed, because your head is within six inches of those electric fields. So the body at that point is an antenna. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, all you gotta do is ground the springs of the mattress.” Or, “You ground this, you do that.” That’s crazy, the body is an electrical, it’s every bit as much of an antenna as the springs in your mattress, or the lamp in the corner, or anything else. So the only thing you can do is turn off the electrical in your bedroom at night. There’s no other option. And I hate to tell people that because it’s expensive, most people can afford it most people can comply with things like that. So the only other option you have is to ground yourself and get rid of the antenna effect. Now, here’s how electric fields affect people, they do not cause cancer, they do not do all of these things that a lot of these fear people are always talking about. What they do is the hair on your skin, on your arm in your head. It’s really an electrical antenna. It can sense. It’s like a bear in the woods. In the old days when there wasn’t all this noise in our environment. If you were out in the woods, you could feel a bear, you couldn’t see him, you couldn’t smell and you couldn’t hear him. But you could feel him, you knew he was there. And so what you did is you look for safety or your cortisol came up and you are prepared to run or fight.

Now then as soon as the problem went away, cortisol went back down, life was back to normal, everything was happy and good and you’re grounded. So any inflammation that was created from that charge of cortisol is automatically dissipated, get the immune system in ground. So now today, we have the mailbox is a bear in the woods, the phone’s a bear in the woods, a swimming child is a bear in the woods, the boss is a bear in the woods, the traffic is a bear in the woods. So our sympathetic nervous system, which is sensing all of these environmental things. And now we have this electric field that’s radiating from these electrical appliances and devices and so on. And the hair on your arm can sense that. And it’s holding your body in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, as is everything else in life. Wind can do the same thing, chronic noise, there’s many things that can do the same thing. So if you’re sleeping ungrounded and your body is an antenna, or you are in an environment where you’re exposed to a lot of electric fields, and you are wearing rubber soled shoes, then when you’re in a chronically elevated state, what you’re doing is your body’s pumping cortisol, your sympathetic or your parasympathetic which is operating on hormones, it becomes exhausted. So it can no longer function and maintain that normal state. So anxiety, irritability, and depression, come next, then comes diabetes and lupus, MS, et cetera cancer, heart disease, et cetera. Because our bodies are taxed, but electric fields themselves are not the problem.

 

 

1:24:06 Ashley James: It’s not being grounded, that’s the problem.

 

 

1:24:08 Clint Ober: It’s not being grounded, because the human body throughout most of time, most of existence on this planet was grounded. The immune system had that resource to function and be the mop to clean up the excess free radicals or to prevent free radical damage to healthy cells. So that’s my take on it. Now a lot of people say, Well, I gotta fix my electric fields. Well, I mean, that’s maybe four or five or six on the list. It’s probably your food, it’s your toxic work environment, it’s your toxic relationship, it’s all these other things – not enough time sitting in the park, not enough time walking, not enough time waking up and becoming a little more conscious about our environment and nature and who we are, and how we relate to it, and that we’re a part of it. And we have separated ourselves from it. But anyhow, one thing that’s beautiful about it, is you put it back and you ground it and put it back in nature and you see some nice healthy food, do a little exercise, the body returns to normal, take the stress off the immune system, stop inflammation, take the stress off the immune system. The body only knows to do one thing – return to normal. And you have to remember, health is the body’s most natural state.

 

If anybody’s got anybody’s got a health problem, then they’re doing something or they’re in an environment that their immune system is challenged and it can’t maintain health. And it manifests differently. You know, it’s like the fellows at  Rutger and those folks at Boston Massachusetts, when they came out with that article in 2004, cover of Time Magazine, and it showed the body on fire and it said inflammation. And what they’re really saying is you don’t have cancer, you don’t have lupus, you don’t have ALS, you don’t have any of these diseases, what you have is chronic low grade inflammation. And as time goes on, the body becomes compromised. And then the body’s going to try to save itself. But in the process, it has to give up something. Maybe I’m going a little bit too far here. But anyhow, disease manifests differently in different people based on their genetics, and based on their environment. And that means what you’re breathing, eating and, and doing and hearing and whatever. But if you if your immune system is functioning perfectly like it in nature, like in the wild animals, then you couldn’t have lupus, MS, you couldn’t have these things. It’s not possible.

 

 

1:27:04 Ashley James: I had a listener recently and shared that she went out to do some grounding. I think she lives near LA or in California. And she was really upset to have been poisoned basically by whatever they sprayed. Because I think she’s at either a condo or an apartment complex. And so she doesn’t have control over the grounds. But they sprayed some kind of chemical maybe to kill the insects. And she was walking barefoot and end up getting this big rash. And she was really upset because she thought that  her body’s absorbed some toxin. And I was just last night chatting with a chiropractic friend of mine, a chiropractic doctor in Las Vegas. And I used to live in Las Vegas and many houses or condos, those grounds are sprayed with all kinds of chemicals. And so I was telling her, “Go do some grounding.” And she goes, “I don’t know, where could I go, every park is sprayed.” Some people, like I can go in my backyard, I live in Washington State and I can go, there’s lots of places I feel comfortable and safe going because I know there’s no pesticides, but there are so many places, especially in the cities where we just don’t know what’s on that grass. And so we’re not really sure that it is safe. Or in the winter time when there’s snow, I’m also from Canada, originally, and so there’s like six months of the year where we would not go barefoot outside. So I really like the low cost solution you created, which is the grounding mats for when we’re at our desks, for when we’re sleeping, that allows us to ground you eight hours a night at our on our bed and all throughout the day at our desks. And then if we can go outside in nature, which is obviously preferable if we can access a healthy patch of grass or ground that we know has not been sprayed, then that’s good as well. But it’s not something that we do once a week for five minutes and think that that’s enough. Like I’m really getting that it’s something we need to ground ourselves as much as possible. Dr. Joseph Mercola was on that documentary saying that 95% of the time he is grounded. And that just blew my mind that we really need to make an effort to ground ourselves all the time.

 

 

1:29:35 Clint Ober: Well, that’s the issue. And I have to tell you a real short story here. When we were doing our research studies, I had to make ground planes, meaning pads and whatever to either put people on so we could measure them, things they could sleep on, and or electrode patches and things that we could use to do our measurements. And many of our subjects, they all begged and pleaded to keep the little devices that we had created. And then all of a sudden there is this, “Can I get one from my uncle?” “Can I get one for whatever people who had problems?” In the early days of all of this, I never had any intention whatsoever of going out and creating products. I had to have products in order to do the studies, or not products, but devices. And we manufactured those and we know begged and borrowed and figured out some things and how to do all of this. And so anyhow, but this business grew up, it was an accidental business. And as an absurd business, you have to try to reconnect because I mean, 60 years ago, we couldn’t get off the earth. And today, we can’t get back to the earth. Except for having a wire, or something of that nature. So and then this one, I remember the, like I said earlier about California Health Services and National Institute of Health Sciences, they all say the same thing. “Don’t go out there and scare the people and don’t go out and create trauma unless you have a solution that you can offer them.” And that’s where I started, I said I will not talk to anybody, I will not do anything unless you go outdoors and go barefoot for a half hour or an hour and just experience this. And then if it helps you, if it has benefit for you, then do it another half hour and then do it more time and do it every day. And then if it’s really important to you, then there are these devices that are beginning to surface and that we’ve been able to pull together that now work and now have some long life and longevity to them.

Going outdoors, first of all, anybody who could go, if you can go to the beach, if you can go and find a sandbox or build your own sandbox or do whatever, to spend some time grounded to the earth, it’s just really, it’s it’s bigger than just reducing inflammation, it’s the connection. When you are connected to the earth, when you are in contact with electrical contact with the earth, then you’re connected to every living thing that’s in contact on the earth, throughout the entire planet. You are electrically connected, because electrical operates speed of light. So it’s important, when possible to find your place in nature, if you can find that. But on the other hand, if you’re going to be exposed to all of this craziness in our living environments, whether it’s static electricity, or whatever, then you need something, some mechanism to ground yourself in the home. So what we tried to do, and which we sold probably a million products that we never advertised, this was all word of mouth, and it went around the world. And now we’re trying to figure it out, because there’s so many people trying to get into the business and all this nonsense out there. But it does have to be safe. And that’s number one in anything electrical and it has to be safe. So all of the products that we put out there are involved with, they have a built-in electrical resistance. So they are not a purely conductive, they’re called a deceptive or a soft ground. That means electrons can move back and forth, slowly enough that there’s no possibility of an electrical shock or a spark, or anything of that nature, anything uncomfortable. So that’s number one. And then number two, it has to be functional, you have to be able to put it on the bed. And it has to be something that people can tolerate. And it has to have a life expectancy. For years we had the cotton sheets, they put silver yarns in them. In many cases, especially men, because they perspire and there’s a lot of sulfur in their perspiration. It’ll oxidize a silver in just a few days. Or women could sleep on them for months or years. And so we had to fix that problem. And that’s why we ended up with the black carbon mats, because carbon is safe, clean, it will last, literally it could last forever, somebody would take care of it. So now what we have is a no cost, low cost, and that’s what I deliver. It’s free, it’s free. Doing it yourself is okay if you’re if you have an electrical background and know something about electrical. But do not just run out and start grounding wires and tying wires around people’s toes. You have to have you have to be conscious of safety.

 

 

1:34:55 Ashley James: Absolutely. So this little white box with these three lights, red and two yellows, and it has a little instructions like what the lights mean. You plug that into your outlet and it tells you whether your outlet is a clean, healthy ground or whether it’s undergrounded or whether it’s a dangerous outlet. So tell us a bit about that. Because that’s something that other people who try to copy what you’ve done, you’re the founder, you’re the original. You’re the first. Right?

 

 

1:35:34 Clint Ober: Right. 20 years ago, for biological grounding. Yes.

 

 

1:35:40 Ashley James: Absolutely, biological grounding. I remember making computers with my husband and we knew to attach ourselves to something grounded while we were working with the electronics and my husband has been building computers since 94. And I feel very blessed to have his skills, the computer I’m currently using he built for me a few years ago and it’s still holding up. So in terms of people who make electronics, they know to ground themselves or like you said doctors and patients in the OR have to ground themselves. But those are for different reasons. The reason we’re talking about is so that we can release those electrons and beat become grounded, like we’re meant to, we’re returning to what we were less than 100 years ago. It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it, less than 100 years ago. We were grounded almost all of the time. For the most part, right? Almost all of us were grounded all the time, and just to see the rise and all these chronic diseases take place at the same time as us becoming less and less grounded. It’s just no wonder between becoming ungrounded, and stressors, like you said have now multiplied, and the chemical stressors, and environmental stressors, and the stress of poor food and lack of exercise and bills and all that. So the stressors have increased. And then the biggest stress of all, which is the stress of being ungrounded. Coupled with all that, no wonder we’re seeing these diseases come out of nowhere that we didn’t have 100 years ago. So that’s fascinating.

 

So you have this little device that when people buy your grounding mats, this little device, they plug into the wall first to test it. Can you talk a bit about that?

 

 

1:37:40 Clint Ober: Yes, I will. I want to follow up on one thing you were discussing. A good way to think about grounding is amino therapy. Ground therapy is your grounding the immune system, restoring the immune system function, bu it’s restoring the immune system. That’s what it’s all about. But anyhow, enough of that.

The electrical outlet tester, that is a universal device for outlets, like used in America and Canada and various other countries. So you plug it in, and what it’s doing is it’s testing the heart and the neutral and the functionality of the ground. So if everything is proper and working properly, then you only get to the two little yellow lights come on, saying it’s there’s a ground, there’s a working ground. So then you can plug in your device, put that away and put it in a drawer. And the only time you ever use that again is if you move on, you need to check your outlets and make sure they’re grounded. So then you plug in your device, and it’s connected to the ground, it’s not connected to the electrical system, it’s connected to the ground which ends up going to ground rod in the earth. So it’s like the water coming out of the pipe coming into the house. This is electrons coming up the wire into the house. And then whatever you connect to it, it will hold that device, if it’s conductive and at earth potential. So it’s like going out in the backyard and taking a few square feet of earth and bringing it in the house.

 

 

1:39:24 Ashley James: Uh huh. Yeah, absolutely. I feel a difference. Like I said, My feet are on it right now and I don’t want to get off of it. I noticed a decrease in stress, I just feel more relaxed, and calm and happy, happier. You know, and I know that you had people saying that even their depression was going away which makes sense. I mean, if you take the stressor out, then the body’s like you said, the most natural state for the body is health and the body’s constantly trying to get back to homeostasis, concentrating back to health. And if we remove that stressor, then we’re going to notice that shift. So, that’s really exciting. I know you’ve got several different products, you’ve got the one for the bed, you’ve got the grounding mat that I’m using my feet on for when you’re at a computer, what other products do you have?

 

 

1:40:21 Clint Ober: What we have, first of all on that meter, if you see the red light comes on, that means that you either don’t have a ground or is not wired properly, you need to call an electrician. Or you may not have a ground, if your home was built before, you know 1960 or so in that timeframe, most homes weren’t grounded, they did not have an electrical ground in their electrical system. And a lot of times with all the Do It Yourself remodeling, they go to Home Depot or whatever and buy new outlets, and they have the ground port, but there is no ground wire in the wall. So it’s not connected to anything. So when you stick the electric tester in there, then it’ll show that there’s no ground. So then you have to either get a ground rod like we were talking about, then throw it out the window or whatever, put it in the earth where there’s grass, or flowers or something. Or just have them come and install, figure out how to run an electrical ground for you.

The products – we’ve experimented with a lot of things, but what we’ve ended up with, one of them is called a patch kit. It’s the ground therapy patch kit. The reason I came up with it is it has a couple of wires in it. And it has 90 electrode patches in it. It has a book videos and everything and a nice little kind of like a first aid kit. And the reason for that product is so that most people can’t get their mind around grounding until they experience it. So with the patches, they can buy the patches, if they have, they can put it on the bottom of their feet, they can put it on the palm of their hand. And if they have inflammation in their body, put it wherever, you need to actually put it over an area of inflammation. But anyhow, so people can experience grounding, like you’ve experienced your bed. So a lot of people don’t want to do anything until they experience every piece. It’s really absurd and unbelievable that this is true.

In many cases, they cannot go outdoors because there is no place for them to go that’s convenient. A lot of like you say in apartments and condos and city areas, everything is sprayed, you know bug killer fertilizers, pets, the whole thing, it’s just not going to happen. So what we did is we came up with this kit so that everybody could have something available that you can go experience yourself, or go patch grandma, see if it helps her, patch mom, patch anybody and everybody, you know. Because here’s what we’ve learned over the years, the average person who buys a product and grounding products in between 35 and 55. Yes, and it’s 99% female, men all go out and tinker which is fine. So anyhow, she buys a product. And the first thing she does, she uses it for two or three days telling, “Oh my goodness, this works.” She calls her mom, her sister or her girlfriend, or her child who needs it worse than she does and gives what she bought to them. Then she buys another one for herself. And then she gives that one to somebody else that needs it worse than she does, but she needs it worse than anybody. But she wants to. She’s a caregiver. And she’s not happy unless she is helping somebody heal with their health or something. It’s just middle aged woman. And it’s just in her blood. So now she’s found that resource that is relatively inexpensive, that she can share and many times she will go put it on the bed for them because they won’t do it themselves. The doctor doesn’t tell him that I’m going to do it. The patch product is kind of a product that you can use for acute injury, acute issues, after surgery, all kinds of things. But it’s really designed to let people experience grounding, so they can learn about it and find out if it’s a value to them. And then we have the movie and the resources, books and all that kind of stuff we put in with it so they can do whichever. So then as soon as we figured out in the early days what people need the most, what can we do to help people the most and that was ground the bed, because put it on the bed one time, plug in and forget about it. Every night to come home go to bed and get up, there’s no compliance and they’re going to get great benefit. And there are various sizes of that.

Number three product was a mat that’s 14 inches wide and 40 inches long. You can put it on the floor, put your feet on it. When you’re at the computer you can put it on your desk, put your keyboard and mouse on it. You can’t have carpal tunnel if you have that mat under your keyboard and mouse because the palm of your hand will touch the mat. A lot of people buy it because it’s a little less expensive, but we call it the poor man’s bed because if you can’t afford it, what’s the least expensive thing you can do to sleep grounded because that’s when most of the healing occurs in the body. And so it’s the most important time to be grounded. So we focused on that. The little mat, it can be used in a chair, it can be used, on the floor, it’s called the universal – it can be used for anything. And again it has to work and it has to be functional and all of that, so it took us years to get the right product, get their carbon, the right everything to make this work. And so it’s not toxic.

Then the fourth family of products is what we call it throw. One day we were playing around, people want a grounded mattresses. It didn’t make sense at the time because of the silver going bad, but they had made up a yard of material 36 inches wide and 72 or whatever inches long. And so I was standing there and it was cold so I just wrapped it around myself and my shoulders that day. And somebody said that would make a good throw. So we ended up making that product by accident. And it’s a conductive wrap like a throw on a couch. The new ones are like 45 inches by 72 inches. And so you can lay on the couch and put it on top of you or even put it on the bottom and lay on it. And people in recliner chairs, a lot of people use it as a cover. It’s just a comfort thing. It’s a very popular thing in the winter, especially up in the Canadian and most areas. So that’s the only real products that we have. We do have grounded meditation chairs that are coming online, we have grounded recliner chairs, where the entire chair has grounded carbon leatherette material on it. These are zero gravity recliners, and we have in the works other things that will come online as time goes on. It takes six months to a year to bring anything new online. So what we’re trying to do is put the most effective, least affordable, most affordable, most effective product we can out there, and that’s what these products are.

I don’t know how we can educate people too far on them, but basically the sleep mats, take your sheet off, put them on top of the mattress, plug them in, and then you put your sheet back over the top of it and just lay down  and go to sleep.

 

 

1:48:48 Ashley James: If you had a mattress protector, they’re usually some kind of plastic. Is it okay to put the grounding mat underneath it or that then defeats the purpose?

 

 

1:48:58 Clint Ober: That defeats the purpose.

 

 

1:49:01 Ashley James:  Got it.

 

 

1:49:02 Clint Ober: We do have one coming up maybe four or five months that won’t have the whole [inaudible 1:49:07] So it can serve as a mattress protector and a waterproof mattress protector.

 

 

1:49:14 Ashley James: Ah, there you go. Excellent. Well, we figured we probably should not put it underneath the mattress protector. Now most sheets, though, are not synthetic. So most sheets, does the material the sheets matter? Do you need to make sure their cotton or bamboo or there’s something that’s not synthetic?

 

 

1:49:45 Clint Ober: Well, the only thing that’s not synthetic would be a fiber, like cotton, or hemp or something of that nature. Anything like bamboo, I don’t think that’s a fiber. That’s a polymer. So that’s a synthetic. But that family, anything that’s a polymer base. You would be better off with cotton, normal thin cotton. But if you use anything, when you lay on it, you’re going to perspire. And as you perspire, it hydrates the sheet. It’s like when you drive a car and you reach back and touch your back of your shirt in a few minutes, you’ll feel the moisture. So when you lay on a mat, the perspiration is creating a moisture. It’s hydrating, your pajamas and your sheet and you will eventually be grounded. I mean within a few seconds.

 

 

1:50:41 Ashley James: Got it. It’ll conduct because of the moisture. Right?

 

 

1:50:46 Clint Ober: Yes. People whose health is very compromised – that means you have lupus, MS, or something more compromising. They will sleep directly on it, on the black mat. And the reason they do that is because it works. But once they recover from the situation they’re in and their life and everything stabilizes, then they can go back to sleeping on the sheets. We don’t tell them to do this. This is what they do.

 

 

1:51:23 Ashley James: I love when people’s intuition kicks in.

 

 

1:51:27 Clint Ober: Yeah. What I do tell a lot of people to do, is if you have a chronically inflamed knee, or elbow or joint or you have chronic inflammation, something debilitating that’s interfering with your sleep – to put a patch on the bottom of the foot, and sleep and put a sock, you need to make the wire and everything stay on, but sleep grounded, I mean put a patch. Because it will put the fire out and then the body can heal. And what we’re trying to do is support the immune system, reduce the inflammation so the immune system can clean up the damage, rebuild the knee or the ankle or whatever is going on.

 

 

1:52:14 Ashley James: So just to recap, you’ve discovered that the cortisol returns to healthy levels, when we ground on a regular basis, cortisol – so stress hormones are returning to a regular basis. The body is coming out of the stress response, the autonomic nervous system is balancing. So if we’re not in fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system response then we switch over into the parasympathetic rest and digest response. So it’s helping the body come back to rest and digest. When we ground, it helps the immune system function properly so the immune system can clean up the unhealthy cells and not accidentally harm the healthy cells in the process. I believe in the movie, The Earthing Movie, they said it was around two hours of grounding or earthing, that the blood becomes viscous and healthfully thinned, meaning it wasn’t all stuck together, that they could see that the blood was acting like really healthy, viscous, thinned blood – not clotted together, and it could then better transfer oxygen to all the cells and pull the toxins away better. They also talked about that the buildup of electrons affects the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the body in producing ATP. We didn’t touch on that, can we just touch on that for a second?

 

 

1:53:48 Clint Ober: It’s really simple, you need an abundance of electrons to create ATP.

 

 

1:53:56 Ashley James: So in order to create cellular energy, we need to have that balance though.

 

 

1:54:03 Clint Ober: I don’t remember exactly how all of this works. But anyhow, when you digest food, basically you have molecules, and these molecules are somewhat balanced, let’s say, like sugar. So when they go into the ion channels, then what happens is how the body creates energy is it separates electrons and protons, and they’re electrofiles, so they are forever wanting to get back together. Boom. These all feeds into the ATP. I wish Dr. Sinatra or a couple of these others were able to explain the details of it. But yeah, your ATP increases significantly when you are grounded. And that’s what gives you more energy, you get up in the morning. When you get out of bed in the morning, you’re ready to get up, rather than dragging yourself out of bed.

 

 

1:55:05 Ashley James: I love it, I love it. So it helps people have more energy, have less stress, balance their stress hormones, put them back into the healing mode, balances the immune system, the immune system is now acting healthfully. Gosh, so many of my listeners have autoimmune conditions, I am almost in tears, thinking about how much this can help and how much this will help all the people who are listening, I’m really, really excited. Clint, it has been so amazing having you on the show today. I’m going to record a little blurb at the beginning, so everyone knows this. But for those who want to try the patches, or the bed pad or the pad that I’m using right now, which is the pad that you can put your feet on or put your wrists on, they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And that takes them to your site with all of the different options that you’ve discussed. Of course, and the free one is go put your foot your feet on the ground, take your shoes and socks off. But not everyone can. So if you can’t, then get the grounding mat or get the little patches and just experience it for yourself and do it as much as possible. And do it 95% of time like Dr. Joseph Mermcola and see the difference?

 

 

1:56:29 Clint Ober: Yes. It’s really important. I can tell you I started out in my early studies and research working with ladies who had MS and lupus. And what I saw was the dramatic impact the grounding had on them is what gets me up every morning. It’s the first thing I’m thinking about when I go to sleep at night, whether it’s 10 o’clock or midnight or whatever. The last thing I’m thinking about is what can I do to get this done so they can get to the people, so that people can take charge of their lives and restore their health.

 

 

1:57:03 Ashley James: You are going to be revered. You know, it’s only a matter of time. Because of the way this information travels. Like you said, you sold so many of these mats without ever advertising it because it was word of mouth. I’ve already told dozens of my friends since using your mats and since watching the Earthing Movie. I can’t stop telling people about it. So I know my listeners who are very active and love helping their friends and family to gain their health back. It’s going to be like a ripple effect, right? Turn that ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible. Now we do have a lot of international listeners. What about those in the to 220 volts? So it’s a different looking outlet? D How would they go about using your products?

 

 

1:57:58 Clint Ober: It’s identical. They have adapters.

 

 

1:58:01 Ashley James: Ok, so the adapter will work?

 

1:58:03 Clint Ober: Yeah, they have adapters for each of those countries. And they can get outlet checkers in any hardware store. And generally their systems depends on the country, India is terrible, but other countries are great. But yes, all of those can be accommodated. One way or another. But we do have like the UK, Australia, China, various adapters that are universal throughout the world.

 

 

1:58:40 Ashley James: When you say India’s terrible, do you mean that they often don’t have a ground?

 

 

1:58:44 Clint Ober: Yes. They have too much electrical. And I mean, it’s electrical exploded over there, many years ago, but they didn’t have the resources to come back and fix it up. So if you go to India and look up, you’re going to see a maze of wires overhead. So in India, we do have a lot of grounding in India, but they have to use ground rods, or they have to live in one of the newer, something built after 1980.

 

 

1:59:20 Ashley James: God, but they could figure out how to ground their house? It just may take working with an electrician or getting creative. And we know they are incredibly intelligent and creative and resourceful people and they will figure it out.

 

 

1:59:30 Clint Ober: There’s a whole new industry waiting out there for people to come and fix these homes, these older homes and make them, so people can ground. And especially young people or older people who don’t have time, people just don’t have the knowledge, they need to have a ground. I remember in the old days, we started installing cable TV. While it was an industry, it took 40 years and took an army of people to get a cable installation into every home and build the programming and build everything that went with it and so on to make it work. And then came the computer industry, we had to redo it and do it better. And all of these things. So it’s the same thing. The telephone industry had to go drill holes, cable industry had to go drill holes. This is another industry, 40% of the homes in the world don’t get ground.

 

 

2:00:29 Ashley James: Yeah, I can definitely see a need for that for sure. When you were in Florida, looking at the mentees, and just on your journey of enjoying life after you had that sort of near death experience. And you received those two messages be an officer in charge and status quos, the enemy. I will point, did the light bulb go off when you knew what that meant?

 

 

2:00:58 Clint Ober: I didn’t know what that meant until many years later, and when we started to write the book and about 2010. Then I realized that becoming an opposite charge was becoming negatively charged rather than positively charged. And the whole world had the problem, that we were all ungrounded and we needed to fix that. And status quo is very simple. People don’t change, people don’t want change, people will fight change. And so I think I got the message loud and clear. But there’s a bigger, more powerful driving force behind this than me. And so I just keep working away and this is an opportunity for the world, I mean everything gets out of balance, our medical institutions are out of balance. We’re treating symptoms rather than preventing problems. And that’s what this is more about is prevention. But it’s also, I don’t like to necessarily use the word spiritual. But nature is spiritual. I mean, we are a part of it, we’re connected to it. And when you connect with nature, it affects your psyche. It affects your heart and it affects who you are. You’re a nicer person, when you’re grounded. You’re more conscious of other people and you know, you aren’t some money or you aren’t materially oriented. You there’s a natural beauty and there’s a natural elegance and a natural scheme to nature of which we are partners. Just you can’t put it in words.

 

 

2:02:37  Ashley James: Absolutely. You know I think I am a bit nicer now that I’ve grounded. I started thinking about some grumpy people in my life, I need to go get them on a grounding mat.

 

 

2:02:50 Clint Ober: Well it gets rid of the stress. And the most important thing is getting our kids grounded teaching them grounding. And slowly getting into the schools because it’s gotta stop, We can’t electrify our kids. I mean, all of our kids are sick today, or their health is compromised. I’ll say it that way. They don’t have perfectly natural health.

 

 

2:03:14 Ashley James: And I love that in the movie, The Earthing Movie that they covered a classroom, a special ed classroom that had grounding mats. And they noticed that even children who were autistic nonverbal wouldn’t sit still for more than two or three minutes, that would sit still for seven minutes if they were on a grounding mat. And that they could get kids to focus that their constant fidgeting and twitching and looking out the window and fidgeting with things that it all went away. And it makes sense because when they covered those who have MS. In the movie, they said that their restlessness went away, the crawling of their skin that feeling like their legs were restless, and their skin was crawling. And that just wired feeling went away.

 

 

2:04:01 Clint Ober: Yup.

 

 

2:04:02 Ashley James: And it makes so much sense.

 

 

2:04:03 Clint Ober: You know, autism is an inflammation related health disorder. It starts out as an inflammation related health disorder. And you gotta put the fire out. I put the fire out these kids calm down. And if they’re damaged, not too much damage is done, they can slowly recover. We’ve seen it too many times. The immune system is a self healing mechanism. It only knows the one thing, try to restore if its got the resources and remove the stress.

 

 

2:04:34 Ashley James: That’s wonderful. So this movie, you’ve done two movies, and this latest one is now being shown at different festivals. What are your thoughts on that? Is it kind of like surreal to sit back and go, “I’m in a movie that is being shown at these big film festivals.” Isn’t that awesome?

 

 

2:04:56 Clint Ober: Yeah, it’s weird.

 

2:04:58 Ashley James: You’re like a movie star.

 

 

2:05:00 Clint Ober: No. What’s interesting is we were at a film festival in Hollywood. Two weeks ago, I think. And we won the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary in Hollywood. So that’s a huge thing. And what it meant to me was this can get to the world now.

 

 

2:05:28 Ashley James: Yeah. That’s awesome. So cool. So what’s going to happen with the Earthling Movie? Is it is it going around the world to all the different festivals? Will it ever end up like on Netflix or something? What are your plans with it?

 

 

2:05:39 Clint Ober: My plans are, Netflix and all those people who manage films, they’ve all come to us. And we have said that what we would like to do is, first of all, finish up the festival just so we get the media and we get the feedback from the consumers. And then we would like to make it free to the world through whatever mechanisms we possibly can to facilitate educating as many people as possible. It’s not about money, we haven’t made any money, we sold a million plus we have not made any money yet. It all goes back in. And this is really a mission. It’s more of a movement. And it’s bigger than me, much, much bigger than me. And I’m 75 now, and some youngsters are going to have to come along here and you know, help out. I mean, we are working with people in China, Malaysia, India, Europe. Everybody’s starting to wake up more so there than here. It’s easier for them to tune into nature, I think, than American for some reason.

 

 

2:06:59 Ashley James: Yeah. You have you have a gauntlet to go down, that’s for sure. Like you said, once people experience it, they’re forever change, they can’t go back,

 

 

2:07:13 Clint Ober: Yes, they can’t go back. And then they have to share it. So what we are trying to do is provide them tools that help share it. You’re eventually going to have grounded flooring, grounded beds, grounded everything. Because if ground is what maintains the immune system in its natural state, then we have to incorporate grounding into our living environments. Now that’s going to create an army of what they call it value added. So when they make sure is they’ll value add grounding to it, they’ll value add grounding to the carpets, to do the flooring, to whatever. So it’ll create a new industry, like TV, or telephone, or radio or TV or sewer, or railroads or anything else. It’s a new industry, we have to go back and fix, find balance and fix what we did over the last 60 years. Plastics are good, plastics are good. And they can be used, we just need to make them so that they have ground material in them. So that when you use them, you’re still grounded.

 

 

2:08:23 Ashley James: Last night, as we walked to bed, I said to my husband, I wonder if we could ground the floor. If there’s a material we could use, I’ve seen these corks, you know, but like a natural material, if there’s a way to ground it. And his response was that sounds like it would be too expensive. And he started thinking about all the problems. My husband was a carpenter. So he starts thinking about right now, how that could be possible. And my vision was to see every floor grounded and just and then we need to teach people to walk barefoot in their homes and leave their shoes at the door. And that was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s that’s the solution. You ground everything in the house.” And now that’s what you’re saying is that this is you have that same vision that everything in the house needs to be grounded.

 

 

2:09:12 Clint Ober: Over the next 40 years it’s a new industry that will employ a lot of people. And you know, it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s like the medical industry didn’t happen overnight, the way it is. It took 60 years to get there, it’s going to take 60 years for the transition to occur. But there will be grounded flooring, it’s like a lot of the plastic based flooring materials that they have. They put a layer of conductive film on that. And so it wouldn’t even be noticeable. You put in saltillo tile or use water based cedars on concrete, you know, concrete floors and polish them and make them pretty. There’s lots of things that will surface.

 

 

2:09:58 Ashley James: Very cool. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show, Clint. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview anything left unsaid, you want to make sure that you share with our listeners?

 

 

2:10:12 Clint Ober: Well, I could probably talk for hours.

 

 

2:10:15 Ashley James: I’d love that. I love learning from you.

 

 

2:10:18 Clint Ober: Yeah. The main thing is, if you have pain in your body, if you have anxiety, irritability, depression, chronic fatigue, if you have an autoimmune disease, you must pay attention to this and at least go outdoors, take your shoes off and spend enough time out there that you can know if this will serve you. And then if you can’t do that, then you must go to ground therapy and at least investigate what they have. And find something that you can afford. And try it if they don’t, I’m sure they’ll give you your money back. But we know that doesn’t happen. Because once they get grounded, then then they they have to keep using it there. The big issue then is how do I get grandma? How do I get I’ll get my sister how to get my girlfriend grounded? That’s more of the issue. But again, this isn’t about pushing product to make a profit. For me, it’s about educating people. But these tools like ground therapy, they’re important tools. And we did try to follow the advice of the NIH and California Health Services to provide low cost methods to solve the problem.

 

 

2:11:42 Ashley James: Awesome. Well, listeners can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding to check out those packages. And I was informed by your excellent staff that several are being given away to the listeners. So we’re going to have a giveaway and I’m going to make sure that I make a blurb and put it at the beginning of this interview. But that there’s going to be a giveaway in our Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group. And so the listeners who aren’t there yet can go to Facebook and search Learn True Health and join the group. Or they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group and that redirects them to the group. And from there, we’re going to have a giveaway for listeners to be able to win some of your awesome grounding mats and materials. My listeners love to share their experiences with trying new things. And so they’re going to get vocal and share how it made a difference in their lives. And then we can all have this discussion in the Facebook group about how we’re feeling and how this is changing our life. How earthing and grounding is having a positive impact on our lives.

So thank you so much Clint, for everything that you do. I am such a fan of yours. And I am a cheerleader for the work that you’re doing. You’re welcome back on the show anytime you need a platform, you want to have a platform to share new information. And I’d love to interview anyone, any of those doctors that you see fit. I’ll definitely have them on the show because I know that there’s so many doctors that are seeing a difference in the lives of their patients, and that they’re totally on board with your mission to help the world get grounded again.

 

 

2:13:21 Clint Ober: We’ll have a few of those. So I’ll point them in your direction for sure.

 

2:13:27 Ashley James: That sounds great. Thank you so much, Clint. It’s been such a pleasure having you here today.

 

2:13:29 Clint Ober: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.

 

 

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, 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 lives 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 www.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 office, 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’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 gonna wanna 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 www.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 www.takeyoursupplements.com

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Clint Ober!

Earthing

 The Earthing Institute

Grounded Beauty

Ground Therapy

Earthing Movie

Facebook – Clint Ober

Book by Clint Ober

Earthing

Recommended Readings by Clint Ober

Return To Nature by Adolf Just

The Plant Paradox by Steven Gundry

Jul 4, 2019

Health Coach Success Summit:
https://www.learntruehealth.com/success

More info about becoming certified in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition: https://www.learntruehealth.com/fdn and (use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!)

Free Gift - 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick, or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less! URL is- wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth

Music:
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What is The Root Cause Of My Disease?

https://www.learntruehealth.com/what-is-the-root-cause-of-my-disease

Highlights:

  • The body expresses itself if it’s out of balance.
  • Symptoms mean there’s something dysfunctional inside the body.
  • Looking at the body’s whole picture to remove the root cause of physiological symptoms.
  • Health issues does not happen overnight.
  • Parasites and yeast overgrowth, how it affects the body.
  • How the moon phases affect the body internally.
  • Environment is 80% of the disease process.
  • Autoimmune disease and gluten connection.
  • The importance of quality sleep.
  • Stress and its relationship to disease.
  • Things you can do to de-stress.

 

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health Podcast.

I have a little announcement for everyone who is a health coach, an aspiring health coach or who works in the healthcare industry.

In my interview today, I interviewed a health coach that specializes in functional diagnostic nutrition. She took a course with FDN to learn how to read labs and how to choose which labs should be run specifically around understanding the metabolic process. My guest describes it as metabolic chaos and being able to dive in and assess and figure out the right tests and the right labs to run so that they can understand the root cause.

The example she brings up is that many people with Hashimoto’s thyroid actually the root cause is in their gut health and liver health. That is the first thing that set off this chain of events that trigger the Hashimoto’s. As long as they still have that liver and gut dysfunction they’ll never be able to fully heal their Hashimoto’s and so, many people are going around chasing symptoms. Even naturally chasing symptoms, because they haven’t been able  to get to the root cause. That’s exactly what Functional Diagnostic Nutrition provides.

So if you’re a holistic health expert or health coach and you’d love to learn how to read labs and how everything interrelates, if you’d love to learn how to provide that for your clients that kind of skill set that would take you to the next level, then definitely go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn as in functional diagnostic nutrition and get more information from that website. You can click through and they’ll give you all kinds of information and I know by using that link and the coupon code LTH, they’re giving $750 off this week. Normally, if you use that code, they have told me that they’ll give my listeners $500 off but this week only it’s $750 off. This course is online and at your own pace which I really enjoy. I’m gonna be enrolling and taking this course because I’m very interested especially after this interview. I’m very interested in learning about how to order these labs and how to interpret these labs and not only do they teach you how to interpret them, they also teach you what to do once you have the information.

In fact, coach Jen even told me that some people take this course simply for their own knowledge which I can see myself doing. Learning how to apply these for my health, my family’s health, but also helping all my clients as a health coach. So go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn to learn about how you can learn about functional medicine and become a functional diagnostic nutrition certified that adds to your ability to be an excellent health coach. Speaking of being an excellent health coach, there is a free summit for health coaches that is coming up in 14 days. I want you to enroll so you get your spot reserved, it is called The Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit. They interviewed 36 speakers that are experts in health coaching and marketing and they teach you how to grow your thriving health coaching business and the things that you can do to make sure you empower your clients and grow your business. If you are a health coach or if you’re interested in becoming a health coach, you definitely want to attend this free summit. They also give you the opportunity to buy it and own all of the interviews as well but if you sign up, you can watch it for free. Go to www.learntruehealth.com/success to sign up for the Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit that’s coming up in 14 days. If you do decide to purchase it, you get to watch it right now. That’s something really cool, you could sign up but if you can’t wait and you want to start watching it now and watch at your own pace then you can decide to purchase the Summit. So www.learntruehealth.com/success gets you access to the summit and www.learntruehealth.com/fdn gives you access to more information about the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition course.

Excellent, well thank you so much for being a listener and if you’re in the states, Happy 4th of July. This is a time where we definitely celebrate with our loved ones and I hope that you are having a wonderful week celebrating with those that you love most. Enjoy today’s interview.

 

 

0:05:08.1 Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 365.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us a Functional Diagnostic and Transformational Coach, I love that title it’s quite a mouthful. Welcome to the show Jenn Malecha it is such an honor to have you here today.

 

 

0:05:35.9 Jenn Malecha: Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here to provide some information and insights for your listeners.

 

 

0:05:43.1 Ashley James: Absolutely, we were just chatting before we hit record and you were telling me how you were just listening to one of my more recent episodes about mold and how mold has really played a role in your health journey and that you and your family have experienced mold several times and also, you now can help your clients as well with mold. It’s one of those major things that we don’t realize, it is a major contributing factor to triggering disease and autoimmune conditions and kind of maybe being that straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people. It’s fun that we’re gonna dive into your story because I think you have a really interesting story that we can all learn from. Then you’re gonna teach us some great things about helping us heal when we have been faced with stress, maybe not the best diet that we didn’t realize was the best diet for us, or hormones were unbalanced, maybe we have autoimmune condition. How do we just finally take control again and get conscious and figure out what are those necessary steps in getting us back to health and I know that you are here to share some great tips for us today. I’d love to start by hearing your story.

 

 

0:07:00.4 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I would love to share it too because all of us I think have a health story in some way and obstacles and challenges that we’ve faced and ultimately, our health is what supports us really living our best life. When you think about anything that you do in this lifetime whether it’s your career, family, or if you love to travel like I do, if you don’t have your ideal health and weight then you’re not really getting to, you know, optimize those experiences or get the most out of them in a lot of ways. That was kind of a beginning part of my health journey. I had always been kind of an active kid growing up and I would say I’m fairly healthy in comparison to most. My parents had a garden and we would get about making sure that we had balanced meals for dinner and that we ate our dinner before we had desserts and things like that and so, I actually went to college to pursue an education in Fitness Nutrition and Health and soaked all of that knowledge up and in my early twenties when I was in college is probably when I first started having some health occurrences and I began to come into light and this was very much pre-mold. So I’m definitely gonna talk about the mold’s piece but the molds piece in my journey is the second obstacle that I have faced. I think just explaining to the audience a little bit about the journey prior to that is gonna help bring light to the mold situation a bit too. When I was in my early twenties I, all of a sudden just started to develop seasonal allergies that were worsening year over year over year and these were the things I never had as a kid to the point where I was having recurring ear infections and the seasonal allergies were so debilitating that they would take me down for days or sometimes weeks at a time. I remember one of the last ear infections that I had I was really laid up on the couch for multiple days just struggling for it to finally go away. At that time I was questioning, why was this happening to me because I never had allergies. I was somebody who really prided myself on always being healthy and not ever getting sick. Along with that, I also started to experience what some people might call Chronic Fatigue where I was a personal trainer at the time so I graduated college with my degree in Personal Training where I was kind of figuring out the future of my career path and I just remember going to Starbucks in the afternoon and getting a double Americano and still struggling to keep my eyes open and to stay awake as I was training my afternoon and my evening class and that’s just not normal.

I was tired all of the time. I would go home and literally sit on the couch for 5 minutes and fall asleep instantly. I was having different joint aches and pains that were recurring and I thought that just because I was a runner, that those might be normal but then it became kind of debilitating too. Finally, at the age of 26, I was diagnosed with skin cancer which is kind of like light bulb (aha!) moment for me because when I really started to ponder why I was diagnosed with skin cancer, the pieces of the puzzle just really didn’t fit together. First of all, it was extremely scary to be diagnosed with skin cancer, I think out of all the diagnoses one can receive, anything related to cancer is one of the scariest ones to have because you just don’t know am I going to survive this? Is it treatable? Is it gonna come back? There’s so many questions when it comes to cancer and when I was looking at my specific case, you know, the dermatologist and the doctors start asking you if there’s any family history of cancer and all the questions that looking for clues about why you would be diagnosed with cancer. In my family there was no family history of any cancer related to skin cancer specifically. There was other cancer that ran in my family but nothing related to skin cancer. I was not your, you know, what we will qualify like a chronic tanner, somebody who’s out baking themselves on the beach all the time or using the tanning salon on a recurrent basis. I was, you know, the healthiest people that I knew, I was like “healthiest people” because that version of healthy is not the version of healthy that I practice today and I’ll explain that a little bit, also, but at the time I was eating lean proteins like boneless skinless chicken breast and having a vegetable with every meal and eating yogurt and berries as a snack and exercising regularly, like that’s most people’s definition of healthy right? It wasn’t until I got into the work that I’m doing now as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner that I really started to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out why I had been diagnosed with skin cancer or how that manifested in my body. When I enrolled in that training program The Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, one of the things that they have us do is run some lab tests like its a requirement, you have to run a couple of lab tests on yourself as part of the training and one of the lab tests that I ran was about Health 101, it’s a metabolic profile that looks at urinary bio acids which is basically getting you some insights as to how the liver is functioning, like is it sluggish or congested? If it’s not moving bio acids through, that can be an indication that there’s toxic build up. It’s probably happening in the body, it’s just not detoxing as well as it could be. My urinary bio acids where high, my liver was clogged, and then it also looks at lipid peroxide which is a measurement of oxidative stress, and oxidative stress gives you some insights as to how the body is aging, like is the aging really fast which can be some indication for cellular damage or DNA damage its going on and my oxidative stress was also very high. Also measured something called urinary indican which takes a look at how you’re digesting protein and can give you insights about malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth such as H pylori or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and my indican was off as well. After running a simple test, I found that I did have H pylori overgrowth happening in my gut which attributed to some of the migraine headaches that I was having and the recurring back pain I think its vertebrae T7 its where its associated with. I also ran a Salivary Adrenal Hormone Panel and I had a level of adrenal dysfunction that was going on. Essentially on the inside I was a metabolic disaster even though on the outside I was doing all of these allegedly healthy things, right? Especially when I saw that my liver was clogged and the oxidative stress markers where high, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what’s cultivating this environment for cancer to basically grow in my body”. I immediately implemented a plan that changed my lifestyle like my diet, my rest, the exercise doing more stress reduction type of stuff, eliminating toxins out of my environment, taking supplements to support my body in ways that it needs to be supported and I’m happy to say that the skin cancer never returned and here I am this year 10 years skin cancer free as a result of making some of those lifestyle changes which is huge.

 

 

0:14:41.6 Ashley James: That is definitely huge, now did you just have it surgically removed or how did you proceed with your oncologist to eliminate the skin cancer and monitor it?

 

 

0:14:52.2 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so, they went in to the sites. I had a couple of different sites, like the one on my leg and a couple on my back, they cut out a certain diameter around the skin cancer to make sure they get all of the cells and then they stitch it up so I’ve got some beautiful scars on my leg and my back and they monitor that over time. I had to go for skin check-ups every couple of months to make sure that there weren’t any new spots that are coming back. Thankfully, the biopsies on the places that they have kind of cut out came back and none of them were related. So that indicated that the skin cancer itself wasn’t actually spreading it’s just that I had multiple different spots that were happening. So I still go back every year for a skin cancer check just because I am always gonna be a high risk person from having it previously and I’ve never had anything new pop up since those first instances.

 

 

0:15:46.3 Ashley James: Can you share what kind of cancer it was?

 

 

0:15:48.5 Jenn Malecha: Oh, you’re gonna make me think about this. I wanna say that it’s been so long, I don’t really keep track anymore because it’s something that I just don’t think about aside from it being a fact a huge part of my story. I believe it was basal cell melanoma but I have to go back and check my records I don’t actually know that off the top of my head.

 

0:16:07.2 Ashley James: Right, you don’t sit around going “I had basal cell melanoma type 2.5 and whatever”. They come up with all these numbers. You figured out that the environment of your body expressed itself with skin cancer because the environment of the body was at a point where it couldn’t handle its oxidative load and so it expressed itself not only with cancer but like you said, you had fatigue, you’re getting chronic infections, and allergies. So all these symptoms, your body is expressing itself saying “I’m out of balance, something is incorrect, something is not optimal” and then you started to dive into those tests. If all of us were to go get those tests would we all find that we are out of balance in some way or have you actually seen people who get these tests and they’re all within normal ranges? I mean, is it pretty common to be out of normal ranges when we get these metabolic tests?

 

 

0:17:13.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that most of the time I see that people are out of range but that’s because people are coming to me with some type of health complaint that they want to resolve. They already have some insights that their body is signalling to them that something’s not right, they don’t feel right on their own skin, they don’t feel at home in their body, they’ve been diagnosed with something and so the majority of the testing that I see is gonna indicate some things out of balance. If we were running testing on people who said that they felt great on a normal basis, we probably wouldn’t see much and sometimes the reason for that is because everybody has their own threshold of vitality in a sense. It can be an example of how we can correlate this or an example of this is if somebody can get stung by a bee and it’s the end of the world, that’s excruciating pain for them versus another person getting stung by a bee and they don’t feel it at all. So their pain threshold is different, or like women who give birth and some of them are able to give birth naturally and they are like, “Oh, it’s like an easy experience” versus other women who are like, “Give me the epidural as soon as possible” because they can’t handle the pain. Everybody has this bio individuality where our threshold, our adaptability is different. There are some people out there where they can recover or adapt from environmental factors and chronic stresses maybe better than some other people and what’s also interesting that I’ll add about your question here too is that, any time that we’re doing a test it’s only a snapshot in time and the body’s metabolic state is constantly changing like you’re thyroid hormone can be different every single minute of the day. When I work with clients and we do testing and do the training that I’ve received, one of the things that we really emphasize is that we don’t treat the test results, we treat the person and that’s because I definitely have had test results come back what I would say clean, like there’s not really anything on them but the person feels terrible and so I’m not going to dismiss the way that the person is feeling just because the test result comes back saying there’s nothing to be found here like it could have just been that snapshot in time when we caught it at a good moment and there was nothing to show but if we would have tested it five minutes later it could look totally different. The reverse of that is that I definitely have had people that I worked with and say, “I feel really good”, and their test results shows some dysfunction but if they’re telling me that they feel good, there’s no point in chasing the test result and having them go through all the stuff if they feel good because again maybe we just caught it in a bad moment on the test results.

 

 

0:19:59.9 Ashley James: Absolutely, I was just at my naturopath yesterday and the nurse, the second I walked in takes my pressure and it is amazing. Throughout the day, my blood pressure is absolutely amazing. I just know myself, the second I walk into the naturopath where I had our 4 year old son and he was extra hyper yesterday for some reason so he was just bouncing off the walls and I have my husband with me and he was just a little bit cranky that our son was just bouncing off the walls and so we’re all in one room together with the nurse who’s taking my blood pressure the second I walked in. I’m like, “My blood pressure’s going to be high” like I just know that and it was like 148/97. I was just, “Wait a second, take it again give me a few minutes” because I have a really good blood pressure so the nurse was like, “Ok, I’ll get the doctor to take it”, I’m like, “Good”. She used one of those machines and I was like, “What are you doing? Get your sphygmomanometer and take it yourself, don’t put this machine on me” and sure enough after I had my appointment with my naturopath and then I’m like, “Oh, by the way can you take my blood pressure?”. She was like, “Sure”, whips it out I was 117/78 or something like that, I’m like, “See, my blood pressure is always good, you just gotta give me a minute, let me sit down and recover from the chaos” but that’s just it is, we would take a snapshot of one time we take blood pressure, one time we take a lab, it can be different from 5 minutes from now. Like you said, we don’t want to treat the lab results as though it’s like the 0:21:51.3?? but we need to see the person as a whole. So, you’re looking at how the liver is functioning, understanding that it can go up this lab result isn’t what it is all the time but it can go up and down, thyroid does go up and down, cortisol does go up and down. I’m sure there are some tests that you do like 24 hour urine collection where it’s like an average of 24 hours or taking samples of saliva throughout the day for the whole day cortisol snapshot, gives you a better understanding of what’s going on but you’re really looking at the symptoms. Can you maybe dive in to a bit about listening to the body, listening to the symptoms and how it paints a picture for you so when someone comes to you and gives you a set of symptoms, you go “Aha! It might be this, or it might be that”, can you talk a bit about those kind of symptoms that you commonly see and what they mean.

 

 

0:22:48.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so let’s just first define the fact that symptoms are the last thing to show up in a dysfunctional state. When we’re experiencing symptoms, there’s already been some type of dysfunction that’s been going on underneath the hood of your car and your body basically for a period of time and we kind of touch on this earlier when were talking about my skin cancer story is that my body had been giving me signs, the allergies, the fatigue that I was experiencing, the stuff like not being able to manage my weight very well even though I was doing all the right things. These were all symptoms that something was happening and the skin cancer was like my body raising a huge red flag going, “Hey! Like you need to pay attention to the situation that’s happening here because this is not good, you know?” I do remember finding that first, it was like a mole on my leg and really feeling like intuitively it was a foreign thing on my body. I have moles on my body and freckles and things like that and this one I was like, “This feels like it’s not supposed to be here”, it’s like an alien whose landed on my leg and I needed to go get this thing checked out and I think that so often, most of us are ignoring some of the signs because we consider them normal just because they’re common. Symptoms can be very common but that doesn’t mean they’re normal. We need to start looking at like one of the symptoms that we’re experiencing and what does our body trying to tell us as a result of that. There’s a lot of symptoms that we will ignore that we just don’t even know that are symptoms for example like one of the questions that I ask clients on my intake forms is, are you sensitive to bright lights, and most people would not even think about it as a symptom because it’s so normal just to put on sunglasses immediately as you walk out your front door right? We look at symptoms, the tricky thing about symptoms is that they are cross-related to multiple different systems of the body so we can take something like fatigue for example. Fatigue could be related to adrenal dysfunction, it could be related to poor blood sugar regulation, it could be because you’re getting inadequate sleep at night time, it could be because your T3 hormone is low, it could be because you’re liver’s not functioning very well, maybe you’re nutrient deficient because you’re gut is dysfunctional, and so the reality is when it comes to symptoms, we may never know what the root cause is but we can always have a positive effect on it and when one system of the body goes down, all the other systems of the body are going to be soon to follow essentially. Going back to your question Ashley, you asked me, basically, how do you look at a cluster of symptoms to determine what somebody might have, well, my job is not to diagnose people with their condition, my job is to look for healing opportunities in the body because regardless of whatever the condition is, if we go back to the general principles of health and we coach up function or improve function in the body no matter what their symptoms or conditions are, they’re going to start to resolve themselves you know. I find in my own personal journey and with a lot of the clients that I worked with, a diagnosis isn’t really helpful in a lot of cases like I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s as a result of the mold that we eventually found in our home in a later point in time in my story and having that diagnosis didn’t necessarily changed the course for me on what I was going to do to get my body back, like it still involved modifying my diet, my rest, my exercise, stress reaction, some strategic supplements that were supporting my thyroid and some other functions that were going on like it helped. It’s like it helps with 20% but the other 80% is really just dialing in on those general principles of health that we kind of all know to be true but I don’t think that most of us are really paying attention to or prioritizing sometimes in ways that we need to really feel our best.

 

 

0:27:06.2 Ashley James: So you have a set of rules for helping people to dial in optimal health, you know, the foundations, the building of the strong foundation of health regardless of what their diagnosis or symptoms are, they follow this set of rules. I’m pretty sure I could guess some of them like to drink enough healthy water everyday, move your body in a way that brings you joy, and get enough of those wonderful nutrients from fruits and vegetables everyday. There are certain things everyone knows to do, whether they’re doing them or not is another thing but that they really do make a difference. I definitely want to dive in to what you teach to build the foundations of health but first, I would like to go back. Are there symptoms that you could tell us that when someone presents with this symptom, this is the test I look for, this is how I help them, do you have sort of a list of symptoms that when someone experiences, it puts a light bulb in your head to go “Ok, we should look over here”.

 

 

0:28:15.8 Jenn Malecha: Actually, I don’t because that would be chasing the symptoms versus really understanding what the healing opportunities are within all systems of the body. When a client comes to me, no matter what the condition is or the issues they’re having whether it’s fatigue, or known autoimmune condition my goal in order to truly understand what is going on with the person on a physiological and a functional level, I love to run a group of lab tests to look at the hormones, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system. Let’s get the big picture of what’s going on here because, no matter what is the condition or the symptom that they’re having, again, going back to the concept that every single system in the body is interconnected, that’s a network of systems. If one system is going down, they may be presenting symptoms in one area but that area could be completely disconnected or really far away from whatever the root cause is and a really great example of this is Dr. Tom O’Bryan is somebody that I follow and one of my mentors, and in his book, the Autoimmune Fix, he’s talking about a 4 year old child that had a recurring growth on their eye and they couldn’t figure out what was going on with this. They finally cut gluten out of this child’s diet and the growth never came back and then they tested him to be celiac so that can just be an example of how like the root cause can be removed from where the symptom is actually showing up like you would suspect the recurring growth a tumor in your eye is related to celiac disease. How is the eye related to the gut you know, it’s what a lot of people would be considering. Thyroid is another really great example of this too, if you have poor thyroid function or a sluggish thyroid, well we have to ask a question of why is that happening in the first place? If you go through the physiological process of thyroid where you have your TSH that is released from the pituitary gland to stimulate the thyroid to produce T4 and T4 has to be converted into T3 and then the majority of that conversion happens in the liver and then the intestinal tract, if you have low T3 we need to be looking at what’s going on in the liver and the intestinal tract also like, why are you not converting T4 to T3 properly or is it you’re actually not making enough T4 from the thyroid and if that’s the case then ask him the question again why is that happening, like, are you not getting the right amount of nutrients or support, is the HPA access not working well? So you can start to see how in order to really understand the whole picture we want to look at all these different systems of the body at the same time to see how they’re all interconnected and where the multiple dysfunctions might be lying and that is where you understand how you really get to heal the body. We can correct cortisol dysfunction if we can boost liver function, if we can get the gut running better and cleaner, then the thyroid issue is going to resolve itself. We don’t want to just go after thyroid, is that making sense?

 

 

0:31:40.3 Ashley James: Absolutely! If I have a friend with Hashimoto’s and her nature path finally after years discovered that she had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and now she’s being treated for that and what you’re saying is that what’s going on in your gut absolutely affects your thyroid and your other hormones.

 

 

0:31:59.9 Jenn Malecha: Exactly, and that’s why I have so many people that come to me and say, “I have been working and taking thyroid medication or done some things to support my thyroid but I’m still not feeling better”, it’s because they’re kind of missing some of these other pieces of the puzzle and so I never really chase the symptoms. I’m like, let’s actually look at the whole picture and see what’s going on and where are those areas of opportunity where we can boost function in the overall body which is going to have that same domino effect to help bring the other systems of the body back up and running again.

 

 

0:32:30.4 Ashley James: Cool. I want to reword my question because what you were explaining is actually what I want, I want more of that. So, when someone comes to you and they have been experiencing the symptoms for a while and they have a diagnosis like, autoimmune or hashimoto’s or autoimmune of the thyroid or some kind of autoimmune condition or some kind of maybe their hormones are out of balance in some way, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis or not but they come to you and they say, “This is what’s going on with me or this is what my doctor told me I have.” and obviously they’re suffering. Can you give us some examples of ok so someone comes to you with this diagnosis or these set of symptoms and you go, “Aha! We need to look over here.” and it’s just like thinking, “What do you mean the gut has to do with skin health” or “What do you mean the gut has to do with or the liver and the gut has to do with thyroid”, can you just explain a bit about why looking at the body holistically is so important when people come with each of these different conditions and where you want to look to see what’s going on like these different conditions that you end up looking at the health of the liver, or health of the kidneys, or health of the gut in order to help them to resolve something that doesn’t seem like it’s related to the gut, or the liver, and the kidneys.

 

 

0:33:55.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. First, I’ll say to that is that whatever you’re currently experiencing right now in terms of the health issue did not happen overnight and that is the first thing that I explain to people. We get in a consultation, that’s basically where we start is I just set the preface of the conversation with whatever you’re experiencing currently right now did not happen overnight. It’s an accumulation of things that have happened over a period of your lifetime that have probably just worn down your body and started to degrade some of these systems, like dysfunction started to set in and then we have symptoms that arise ultimately. And so, I will have people go through their health history, I have them go all the way to the point of birth Ashley because, if somebody was a C-section baby or they were not breast fed for example, those could actually be factors that are affecting their current health for them right now in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or however old they are because right from the beginning of their entrance into this lifetime, they were not exposed to the right types of bacteria to help build a healthy microbiome and a healthy immune system and so we usually find clues right there and then throughout their childhood, they’re often becomes more inclusive, like recurring illness, or infections thats happened, or things and then all of a sudden their menstrual cycles were off from the beginning and they have forgotten that all of these things that happened over their timeline or they just haven’t really paid attention to them realizing that they were contributing factors to what’s going on with them today. So, that’s part of my answer to your question because looking at the whole person means looking at that whole life experience to understand what are all the different types of stress that they have encountered in their lifetime and I ask people to redefine what the word stress means to them because we often think that stress is just the mental emotional stress that we encounter when we get in a disagreement with a loved one, or when we have an angry boss, or we get stuck in traffic or something but, stress is anything that places a burden on your body that results in inflammation and leads to dysfunction. It could be to foods that you’re eating that aren’t right for you, poor quality food that your getting, over or under exercising, toxins in your environment, and other types of triggers. Someone comes to me with let’s say they do have a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s. My goal is to understand how they got to that point in the first place because I want to get us some insights on how do we go about reversing it. Again, going through that clear health history from the point of their birth all the way leading up to where they currently are, being able to pick out clues of things like, maybe they had hormone imbalances that set in in adolescence when they started their menstrual cycle and they have indicators for what would be like estrogen dominance which can lead to triggering Hashimoto’s and thyroid imbalances or if they’ve been drinking and bathing in toxic water, the chemicals and water that can bind the thyroid hormone and start to create dysfunction that’s happening in the body and that would also give me some insights that their liver has been overloaded based on their environmental exposures. Talking about their digestion, what do their bowel movements look like, do they have bloating or gas, are they responding to food; could give us insights about what’s going on with gut health. And how do they sleep? You know, there are some key clues that you can get around sleep like if somebody is wired and tired at night time and has trouble falling asleep that usually highly correlates with having a parasite bacteria or yeast overgrowth that’s going on in the gut, if there’s somebody who wakes up recurrently in the middle of the night, usually that window of like maybe 1  to 3 AM that’s an indication of their blood sugar dropping so you have poor blood sugar regulation which probably means that they’re not eating the right diet, like macronutrient breakdown for them to regulate blood sugar or that they have some cortisol dysfunction that set in that’s dysregulating blood sugar as well, or they’re insulin resistive and kind of like putting all the clues of the puzzle together and whatever all the clues of the puzzle are, they always kind of relate back to these foundational tests that I run with every single person to start. Again, so we can look at the hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system all in one swoop and see this big picture of like let’s look through all the systems and then based on that information, I will put together a protocol for them that includes strategic recommendations for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation, and toxin removal, and there’s a reasonable expectation that within 90 days, they should see some really significant improvements in their health. If they’re not seeing the improvements that I would expect them to see or making progress in a way that I would expect them to, that’s where we go back to the drawing board. Let’s dive a little bit deeper, you’re doing all of the right things, you should be seeing x, y, and z results but you’re not getting that, so now let’s consider something like mold in your home or an underlying autoimmune condition that we don’t know that you have or lines or something else that might be deeper that didn’t necessarily show up on one of those foundational lab tests. Regardless of some of those deeper issues that are happening, you still need those foundational lab tests to be supporting those systems of the body because let’s say it is molds, toxicity for example, you still have to support the hormones, liver function, the digestive system, energy, nervous system, immune system in order to be able to recover from mold exposure, right?

 

 

0:39:55.1 Ashley James: I love it. I love that you are looking at the body as a whole and that you have these insights. I know about waking up in the middle of the night was blood sugar but, being jittery tired but wired, I did not know the connection to parasites. I’ve had a few really cool interviews about parasites and it always blows my mind how common parasites are. No one wants to talk about it, by the way. My mom, when I was about 11, or 12, it was late 80s early 90s. My mom brought home a book called, ‘Guess What Came to Dinner?’ and I still remember it, my mom put us on a parasite protocol because we got some parasite testing and we had picked up one parasite from Mexico and 2 parasites from owning pets, a cat and dog parasite. Who knows how long we’d had them for. I think it was like one dog parasite one cat parasite. I had a dog when I was like an infant, so the whole family basically had these parasites. I remember doing the whole parasite cleanse. I was just a kid and I was so into it, I thought it was like, “Are you kidding me? We all have worms inside us?”. I grew up, my mom was really into health stuff and doesn’t every family do parasite cleanses and drink fresh smoothies and juices and protein shakes and doesn’t everyone do supplements. I grew up and that was my environment and so I just thought this was totally normal and now coming into the real world going, “This is so not normal!” like, parents don’t talk about parasites with their kids and go on parasite cleanses. Of course, for the majority of people this is news to them, thinking that we need to deworm ourselves. One of my previous guests Dr. Jade Davidson explains and he has a whole protocol of getting rid of parasites, especially for people with lyme disease and his protocol works really well with people with lyme and he says that, back a 100 years ago our great grandparents knew to deworm, that every year we would give these herbs and clays and all that stuff to all of our farm animals and we do it to ourselves too, that it was just a known thing. Since modern medicine has come in, in the last 3 generations we’ve really given up our health and health education over to the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and the hospitals and we have stopped practicing these daily health habits. It’s been lost, you know? We all moved away from the farm to the city, and with a matter of generations we forgot about midwifery and we forgot about how to take care of ourselves using nature. Now we’re coming back, now we’re turning around going, “Wait a second”. So listening to the body, what other symptoms do you look for to confirm for you that someone might have parasites or yeast overgrowth or candida, what other common symptoms happen?

 

 

0:43:28.3 Jenn Malecha: Yes, another thing that’s interesting is that they can correlate with the moon cycles. So, we’re in a new moon right now, today’s the first day of a new moon and so usually the symptoms you’re having would be lower in a new moon stage versus during as we get closer to the full moon if you’re having digestive issues or skin issues or anxiety or sleep issues, you would see those symptoms start to worsen as you get closer to a full moon because the full moon, creates its gravitational pull on the earth and we know this from tide cycles of the ocean during a full moon, the tide tends to be higher, the tide will shift on the earth and that same gravitational pull kind of happens in our body and creates this awakening response in the kidneys, and within parasites and bacteria and yeast. That would be something to look for as I start tracking and seeing if your symptoms are worsening as you get closer to the full moon and as you start to see some relief as the full moon starts to go away we get into a new moon phase. There’s also, skin issues can be a result of parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth or they can be connected because whenever you’re experiencing skin issues like rashes or acne like anything that’s coming out of your skin is like an indication that your body is trying to detox, and parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth create their own byproduct or waste product internally and they can create a really toxic environment for us. Definitely, variations within your bowel movements, if you vary from being more constipated to having diarrhea, if there’s a potent smell that comes along with that, sometimes you can actually see what we call biofilm in the toilet, it seems like there’s a filmy substance that’s in the toilet because parasites and bacteria and yeast, they produce biofilm, it’s like a protective layer that they produce so they don’t get eliminated. Another thing is teeth grinding, a lot of people don’t know that teeth grinding and tinnitus actually can be indications of parasitic or yeast or bacteria overgrowth as well. These are really common things I see a lot that can be linked to those kind critters that are going on in our gut.

 

 

0:45:55.3 Ashley James: Now, one thing is becoming more and more popular is autoimmune disease and one argument is, “Well, we’re better at diagnosing.” People have always had autoimmune disease, we’re just now good at diagnosing it so that’s one argument. Kind of like, autism are those in the spectrum it was like 1 in 10,000 children back when we were kids and now it’s like between 1 in 40 and 1 in 60 depending on boys or girls and so some people say, “Well, we’re just better at diagnosing and better at seeing it.”, is one argument right? We can’t really disprove that but we can definitely gather some evidence to prove or disprove it but ultimately, we know it’s a hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that in the last 30 years, many changes have happened in our environment and even in our food chain that have lead to people developing autoimmune, so autoimmune is primarily a man-caused illness that if we were all living peacefully in the jungle eating fresh fruits and vegetables and we had no chemicals, we didn’t have any pollution, that no one would have autoimmune condition or that it would be incredibly rare. So, this one idea that in the last 30 years it has exacerbated greatly because we are exposed to so many toxins and the body just can’t handle it right? It’s showing up as the weak point in that person’s genetics. What is your is your belief in huge increase that we’re seeing in autoimmune? What do you think contributes to triggering it in people?

 

0:47:46.7 Jenn Malecha:  I wanna think that the environment is 80% of any disease where currently known, autommunity, cardiovascular disease, like whatever is going on, environmental plays a bigger role that I think most people are willing to or want to even acknowledge. And we know this because there are still places around the world we call them blue zones where the diseases are virtually non-existence and people were living well into their nineties and their hundreds disease-free and a colleague of mine Jason Proll just did a whole documentary about this called the Human Longevity project and they went out and they researched and met with these people that lived in this blue zone to figure out what are the things they are doing like what makes it different for them and environment is the biggest part and you know just how they live their lives and the fact that they do live in these areas is where toxins and modern society is barely present in their environment, I think that’s a huge factor. When we look at something like autoimmune conditions, there are rules that says that 3 things have to be in place, this one that you have to have a genetic predisposition to it but, we are not a result of our genes. Our environment is what turns our genes on or off essentially. So, you have to have this genetic predisposition to it. Second is that you have to have basically a degree of leaky gut going on. And leaky gut really means that you have a dysfunctional intestinal tract where toxins are crossing the gut barrier getting into the bloodstream that aren’t supposed to which then is triggering the inflammation in the body and the immune system and autoimmunity really shows itself when the immune system has become so overwhelmed with so much inflammation that it no longer is able to differentiate who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and it starts attacking healthy tissue as well. The third piece of autoimmunity then are these triggers for inflammation and there are some specific triggers that then can be related to certain autoimmune condition. With Hashimoto’s for example, we’ve found that epstein barr or also known as mono like UBV is a trigger for Hashimoto’s as well as certain parasites and bacteria like H pylori bacteria, blastocystis hominis as a parasite, those have been strongly correlated with Hashimoto’s cases. On the stool sample tests that I run with all my clients, there’s actually a section for autoimmune trigger types of bacteria and parasites, we got other things like klebsiella for example, which is a common one that we can find amongst a lot of people. Gluten is a trigger for some autoimmune conditions obviously celiac but also crosses over to Hashimoto’s as well and then there are certain toxins in our environment. If we look at this factor of like what you are saying, I love that you’re bringing these 2 hypothesis to light because, yes, we are better at diagnosing I have been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and when I was looking at family history, both of my grandmothers were being treated for thyroid disorder but they hadn’t necessarily been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Now, knowing that I’ve been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, they’re long passed but I could probably make a really good assumption saying they probably had Hashimoto’s too just probably didn’t know how to diagnose it then. There’s studies and surveys that have been done with the traditional medical world with doctors coming out of school to ask them, how comfortable do they feel with diagnosing autoimmune conditions, and the reality is it that they don’t really feel comfortable about it and so do you think it’s been underdiagnosed for a long period of time but that means that we actually could have higher populations of people in the previous generations that had autoimmune conditions and we would have to ask why would they have these autoimmune conditions and then we’ll start to look at environment again. So, they kind of really interplay with each other, I think, and the environment is a huge factor and that’s what we have to be more conscious of because I know it for myself, reversing my Hashimoto’s, the way that I was able to do that was by changing my environment and changing my lifestyle. Just because you’ve been diagnosed with something doesn’t mean that your doomed to live that way or have that forever. I will always have to be aware of this risk factor that I have but I don’t have to live a life suffering with Hashimoto’s because we do have that ability to change our environment and our lifestyle and reverse the effects of it essentially.

 

 

0:52:40.1 Ashley James: I’m glad you brought that up because some people especially some doctors will tell their patients that you have an autoimmune condition, you’re going to have it for the rest of your life. If I had stuck with MDs they would have kept me on metformin and kept me in diabetes. Luckily, especially if any MDs is listening to the show which are about 20% of my listeners are holistic health professionals, so I have had MDs write me and say, “Hey, I’m not one of the bad guys”, I’m not trying to bash them but it’s just if we take all of them, there’s a majority that will give their patient metformin or give their patient insulin if it’s called for and tell them ok, “Follow the American Diabetes Association diet” and we’re going to manage your diabetes. I’m talking about type 2 obviously type 1 is a totally different concept but type 2 being that the body can still produce its own insulin and the blood sugar is out of control it’s not in healthy ranges and the body is able to produce insulin, so type 2 diabetes. So going to see “traditional pharmaceutical allopathic based medicine”, you go to see that MD, they put you on drugs to “manage” as in we’re not curing you, we’re not going to reverse it, you will always have diabetes, we’re just going to try to manage it. So a lot of people that have an autoimmune condition get the same treatment, get the same spiel that we’re going to put you on these drugs, we’ll test you every few years but there’s no talk of let’s reverse it, let’s cure it, let’s no longer have it, no you have it and you will always have it. Maybe you’re body will spontaneously go into remission but you will always have it. That’s one philosophy right, and then we’ll have to pull ourselves out of that box, pull ourselves out of that man-made philosophy, man-made confinement, and pull ourselves out to this new way of thinking where the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself if we give it what it needs and if we stop giving it what it doesn’t need.

 

 

0:55:05.3 Jenn Malecha: Exactly.

 

0:55:07.4 Ashley James: And that diagnosis is man-made. It’s a set of symptoms and the body can correct itself. So, we are not so broken that we’ll always be broken. That’s what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe but the body has a miraculous ability to heal itself. Let’s not own the diagnosis as though it’s a death sentence or a life sentence or how we are defined or confined, instead, we come out of it. Just take yourself out and go, “Ok, my body has a set of symptoms, something’s going on let’s heal the body and it’s reversible”, now if I went and decided to eat junk food everyday, if I went and eat a standard american diet I could recreate diabetes in my body, that’s just how my genetics expressed when I fill it full of junk right? And so, I know that about myself and someone like you, you could recreate autoimmune condition or the skin condition, you could recreate that, you could give your body a set of circumstances, like McDonald’s and Starbucks everyday and figure out how to recreate that disease. It’s kind of empowering, once we realize that the choices we’ve been making 50 times a day, everything we put in our mouths and how we choose to manage our stress, or not manage our stress, and whether we’re moving our body in the way that it brings us joy or not, but every single choice that we’re making everyday has built up and led us to the disease state we’re in and that we can shift that, like you said 80% is the environment we can shift it and help the body gain health. Coming all the way back to birth, can you elaborate why even knowing you’re a C-section or whether you’ve been birth vaginally and whether you were breastfed or not, why that can play a factor in someone’s health now 30 or 50 years later?

 

0:57:11.7 Jenn Malecha: So when we are a natural birth we go through the vaginal canal and at that point, you are exposed to all of the bacteria within the vaginal canal and that bacteria is what helps to stimulate your own micro biome growth and helps to stimulate the strength of your immune system. So, if you’re a C-section baby or if you have C-section children, you’re missing out on this once in a lifetime opportunity. We’re not going back up and down on that vaginal canal ever in our lifetime right? There is a practice out there, obviously C-section has to happen sometimes because of medical concerns or if the mom or the baby’s life is at risk and things like that, and there are some doctors out there who are practitioners of something that you should request if you ever get yourself in a position of having a C-section baby is that they can still sweep the vaginal canal and smear? some of that bacteria over the baby’s face and the mouth and eyes so they get some of that exposure and that can be very helpful. When it comes to breastfeeding, there’s colostrum. The mother produces colostrum, there’s also bacteria that’s coming from the mother’s body that’s again helping to boost the immune system and helping to build the microbiome and so, if we don’t get exposed to that from a young age then we’re basically missing some of the building blocks that are really critical to the future of our health. And aside from that, when breastfeeding doesn’t take place then what are we supplementing with? We’re supplementing with formula which tends to be really high in sugar and that is then disrupting or causing inflammation within the intestinal tract and also tends to be milk-based. So milk that’s produced by cows or somewhere else and that is not our natural form of food for humans. It’s not exactly replicable, formulas not a great replacement necessarily but it’s the only thing that we really know about or know what to do if right now, right? There are places out there where women donate their breast milk, and you can go get that. You know I’ve had friends of my own, I don’t have any children but I’ve had friends of my own where they were in a situation where they weren’t able to breastfeed. It just wasn’t working, you know, for various reasons and they were a little bit reluctant to go utilise some of these places where you can purchase breast milk because it is a hit to your ego and your pride a little bit, I understand that. I hope for some of the listeners out there that are listening to this, know that if you’re the one who set your child up for the best success with their health, that should be something that you might want to consider as a replacement instead of going straight to formula. We can get down the rabbit hole of the push on formula in the food industry, but ultimately we need to be like you said, every choice that you make or every action you take is an opportunity to make a choice for your health or your child’s health if you’re raising a child, every time you sit down to eat, you would have a choice to make. You can eat something that either support your body and builds it up or breaks it down. When we go out to exercise, or when we look at our sleep, or the other choices that we’re making in life, every single action is an opportunity to make a choice on how you’re going to support your body, to either build up health or break it down essentially.

 

 

1:00:48.0 Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. Our son, when he was born just over 4 years ago I could not produce enough breast milk and I did everything, I drank the teas, and the tinctures, the cookies, and all those little things that the midwives and doulas and my naturopath all recommended and I did everything I could and I still wasn’t producing enough. The first rule is baby gets fed and that’s when I was introduced to Human Milk for Human Babies which is a project where women, wherever you are look for Human Milk for Human Babies’ Facebook group in your area and if you have milk to donate go to Human Milk for Human Babies and find the local Facebook group and so there’s women who are donating. So I connected with women who say I eat organic, I’m not on any medications, I eat organic, I do not drink alcohol, I don’t drink coffee, my baby is this old, and I have this many ounces to donate. We went around for the first 6 months of our son’s life and supplemented the majority of his milk. I’d give as much as I could and then we drove around and we would drive sometimes an hour away, even this one woman who was a client of one of our naturopaths who had flown to the east coast and she has a huge surplus, she shipped it frozen, she shipped it overnight to us. Now that was like a month’s supply, like a huge cooler, a month’s supply of breast milk. It can be done, it absolutely can be done and it was a great adventure and actually made some friends that are still friends to this day. It can be a great support network to connect into and if I do have another child and I have a surplus, I would be so excited to donate it but it’s very interesting that we can see the correlation between whether someone was breastfed, whether they were birth vaginally and their health to this day, and so we know that if someone wasn’t, that we need to do extra support for the microbiome of their gut and that does play a role in their health. The last 2 weeks I love doing experiments on myself. I’m always shifting my diet. I’m always playing around with what does my body needs? I figured that you would just be playing with your diet and I think the listener would benefit from this kind of mentality where it’s like be fluid and be willing to experiment, be willing to do these little elimination diets with yourself. You know what, I’m going to do an experiment for the next 2 weeks, I’m not going to have any dairy, or I’m not going to have any grains just to experience what does your body feel like away from those foods. And so, I decided to cut out, I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years so I don’t eat barley wheat oats but I decided to go flour free and I’ve been sugar free for the most part but you know like occasionally would have something with some kind of natural sweetener but I decided to go 100% sugar free, I’m already dairy free, and flour free, and focus my foods on whole food plant-based. So it’s like a very anti-inflammatory diet. I wake up with so much more energy now and I don’t feel like I cut out that much, I just decided my plate is full of vegetables and whole grains, so like either brown rice or sweet potato and just tons of vegetables and some legumes and that’s it, that’s like my breakfast, lunch, dinner for the last 2 weeks and I’m really impressed by how good I feel. So there’s been a few times where I was out or I was at a friends house and I could have eaten sort of off my plan that I’ve created for myself and I sat there and I thought, “You know, I could have that.” like whatever the food was, that was delicious. I could have that gluten-free vegan cupcake at the birthday party last weekend, but I didn’t because I thought, you know what, I feel so good right now and I just know that I won’t feel as good after I eat that very pro-inflammatory food. And so we have to ask ourselves, do I want the 5 minutes of joy that eating this McDonalds, I always use McDonalds as an example but, I’m going to get a letter from them one day, and just whatever that food is you know that is pro-inflammatory to you, is 5 minutes of joy really worth a 3 days of inflammation and maybe just feeling off and feeling kind of sluggish, is it really worth it? And ultimately, it wasn’t for me. I am just feeling even better and even better everyday noticing that the inflammation that was caused by flour products and those grains that its dropping of my body and I’m feeling better and better. It’s a cool little mind trick. Once we’re eating really clean it’s like, it’s not worth it to go back and eat the foods that are harming us because 5 minutes of pleasure and that 5 minutes of dopamine spike is not really worth 3 days of pain.

 

1:06:21.9 Jenn Malecha: Right, right. Yeah, I love this concept. I mean, this is something that I talk with my clients all the time about is play this game with yourself, create presents by every time you’re faced with food choices, like ask yourself is it worth it, because most people are just moving through life on autopilot, we were talking a little bit earlier about, have you ever had that experience of driving home from work and all of a sudden you are in your driveway and you don’t really remember how you got there because you are on autopilot. It’s like a routine of what you do every single day and most times that’s how we’re moving through life as well, we’re not paying attention to how this food or how does this experience or how does this action really make me feel, and then questioning like is this worth it and I know that was a shift to that I made in the beginning also, when I started to move towards a gluten, dairy, sugar, soy free type of lifestyle which is starting to make that connection that when I eat this I feel this way, and is that how I want to be feeling. After I’ve been gluten-free for some time we went to Thailand in 2017 and we’re in Chiang Mai and I remember there was a local dish there sounded so amazing and I decided to try it knowing that it had gluten in it, I shared it with my friends and I didn’t feel great afterwards. I had brain fog, my stomach was a little bit upset, and my joints were a little tender and so I remember just consciously going through this process of is this the way that I want to experience the rest of my trip, because this is like day 2 when we arrived there. I want to have energy, I want to remember and be clear minded, like all the beautiful sights that are to be seen here, I flew 36 hours from California to Thailand, I don’t want to mess this up you know. And I think that that’s just how we want to start living our life more on a day to day basis is really just creating that presence and recognizing like tuning in to our body and seeing how it responds to the things that we’re doing. And also this point that you brought up too, is that things can shift. One of the reasons that I kind of play around with my diet from time to time is because our body is always shifting. When I was in the midst of healing Hashimoto’s I had tried to start and get into a little bit of intermittent fasting and more of a Keto style diet and I instantly realized that my body was not responding well to that and I healed the Hashimoto’s and now I primarily eat more of like a keto style diet and it totally works for me because I’ve resolved the underlying hormone imbalances that were going on or another great example of that is eating seasonally, you know, you’re in southern california in the US, you know it’s summertime and so the hotter weather like I’m finding my body craving blueberries or we walked by a peach tree the other day and I was like salivating looking at these peaches. And I was like, you know what, this is my body, we’re meant to eat seasonally, we’re not meant to be forced into this structured diet 100% of the time, I don’t believe that. If we look at our ancestors and even indiginous tribes that are around our modern day society now, they eat seasonally based upon what is available. They have great food orientation in their diet and that’s something that we should be considering too as well and you might find that some foods are problematic for you right now, you cut it out for a little bit and then you may be able to reintroduce them and have no problem with them you know. And it’s all about the overall load on your body and sometimes we just need to stop adding fuel to the inflammatory fire and allow our body to heal and then we’re able to tolerate things much better afterwards.

 

 

1:10:21.5 Ashley James: I’d love to dive in to what you teach your clients. Overall, what’s the foundations of health that no matter what condition they have really benefits, so benefits a 100% of the population to make sure that their doing.

 

1:10:40.1 Jenn Malecha: So the first thing is figuring out what foods your body needs to eat to function at its potential and I’m not biased towards any type of diet. I really believe that you are unique and therefore your diet should be too. There is a difference between eating healthy and eating right for your body. Eating right for your body will incorporate healthy foods but not every healthy food is right for your body. You just gave a great example of yourself, that you’re gluten free and all these things but maybe like, even the gluten free flours were “healthy”, they were not doing you a good service at this point in time in your life. A banana, banana will obviously be considered as a healthy food but if you have blood sugar regulation issues or insulin resistant going on, that’s not a healthy food for you right now. And so, and what they try to walk people through in exploratory process like we use food sensitivity testing, looking at their digestive system, as well as metabolic typing to kind of find those pieces of the puzzle to figure out what kind of foods are right for your body then they go through this journaling experience to really dial that and see how their body is reacting to certain foods so that they create a connection with their body, an intuitive connection so that, they will know how this knowledge moving forward about what foods are right for their body and that’s something like you’ll always have, that’s priceless. And then, really that might have huge emphasis is on sleep, because I say all the time like your diet and exercise efforts are worth nothing if you aren’t sleeping well and aside from sleeping well, good quality sleep during the right periods of time of the day. I’m sure you’ve talked about circadian rhythms and cortisol rhythms here on your show before and our body has this natural rhythm to it that is in alignment with the sun and the moon cycles. And so, there are certain times, really critical times that we should be sleeping and generally speaking, that’s from about 10PM to at least 2AM and then in extended 8 hours would be 10PM to 6AM or so. Once the sun sets and temperature decreases and light decreases, our bodies are already starting to shift into this creative like we’re supposed to preparing for sleep and based on this time clock that we’re on certain critical functions are supposed to just happen in certain times. A couple of hours after the sun sets your body will start releasing human growth hormone and the liver’s supposed to its big huge detoxification process around like, 2AM in the middle of the night. If you’re not sleeping during those times those functions will not be happening or they won’t be happening to the extent that they should be and your missing out on these natural healing opportunities that happen all the time and no matter how much you sleep in the next day, your body will never make up for those lost times. So that’s why a lot of people can like, they go to bed at midnight or 1 and yes, they sleep until 8 or 9 or 10 o’clock the next day but they still feel groggy, it’s because they missed out on that critical sleep time from 10 to 2 and they missed out on those critical functions that their body is supposed to be doing at that time of night. A really good visual for this is people can Google the Chinese medicine like body clock or time clock, and in Chinese medicine, they have it all mapped out. There are certain hours at certain times a day, like your body is supposed to be doing these things. So if you’re not sleeping during those hours, you’re missing out on those incredibly important functions.

 

 

1:14:30.6 Ashley James: And how important is timing around eating because if someone’s still digesting their food at 2 in the morning because they have a late night snack, or they ate right before bed, how much does that disrupt the big liver healing that happens at 2 in the morning?

 

 

1:14:48.4 Jenn Malecha: It can be different for every person. Especially if somebody’s got some more severe blood sugar imbalances that are going on, some of those people actually really benefit from eating a high protein or fat containing snack right before bed within a 30 minute window before bed because it helps to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night versus other people won’t do as well with that. So I think that’s just on an individual basis to really figure those things out and what might work for you to resolve that issue like when I have somebody eats a high fat or a high protein snack before bed to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night. Once we get it balanced, they eventually don’t need that anymore and usually that comes from resolving what their eating throughout the rest of the day. Making sure they have balanced meals throughout the rest of the day but I do believe that and I found this to be successful in most people, we do need to give our bodies a break from digesting which is kind of where the whole philosophy around intermittent fasting comes into play or like just having an eating window of like 11AM to maybe 7PM so that you can give your body a break. There’s a lot of healing benefit that occurs like cell autophagy and things that can happen when we’re not digesting all of the time. That’s for some of the lab testing that really helps like I can see on a DUTCH test if their cortisol or other things are super dysfunctional then fasting isn’t right for somebody in order to balance things out at this point in time once we get them in a better place and they can implement some intermittent fasting or specific eating windows that are right for them.

 

1:16:33.8 Ashley James: Absolutely, that’s where the individuality comes into play. If someone doesn’t have a blood sugar imbalance and they might benefit from intermittent fasting or experimenting, I love experimenting, it’s like “try it.” I turned to my husband a few weeks ago and I said, “Let’s try finishing dinner by 6PM and then just seeing how long we last until we break the fast. It might be 2PM the next day, who knows? Let’s just see how we feel.” and I noticed that for me, I have way more energy in the morning when I make sure that the last food that gets put in my mouth is at 6PM and that’s just maybe drinking some water, some herbal tea, obviously caffeine free, you know herbal tea in the evening and then, going to sleep at a reasonable hour between 9 and 10. The next morning I have way more energy and I feel so much better than if I had eaten at 8PM because sometimes, you know, I just get into the routine of feeding our kid and then doing the bedtime routine with him, getting him to sleep and then I get to cook dinner for myself. Just that little change of eating with my son versus eat after he’s gone to bed has hugely given me way more energy, I mean, the more energy that I could ever get from 4 espresso shots. I’m just so impressed by how much energy that one tweak. So, be willing to tweak and try things but try it long enough, try it for enough days to go, “Yeah, this really does make a difference”, and then also the next experiment which I’m working on is what’s optimal for my body right now to break the fast, is it first thing in the morning, is it later in the afternoon, because it’s really different for everyone. Because sometimes for some people, if we wait too long and we break the fast at 2PM then, they end up being so hungry by 7 or 8 PM and they don’t have the willpower to say, “Ok, I’m sticking to this.”, and so then they end up pushing their feeding window to be too late and they go to bed with a full stomach. So, we have to play around with it. I love the idea of let’s experiment on ourselves and track our progress and see how we feel.

 

 

1:19:01.6 Jenn Malecha: I was going to add to that too. Recognizing we have different energy needs on different days. If you have a 12-hour work day, you know, that may not be an ideal day to go on an extended fast. Being a little bit flexible, I think also in recognizing what are the demands being placed on your body and making sure that you’re supporting whatever those demands are at the same time.

 

1:19:23.6 Ashley James: Stress is something that you’ve talked about that I think especially as women, I mean, I’m a woman so I don’t know what it’s like to be in a man’s body. Based on the observations of my husband I am sure that men also equally do not deal with stress. But, I could speak as a woman, I know that we culturally do not deal with stress that we really would rather put ourselves through the ringer, put ourselves last, drag ourselves through the mud. I had a client once, I gave her the best diet plan based on her needs and the supplements and the lifestyle changes and we worked on everything and she seems to be getting some results but she hit a wall, and I kept coming back to her stress and she said, “I don’t feel stressed”, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. Stress is not an emotion that you feel.”, when you actually feel stress as an emotion, you are at your breaking point. When it’s an actual sensation that you’re feeling like feeling your blood pressure, in your neck, in your head, you are way at the breaking point. So you don’t feel stressed, you’re just doing things that cause stress on the body by not managing it. She had a mother who was sick, she had a young child at home, and she was a very busy manager. So she has constant demands on her at work, with her mother who was ill, and her young child and there was not one break. I gave her all these things that she could do throughout the day to manage her stress that because it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t like, and I get it because it doesn’t seem not important, like why is laughing and hugging and social time and relaxing, that stuff doesn’t seem important, what seems important is working at your job 12 hours a day and then taking care of your kids and then taking care of husband and then just putting ourselves last. But all of that, the lifestyle of not managing stress exacerbates disease and causes the body not be able to heal. Could you talk a bit about your observation with stress and its relationship to disease?

 

 

1:21:43.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I talked about in the beginning too just the concept of let’s redefine stress. Stress is anything that places a burden on the body that results in inflammation and dysfunction. We’re talking here about mental emotional stress, but there is also a ton of other things that can stress the body for example, travelling across different time zones if you’re a traveller. That places a stress on the body and disrupts your natural circadian rhythm that we’re talking about earlier or toxins in your environment or mold like we’re talking about earlier, those all place a stress like a burden on the body that then results in inflammation and that dysfunction. The mental emotional side of stress is so fascinating because I love this example of the woman that you were just speaking of is I find this too with clients. The mindset that we’ve developed in our modern day society and I remember watching the presidential elections that we had here in the US, when was it 2016 with Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump running against each other and then there was a point where Hilary Clinton got really sick and she just kept and she just kept plowing through and what am I thinking in my mind is, “This is just a terrible example for women.”, a powerful woman I think would take a sit back and say I need to take a break and recuperate and take care of myself because what good are we with a person if she would have had won the presidency like what good are we with somebody who’s going to be chronically ill because they’re not really willing to prioritize themselves and take a break from the amount of stress that they’re experiencing. I often have clients because I tend to work with really Type A personalities who have climb their corporate career ladders from a young age and they sacrifice their health as a result of doing so, like they have this defense mechanism built in on those, I would call it as like, they just put their head down and keep plowing through and they never really stop to acknowledge how stress is affecting their body and then they come to us with all of these health issues and again like you said, are doing all the diet things, all the other things but the health issues aren’t fully resolving themselves and finding if we can correlate, let’s start journaling this and writing this down and we can notice, “oh you had a super long day at work” and then we’re working on a huge project and all of a sudden you’re exploited with some symptoms or you’re travelling and then you’re exploited with some symptoms and we can start to connect connect the dots. And it’s not even lack of wanting, it’s kind of like an ingrained ignorance because they just don’t know any better because of the mindset that we’ve developed in our society to even be able to acknowledge the fact that what they’re doing in their lives is contributing to their health like the fact that they’re not acknowledging stress or that again, going back to this concept of just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s a normal scenario. I’ve had conversations with clients before where they’re doing all the things like we need to start looking at the fact that like you know, it’s your job, have you considered getting a new job because it’s what’s killing you and that’s where I infuse them of that transformational work and the coaching that I do with clients because it’s not uncommon for a lot of my clients to either end up changing career paths or moving out of their city or their homes because we start to recognize that those are some of the biggest burdens of stress that is depleting their body and making them feel unwell.

 

 

1:25:34.9 Ashley James: Can you elaborate on certain conditions that you’ve seen that stress has caused or exacerbated.

 

 

1:25:42.2 Jenn Malecha: I keep going back to Hashimoto’s because it’s so close to home but that is certainly one of them. When we look at the energetic aspects of autoimmunity, it manifests a lot of times and correlates with feeling attacked our personal lives in some kind of way. Especially for women and we see that women are like, I can’t remember exactly what the statistics are but, so much more likely to develop an autoimmune condition over men and to be diagnosed with the thyroid imbalance as well. A lot of these comes from like, if we look at the energetic aspects like the thyroid is related to our throat chakra, and the throat chakra is all about communication, like the communication center so when we’re not standing up for ourselves and setting boundaries and speaking our truth and owning our self- worth, we are stopping all of this energy and creating a road block. It can then manifest itself into a disease state essentially or we’re kind of evolving out of this time like a more masculine air into a more feminine presence now, spiritually speaking in the world and so many women have tried to keep up in a man’s world where they don’t call out sick, they don’t stay at home with their kids to take care of them, they shove their emotions to the side, I mean I remember working in the corporate world and having one of my regional bosses came in and he said, “You’re too emotional for a manager”, talk about like you know stunting my health progression right there or like giving me a nice good kick in the gut or should I say my thyroid and just making me feel really bad about being emotional as a woman and I think now in the world that I work in now like my attunement with my emotions is part of what helps me create success and also is what helps me be such a good advocate and intuitive leader for some of the people that I work with. So in any point in time whenever you’re not fully expressing yourself, you’re creating a blockage of energy that’s happening in the body and so when we’re shoving emotions to the side, not acknowledging stress, it’s gonna fester and it’s gonna manifest itself in some kind of health condition for sure.

 

 

1:28:14.2 Ashley James: It’s so individual, it’s so specific to each person’s circumstances, can you give some generic – for everyone kind of advice on how to figure out what is causing stress for them and what kind of steps they can take to de-stress?

 

 

1:28:37.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. I mean there’s a couple of scientific tools that you could use to evaluate. Like heart rate is one of them, when we are stressed out, our body releases cortisol which acts almost like an adrenaline rush and so your heart rate variability is one way to be able to measure stress or just your heart rate in general. You gave a great example earlier talking about your blood pressure also, right, so what you were having a psychological response like a stress of your kid running around, and your husband being there and all these things happening and you knew when you bought into that quiet room with that naturopath that if she took your blood pressure again it would look better so the physiological responses – anxiety, I think would be another one as well to look at like that’s something that lets you know – communication of stress and just feeling wound up when were round around the axle or when we are shooting all over ourselves, I should have done this, I should have done that or I should be doing this, you know we’re being self critical that can be another indication of just being really stressed out or trying to control a situation and that oversensitive control is stressful in itself. The list can go on, there is an emotional aspect that even so people recognizing they are stressed out and then they tend to eat as a result of that, often we have clients kind of assess that when they see that they feel they need a snack or that they’re hungry all the time. We are working on improving their diet, and they’re doing a lot of the right things but they still have a sense of being hungry all the time or they need a snack then I asked them to stop and shift “I want you to stop in the moment when you feel that way, check in with yourself and ask yourself, what is really going on” and check in and see if there is an urge of boredom or reaction to stress in some kind of way or scarcity or a fear, what is the emotion that is coming up and then implement an activity that shift whatever that is that’s happening. So we will define some things that they can do, like go outside or do some deep breathing techniques or something like that. Those usually resolve the problem once they shift that mindset and get out of that stressed state. In terms of things that you can do, deep breathing hands-down is the single most effective and easiest thing that anybody can do to take themselves out of a stressed state into a rest or digest and healing state. So one of the things that I want to drop for your people here Ashley is like, your body can only heal in a relaxed state. If you think about how many times a day you are actually in a relaxed state, it’s very infrequent. When we adopt the deep rhythmic breathing patterns of a relaxed person, it automatically flips the switch in our brain, it takes us out of sympathetic fight or flight mode and puts us into parasympathetic mode. I’ll usually have people do a deep breathing technique or inhale for 5 seconds then hold it for 5 seconds and then exhale for 7 and they just do that 5 to 10 times. It doesn’t require learning how to meditate or any devices or other tools, it’s something that’s accessible to you all of the time. I have clients do this right before they sit down to eat so they can get in the parasympathetic mode because you can actually only really digest your food when we’re in parasympathetic mode so that’s called the rest and digest state basically versus the fight or flight state. I’ve had clients use this breathing technique when they’re feeling anxious about getting onto a plane, when they’re in a meeting and they feel themselves getting worked up, nobody can tell that you’re sitting there doing deep breathing you can be sitting in a room with 20 people on the spotlight, in a board meeting and be doing deep breathing and nobody knows the difference. Otherwise, there’s some really great tools out there people want somewhere like biofeedback stuff, something like Heartmath is a great tool you can use, one of my clients was just telling me she’s been using something called A Muse that helps you with your meditation state and it can identify when you get your brain starts to wander so it kind of pulls you back in. Meditation is another way that we get into that relaxed state as well. So there’s a ton of tools out there, different fitbits and Apple iWatches, all of these technology tools that we have are starting to incorporate more of these stuff in there as well like a mindfulness tool that helps you just take a moment to breathe and relax and calm down a little bit.

 

1:33:47.9 Ashley James: Got it, I like the free one, just breathe. Taking that time to do that slow deep breathing is great. Thank you so much, there’s so many nuggets of gold in what you’ve shared today. What kind of homework would you like to give our listeners? What kind of changes would you like to help them make in their life? Can you give them an assignment so they can go and do it and make some really positive changes.

 

 

1:33:47.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, well, since we’re talking about deep breathing and I just said it, I think that the deep breathing before you eat is huge because you could be eating the healthiest food in the world but if you’re not digesting it very well, you’re not getting much out of it you know and often times in our fast paced life, we’re constantly eating on-the-go or eating with distraction and so simple doing this 5 5 7 breath like I said 5 to 10 times before every meal you’ll probably notice some shifts and the amount of energy that you get out of your food, your ability to digest your food a little bit better and also just feeling satiated and full for longer are usually some of the really few things that people get from that. The other thing we talked about that was so important today was sleep, so for everybody out there, like we said the critical sleep time is be asleep by 10PM or as close to it as possible, most nights out of the week and most nights would probably be like 5 nights out of a week if you could do it every night of the week, awesome but you know I’m a realist there’s going to be Friday night dinners to go to or parties or whatever so there might be those times when you’re up a little bit later but on the majority of your time, get to bed at a reasonable hour and your body will 100% thank you for it, definitely. I think these will be the 2 biggest things that I recommend as homework for people and if I was to add a 3rd it would really be to just be more present every single time you sit down to eat and checking in with yourself like we were talking about earlier, and remember every time you sit down to eat, you have a choice. You can eat something that builds you up or breaks you down and just being present in that moment and making a conscious decision about how it is you want to feel after that meal, or for the rest of the day, or into tomorrow and when we connect with those choices, it makes it so much easier just to naturally choose foods that are right for us versus the ones that aren’t as beneficial for us.

 

 

1:36:38.6 Ashley James: And you said sit down to eat, that’s actually part of the homework.

 

 

1:36:43.8 Jenn Malecha: That’s part of the homework.

 

 

1:36:47.0 Ashley James: I know women who will stand to eat by the kitchen sink, shovel the food in their mouth in between doing the laundry and getting the kids to bed or whatever or drive and eat. It is sit down and take that 5, 10, 15 minutes to eat slowly and to be conscious of that everything we put in our body is feeding our body. You know it’s funny to me that someone will take a prescription medication, the size of a pea, let’s say they take 1 pill a day to manage their blood pressure or manage their blood sugar or manage their thyroid but it is a pill the size of one pea that they take everyday and that tiny little pill the size of a pea has a huge impact on the body. I’m not saying in negative, I’m just saying it has an impact. It can shift your blood pressure, or it can shift your blood sugar, or it can shift your hormones, so this tiny little thing that you put in your mouth once a day or maybe twice a day really impacts your body and we know that. Like if someone takes an Advil for pain, like they know they take this tiny little thing and it has a huge impact on their body, it’s going to shift how they feel and yet we’ve disconnected that everything else we put in our food has an impact on how we feel, there’s a disconnect. So like people are eating the standard American diet right and not getting that huge plate of food can, way bigger than any of those pills they take, has even more impact on the body than that 1 little pill does. Everything that we put in our mouth throughout the day is like a medication. If we think about that, is it a medication that, it has side effects right, so fried foods for example has absolutely studies of proof and will take 10 years off of our life. If we eat fried food everyday, it will take 10 years off your life and cause heart disease and increase the chances of cancer. It’s been proven and studied enough that these foods that are readily available to us have side effects. If we would look at everything that we put in our mouth, like either this is a healing food, or this is a harmful food just like medications. We’re really careful about the medications we choose to be on or not choose to be on based on their effects or side effects. If we take that approach with our food, that everything we put into our mouth is healing or harmful. And another thing that I’ve had a struggle with, I’ve been doing a lot of emotional healing for years around food and that food is something for pleasure like ice cream or chocolate bars or whatever and it’s like catching myself going, “Wait a second, am I missing so much joy in my life that I need to get a dopamine high from the food?”, and I really have to catch myself and go, “Okay, when I wanted that twinky or when I want that ice cream”, even a celebratory ice cream with my kid, it’s like ok and even if it’s vegan and all that stuff. It’s still looking to food for dopamine, I’m putting it in my mouth and it’s what are the effects over the next few days on my health versus how can I increase joy and dopamine and excitement and love, how can I increase that amount of happiness in my life and not have it come from foods. We do live in the real world, we do go to birthday parties there’s always birthday cake, I get that. That’s one thing that people can choose to participate in or not participate but, I did find myself everyday seeking food for pleasure and everyday opening that fridge going, “What am I gonna eat, what am I gonna make for dinner?”, based on wanting more pleasure, and I had to catch myself going, “Ok, I am making food choices that are motivated by this lack of happiness in my life.” and I’m trying to fulfill happiness from food and that ultimately is destroying my health. And you know what? Healthy food, like my salads taste absolutely amazing. I’m sure I’m getting dopamine from my salads now. I can make them taste really good but I know I’m also getting a little bit of a high knowing that everything I’m feeding my body is moving me towards better health. And so for me there is that emotional component, that psychological component, that mindset that comes into play when choosing food and you’ve outlined some really great fun steps that sitting down, being conscious, taking those deep breaths, and you’re asking yourself, “Is this food that is healing for my body or maybe I’m missing something else in life and try to compensate?”. I love your advice around that. I know that you have a free gift for our listeners, I definitely want to make sure. The link to everything that Jenn does is going to be shown on today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your free gift is a 21-day program, I’d love for you to just explain a bit about what it is and the link to it is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth. So what is this wonderful 21-day free program that you’re giving us?

 

 

1:42:15.8 Jenn Malecha: So the 21-day free program actually goes through in more detail a lot of the stuff that we talked about today and it’s kind of getting to the roots of why you might be feeling fat, sick, or tired all the time, essentially, and uncovering some of those hidden healing opportunities. Week 1 is actually all about exploring what food is right for your body so they can function at potential, I actually take you through some of the journaling aspects that I mentioned earlier today to really narrow in on how is your body responding to certain foods and then based upon that feedback, you can then go and make adjustments to really figure out the perfect meals for you and the foods that work with your body best. And then week 2 we move in to talking more in-depth about sleep, giving you some more tools to improve the quality of your sleep, shifting your sleep cycles so that you’re just ultimately getting more restful sleep, in general which will support all of the metabolic processes that your body goes through. And then week 3 is where you get to explore some parasites, bacteria, yeast overgrowth opportunities that might be happening so going through some self screenings where you can check and do some home test to pre-screen yourself to see if these are potential issues for you, and then I’m definitely available to answer your questions for you as you go through that process and I love to hear the feedback that people have from it too on what their finding and exploring. And obviously, I’m open to helping people in more depth if they need some more guidance beyond that but, those are probably the 3 big key areas that I focus on with people and when we make those shifts on those areas they’ll start feeling better instantly in just a matter of couple of days or a couple of weeks. There’s just overall improvement in their health and it’s bringing awareness to some things that maybe they didn’t know previously so they can support themselves better moving forward.

 

 

1:44:18.6 Ashley James: Awesome, thank you so much for that free gift. The website again is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth and I know that my listeners will love gaining more insight from you. It’s been so great having you on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say that was left unsaid or anything you like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

 

1:44:38.5 Jenn Malecha: You know I just want to empower people and leave them with that, I always like to say that I think that you’re kind of in this line of work too, Ashley, we’re in the business of making the impossible possible. We’re here to help people that feel stuck and aren’t getting answers or solutions, so no matter what you’re situation is, just know that there’s probably a solution out there for you and it’s just a matter of finding the right person to work with and sometimes you just have to keep digging and really, the possibilities are endless. I also love to tell people, you only know what you know until you know something different. And I know that even when I’ve done lab testing on myself, like I’m in a really good place right now but every time I get lab test back sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, like I can improve in that area”, like I just got my cortisol and dopamine values back and they’re sitting a little bit low and I was like, “I consider myself a pretty energetic and happy person but what is there like a possibility for like, I can feel even better than this,” you know. So, the possibilities are really endless, and I think that just coming from a place of empowerment, like we’re talking about earlier today that you’re not doomed to the results of a diagnosis or a situation that you’re in, there’s likely a solution that’s out there for you, and to just keep searching and having hope you know.

 

1:46:07.7 Ashley James: Wonderful, absolutely, yes. There is hope, the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself. We got to give it what it needs, stop putting in what it doesn’t need and that there is absolutely hope. I have even seen a woman who is in wheelchair from MS, was told that she’d never walk again and a month later was walking and pain-free because she shifted her nutrition, her diet, and her lifestyle. Just cause the doctor said you’re going to have something for the rest of your life doesn’t necessarily mean, even if you do, you could optimize, we could always optimize our health and well-being. But it does take time and it takes effort and it takes being a detective and that’s what I love doing what you do. I love what you do because you’re that detective that helps people to go deep and find the root cause and support the body holistically. So wonderful, excellent, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing, and of course giving us your free 21-day program as well. It’s been such a pleasure to dive in to this topic with you today.

 

 

1:47:15.1 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, thanks for having me and it’s been wonderful to chat with 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, 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 lives 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 www.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 ore 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 office, 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’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 gonna wanna 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 Jenn Malecha!

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Free Gift – 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less!

Recommended Readings by Jenn  Malecha

Beyond The Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighten

The Thyroid Connection and Autoimmune Solution by Dr. Amy Myers

The Wahl’s Protocol by Dr. Terry Wahls

The Autoimmune Fix by Dr. Tom O’Bryan

Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms and Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Dr. Datis Kharraian

 

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