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Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness
https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness
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https://learntruehealth.com/red-pill-revolution-navigating-the-lies-of-modern-medicine
In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, Ashley James interviews Dr. Jeremy Ayres in a thought-provoking and controversial discussion that challenges conventional health narratives. Dr. Ayres shares insights designed to inspire listeners to question deeply held beliefs and explore alternative perspectives on wellness and healing. With a focus on evidence-based approaches, this episode offers an opportunity to rethink modern medicine and consider empowering paths to true health.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. We have a very controversial and interesting, thought-provoking deep-dive today with Dr. Jeremy Ayres. He’s going to say some things that I think are going to shake up some belief systems. I think some of his topics are so controversial that some people may find themselves upset or may find themselves deciding to question their own belief system and go deeper.
I just want to say that anything that he says that goes completely against your current knowledge or belief system, approach it with an open mind, ask yourself, am I upset because it’s challenging my dogma, or am I upset because I think it is hurtful, or am I upset because I’ve never heard this before that it’s completely opposite to what everyone around me believes.
We just question our own belief system. I’m not saying that I believe everything he says. I’m saying that it’s worth having thought exercises. I believe it’s part of personal growth to listen to an opinion different from yours and to just keep your mind open and then go deeper and see what evidence is there for that. Is it true? Is this the truth? Can I find evidence to support this? Why does he say these things? He does a lot more information. We didn’t go super deep on some things he says. I love to have him back and have him explained why he said the things he said. Although there are his books you can dive into. There’s plenty of videos of him online and articles. He’s been a doctor for many years. He doesn’t say anything without a basis. He doesn't just state something that’s an opinion. He comes to conclusions based on enough evidence. You can find this same evidence that he’s found and I'm sure you can reach out to him as well and he will provide you with that evidence.
This is a wonderful exercise to challenge our belief system. I’ve had my belief system changed doing this podcast for the last eight years and it’s really enriched my life. I’ve allowed old beliefs to be shed away in light of new evidence, new information, and I find that it actually builds us up.
I hope this information builds you up. I hope the information exposes you to ideas that empower you and that give you a path to building yourself up. I want to let you know that if you are new to seeking true health that I have published a book that I’d love for you to do. It's called Addicted to Wellness. It’s a workbook so it’s where rubber meets the road. It provides you with the foundations of health in a way that is fun and doable even for the busiest of people. Please check it out. You can go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness or type in Addicted to Wellness by Ashley James on Amazon.
Thank you so much for sharing this podcast for those you care about. I have a feeling this is one of those very shareable episodes because we’re going to start to think about friends and family and colleagues that need to hear this information, especially those who have been lied to by their doctors. the doctors don’t even know they’re lying. Again, this is what we’re going to be talking about today. But if you’ve a friend or a family member who is sick and is suffering, who’s sick of suffering, who just doesn't’ want to suffer anymore but they are on multiple medications and the medications are making it even worse not better and they’re not getting to the root cause, their doctor’s not helping heal themselves. This is going to be a wonderful introduction to why it is the way it is and that there is a different way how we can guide people there. I encourage you to check out my book because there’s a lot of evidence-based actionable steps to building our health up and I’d love for you to have those tools on your tool belt. Learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness is the book. Enjoy today’s episode.
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 526.
Ashley James (0:05:02.426)
I am so excited for today's guest. We have on the show with us, Dr. Jeremy Ayres. naturallybetterforyou.com is his website, spelt anyway, that's really smart. naturallybetterforyou.com. Dr. Ayres is an osteopathic physician who combines the best of naturopathic, chiropractic, and osteopathic care. He's famous for the book he co-authored, The Red Pill Revolution. It's criminal how the medical industry and the food industry has taken us prisoner and it's like the Matrix, you can't see the Matrix, but you're a prisoner of the Matrix. This is where we live. We live in a world where our health is controlled by major corporations who profit from us being sick. Of course, if you're listening to this, you are interested in stepping outside of the mainstream to look for how to achieve true health. I know with our guests oday, this is a missing piece that has been missing for you and for all of us. Dr. Ayres is gonna fill us in on what we need to know in order to help our body's ability to heal itself. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:06:24.430)
Well thank you very much for finally getting me on here because we've had some technical issues a few times but we're here now.
Ashley James (0:06:32.636)
Yes, I'm very happy to have you on. We have been trying to get this interview for a while and today we did it. I'm so committed to getting this information out there. I've been screaming from the rooftops for years and then I come across your message and it was so refreshing to see another person saying almost the exact same thing I've been saying, but you also have been in the trenches as a doctor. so you have a unique perspective. I’ve interviewed over 500 doctors the last eight years, and many of them are actually medical doctors, MDs. I was always surprised, what does it take for an MD to wake up, reject the system that they spent over half a million dollars investing in their education, and then move towards holistic plant -based or, herbal-based medicine, functional medicine, and almost reject the drug-based medical industry. So often I'll ask them, what happened in your life? Every single one of them said, I got sick or my wife or my dad or someone in their life is either themselves personally or someone that they dearly loved. They realized that the allopathic drug-based, pharmaceutical-based medical doctor system had zero answers to helping support the body's ability to heal itself and had zero capacity to reverse disease and get someone out of a disease state and live their optimal life, optimally healthy. That's when they went, my gosh, I can't believe I've been lied to because they all said the same thing. They said, many, many years of medical school that we're taught all the answers. If it's not taught in medical school, it's not even worth knowing. What a bunch of lies and manipulation that there's so many doctors out there that their hearts are in the right place, but they've been brainwashed by the medical industry. So I'm so excited to have you on the show today because I want to go deeper and have people understand the history of the modern medical system that it's only about 130 or less years. It hasn't been around that long. When we look at how we think it's always been this way, we're born into this system. It hasn't always been this way and we have to understand that we have been lied to since birth. So I'm very excited to go down that rabbit hole with you. Then we're going to talk about the problem, unpack that problem. Then we want to talk of course about the solution, which you have a wonderful solution.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:09:12.348)
Where to begin with all that? Because what you've said is profoundly right. Probably most of your audience is aware that you are profoundly right. If there's anyone listening for the first time by chance and just listened to you and thought, what a wacko, let's start there.
I'm 55 years young and I didn't one day wake up and decide to pick every controversial subject and do the opposite to what everybody else has been told or thought was correct and right so that it would make me more money and win me more popularity and friends because as you know the opposite is true. I could have made myself a great fortune if I'd have gone a different route for example. So there is a reason why doctors like myself have chosen this path, which has been bumpy and arduous and challenging at times. The bottom line to that is I was brought up by a wonderful mother who passed away last year, accelerated by certain medical interventions that have happened in the last few years. Maybe we can touch on that. But, nonetheless, I was brought up by a wonderful woman, a very simple woman in many ways, and she hated bullies and liars. I didn't realize she was prepping me for my adult life, and certainly she didn't either, but prepping me for my adult life when I realized that the system per se is the bullies and liars. I was brought up like most of you, so-called educated, believing that the politicians, what they're saying were true and how things were run and that doctors were there to help you and so forth.
At 12 years old, cancer came to our family for the first time. It was my brother's wife's mother who had breast cancer and she went on to pass with that. Now at the time, I was told that she died from breast cancer and I probably think my brother and his wife would still say that. What I saw was the fear and as a 12 year old boy, the fear and the grief and the upset and the anger and how it caused problems with relationships as her mother went through what she did and then finally passed.
At 12 years old, I remember thinking, this is just wrong. Something's got to be done about this. This is terrible. Then I went off on my merry way, growing up until I was about 21, 22, where I represented Great Britain in canoeing in the Olympic training squad. I hurt my back very badly and I've never liked doctors. I don't know what it was. I just didn't feel comfortable ever going to a doctor, talking to a doctor, being in a doctor's office.
So I hurt my back very badly. It was the Olympic year. There was this portly chap, who looked more like a British butcher than an osteopath or a healthcare professional. He was an osteopath and I didn't know what the hell that was at the time, but he wasn't charging very much. He said, well, I can help you come along to my clinic. So off I went, well, struggled to get in my car and drive there, could hardly walk. He had a sort of production line clinic, which was lots of booths with separated by curtains and lots of student osteopaths. It was a bit like a commercial factory really, nonetheless, I came into there and he asked me to take my clothes off down to my boxers, and I wasn't ready for that one, examined me and then handed me over to an Eastern European woman with more muscles and facial hair than me at the time, who then proceeded to massage me into near tears, of course, I'm English, so we don't complain. We construct a carefully written letter the next day, rather than like Americans or Canadians who might speak up. So there I am laying, crying, thinking, when will this torturous thing end?
Then in came Ron Johnson, this osteopath, and put me in what I thought was a pseudo sexual position at the time, no explanation, and adjusted my back and this loud crack and all the pain went away. That was it. I went, I've got to do this. That was the moment. It was from there on in these memories of 12 years old and the cancer that came into my family came back and I went off with this determination that I must become an osteopath and something's got to be done about this terrible disease. It was as naive as that, thinking that there would be some university course or something that will teach you. As I expand on the story, but as you well know, the more I studied and as I became an osteopath and the more I researched, the more I realized the opposite was true. The closer you got to the information, especially the closer you got to speaking about it, the more trouble you got in. So very quickly, by my mid 30s, I realized that this game is rigged. I think the first book I came across that explained it well was Dirty Medicine. The author had had several attempts on his life. Me at that time, it was like, no, this has got to be exaggerated.
But when you pull the layers back and you apply the original journalist method of following the money, we're talking about medicine, the biggest business on the planet by a mile. According to the Fortune 500, they're way ahead of any other company and profits and money generation.
When you are asking, if anybody says, well, come on, that's just rubbish. You have to just go and ask anybody in any country where you have lived in the last 50 years, have you become healthier or sicker as a people? Everybody this is pre-convid, and that's what I call it, and I'm willing to explain why I call it convid, but pre-convid, everybody would say, well, we're sicker, much sicker. If you go back to follow the money, who gains?
So what you have to at least start to be open to looking into rather than accepting is that this is not a healthcare system. It's a business model. It's an extremely successful business model. It's a bloody dirty one too, because they have done everything possible to silence and ruin critics and any medical doctor that has woken up and come to realize what they're actually in will know what I'm talking about because they're absolutely professionally crucified till they shut up and tow the line or go off and do something else. So I don't think it takes that much for people to realize that this is actually a business and not a healthcare system.
Ashley James (0:16:35.741)
That book, Dirty Medicine, is that Martin Walker who wrote it?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:16:42.408)
Honestly, it was 30 years ago, I'd have to go and check, but it was just the beginning of many, many books that started to show me. In fact, most of the best stuff was written a hundred years ago, which is about the time that the Rockefellers who were into oil were being basically investigated for a monopoly on the oil.
Actually, they had a monopoly on the petrol and pumping station. That's where their monopoly was, selling it once it was refined. so they decided to diversify into pharmaceutical drugs, which weren't really abundant then. The doctors and naturopaths and chiropractors, and osteopaths and herbalists and homeopaths were sort of level pegings. If anybody was the snake oil salesman, it was the allopaths and the chemists at the time, actually.
Rockefeller employed Flexner and began to produce the Flexner Report, which basically did a classic hatchet job of saying, well, some of it was true, I must say, but basically a classic hatchet job of we must standardize all education always for the patient's benefit. They love that marketing line. But what they actually did was create a situation with a lot of backhanders and bribes and upfront and behind the scenes to create a situation where only those with enough money could comply with the new regulations to educate people, whether it be chiropractors, osteopathy or what have you. So you had to go to them for a handout. If you took one of their grants, you had to take one of their members onto your board. So it didn't take very long before so-called natural medicine was pretty much eradicated
It was turned into a poor man's cousin of what it used to be. so-called modern medicine, allopathic medicine, correctly, became the market leader legally, protected, financially funded, and that's how it became and established the world leader all around the world as so-called primary healthcare.
Ashley James (0:18:56.912)
Let's go deeper. Let's unpack this because not everyone knows about the Flexner report. Not everyone knows about this history. This is the history of modern medicine that we need people to understand because if you understand the history, you'll understand that we have been manipulated and lied to our entire lives.
So what did medicine in America and Britain and Canada, let's say all the Commonwealth countries and in the United States, what did medicine look like before the Flexon report, before allopathic, the drug-based medicine, the drugs being coming from the petrol industry?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:19:44.652)
Well, it was a pretty level playing field and probably you could say a true free market existed. So if you were good at what you did. People got to hear about it. If a medicine was good, people got to hear about it. You can trace this all the way back even to Dr. Jennifer Daniels work and the slave medicine, particularly pure gum turpentine. Today pure gum turpentine is sold as a paint stripper. Back in the day, it was used as a very effective parasitical medicine and it earned its reputation by being effective and people doing this work and they didn't really need to know why it just worked.
I think a best example is if you go to something like the Spanish flu, which to this very day is in every website and history book as a foreign virus that came and killed 50 to 100 million people, which is absolute nonsense, by the way. The actual truth of the matter is that they didn't have the technology nor do they now, either, but they certainly didn't have the technology to find a virus.
It's always foreign because that's scary to Western people, some dirty foreign thing. At the end, World War I had ended early. so there were a lot of very toxic vaccination vials left. so the largest marketing pre-covid or convid, the largest marketing campaign to scare the world into taking all these going out of date vaccinations because all their men and women were coming back from foreign dirty foreign countries and you're to need to be protected and it was actually the mass vaccination that started all these differing symptoms of very serious illness and the allopaths of the time were treating them with aspirin and arsenic based medications which then put them into sepsis and also pressed their organs of detoxification and that's what killed 50 to 100 million people.
Homeopaths had about a 0.1% fatality using homeopathy. So they were actually extremely popular and a true free market as people started to see the way. As you will see, history has recorded that a flu virus came, this invisible thing, and that was the cause and it couldn't be further from the truth.
Ashley James (0:22:23.738)
This reminds me of when we look at polio and I apologize for not knowing the exact dates, in the fifties? I think the children were being doused and showered in DDT. They're fogged. There's pictures of children dancing with DDT, like being thrown around like flowers. They were being doused in it, showered in it. DDT was being dropped from airplanes and it was horrible. DDT poisoning mimics the exact same symptoms as polio.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:23:06.160)
Because it’s polio.
One of my most famous sayings whenever I do a podcast, I’m trying to plant seeds that stay there. You’re not sick, you’re tox-sick. T-O-X-$-I-C-K. When you start to critically look at things without an agenda of being right or wrong and especially being open to being wrong and when you remove the outcome from your investigations, particularly if it's financially beneficial to you, when you remove all those barriers and you look at it, once we started spraying DDT, fogging on these children and people, polio came along. What it was, it was these incredibly toxic neurological chemicals going into these children. I actually like the polio one because it's the one that people with angry countenance attack you over with vaccination science, which is also another joke when they go, well, what about polio? They show you a graph where the vaccination started and polio was eradicated. What they don't realize is one of the most common tricks of this very dirty business is once the polio had begun to set in, which was caused primarily by DDT, and was eradicated when they stopped using it and sold it to third world countries instead. When they stopped using it, polio symptoms started going down. Plus, they ordered the doctors to give five other different diagnoses other than polio. So when you look at a graph and it looks like it's radically going down because of the vaccinations, it's because they stopped spraying DDT and they weren't allowed to call it polio unless they reached a very, very strict criteria. So five other different diagnoses came in. Bob's your auntie, especially this time Bob's your auntie. Bob's your auntie. You've got this beautiful graph to show the world and shut up quacks. You're all stupid and just go and do something more interesting.
Ashley James (0:25:22.266)
I heard another thing about the Spanish flu and that at the time they were still dialing in aspirin. They had no idea what dose to give people. Now, for those who don't know, aspirin is an extract from willow bark. So, and then of course they've done something chemical to it to be able to patent something, I don't know. This is your wheelhouse, not mine.
What I do understand is if you were to take enough willow bark, make a tea out of it or a tincture. If you take enough willow bark, there's a constituent naturally in nature. This is why natural medicine is so cool. That if you took too much, it would cause you to purge. You would start throwing up. You would expel too much willow bark but they figured out how to isolate the thing in willow bark that blocks pain and remove the thing that causes you to throw up if you take too much of it, if you take the toxic amount. They took that out, they took the safeguard, the natural safeguard built in nature. They took that out and they had no idea how much dose they should give someone. So at the time they were giving people toxic doses of aspirin.
I have a client, he had an abscess. It was Friday and his dentist couldn't see him till Monday. He took a whole bottle of aspirin, because he just doesn't read bottles and thinks it's fine. He had called me and said, I can't see and I can barely hear, I've almost have no hearing. I'm like, okay, you need to go to the emergency room, natural medicine is not going to help you at this point.
You took a whole bottle that is lethal. That's what I learned about how dangerous it is that you could go into a pharmacy or even into Costco and buy a bottle of aspirin or a bottle of cough syrup. If you complete that entire bottle in a weekend, you can die. You can easily die. They sell things over the counter that if someone took the whole bottle or most of the whole bottle, they could die.
Back in the Spanish flu, MDs were giving people as much aspirin as they wanted to because they had no idea what the dose was. They were essentially playing with us and using us as guinea pigs. A lot of the negative outcomes from quote unquote the Spanish flu, were also contributed to the fact that they overdosed people on aspirin. like you said, that shuts down the among three systems, such down detox pathways.
They were using us back then like guinea pigs. Interesting how we can kind of look through history over the last hundred years and see how they have used us or just over a hundred years now and see how they have used us as guinea pigs in medical experiments.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:28:25.415)
Yes, well, as I said, if you put yourself in a critical thinking mind and look at the actual evidence, which is pretty well hidden now. You have to use a search engine like Yandex, which is a Russian search engine to go and even find a lot of the documented stuff now, because corporate Google and Brave and all the rest of them are so controlled. Perhaps even the time machine couldn’t go and find these documents. The evidence is overwhelmingly there. The aspirin, which of course is Solicilates, was suppressing their organ of detoxification from the already poison of all these multiple vaccinations that they'd put into these people. So it was adding injury to insult. That's what they would die for. Very often, sepsis, which is where they would turn black and things, but most of the deaths were actually pneumonia as they suppressed the lungs and fluid build up and they died from that but it was all toxic shock.
When you see this, or you see the evidence where this is absolutely accurate, and then you look at every single modern day history book or medical book that is still sprouting the same, you have to ask yourself why. Then when you come back into the well, follow the money, it becomes very, very evident that these are not talking about the good people that are trying to be doctors and nurses and don't know what I'm talking about yet. You have to start realizing that doctors have been deliberately designed to be drug dealers. Those drugs are very, very toxic. I mean, you can't be deficient in aspirin. Most people, the word medicine is a positive word, if a medicine makes a healthy man sick, it can't make a sick man healthy.
So we've got to start sort of once again teaching people and that's what I do on my membership site at naturallybetterforyou.com but we've got to start teaching people how to think again. I don't want anyone believing me. That's how my mentors taught me. They taught me how to think. They taught me how to ask better questions and they taught me where to look. After 30 years of looking at, I would imagine just about every alleged previous pandemic. I can hand on heart tell you it was caused by either chemicals or heavy metals or vaccinations or medical whatever and then killed off by the intervention, the treatment.
Ashley James (0:31:03.059)
My mother died because of drug-based medicine. So I know how you feel when you share with us that your mom's death was accelerated by what we are exposed to when we enter our body into the mainstream medical system, you said you might share with us a bit about what happened to your mom.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:31:29.071)
Yes, well, my parents were ordinary folk, good folk, hardworking folk, decent folk. They found it very difficult. They're of the generation of trust the doctor. So they found it very difficult to embrace anything I had to say because if what I was saying was correct, why doesn't my doctor know it? That kind of attitude. So I had to learn to have a relationship with them that allowed them to do obviously whatever they choose to do, even if I believe it to be wrong or know it to be wrong. So I watched them. When my mother went, for example, 10, 15 years before she passed, I think it was 20 years actually now.
She was diagnosed with osteoporosis like most postmenopausal women. They haven't got the hormones. They haven't got the fats. She'd bought into the low fat diet. So she had weakened bones and she said, doctors put me on calcium supplements. I said to her, well, if you take those, you'll end up with a calcified heart or valves. Sure enough, five years later she did and she had to have open heart surgery, which she nearly died and somehow she pulled through.
It was never again the same. Then she went on a load of drugs, the old favorite statins and hot blood pressure. They also put her on a PPI, a proton pump inhibitor, which you shouldn't put them on for more than 12 weeks. She was on it for 10 years. So it ripped even more calcium out of her body. My father, my mother fed him. So he got brought into the low fat diet. He loved his fat. We grew up with fat, animal fat and things and he got sold on that myth and I saw his brain start to deteriorate and then they put him on statins and I saw his brain radically deteriorate into diabetes and dementia and then they put him on those drugs and then of course, convid came along and my brother who's a good man, we're estranged from each other for reasons of kind of things I'm talking about now but he did his duty what he thought was good.
He made sure that they both got their vaccinations for the COVID. That's when I saw them radically decline. My mom had a stroke, sorry, a massive clot soon after. My father's dementia exponentially increased or deteriorated, I should say. Then my mother finally had a massive stroke as well. You know I'm sure, Ashley, we are seeing post these vaccinations, which aren't even legally vaccinations, we are seeing more strokes, heart disease and so-called turbo cancers and other complications that we've ever seen in history.
Ashley James (0:34:13.226)
It is disgusting what they have done to us. It is criminal. So many people can't see it though. They can't see it because, and you said like, trust the doctors. Your parents were brought up to trust the doctors. I'd like to dive into that. Did you uncover through the last hundred years, the PR marketing that they did to brainwash entire generations of people to blindly trust doctors and the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:34:47.702)
Well, as I started my research, and dove deep and had several good mentors, including Harry Hawes, a brilliant original osteopath in his 70s was my first mentor and then Barbara Wren, a just genius of her time, naturopath, where she was able to show me that we're not dealing with disease, we're dealing with dis-ease. She explained it in such a clear way of how you accumulate toxicity and as the body attempts to get rid of it, if it can't, it throws up fevers and it creates an environment where bacteria can be found and the bacteria is not an infection, it's actually more like a janitor trying to clear it up.
So if you start, and it's very simplistic, of course, at this point, but if you start trying to suppress that and using toxic drugs to take away those symptoms and the body's ability to cleanse, the body will have several attempts at doing that. Finally it will go, well, I can't do it. I've got to do something with it. I'll dump it over here in a tumor or a cyst or dump it in the joints and you got arthritis or rheumatoid or dump it In this tissue. When, as you go and start to investigate this and you start to see how doctors and nurses have been trained and you start taking case histories, and I've taken tens of thousands over 30 years, you come to see without doubt that their dis -ease progressed as they had more and more quote unquote treatment. Then when you do a case history and show people that they can start to see that actually it hasn't been good medicine.
Now I want to say before I go any further, I worked for a few years with a brilliant pharmacist called Graham Atkinson who woke up to use such terms during convid when he was actually a UK government advisor. So very high up in pharmaceuticals and he thought the pandemic had truly arrived and that many people were going to die from it. He was involved in setting up protocols and a vaccination center. He was sitting there as a proper data scientist, realizing that what the government and it's the same around every country, but what the UK government and what the UK tell a live vision, quote unquote, media were saying was not playing out in real life in what he was seeing.
As a data scientist, the data wasn't what they were saying. So he stepped forward to speak about that. As we know, those kinds of people got absolutely professionally crucified, not welcomed and all that's interesting, show me the data, but absolutely crucified professionally to the extent that he had to leave his profession and was very ill. That's when he came to me and I helped him recover from that.
We did a lot of work together and he started writing a book which unfortunately hasn't finished and he sort of stepped back for a while because he's had quite a battering as you can imagine. He was going to write a book that I was going to write the forward to called The Baby and the Bathwater. Now the baby is what's good about modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry and of course there are some good things. It's a small and beautiful baby but the bathwater is more like a filthy sewer.
There's a lot and that's what was a lot to let go of. Doctors and nurses and many of them are wonderful people trying to do wonderful things. They have been put into a system that they didn't realize how trapped they were going to become. For example, prior to the HIV and AIDS deception, I'll call it that for the moment. They had quite a lot of autonomy when things came in to look at and get tests and make different decisions and second opinions and that sort of thing. They had quite a lot of autonomy and old school doctors were still there and were pretty good as a whole. Around about that time, so-called evidence medicine, evidence-based medicine started to sort of rear its marketing head. They were trying to create protocols and standardizing and computerizing diagnosis and records. So what happened is, and this is certainly what's going on in modern day, if you have a certain amount, it's test, test, test, test, give a label, a diagnosis. By the way, diagnosis is made up of three words. DI means to, AG means not, and NOSIS means to know. So it literally means two people not knowing what the hell's going on. That's very, very advantageous to them and very, very scary for you because people write to me from all over the world, my clients are worldwide, and they write to me, what's the cure or remedy for this? My answer is always the same, knowledge. The very, very first thing that I'm doing with them is undoing what I believe is a very powerful spell because they say, I have, and then they fill in the blanks of what disease label or syndrome they've been given. What's happened is once you put that label in the system, the system is now coded and it has protocol. So the doctors are restricted to this protocol or this protocol and they're very limited. If they go out of that, they'll lose their license. So they're really becoming autonomous. I can't pronounce that word properly, but they basically almost lost their autonomy of making decisions and they got more and more restricted. That's the wet dream of the pharmaceutical industry, that you won't even need doctors at some point. That's what AI more coding is trying to achieve that you won't need them. You can go straight to an AI and put in your symptoms and have a blood test or whatever it is and it pops out this label and here's the medication. Thank you very much. That's the trajectory that they want to get to.
Ashley James (0:40:50.430)
There's two lenses we can look through. We were raised to look through the lens of allopathic drug-based medicine. We wait to get sick and we go to the doctor on high that's on a pedestal and he's going to save us. We've given them a savior complex that every doctor is Jesus Christ and the pharmaceutical industry is God and we are the lowly sinners. It's a religion that they bow down to. It's complete dogma.
We've bought into it because when we are sick, we are terrified, we are scared. It is such a relief to think that there's some big hospital or some big clinic that I could go to, that you could go to, and that the saviors will save us or take our children to it, or take our husband or loved ones to their mom. That they're gonna save us. So it's a child-like mentality that the adults will save us. We've been raised in this system.
Look at Hollywood. Hollywood, all the media that we were raised in, all the movies, the TV shows, it glorifies drug-based medicine, that it's our savior. They shine this beautiful light upon drug-based medicine and all the miracles of modern medicine. Then they poo-poo and coined alternative medicine, the vast majority of therapies out there that were here before the pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical drug-based medicine is largely derived from petroleum. These chemicals do not belong in our bodies whatsoever. What drugs do?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:42:38.617)
Correct. Shock Horror? How many people know that most medicines are derived from petroleum? They don't.
Ashley James (0:42:46.093)
No, they don't. So, I like that you pointed out there is a baby. Listen, of course, of course, of course, of course, there's a baby. I'd rather you get on some drug that temporarily saves your life rather than you die. I'd rather you go, obviously you're in a car crash, please, please go, go to the ER. Don't go to your acupuncture. There's of course, in intelligence to this, when you take a body that has chronic illness to an MD, they don't have the answers for you. They do not, because drugs suppress, manipulate, alter the body. They do not help the body come back into balance. There's life-saving drug-based medicine and I appreciate that it exists. When you take a chronic illness to an MD, it's like you're taking your car to your plumber. It’s just like the old saying, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail and that is exactly what an MD has. I looked at the way MDs are trained because if you look at the last hundred years and you see it, it's been very methodical how they developed the MD training system. It is almost identical to how they train soldiers.
Think about doctors when they go and they have 24 hour shifts. So we've deprived them. This comes back to MKUltra and looking at how do you brainwash people? How do you train out the old behaviors out of someone and train them with new behaviors and new ways of thinking? They are sleep deprived. They feed them really crappy food. Think about hospital cafeteria food. There's absolutely no good reason why doctors should, while they're getting trained, work on 24 hour shifts. It is inefficient. Our brain doesn't work optimally. Would you want to be in a hospital bed and a doctor's been awake for 23 hours? Do you really want someone being awake for 23 hours talking to you? I mean, truckers aren't even allowed to drive for 23 hours. You're not allowed to drive for like, I think something more than 16 hours because they can cause accidents on the highway. Do we really trust an MD who's been awake for 23 hours to be able to take care of us when a trucker would cause a car crash? It is ridiculous. Maybe they get a little nap here and there, but they're not optimal. So it's completely inefficient. If you think about it from a standpoint of like, well, doctors are supposed to heal us. Then why do they have this system set up the way it is? It's because that's how they train them and manipulate their brains just like they do with soldiers to get them to become good little soldiers, good little MDs.
So we look at how they're trained and then we look at what they're trained, what they're trained in, what are they're taught? They are taught, for example, you cannot regrow cartilage once you have arthritis, you always will have arthritis, you can't reverse it. Once you have dementia, you can't reverse it. Once you have these issues, you have to go on a drug, you can't reverse it. Over and over and over again, they are taught that once someone is sick, they can't reverse it, they need drugs, they need drugs, they need drugs, they need drugs.
They're taught that diet is just, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you eat. Over and over again, I've heard this from doctors, it doesn't matter what you eat. From my clients who are their patients, they go in, I had a client with colitis go into the hospital and they said, you should eat pizza and milkshakes because you need to gain some weight. They fed him, he's colitis, he has inflammation throughout his entire digestive tract, which is likely caused by his diet. And they gave him the very thing, because they want to remove half his intestines. They gave him the very food that exacerbates the problem, then put him on steroids for the rest of his life. It's ludicrous. The thing is, this is education. Now, who designed their education? That's where we have to crawl back and go. The people who invented these drugs in the first place, the companies that sell the drugs, were the ones that created the education, just over a hundred years ago. That's why it's so important. You can tell us the exact timeline, but around the Flexner report, that's when it all began. They only funded the colleges and the universities. They only funded them.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:47:17.055)
Correct. It was an aggressive business model takeover. There's no doubt in my mind or anyone's mind when you look at it. I mean, just to share something with you and then I'll expand on what you just said. I had a very frightened woman, a single mother with a nine year old come to me four weeks ago that had just been in hospital for two weeks with gallstones and jaundice. She was going to have her gallbladder removed on Thursday. It was a Monday.
The words from the surgeon were, if you don't have this removed, you'll die. We went through her case history and of course they'd put her on completely the wrong diet, no fat and high carbohydrate and high grains. Anyway, I dispelled the fear, made sense of how she got there, that also she'd harbored a lot of anger. The liver in Chinese medicine is a lot of resentment and holding onto anger. That's what the Chinese say, gallstones are. By the way, we're four weeks in, she's lost two stones, never felt better, never looked better.
I asked her the other day, if you hadn't had this episode that you went into the hospital scared literally nearly to death, would you go and see a doctor today? The answer is no, I feel fantastic, better than I've ever felt. We're only four weeks in. So when you get back to what they're taught and how they're taught, and you're absolutely right, they are overwhelmed with study.
It's quite well understood that most medical students are cheating. I understand from Clive Decarle that the first lecture at Harvard Medical School is 50% of what we're going to teach is wrong. We just don't know which 50% that is. I believe it is the Lancet, and I'll have to double check my facts on this, but one of the major medical journals, the main editor, I'm pretty sure it is the Lancet, but the main editor two years ago said, he's now convinced that 50 % of the studies, if not more, are completely false. Most doctors and nurses and what have you go in with maybe a career more than a vocation, but certainly with honorable intentions to help people then before they know it, they're in massive debt, they're under massive pressure, there's a huge social status to becoming a doctor or a nurse and they very quickly learn, I know because a lot of doctors have spoken to me, that if they start asking the wrong questions, they get very heavily chastised and you quickly learn shut up and do your job and just shut up. Otherwise you're out before you even become a quote unquote doctor or nurse. The facts are, and you're absolutely , by the time they actually get into the job, they've been sort of like a soldier traumatised into a certain behaviour. They disassociate with human beings and they just become patients, not everyone but mostly, because they have to see too many of them in a short period of time and basically they become drug dealers.
Ashley James (0:50:26.535)
That having the debt over their head, I mean, once money is involved, people's morals are challenged.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:50:26.535)
They're compromised. During the convid area, we discovered that on average a local GP was making about 50 to 60,000 pounds extra on the vaccination program. That almost doubled their income.
Now, my first mentor taught me the great Harry Hawes. It's a rare man or woman, but it's a rare man that will make the right decision when money is involved for someone else. I'm not saying they're bad people, but human nature is going to go, thank you very much. This is what through my 30 plus years, the horror of discovering how dirty it is and how loaded it is, although that's changed many, many doctors and nurses since convid. Seeing what went on there and the reality of what that really was and what it certainly wasn't, many, many are starting to see and talk to us. What we want is we want people to have open conversations. I'm internationally known for getting people for the most part. We don't succeed with every case because sometimes they've just been too damaged usually by medicine, but mostly we get people well and we teach them how to get well. What we want is people to come up to us, doctors, nurses and go, that's interesting. How did you do that? We had a conversation.
I interviewed, she's a great fan of mine, a great, great advocate of mine, Valerie Warwick. She was a whistleblower, an American whistleblower oncologist nurse of 18 years. I interviewed her about 10 years ago, I think it was now. She was fresh out of waking up and seeing what modern oncology really was. She actually got a lot of heat for becoming a whistleblower for quite some time even the FBI were looking for it at the time. I asked her a question, why did it take you so long to see what you're actually doing, which is not treating people. You are literally poisoning them to death. She said, because you apps, and I know people that are in, if there's doctors and nurses listening, I know they will relate to this because I've spoken to so many of them. She said, you believe you're in the best of the best. You believe you have the cutting edge evidence -based science and knowledge. If there was something outside of you would have been told or heard about it. They're also equally told that anything outside of that is quackery. So she was happily, I mean, really happily an oncology nurse, even though, all these people were passing and those that appear to survive, I think survive in spite of the treatment. Usually those that actually do have treatment and survive, they change a lot of things in their life. That's at least what I've found.
She said it was one patient one day, she looked at him and he had all the symptoms of scurvy, vitamin C deficiency. She went up to the nutritionist, or I think it was, and all the dermatologist wanted to, can't remember now, but she said, isn't that scurvy? He said, yes. She said, well, why don't we give him some vitamin C? We're not allowed. That was the first straw.
The second straw was when she found out that oncologists make most of their money from prescribing chemo. That was the final straw because she realized, and it was well known on the oncology wards, when someone wasn't going to make it, like this person's going to die. They would prescribe more chemo frequently, which makes no sense unless you're looking at it for financial gain. If you knew, if the whole ward knew, if the family knew, this person ain't going to make it. What you would do is make them more comfortable. You would entertain them, prepare them for their death and have their family around them and their priest or whatever it is and just prepare them for this rite of passage to the other side that does exist. But they wouldn't. They'd prescribe more chemo. So that was the second straw that broke her very rapidly. She saw what she'd been doing. Of course, she had a lot of guilt to process and she's a wonderful woman Valerie Warwick.
Ashley James (0:55:17.474)
Actually, I had her on my show episode 141. This was years ago and I loved talking to her and her experience where she actually saw a few people who were sent home to die and then they came back a few months later, totally cancer-free. That's what woke her up because she's like, wait a second, what did you do? They're like, we went to Tijuana or we went to some clinic somewhere else. I did all these different alternative therapies and she had gone back to her bosses, the chemo doctors and said, hey, what did they do? They got better. Shouldn't we do that? They were all just, no, no, we're going to keep cut burning and cut burning poison. We don't want to know. They're like, la la la la la, like putting their hands over their eyes and ears. When they see someone reverse their cancer naturally, they don't want to know about it.
It's wild. I've coached many people to get so healthy they no longer have type 2 diabetes. That's something that I overcame and that's one of the reasons why I do health coaching because it's like, Type 2 diabetes is so easy to reverse naturally. It's so easy to reverse naturally. It really is. It's so worth investing the effort into doing it for yourself. It's amazing. It actually transforms when you stabilize your blood sugar. It's not just okay to stabilize blood sugar. Your inflammation goes away. Your sleep gets better. Your sex gets better. Your mental health gets better. Emotional health gets better. You wake up, you jump out of bed full of energy. Your eyesight gets better. Every aspect of your life. Then you've increased your longevity and decreased your chances of heart disease. I mean, it's wild. So I can't tell you how many times I've lost count that my clients go back to their doctors. They no longer have Type 2 diabetes. They're throwing away the insulin or the metformin or whatever. They are going back to the doctor for some blood work. The doctor who's been quote unquote treating their diabetes for many, many years now sees that their A1C is amazing, like 4.7 or something, just amazing. Every blood marker is wonderful.
When the patient says, do you want to know what I did? I'm not taking any of your drugs anymore. I'm not following your advice anymore. It didn't work for me. Do you want to know what I did? The doctors don't want to know. They do not. They just put their hands over their eyes and ears and say, nope, good day. Go away. They don't want to know. They don't want to know. The money motivation. The fact that they're into a system now, they're so deep in a system. How much guilt and shame would have to come up for them if they realize that they've been doing the wrong thing for thousands of patients. If they've been profiting off of keeping their patients sick, the people they actually care about. A lot of doctors like their patients and they've been keeping them sick because they've been poisoning them because they have the wrong tool because they themselves have been deceived. Can you imagine how much humble pie you'd have to eat to be able to come to terms with that, people can't come to terms with that.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (0:58:43.008)
We all will meet our maker and we all have a soul whether you believe it or not, you're going to find out you do. It's interesting that oncologists were interviewed apparently and 90% of them wouldn't take the prescriptions that they give to their oncology patients, and I think that's very, very telling. I think it's a very positive time actually, Ashley. I think there is since convid and I probably should define that for people because you there might be someone listening going but my mum died or my dad died or my aunt does it and it's and it's almost certainly not from a virus that didn't exist and that may come as a great shock but any virus but certainly no SARS- CoV -2 virus has ever been properly isolated.
It's all computer models called silica which is shocking to most people when they hear this but and the pandemic which wasn't was driven by false data from a pcr test and it's not pcr has never been a test Kary Mullis, the inventor, nobel prize winner, made that very clear who conveniently died as covid-19 begun but he was very clear this is not a test and if you amplify it which they cycle it several times past 25, it becomes science fiction. The data that was provided for the media and the authorities on the pandemic was cycled 45 or more times. So it was complete utter nonsense.
Even at 45 cycles, it doesn't show a virus or an infection. It just pings certain markers and then that was a positive test and that got put down as a pandemic, but it wasn't. That's why I call it. During that time, at the beginning, many of the doctors and nurses believed wholeheartedly there was a pandemic, even though strangely enough, the hospitals were almost empty. This is why you saw all these incredibly well choreographed and practiced dance routines that the doctors and nurses found time to do during the hospital.
This is also what woke up Graham Atkinson because just the doctor surgeries and the hospitals and the paramedics were sitting around, twiddling their fingers. It wasn't overloaded, quite the opposite. Actually I'm jumping ahead here, but that's the beautiful thing about now, the actual data that's coming out, the true data, that's what's actually gonna hang these criminals by their own data and true science. Nonetheless, what it has given, at the beginning, I would argue 90, 95% of medical professionals would have probably lynched us for talking how we were talking during then, even though we've been historically proven and time stamped to be correct. Now there is a huge groundswell of doctors and nurses talking, knowing what happened. They've realized, and I know they're listening and watching podcasts similar to this and Dr. Jack Cruz's and the Dr. Kemper's and Dr. Chaffee's and Dr. Saladino's and similar like doctors that have basically stood up and started being true doctors. I think we're in a very exciting time. I mean, it's said that no army can defeat a thought that's time that's come. I believe, worldwide and because of technology like this and this beautiful platform that we can talk on with each other in different countries, I think the world is very much waking up and coming together and starting to see that some very nefarious stuff has gone on and I don't think you can defeat that because it seems to me, enormous energy is being employed to try and quell, this shall we say red pill revolution which of consciousness which is why we named the book, The Red Pill Revolution.
It's a consciousness revolution. People are listening and thinking and they're starting to take action. Are there a lot of people that are not on this page? Of course there are. Historically, it's always been that way. In traditional revolutions, not that we want a traditional revolution that is violent and forceful, but in traditional revolutions, it's well documented that only 10% of a population stood up and said, we're not having any more of this and did something. The 60 -70% of the population followed them, outed a regime and then went back to following the next regime or the next religion or the next political ideology. Where we're at now, hence the Red Pill Revolution and we also wrote the Red Pill Food Revolution, which is equally brilliant, where we're at now is people are around the world getting onto the same page. I would say from a numbers point of which is always in motion, it is way past 20 -30% of the world population have worked out that we've just lived through the greatest crime ever perpetrated against human beings and I believe very positive things politically and medically and legally and humanitarily are going to come together. I certainly don't believe we're gonna build back better. If we are gonna build back better, it's gonna be without them, the parasites, the criminals and the liars.
Ashley James (1:04:20.053)
It's a tall order, but that's why I'm here. I'm here to call them out and to educate the masses that you don't need to be sick, that suffering is optional, that there are answers for you that have been suppressed, you've been lied to about the quote unquote alternative medicine out there.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:04:48.055)
Yes, their words, I hate that term. True medicine. Well, true medical philosophy, because there's a lot of really good people out there practicing allopathically with true medicine, but they're misguided. Once you have the true philosophy, which is fundamentally, your body doesn't know how to work against you. You can prove this, even if you're a complete dumb ass.
If you cut yourself, your body immediately goes to work to try and stop the bleeding and start knitting together that wound as it does in nature for animals in the wild and short of infection, there's lovely remedies, both pharmaceutical and natural to deal with that. Short of that, the body is trying to deal with it. It only knows how to protect you. If you look at so-called autoimmune diseases, which don't exist because the body doesn't know how to attack itself.
It does attack foreign particles that are in the cells and tissues, but these conditions don't exist in nature. You don't have lions walking around with rheumatoid arthritis. These are man-made diseases or modern man-made diseases. When we start with a philosophy, how many people out there have lost people to horrible illnesses? When I say something like the body doesn't know how to work against you, you wouldn't blame them for going, “what?”
When you start to look at how poisoned, and we've talked about a few things like polio, when you start looking at all the chemicals and poisons that have gone into people, and we've been through a time where people don't even know what food is. We have to define what food is overfed. I mean, we're the only animal on the planet that doesn't know what to eat.
So when we take the philosophy, which is really robust, and describe medication or medicine as nurturing, nourishing and healing, then it's quite easy to start putting together what is true medicine, even pharmaceutical and what isn't. I mean, you wouldn't study a poor man to get rich. You'd study a healthy man to get healthy. So we've been studying sick and sickness. No wonder we've gone wrong.
Ashley James (1:07:03.050)
Well, that's even with labs. The MDs look at lab results differently than a naturopathic physician does because the MDs are looking for, are you sick enough for me to give you a drug? There's normal parameters they look at. So are you in the normal parameters? What are the normal parameters are a consensus of the average American.
So the average American is not healthy. If we took across, it took all the Americans, I'm just using America because this is where I live. You could say Canada, you could say Great Britain. As long as there's a country that's exposed to feed instead of food and the American diet and lifestyle and media, then they have the same problems.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:07:57.457)
Yes. Well, the Western world is calorie rich and nutrient starving.
Ashley James (1:08:02.794)
Yes, our food's anemic. It's anemic. First of all, the farming practices over the last hundred years have made it so that the soil is depleted. We don't have the key nutrients. If you eat a plant, a lot of times it's hydroponically grown. There's zero minerals. Our body needs 60 essential minerals. We're not getting the nutrients we need. People don't sit down and eat fruits and vegetables every single day. They're not getting access to wonderful vitamins. If you ate a conventional apple for example, because you think an apple a day keeps the doctor away. The average conventionally grown apple has 50 different chemicals on it. 50 different man-made petroleum-based garbage toxic junk that is killing us. It's killing our microbiome and our gut. It's causing cancer. Just as an example, I keep saying United States. Most of my listeners are in the US anyway. Look, turn around and look at statistics. One in three people have cancer, one in three people have heart disease, one in three people have diabetes or pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome or obesity. You're looking at around 70% of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. Don't even get me started on pain meds.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:09:23.800)
I want to get you on pain meds. I love listening to you. You go girl.
Ashley James (1:09:29.636)
Our bodies are on fire. Even if you try to eat healthy, if you're to eat a conventional, quote unquote conventional, this is just like saying, we have to choose organic and organic isn't even clean. There are less chemicals sprayed in organic, but there's not zero. You have to grow your own food or find a biodynamic farm somewhere to try to get the cleanest food you can.
Point being, if it comes from a factory, if it comes from a package, if there's a list of ingredients, you're likely killing yourself. Seed oils are one of the worst things to ever be added to the food chain.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:10:11.456)
Yes, catastrophic seed oils. For those listening, I'm sure they do know, commonly marketed as vegetable oils, and they've never come near a vegetable.
Ashley James (1:10:23.686)
Can you imagine? This is my zucchini oil.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:10:25.892)
Well, let's just do that one quickly in case your audience doesn't know. America, even if this is controversial to your current view or understanding, but America was thriving as we over here in Europe on animal fats and dairy fats. Butter and lard and tallow or beef dripping as some people know. McDonalds cooked in beef dripping and KFC or Kentucky Fried Chicken cooked in tallow.
The sugar industry heavily, because they were starting to get some flack because they are a major culprit in causing so much problem, paid a lot of money for the lipid hypothesis. I'm jumping around a bit in timelines here, but the lipid hypothesis and Ancel Keys that saturated fat causes heart disease and high cholesterol cause heart disease which is absolute nonsense. Ancel Keys then went off to live in the Mediterranean, eating an almost carnivore diet and died just over 100 years old. What happened was Procter and Gamble got hold of the rights to take cottonseed oil and turn it into what they call Crisco. Now, prior to that, cottonseed oil was a byproduct of obviously cottonseed manufacturing and processing, and the animals wouldn't eat it, so they were making lamps and soaps from it.
As that industry changed, they weren't making much money. So Procter & Gamble took it, hygienated it, and made it look like lard and called it Crisco. I would imagine everyone in America has heard of Crisco. Then they did another magic marketing trick where they produced a color cookery book, a recipe book, and gave it away for free. Well, that was unheard of in those times. Every food that the traditional American housewife was making with tallow beef dripping or lard was replaced with Crisco and it was modern and it was clean and it was portrayed that granny was a bit old fashioned and this is the new way. Slowly but surely, they moved away from those fats into this absolute poison. We saw this massive skyrocket in heart disease and cancers and autoimmune and the seed oils.
If I had to take one thing out right now, it would be seed oil. Sugar is not great, but don't get me wrong, it is a major contributor to the massive increase in consumption in a hundred years. It's ridiculous. The consumption, yes, in everything and the consumption is just huge, but the seed oils have got to take a huge responsibility for the decline in Western health and the profits of the petroleum pharmaceutical monopoly.
Ashley James (1:13:25.222)
What about cholesterol? It's bad for you. We can't have cholesterol. We should all have low cholesterol.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:13:34.428)
Well, I know you by your tone, that's not true, but this is again, what Ancel Keys did, and he was paid to do it. Again, we don't have science. We have scientism for the most part going on BS science, bad science is what it is. What's the new religion? I mean, during convid, it was trust the science. Well, that's an oxymoron. The very nature of science is to challenge science and come up with something better if you can disprove it. So to say trust the science shows we've moved into a religion.
Ashley James (1:14:07.733)
Trusting science is what the bullies said. It's they're saying, shut up, get in line, take our shots, eat our food, do what we say, don't be a tall poppy, don't step out of line or else we will cancel you so publicly and so hard. So trusting science was a threat from bullies.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:14:29.160)
Well, hence my mother raising me right. Naturally better for you and the whole naturally better ethos is to ask questions. Do not trust what I'm saying. How healthy is that? Anyway, back to Ancel Keys, as you well know, he cherry picked data to produce a graph with some sort of lineal line which he used to show the countries that eat fats. He didn't even define the fats, by the way, from seed oils to vegetable oils or olive oil to animal oils, just cherry picked it, came up with a look here, here's the proof, and the lipid hypothesis and saturated fat and cholesterol causes heart disease was born. As I said, he went off and ate practically a carnivore diet and lived to over 100 in the Mediterranean. If you put his data back in that he took out, there's no correlation. There's no evidence. There never has been. They actually picked and this is the, you got to love these people and many things, but stupid is not one of them. They literally plucked a number for cholesterol out of the air and said, if your number this, you need to go on cholesterol lowering drugs, which is one of the biggest selling drugs and profits of all time. Every five years they lower that number. So they increase their market share.
Ashley James (1:15:54.464)
Exactly and I've heard the interview from the scientists who had to come up with this number, they said, we needed enough of the population in the United States to be on statins to see if we could make a difference. So we looked at the average, like how many Americans do we have? So they looked at the average cholesterol levels and they said, okay, if we say it's 200, then we get this many millions of people on this drug, just to back up, cholesterol is so important that every cell in your body that has a nucleus makes it. Even if you were on the potato diet, even if you're a raw vegan and you're not eating any animal sources of cholesterol, of course, don't touch any oil with a 10-foot pole. If you didn't eat any, only ate, let me say walnuts or something, your body will make cholesterol, not only does your liver produce it, because everyone thought it was just the liver, it's every cell in your body that has a nucleus. It is needed for your brain. 70% of the white matter of your brain is cholesterol. The myelin sheath that protects your nerves is made of cholesterol. Every cell wall, 37.2 trillion cells in your body, every cell wall is made of cholesterol. Sex hormones and stress hormones are made of cholesterol. Bile is made of cholesterol.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:17:12.315)
Well, let me just jump in there actually, because you said something really critical that I don't want to be missed because you're so knowledgeable and passionate. I love it. Just take the sex hormones. Sex is a big thing to people. If you don't have enough cholesterol coming in, you can't go through the hormonal pathways to get over to making the sex hormones in the first place. So all these problems that have manifested in the Western world from infertility to not knowing even what bloody gender you are can be connected to the lack of cholesterol and saturated fat and these hormonal pathways being interrupted.
So when you put those back in, quite profound things can happen to people. If you don't put them back in, the body will take the cholesterol from you. So 60, 70 years ago, dementia, Parkinson's, these sort of things, which are really type three diabetes and a lack of having cholesterol. The body will take it from your brain. That's why we see all this dementia and this neurological decline as you get older. It's starving for cholesterol. When you injure yourself and the body is injuring itself constantly, the first emergency response is cholesterol. I know you know this is an analogy, but some people may not have heard it. It's like seeing houses on fire and there's always firemen there putting it out and making the assumption or the association that the firemen are the problem. Get rid of the firemen, no more house fires. It's the opposite. I know you know this.
Again, back to the philosophy and simple critical thinking, if you apply that without a financial tag to the end result and only a benevolent tag to the result, you've opened yourself up to being a real human being again. See, doctor, the word doctor originally means teacher. We were supposed to teach humans where they've gone wrong and correct it. That's what we've got to get back to. That's why we're called naturally better, by the way. We've literally got to go back to a naturally better future. We've got to go back to go forward.
Ashley James (1:19:33.324)
So naturallybetterforyou.com is the membership. I definitely want to talk about that because I want my listeners to keep learning from you. You are docere, the doctor meaning teacher. I love that you brought that up. That is the original root word, docere, which means that you go to your doctor so you can learn. How much have you learned from your MD?
How much have they sat down with you? That's why when I go see my naturopathic physician, it's an hour long health lecture in a good way. I love it. I like absorbing wonderful knowledge from them. I have never seen an MD for more than 15 minutes, probably five minutes. Come in, I think it's absurd. I'm a little jaded. They come in holding the prescription pad, staring at the chart, not even looking up from the chart because the nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure and they're looking at the labs, looking at the chart, holding their prescription pad in one hand and asking me if I want a drug today. That was my last experience with an MD. I really try to avoid them at all costs. Your doctor should be your teacher. Be willing to fire your doctor and seek a better one.
Don't be like our parents and grandparents, the silent generation, just trust authority, blindly trust authority, don't shake the boat, don't make waves. I don't want my doctor to not like me.
First of all, they work for you. Be willing to walk away from them and find a better one. I abhor the fact that now, because of how certain states have these medical charts that they log into—I know with Washington state, I don’t know about other states—I’m in Washington—that now, any doctor you go to logs in and sees my chart and can see all what the other doctors say about you. They might say that you're difficult because you ask questions. You're not even hurting them, but you're not challenging them. These are almost like bully tactics. It's like you ask questions, and now you're a difficult patient. So this follows you.
Seek out holistic doctors. This is my biggest set of advice when doing a little head hunting for your team of holistic health practitioners that are going to support your body's ability to heal itself. You want to ask them questions like, do you believe my body can heal itself? Have you helped other people get so healthy they get off these drugs if you're on drugs? What is your philosophy of healing? You want to ask them questions and listen and here are they coming from this reductionist way where we have to, well, first we have to look at your liver and we have to see how’s that, and then we have to look at this lab and then we have to look at this, like they're putting you under a microscope and they're not looking at you as a whole.
If your doctor doesn't ask you what you eat, go find another doctor because what you put in your mouth, it's just ludicrous. Let's say you put I don't know, you put six cups of food in your mouth a day, six to eight cups of food. Let's say just measuring a certain volume. They think that has nothing to do with your health, but a tiny, tiny little pill the size of a pea—that's the fix? So something this tiny is going to fix everything? But all the stuff you're putting in your body, shoving in your face hole, has nothing to do with your health. If you don't see a doctor who is concerned about what you eat and wants to help you, get your body to the point where it is really healing itself
Supporting the body's ability to heal itself, getting out of its own way, and stopping throwing fuel on the fire—to continue the analogy of the fire—the body's on fire. Help those firemen inside you, give it what it needs, and then stop doing what hurts it. Get out of its own way. The two philosophies we've talked about: either you've got the MD, drug-based allopathic medical system philosophy, which is that you've been reduced to parts that we look at and we have to wait to get sick and then put you on a drug or the other philosophy, which is where Dr. Ayres is coming from and what he teaches in his membership, which is naturallybetterforyou.com and his book, Red Pill Revolution. I'm excited to actually dive into it, I haven't read your Red Pill Food Revolution.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:23:54.259)
Yes. The Red Pill Food Revolution, I think it's, and I would say this, of course, but I honestly believe it's the best book ever written on food, the history of food, how we got here and the important crossroads we're at.
Ashley James (1:24:09.800)
I'm very excited to read it. I definitely want to read it. The other lens that doctors look through—which we've talked about—is your body as a whole. Everything affects your body: how you sleep, how you move, the people around you, and the things you put in your mouth. Every aspect of your life is your health. That’s what true health is. That’s why the podcast is called Learn True Health. It’s mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical.
It’s energetic; it’s everything. A holistic doctor looks at every aspect of your life and helps your body come back into balance. A holistic doctor believes your body can heal itself.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:24:47.782)
Well, because it's the truth, and I’d rather use the term ‘a true doctor.' Their job is to get rid of you in the nicest possible way, of course. I love the old Chinese philosophy: you pay your doctor to keep you well, and you stop paying them when you're sick. Now, if we applied that philosophy to America, Canada, and the UK tomorrow, watch them change.
Ashley James (1:25:14.058)
My mentor, Dr. Joel Wallach, was raised on a beef farm. He saw that his dad would feed the calves pellets packed with supercharged nutrition—vitamins and minerals. He looked at the ingredients and would actually put the calf pellets in his pockets and munch on them because he observed something. This man is so intelligent; he said, we keep the animals so healthy they don't get sick to lower the cost of your hamburger or steak, right? If we took agriculture and applied the same approach to medicine that we use on our own bodies, your steak would cost $3,000. You’d have to wait, not give the cow any nutrients—just give it junk, wait for it to get sick, and then treat it with a bunch of drugs and allopathic, drug-based medicine. That would be incredibly expensive. Now, I'm not saying the farming industry is perfect; there are many unhealthy practices.
Back then, 70 years ago—he’s in his 80s now, I think 85 or 86—what he saw was that there are two systems of medicine. One system keeps costs down by keeping animals healthy to avoid the doctor. The other, the human medical system, keeps profits high by keeping people sick and away from being healthy. Two very, very different systems.
That influenced him growing up and becoming the naturopathic physician, veterinarian, and researcher that he is. He saved my life. That’s why I’m so passionate about this. I’ve interviewed him twice on the show because I was sick and suffering under the drug-based medical system, as many people are. I was able to escape—like Pavlov's allegory of the cave—I escaped, and now I’m coming back into the cave to help others.
I know I’ve probably upset some people because they still want to stay in the cave. Dr. Ayres, I’m sure you have people upset with you all the time. I really appreciate that you’re willing to run back into the cave with me and help wake people up. Tell us about naturallybetterforyou.com and your membership.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:27:38.994)
Well, I will do the work because, in the membership, we’ve got over 1,200 people from all over the world, and the word ‘community' is spoken about all the time. When I started the membership two years ago—because I normally do one-to-one consultations and packages that way—I thought I was going to unleash a mental asylum. When you work with someone, there are layers of trauma and toxicity that surface, and there’s a lot to guide them through. I thought if I did this on a larger scale, it would be chaotic, like unleashing a mental asylum.
The opposite has happened. It’s a fantastic community. The membership site and our forum, where they can actually speak and video chat with each other, has been formed. I work with someone called Graham Norbury, commonly known as Norbs. He’s a Jack Cruz specialist, deciphering the work around EMFs, light, and circadian rhythms.
Together, we’ve combined 30 years of my work into what is called the ALL CAPS protocol, which they follow in a 90-day challenge. Graham and I have produced over 60 vlogs, where we walk in the beautiful Lake District—one of the most stunning parts of England—and talk for 30 minutes on various subjects, much like we’ve done today. These vlogs have become known as epic, very entertaining, interesting, and helpful to people.
As well as live Q&As every other week and a host of other things that we also do there and other functions. It’s a beautiful place where we can privately teach what I can’t always teach publicly. We’re witnessing immense healing worldwide. As you’ve experienced in your own journey, it’s profoundly life-changing
Ashley James (1:29:33.334)
I'm so excited. What kind of results? Can you share any testimonials, or what kind of results do people see from learning and following you in your membership?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:29:47.210)
Yes, well, there are testimonials, and actually betterforyou.com is sort of a landing page for the podcast because people can remember it. Most of my testimonials are on jeremyayres.com, which is also where you can join the membership. I've got 30 years of testimonials, and you name it, it's been healed. I suppose most of the people coming into the membership have chronic dis-ease, named conditions, auto-immunes, weight problems, type 2 diabetes—all the things that are addressed once you start teaching people that you're not sick, you're toxic, and that food is medicine, being outside and light is medicine, and that trauma gets trapped in the body and that's why you've manifested. Once you start teaching them these things and they start applying and following it, we just see miracles over and over again because, as I say, and as I was taught, and as I teach here, your body doesn't know how to work against you, and anything that it's manifested with a scary label is still it trying to protect you.
Ashley James (1:30:55.234)
I know we're wrapping up, and I'll definitely make sure all the links to everything that you shared are in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. I want to make sure that you explain—you touched on, but didn't really follow up with—the explanation of that: the COVID virus, which has never been isolated, neither has any other virus out there been isolated. If we don't know that it's a virus, what was it that people had? I had, quote-unquote, covid a few times in the last four years, which I treated naturally, very successfully, with the exact things that were being banned. I had great outcomes.
I know many people had the sore throats, coughs, fever, hard breathing, sudden plummets in blood pressure, and in oxygen saturation. So, what were we experiencing if it wasn't that?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:32:10.446)
Well, first of all, there were actually so many varied symptoms and conditions in the beginning when the media started to explain it. Same thing that happened in the Spanish flu. There were just so many different types of manifestations. I would suggest to you that the ones that actually had breathing problems because the oxygen wasn't getting to the right place were caused by metals, mainly graphene, which are arguably being sprayed in the air, getting in, and then the amplification of either 4G or 5G networks.
The hotspots of people getting sick initially where 4G—and there's another one, I think it's called 3C, I can't remember—which is a very horrid frequency that is transmitted from these towers, but certainly 5G. What it did was cause the hemoglobin not molecule to not fully form, and so it wasn't carrying the oxygen properly. This is why hydroxychloroquine worked in many cases, sometimes within minutes for people, because hydroxychloroquine, which isn't an antiviral drug—which is why you had professors of virology going on the tele-live vision and saying to people, ‘This can't be a proper medicine because it's not an antiviral'—because it wasn't viral.
What the hydroxychloroquine was doing when the hemoglobin was damaged by electrical EMF frequencies was repairing that hemoglobin molecule so the oxygen could be carried again. Now, if you didn't get that kind of medication and it was that problem, they then ventilated you, intubated you, and under the pressure of the oxygen, they damaged the lungs and upped the oxygen further until the lungs basically were destroyed.
That's where you had a lot of the deaths, on average 13 to 15 days. If you were on a ventilator, you died, but you were labeled covid-19. If you had terminal cancer and died and had a PCR test at your death, you were labeled a covid-19 death. If you were in a car accident and died and had a positive PCR test for covid-19, you went on the books as a covid-19 death.
So many crimes of data have been deliberately and knowingly perpetrated, at least by a certain fraction of the people, certainly the politicians as well, that we have to now undo all of those lies and all of those poor people that lost loved ones under circumstances like every other pandemic that we've witnessed, that probably could have been prevented.
And if they were already terminal or had comorbidities that were going to end their life, they certainly didn't die from a virus that's only ever been found in a computer.
Ashley James (1:35:13.846)
Episode 445, The Invisible Rainbow, that interview I did talks about how every single major sickness, either an epidemic or pandemic or even localized major illnesses like that of Manhattan—the day they switched over from analog to digital back in, I think it was the late '90s, early 2000s, around there—the island of Manhattan.
The entire island experienced sickness, and many people had several serious symptoms like migraines, dizziness, pain, and flu-like symptoms. He actually goes back and shares in his book. It's fascinating. The book is super—I could not put that book down. It was, and you'll gain some muscle carrying it around. I think it's something like four pounds. The book—it's such a good book.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:36:14.222)
Yes. It's a brilliant book. Yes, it's a historical book because it has shown every development, and we didn’t touch it today, but I’m glad you brought it up. Every development of modern illness and certainly pandemics has been linked to an upgrade, shall we call it, in technology.
Ashley James (1:36:30.958)
Wild. Of course, I mean, every cell in our body is affected by frequency. Why wouldn't our cells be affected by radio waves, microwaves, and cell phone towers? Why wouldn't we be? We have an electrical system in our body–and we're mostly water, which carries the signal. It's just very ignorant to think that our bodies wouldn't be affected. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'd love to have you back if you want to kind of go down a rabbit hole of any of these topics. We could dive in deeper. I'd really love to have you back on the show.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:37:13.190)
Sure. Well, firstly, thank you for inviting me. Thank you for sorting out the technological problems that we endured, and I'd love to come back, Ashley, you're clearly passionate, and you're clearly knowledgeable. Thank you for all the work you've done.
Ashley James (1:37:27.272)
Absolutely. Please go and check out naturallybetterforyou.com. Of course, I'm going to make sure all those links are in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. There was something though—you did have an audience giveaway, which is probably on that website: the Anti-Dependency Guide and Post-Vaccination Detox Protocol. Just want to say that again: Anti-Dependency Guide and Post-Vaccination Detox Protocol.
I can't tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, ‘How do I detox from this?' My answer has been a time machine, because I don't know how to help you once you have become a GMO. I just feel so bad for the people who regret what they did in the last three years. You have a post-vaccination detox protocol that you're giving away to listeners. How do they access it?
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:38:18.884)
Well, if you go to naturallybetterforyou.com, the downloads for those documents are there. I may update it in the near future as we become even clearer. What I wrote is correct on the causes and what was causing these terrible problems. We have a task ahead of us.
Ashley James (1:38:37.539)
Yes. For listeners who found certain things that we said that’s interesting or off-putting and they want to know, they want to know sources, they want to know, give me some proof, give me the sauce, point me in the direction. I invite you to reach out to Dr. Ayres. He's been a doctor for many years and he could definitely point you in the direction of the evidence. We question. Science is to challenge and question and then look at the evidence without having your own belief system in the way. Put the belief system to the side. Come at it with an open mind, willing to let your belief system be challenged. If you're not willing to let your belief system be challenged, then that's dogma. That's a religion. That's not science.
So be willing to look at new evidence. I wish we approached politics the same way. We all just stop saying like all one party is good, all one party is bad? It's like the world doesn't exist like that. The world's made up of people with good intentions and people with nefarious intentions. I wish that we would hold politicians to the same, to the fire. Just don't trust them just because they're in your party. That's ludicrous.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:40:04.145)
I think that time, I honestly think that time's coming. I'm actually writing a book at the moment called Make America Healthy Again. If anyone is out there unwell, you can contact me on any of those websites for a Zoom consultation and Ashley, you're doing a fantastic job.
Ashley James (1:40:23.221)
Thank you so much. I can't wait to have you back on the show. Please, everyone check out naturallybetterforyou.com. When you reach out to Dr. Ayres, make sure you mention that you're one of my listeners because he'll know that you're a good one.
Dr. Jeremy Ayres (1:40:36.433)
For sure. Thank you so much.
Outro:
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https://learntruehealth.com/how-seeking-holistic-health-saved-my-life-david-dehaas
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When I was 19, my health hit rock bottom—I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and infertility, conditions I never imagined facing so young. This pivotal moment propelled me into the world of holistic health, a journey that led to incredible transformations not just for me but for countless others. Join me, Ashley James, as I chat with David DeHaas from the Whole Body Detox Show about my new book, "Addicted to Wellness," and the magic of holistic healing.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today's a fun episode because I'm the one in the hot seat. David DeHaas from the Whole Body Detox Show interviews me on Episode 179 of his show. So I have taken that Episode 179 from the Whole Body Detox Show, David DeHaas being the host and I am placing it here so that y'all can listen to our interview. I was just jumping on his show and I was checking it out this morning and his latest interview, which he published earlier this month, was with Andy Wakefield.
I had Andy Wakefield on my show a few years ago. Be fun to have him back because Dr. Wakefield certainly has some more information and he's been in, I think, a few more documentaries since, so that'd be fun to have him back. I love when I get to come together with like-minded people like David DeHaas. David DeHaas has also been on my show. He runs an amazing detox clinic. I think it's in Idaho. Forgive me, I'm pretty sure it's like it's so close. Idaho is like next door to Washington state, but people actually fly in from out of state, from out of country. They fly in to do, he has a week long and I think he has like a 10 day or two week long detox where they feed you and they do a whole series of colonics and they rebuild your gut, and him and I have had some really interesting off air conversations about how people have come back from the brink and he's had some really interesting experiences with doctors. When doctors wake up when their own medicine fails them and I have a lot of those interviews. If you've been listening, over 500 interviews, I have a lot of holistic doctors who started out as medical doctors in the allopathic, drug-based medical field and then they themselves came up against some illness and their system of medicine couldn't help them and that's when their brain exploded and they went my gosh, we've been taught a lie. We've been taught this lie which is prevalent. We are all bathed in this lie and that is that the MD drug based medicine is the only legitimate medicine out there, that you should always go to an MD. That type of doctor and every other type of doctor is a quack, or every other type of doctor is a quote unquote, and I'm doing little air quotes, alternative, meaning something less than not helpful, something less than and , maybe those alternative doctors might like massage you or something, but they're not legitimate because they don't give you drugs and it's been a lie that they've been feeding us. It's PR marketing that they've been feeding us for over 100 years. I'm not going to go deep down this rabbit hole today, but you can. It's a pretty interesting rabbit hole to go down.
So these doctors wake up when they realize that their system of medicine doesn't have all the answers. Not every system does. That's the point. We should not give the power to any one system, and I'm pretty sure that applies to everything in life. Don't give all the power to one type of school system, to one type of food manufacturer, to one type of government. Don't give the power and all the control and all the attention to one system, because that's not how life works. We should have access to, and the freedom to have access to, many types of therapies and healing.
So MDs that wake up and go, wow, I need to go outside of my system of medicine to find the answers. Then they find holistic medicine or functional medicine and then they heal their body and then they become a born again holistic health expert and they jump on podcasts like mine. Well, David DeHaas, the host of the interview you're about to listen to, he's had several of these experiences where very prominent MDs come to him unable to eat almost anything. Their gut is totally destroyed, they have eliminated most foods in their diet because they no longer can tolerate food and they get transformed by going to his clinic. They do something like 10 days of colonics and juicing and all the other wonderful therapies to rebuild the microbiome at David DeHaas' clinic and they're able to then walk away after ten days or two weeks, able to eat almost anything and tolerate it, and it's so cool. It's so cool that we can do that level of intense healing. So, anyways, there's my plug for David's clinic and his podcast, the Whole Body Detox Show. You can also check out David DeHaas' episode on my podcast as well. I had him on a few years ago and it was wonderful to have him on. then it was great to reconnect when he saw that I had published my book recently this year and he said come on my show and let's talk about it. So this interview today is a great conversation about holistic health and we dive into some wonderful ways in which we can help support the body and healing itself.
If you haven't seen my book yet, please check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness that's all one word learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness or you can just go to Amazon and type in Addicted to Wellness by Ashley James. It's a workbook. It's a lot of fun.
I have taken the accumulation of the last 12 years of working in this industry, in the holistic health field, working with thousands of clients. Before, I worked in the holistic health field, I worked with clients for 20 years. I can't believe that. You kind of like look back and you go, my gosh, like in my mind the 90’s were 10 years ago. I'm an 80s baby and it's just wild to think that I've been working with clients that long. I was working, as I want to call it, life coach. I was doing breakthrough sessions with people using neuro linguistic programming and timeline therapy. So I've been working with clients for a long time and this book is an accumulation of all my knowledge from 20 years of working with people and over 500 episodes talking in depth with holistic health experts.
The book I made it fun. I made it light and I made it impactful. So if you want to take your health to the next level, no matter where you are, this book meets you where you are and you will be able to, through a series of fun challenges, take your health to the next level. So Invite you to jump on it, to try it. Even if you have five minutes a day, even if you have 10 minutes a day, you can do this book. If you have a busy schedule, you can do this book.
I wanted to make it so that every single person could fit it into their life. So get it Addicted to Wellness. Get my book. It's a workbook, so you get to actually do things. That's where rubber meets the road. You get to experience health changes as you build up your body, and that's what we talk about today in today's episode, among other things. So enjoy today's episode. Please check out David DeHaas' podcast, the Whole Body Detox Show, and please share my podcast with those you care about. This is a grassroots movement. My goal is to help over a million people to get their health back, and I can't do it without your help. So you are part of that. You're the ripple that helps turn this ripple into a tidal wave to help as many people as possible to learn true health.
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 525.
David DeHaas (0:08:34.737)
Good morning everyone. David DeHaas, your host of the Whole Body Detox show from Living Waters Wellness Center, where miracles begin by healing from within, and today I have a very kindred spirit on the show today Ms. Ashley James. Ms. Ashley James has a podcast of her own called Learn True Health. You've done what some over 516 plus episodes and growing, does a fantastic job, so you can check that out. She's an entrepreneur, podcaster, author and we're having on because she just wrote an amazing book called, Addicted to Wellness. Ashley is a bit like me. You went through a lot of a health journey. There's a picture of it right there. A journey, much like myself, and we had to figure out how to save our lives, and she did.
So we're here teaching others. Amazing! She's also a massage therapist, a Reiki master, trained in neuro holistic programming, timeline therapy, hypnosis, nutritional coach. She went after it and grabbed all the different things to put them in her toolbox or wellness toolbox so she can help others, which is awesome. Ashley James, welcome to the show.
Ashley James (0:09:44.683)
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.
David DeHaas (0:09:46.763)
Everyone has their unique story, from sickness to wellness, and you've got one amazing story. So maybe give us a little bit of background and we'll get into your book here a little bit.
Ashley James (0:10:00.718)
It's like rags to riches to rags to riches. So when I was six, when I was really young, I didn't know any better and I thought this is just how life is, but I would always have a sore throat, I was always tired and I'd wake up in the morning unable to open my eyes because my eyes were crusted over and I'd have to peel away the crust in my eyes. They were sealed shut.
I just remember being really tired and the constant sore throats and that was my life until I was about six years old. then my mom, she had been put on antibiotics for the common cold, basically, and ended up staying on antibiotics for several months, because this is just in the 80s, what doctors did, and I guess some doctors to this day still do that.
So she ran her own business and didn't take the time like a weekend just to relax or a week just to like let her body recover. So she went to prescription after prescription to overcome an infection and gave herself a wicked case of candida. She finally discovered a naturopathic doctor who actually did colon hydrotherapy in his clinic. This is Dr. D'Adamo the original, not his son, but Dr. D'Adamo back in the eighties had a clinic in Toronto, Canada, where I'm from, and my mom went to him, got some colon hydrotherapy and also cleaned up her diet and she started to get better. So she intuitively said, well, if it's good for me, it's probably good for my daughter.
I remember, at six years old, being in his clinic. I remember looking him in the face as he took a drop of my blood and figured out I was an O blood type, looked at my eyes for urology, looked in my ear, examined my throat because I had that constant sore throat. he looked at me and he said you are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat and sugar. Stay away from them. Now, even at the age of six I knew that were the ingredients. Those were the ingredients in my favorite chocolate bar, Coffee Crisp. If you're from Canada, you know Coffee Crisp. To this day I can still remember what it tastes like. It tastes like what it sounds. It's crunchy, it's chocolatey, it's coffee flavored. Who wouldn't love that? I said to him, when can I eat a Coffee Crisp? he said once every blue moon. At the time I thought a blue moon was every month.
So I got excited, but I soon found out it meant once in a very long while. We came home and my mom tore through the kitchen, got rid of all the processed food, all the wheat, all the dairy, all the sugar, and we ate basically paleo, like what Dr. D'Adamo coined the O blood type diet, and overnight my sore throat went away. My energy, I couldn't even say it came back. I had it for the first time and I no longer woke up feeling sick. I no longer woke up with sore throats, I no longer woke up with sleep in my eyes. I would wake up, jump out of bed and just go, go, go, go go, just twelve hours straight and then go right to sleep and I had amazing health. That was from six to thirteen.
At thirteen, I rebelled and I started eating like all my friends. My mom was really strict around food, and out of love, but also coming from fear and just as a parent now I see how important it is to teach children why that food is good or bad and not just restrict without knowledge. So I ran towards all the food I was allowed to eat, and I gave myself chronic infections, type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Did I mention type 2 diabetes, and infertility. By the time I was nineteen, I was infertile and the doctor said, after doing a battery of tests, that I'd never have kids. So I was so sick from thirteen to nineteen. I created all these illnesses in my body and I was just feeling so horrible.
David DeHaas (0:14:06.600)
Were you seeing Dr. D’Adamo then?
Ashley James (0:14:08.606)
No, my mom switched back to an MD and that MD ended up killing my mom and that was a big wake up call for me. I don't know why she didn't. I guess he got so famous. He ended up not being in the Toronto clinic and so she started seeing another naturopathic clinic and maybe didn't like that guy as much.
I really wish she had stuck with holistic medicine, because she'd still be here today and my life would have been very different. I wouldn't be sitting here with you. But this is my story. We have to learn from our past and also appreciate our story so that we can appreciate who we are, where we are now and then build the future we want. So let's learn from the past.
Processed foods are how I develop those illnesses, and eating clean and then lifestyle changes and finding the right supplements. So supplements are like the mortar but the bricks. You can't out-supplement a bad diet. You can't out-exercise a bad diet right. You can't give yourself enough colon hydrotherapy when you have a bad diet.
It all comes down to using your food as medicine. You're building your body. You're building every cell in your body with what you're eating. So I had to dial in how I ate. I had to go through emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically the transformation to be able to shed those illnesses. I did. I learned what I needed to do. There were many dark years where I would cry myself to sleep, where I was constantly hungry, just going on, the blood sugar swings, feeling out of control, and my liver was so inflamed that anytime I did go on a diet my liver would just stick out. It would be painful.
David DeHaas (0:16:00.329)
Oh wow, I was like that at one time I didn't know what was going on.
Ashley James (0:16:08.465)
I finally figured out that it was heavy metal toxicity, probably because my body had a really hard time detoxifying. I've been MTHFR and so I had to really support gentle liver detox, support my liver and in doing that. But every time I went to lose weight, I could taste heavy metals in my mouth and that and my eyes would burn. I could taste heavy metals in my mouth.
I think it's from the accumulation of secondhand smoke and drinking soda. I don't know, just any kind of exposure to heavy metals. We have so much exposure to heavy metals we don't even realize. If you also have a problem with detoxifying, then they get accumulated in the body. I had accumulated a lot and I’ve spent the last seven years working on detoxifying the heavy metals. I have a sauna, Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely adore and that we can sweat out the heavy metals gently. I have a PES, which is an ionic foot spa, a Platinum Energy System. I've had people on my show, Learn True Health Podcast discussing how they work, very gentle detox without having to do things like chelators. I do also love Chlorella, which there's only a handful of companies I'd recommend. One of them is EnergyBits, and I did have Catherine Arnston, the creator of EnergyBits, on my show as well. So those are really good episodes to check out. so just through these different modalities I was able to detox the heavy metals.
But before that, back in 2008, when I was at the peak of my illness, my husband and I watched a documentary and he wanted to help me, but we just didn't know. You get to this point where you're sick, of being sick, but all you know is MD medicine, all you know is go to the doctor, they maybe do blood work and then they give you a drug and that just wasn't cutting it. I was just getting sicker and sicker under the watch of the MD.
I'd remembered when I was six, I went to holistic medicine. I had to go back before my rebellious era and remember what I had learned when I was very young from the naturopath. When we watched this documentary, it was about eating whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and eating organic. They had interviewed the original CEO of Whole Foods and he said vote with your fork, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, eat organic.
We did that. We didn't give up dairy yet, we didn't give up meat yet. We just shopped the perimeter so we stopped going down the aisles and we chose only organic. So some would call that like the pseudo paleo diet. You're just eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds. We were doing meat and dairy, but we chose organic and dairy, but we chose organic.
In that one month of primarily cutting up processed food and eating organic, my chronic infections went away. I still felt like crap, but I no longer needed constant antibiotics and I thought, wow, we did one change and one of my major problems went away. So what's the next step? We just took these baby steps where we did one change, kind of like a challenge, okay, for the next few days we're going to do this, for the next week or next month we're going to do this. We did one challenge of another and some things didn't work and some things did, but that's how we figured it out and we eventually cut out all dairy.
Dairy is the hardest, because we're actually chemically addicted to dairy, many people know this. For those who don’t, mother's milk, cow milk for a calf, goat milk for a kid, in order to make the infant want to drink it, put forth the effort to find the nipple and suckle. God in his infinite wisdom made breast milk addictive. Then we take milk from another species, we concentrate it into cheese. The thing that triggers the brain, the addiction in the brain, is in cheese, in concentrated form. So we are addicted to dairy and that's the hardest thing out of all the animal products to kick is cheese and dairy.
So we decided to go dairy free, reluctantly, and overnight my husband's adult acne went away within three days. He had cystic acne covered his entire back. It was really gross. It was constantly exploding and painful and he was ashamed and never went shirtless because of it and he had pitting all over his back, his face, but it was mostly in his back and in his chest too. A hundred percent of his acne, within three days of removing dairy, went away. He had never in his entire life not drunk dairy or eaten cheese. So that’s a little challenge.
David DeHaas (0:21:39.233)
We were supposed to have raw milk and of course there was Hershey's chocolate which was advertised heavily on the tv and I love my milk with my Hershey's chocolate. So you got pus with sugar and I always had acne, I had allergies, I had all this stuff and no wonder I had all these allergies. No wonder I had all this problem. My mother took me to what I call a drill, fill and build dentist, from age five on he's got two more cavities, Mrs. DeHaas.
Ashley James (0:22:10.520)
Oh, you mean, you have a boat payment, Mr. Dentist.
David DeHaas (0:22:14.396)
Yes, and here, have a lollipop on the way out. Some more sugar. Food is even worse today. It's really bad chemicals, just pure chemicals.
Ashley James (0:22:34.067)
We go down the cereal aisle. My mom was super strict about cereal in our household. There couldn't be any sugar in it and we had options like there were a lot of options for zero added sugar. I challenge you to find a zero added sugar cereal. I can only find one that's gluten free, also, because we don't eat barley and oats in our home. My son is actually allergic to them, but that's what Dr. D'Adamo told me: Don't eat those.
What I've seen with my mentors, I've been trained by several naturopathic doctors and they say 100% of their clients benefit from removing those grains because we're not cows. We don't have the stomach processing power to process, just like eating dairy. Eating cheese is not necessarily healthy for you, but we feel good eating it because we're addicted. So we keep doing it and we're habituated to the damage. You have to remove it for a while before you go. Oh wow, my migraines are gone. Oh wow, my stiff joints are gone. Oh wow, my vision's getting better. You start to see things clear up, the inflammation goes away and things you thought were completely unrelated, like, oh, my dry eye is gone, completely unrelated, but that's a sign of inflammation and you remove that food that is constantly insulting the body.
David DeHaas (0:23:56.078)
When you went to Peter D’Adamo, did he offer colonics? Did he offer them to you as a child?
Ashley James (0:24:02.368)
No, I was a child, no, he didn't offer. I’m really actually was interested in it. My mom would tell me stories because she'd come home from her colonics and I'd be super interested. I have actually interested in holistic health since I was six. My mom had a newsletter from Dr. D'Adamo and I would sit on my mom's bed and she would read it to me and I remember in the 80’s she read me an article he wrote about probiotics and I was fascinated. Acidophilus was like the only thing they knew about back then. I was super fascinated. She read another one about antioxidants and oxidative stress. I imagine the bullet pierces, the loose molecule bouncing through the body just like harming the DNA. He wrote this beautiful article about it and I was just fascinated. I was fascinated about how the body works in health, from that holistic standpoint.
David DeHaas (0:24:59.600)
Think about this, in 1992, Newsweek, on its cover I was selling nutritional supplements and they were just starting to talk about free radicals. People would say, DeHaas, you're just a free radical yourself, that's a rock band, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean they just dismissed it like that's stupid. What are you talking about, free radicals? What's an oxidant? Of course now it's common knowledge. Most people do know what an antioxidant is, but it is very interesting how, in 40 years, 30 years, basically, we finally got to accept this.
Ashley James (0:25:35.297)
The mainstream will catch up very slowly.
David DeHaas (0:25:39.903)
The community, basically slamming it, saying, there's nothing to that, you don't want those vitamins, that's just a waste. That was crazy!
Ashley James (0:25:47.096)
The same doctors only a few years before were recommending camel cigarettes. So we just have to remember how far we've come since our grandparents or since our parents' generation. The American Medical Association was fine with recommending camel cigarettes. So just got to like, take their advice with a grain of salt and then question everything, question everything.
One thing that Dr. D'Adamo did in his colonics that I haven't seen done anywhere else is he added a cactus enzyme that would break down the biofilm, and I was always fascinated about that and I haven't seen anyone else do that. So my mom told me I was like I'd ask her what they add to the water? One of her friends was from Japan, because there's a little viewing window to see what's coming out of you and they watched a giant worm come out of her, I guess from eating sushi or something.
David DeHaas (0:26:46.611)
Yes, all the time, all the time. Wild Hookworms, liver flukes. We got a whole manual down here. A book of pictures of clients have snapped the picture when they're doing their colonic and as they've seen the bugs, or at home in the toilet a lot of time it comes out, we loosen them up and they go home and they poop. It’s fascinating.
You go do a test. If you go to a doctor and get a test, 98% of the time it's going to be negative because they only test for five. The bugs don't want to come out on a poop and say hey, here I am. They've buried themselves in the coastal lining and they're attached. You got to go after them with all things zippers, herbs, our pulse frequency machine and then the colonics to flush them out.
Ashley James (0:27:32.817)
I wonder why they don't show up on colonic or colonoscopies, or do they?
David DeHaas (0:27:41.224)
I don’t know. I've never done a colonoscopy.
Ashley James (0:27:45.179)
Right and nor should you. There's a lot of people that die doing just regular colonoscopies. You turn that camera the wrong way, they're piercing your colon. Also the anesthesia, you could die from the anesthesia there's complications.
David DeHaas (0:28:04.451)
We've had clients come back and say, my friend, they did it, they pierced it or I don't know why, but they can't get it totally sterilized and they got a bug from a foreign country from the equipment and it killed it.
That was a my gosh story number of years ago, not four years ago, I guess not too long ago, anyway, yes, so there are some risks with that, but we do have clients now that come and do colonics, colon hydrotherapy before they go do colonoscopy, because it's just so much easier than sitting on a toilet all night drinking the toxic goop that they give you so that's good
So you went on your healing path. Of course you said you're taking antibiotics constantly. Oh, that's so bad for the gut.
Ashley James (0:29:00.895)
It is. Actually, Dr. Joel Fuhrman has a really good book. I had him on my show and he talked about this one fact that's in his book. I'm going to remember the name of it it's fast food genocide. Within the first few chapters of the book he talks about the cancer rates go up with every dose of antibiotics.
David DeHaas (0:29:26.646)
Yes, we had a doctor here who went through our 10-day healing retreat. She has 10 straight years of antibiotics. She can only drink what I'm drinking today during this interview, cucumber juice. It tastes great too, but that's all she could eat. When she got done with the 10-day healing retreat, she could actually eat. She said, David, I ate a steak. Last night it tasted so good.
She’s doing colonics, a lot of colonics. In fact, when she moved to Boise, she told her husband I'll only move to a city that's got a good colon hydrotherapist. So they scouted out cities, they scouted us out first, but how sad.
I mean so many people have been like that, like you, they've been on constant antibiotics. My dad recently had a kidney infection like kidney stone last year and he had a stroke and he had some things going on and they just started giving him antibiotics.
I said and of course I'm not there, I'm five hours away and of course now what he's pooping? He's got diarrhea all the time. When I finally just got that changed around. Now we've got a constipation issue but he was like he was shitting his. I mean, he was just David. I crap my pants all the time.
He's so upset and he's afraid to go out in public, so he doesn't. and hasn't been out in public for a while and about six months and because of that he said, hey, I was able to fart today and I didn't poop my pants.
Good win dad.
Ashley James (0:31:05.431)
So I have a family member who was on several courses of antibiotics and then got chronic diarrhea to the point where she also couldn't go outside, and the times that we had to take her to a doctor's room or something, it was like running down her leg. It was so sad and you lost all your dignity. It's just so sad. I had an interview about lactobacillus reuteri with Dr William Davis, who wrote the book Wheat Belly. I've had him on my show three times. It was the second interview I did and at the time I was recovering from PTSD, from losing my daughter, and I figured out, through the help of a friend who was a psychologist, what I was experiencing was PTSD. I'm interviewing him and he's talking about how lactobacillus reuteri is native to humans and should be in your gut but it is not in your gut in the modern world because one course of antibiotics wipes it completely from your system for the rest of your life.
And it gets passed down through mother's milk. So if your mother was on one course of antibiotics before you, let's say you've never had antibiotics, but your mom had antibiotics, then you don't have lactobacillus reuteri. So just think about how many people who are living in the modern world, who are not living in Nepal, in the mountains. They've never had antibiotics. I don't think we could find someone whose generations you could count, all the generations going up, who's not had antibiotics. So it's very rare to have lactobacillus reuteri naturally in your system, but it should be there. Not having it means that we naturally don't make as much serotonin for the whole body. Serotonin converts to melatonin. Melatonin is an antioxidant for all the cells, not just the brain, and that's just one of the effects. It also increases collagen production. So now we have a lot less collagen production. So it goes down the list. So if you take it and how you take it, is you make a yogurt out of it.
I figured out I have made over 200 batches of this yogurt with cashews. I figured out if you're allergic to cashews, you can try it with other like, it does not taste good. I'm sorry. The coconut version, the soy version, doesn't taste good. The cashew version tastes amazing. It tastes awesome and it's a 36 hour ferment. I have it. It's free on my website, just lactobacillus reuteri yogurt, cashew yogurt, on learntruehealth.com.
I made it for this family member and three days later she called me up and she said make me more because this is the only thing that stopped my diarrhea. It ended her diarrhea. So I went and did a little bit more digging and I found out that, obviously, we know your good microbiome gets wiped out when you do antibiotics. Well, one of the side effects is that chronic diarrhea and one of the solutions is lactobacillus reuteri. So we reintroduce the lactobacillus reuteri into the gut and it calms everything down. It gets the gut making serotonin again, gets the gut making collagen again, like it's helping so much. So it ended the diarrhea for her.
Then it had for me, surprise, surprise, it helped me overcome the depression. I noticed that within the same day I took it. The first one I made was out of soy milk, because I had a hermetically sealed soy milk so I just fermented that it tasted horrible but I drank it and I've never taken an antidepressant but I told my friend who's a mental health counselor after three days of drinking, I go, if antidepressants worked, I feel like I'm on one right now. I am feeling happy for the first time in over a year, I was just feeling happy in my body. So there's something to that lactobacillus reuteri and it's just one, one of the thousands of healthy gut microbes that we're supposed to have in our gut. So there's so much to support the gut.
David DeHaas (0:35:33.815)
Think about the colon, five to seven feet, small intestine, about 25 to 30 feet, the surface area the size of a tennis court. There's so much surface area and all these little bugs, good bugs, bad bugs, and it gets tipped out of balance so easily by. You go to one doctor, you got a little infection, here's an antibiotic. Next thing you know, you've taken six rounds and in some cases people get C diff and they actually die from C diff. So now, there's actually companies paying you for good poop. Now they're making tablets.
When I first got into this business, I met a doctor and he was so excited about what I was doing. True story. I've talked about this before on the show. His dad was dying in the hospital in California and he worked at the hospital here in Boise and his dad had C diff and his dad was just, just get me home, Mark, just get me home I just want to die at home.
So he's doing some research and he discovered I could put an implant back in his colon intestinal tract. Maybe that makes a difference. So he went to the hospital and he made his proposal. He says let's do a fecal implant. There's one doctor there from Europe that says, hey, no problem, I'd be happy to do it. We do that in Europe all the time. The doctor there says no, it's too much risk, infection, blah, blah, blah. He says darn it.
So he went home and he got a very healthy person, his daughter. She pooped in a bag and he took it to California, put it in a blender, blended it up and put it down his dad's feeding tube. He says, David, it was instantaneous, like bam, he was like a different guy. He says it was incredible. He's like you just saw a wilted plant in the dirt, dirt over it, and this thing just pops up like a plant staring at the sun.
We went back home and he said he lived six or seven more months. He lived at home. He did die. He says too bad, I didn't get to it sooner. Then that was 2009, we haven't been open very long since 2010 probably and within about two years, I started seeing more and more on the internet. Now you can actually buy poop pills. I saw an advertisement on, I think, instagram one day hey, we'll pay you for your poop if it's good enough, right, yes, yes.
Ashley James (0:37:51.846)
So I interviewed Sarica Cernohous on my show many years ago. I've been doing this show for nine years, so this is probably like six, seven, eight years ago and Sarica is wonderful, she's still practicing. So she was down in Arizona I think Flagstaff and she was so sick, couldn't eat any food. You hear it time and time again, just have to do the elimination diet, then they can't eat anything, and she learned about how important the microbiome is. So she started to eat tiny, tiny, tiny doses, micro dosing, different live culture fermented foods and a variety. Variety is the key. You're talking, like less than a teaspoon at each meal sauerkraut, kimchi, whatever she made. You can ferment almost anything. I have an amazing salsa recipe in my book. Amazing salsa recipe little plug for my book. That's a three-day pico de gallo ferment and it is delicious. So she was fermenting everything.
David DeHaas (0:38:55.257)
Addicted to Wellness is the book. Where can I get the book, Ashley?
Ashley James (0:38:55.257)
They can go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness. That'll take them to the Amazon link where they can purchase it. And they could just go search Addicted to Wellness on Amazon.
David DeHaas (0:39:12.708)
Yes, keep going.
Ashley James (0:39:15.314)
So Sarica Cernohous, she rebuilt her gut microbiome and now her people are trying to pay her for her poop. She won't sell it. They're offering her thousands of dollars per bowel movement and I'm like she's making three bowel movements a day like she could just poop and be a millionaire and I don't know why she's not selling her poop because, in a way she's helping people. I can also see her standpoint because she's giving into the system, that's not actually helping people. What's really helping people is teaching them that they can do the same thing that she did. So now her gut microbiome is in the top 99 percentile for the most diverse gut microbiome and what we have the average American has the Homer Simpson of gut microbiomes. There's very little diversity and our gut microbiome is actually making us stupid. It is dumbing us down.
David DeHaas (0:40:20.466)
Ding, ding, ding ding. I've been saying that, preaching that, for the last couple of years. On the Talk Radio show we're on here, KIDO Talk Radio. You watch all the crazy liberals, republicans, all of them. I mean there's so much stupid being said everywhere and I've been saying it's our food, we got glyphosate that's killed our soils. We had Jim Zamzow on not too long ago talking about how we recover soils because they destroyed the microbiome. You see what's coming out of people's mouths. They can't think.
I remember we covered a gal speaking of that, to your point. She dropped out of college. She had a hard time studying. We meant to retain memory. We'd have to make notes for her Happiest gal ever. We'd make a nice list. She would do great work, smile, happy, glad to be here. She was going off. She's an LDS member and she was going to go on a mission. I told my wife, I said this gal is sick, not sick. We're not sending a letter to go away until we do a 10-day cleanse for her.
So I gave her a 10-day cleanse. I remember day eight, she had to speak at her church and she was really nervous. She hated this. She did not want to speak in front of it. She was so nervous. She came back. I said hey, how'd your speech go? She goes, it went amazing. She goes, David. People come up to me and they say, "Whoa, where'd you learn to speak like that? You're better than any of the missionaries. She goes, “David, I can think”. She cleaned out her body, got her colon, small intestine healed and started restoring, got that transverse colon that's where 90% of your serotonin gets made. She’s a different person, different person full time.
Ashley James (0:41:55.740)
I love it. I love it. Yes, so we can rebuild our gut, eat small amounts of fermented foods. I have a whole chapter in my book on rebuilding the gut
have you ship me some of your salsa and your ferment.
David DeHaas (0:42:08.143)
Have you ship me some of your salsa and your ferment. So are you shipping now?
Ashley James (0:42:12.750)
It's easier for you to make it in your own kitchen because you can regulate, like, how much of each, if you want it to be spicier or not. It's super easy to make. It's crazy easy. The hardest part about fermenting is mentally getting over the fact that you're leaving things out of the fridge. You're not hurting yourself. The salt slows down any bad microbes, but the good microbes thrive.
David DeHaas (0:42:43.835)
Do you get a little like a little yogurt maker and use that?
Ashley James (0:42:47.042)
Are you talking about the lactobacillus reuteri yogurt? Yes, so there's a type of instant pot that not all instant pot models. There's one instant pot model where you can manually adjust the temperature, because it has to be under 109, ideally between 100 and 108 Fahrenheit. So I set mine to about 203. I have a yogurt thermometer and I check the batch. Sometimes I have to, like, up the temperature, down the temperature. You don't want it to hit over 109 because then it kills the lactobacillus reuteri. You just want it to be over. If it's 100, good. If it's 107, good, so just that range.
It has to ferment for 36 hours. In the last hour of fermenting it, the population doubles. At 36 hours, don't stop at 35. You got to be 36. I actually find it's easier to do it because I do these really large batches, and then it lasts for several weeks for the whole family, and so it's yes, it's delicious. Then, as far as making the salsa, you put the contents in a mason jar, put like a mesh over the lid and leave it for three days and it is the most delicious thing you've ever tasted and it's full of wonderful gut microbes.
David DeHaas (0:44:11.564)
Yes, that's a big thing. We had a lady on our show. Clearwater Cultures met her in the show. She actually lives in Idaho County, where I grew up, and she makes soaps and different things. I went to her house where her little manufacturing facility is and she's got all these different big old pots fermenting, all these different things, a lot of different products you can buy from her.
We interviewed her way back. That's been a couple of years, three years ago, I think, Clearwater Cultures, shout out to her. It came to her, divine intervention that we need to keep our microbiome on our skin as well. We think about our gut. That's fascinating, and that's your book, Addicted to Wellness, get it at learntruehealth.com?
Ashley James (0:44:52.616)
Yes. Learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness. If they go to my website also, learntruehealth.com, they'll see a little link to go get the book?
David DeHaas (0:45:05.083)
They can buy it directly from you rather than giving money to Jeff.
Ashley James (0:45:10.220)
Actually it does. It directs straight to Amazon, because I publish through Amazon, which just makes it super easy for me and I like that we can use these days, like Amazon KDP, which is how you self-publish through Amazon. It makes it really easy to allow anyone to publish a book and then we get this information out there.
David DeHaas (0:45:35.564)
It's sad we've got all the information at our fingertips today. I mean we got so much. We have these smartphones, so much information. I mean I go to bed at night. I'm trying to keep my eyes open and my ears open. I fall asleep listening to podcasts and educational information. I'm just an information junkie, but it's just so sad where most people are unable to learn everything I've learned. I've self-learned throughout my life, learned throughout my life. Back in the day, before fax machines, you actually went to a library but no, it is what we've got.
Ashley James (0:46:11.468)
We have information overload. And the problem is knowing what direction; because, for example, one of the things I do is I show people how to reverse diabetes and no longer have insulin resistance so I can guide you to no longer have type 2 diabetes and within three to four months you will not be diabetic on your blood work. You'll feel like a million bucks. You'll feel amazing. But then it takes about a year to completely correct the insulin resistance so that you now have insulin sensitivity and you can eat whatever carbs you want. You can eat bananas all day long. You can eat potatoes all day long. Your blood sugar will be amazing. You'll feel like a million bucks.
You listen to my podcast. I will show you how to do that. Then you go listen to someone else's podcast who tells you to be a carnivore and eat nothing but meat. Do the meat diet. Poop once a week. Carnivore diet is where it's at.
The only way to reverse diabetes is to not eat carbs. So you get completely opposite information and the problem is that there's conflicting information for every single thing out there. So health is confusing. I believe there's also a concerted effort on the pharmaceutical front to confuse people because if we knew how to heal our bodies, we wouldn't need the most of the time
My biggest advice is to question everything, no matter how good someone sounds, no matter how good I sound. Question everything. Be the most open minded skeptic you can be. If it sounds weird don't throw it away. Listen to it.
I dive into the information, dive into the studies, and then find the doctor saying the opposite.
Dive into their studies. It's wonderful to really look and think for yourself and keep that open mind. It's OK to look at the opposing information, just like I wish Republicans looked at the Democratic information. Democrats looked at the Republican information with an open mind. We should all come together as humans wanting to build a better world, not just like. Well, I'm right, because my mom told me I should be a Democrat. It's just religion. People are buying into dogma without allowing themselves to learn.
So open your mind, take in new information and then be willing to try and experiment. I did over 30 diets, I experimented on my body and I noticed the result. I can tell you that carnivore diet looks really enchanting and it's so foul. I know a few people who now can only eat meat because of how they've eliminated everything and now they're stuck, they don't have the microbiome to handle themselves like they've got parasites and they're stuck and they don't know how to get out. The problem is, a lot of people get stuck in when you go down that rabbit hole of elimination and they don't know how to come out the other side and heal themselves. So best thing to do is to take in different sources of information and then be willing to experiment, write down your results and then try the different thing
So in my book I give challenges every week for 13 weeks. There are one to four challenges that you can try and then you write down and every day, morning and night, it still takes like five minutes in the morning, five minutes a night. You write down your results. It's guided questions. So there's 32, 33 health challenges. Each one builds a foundation of health and you try it and you experience it for yourself and you write down your results and you watch over seven days as your body transforms with that health challenge, and then you could choose to continue doing that health challenge or you could say, hey, this isn't for me, but each one it will transform you.
So my one, for example, is proper hydration, and everyone kind of just glazes over when you start talking about drinking water because it's free, because everyone thinks they are drinking enough water but most Americans are chronically dehydrated and most of the symptoms of chronic dehydration are being people are taking either over the counter drugs for or being prescribed drugs for.
So I give a hydration challenge and in that seven days every cell in your body will be fully hydrated. By the end of the seven days you will see miracles happen and one of them is, a 25% increase in cellular energy production. So if you go to stimulants, coffee, or sugar for energy at any point in your day, you likely are dehydrated. So do that one challenge in my book and notice that you will have a 25% increase in energy production.
David DeHaas (0:51:23.986)
I’m a little tired, my wife says to me, do you need some amino acids? Have some water. I go, my brain’s awake now okay, alright. Let’s go!
One of the things we do here, Ashley, we teach people how to muscle test. People call me. They always call me hey, Dave! Such and such is going on, says yes, and, remember, muscle test, yes, yes, that's power. I tell people the first day, you can walk away now and you can start figuring things out, if you embrace this.
I love having the book. You start out, Good morning. Today, I'm grateful for- you have gratitude. Gratitude is so important that our cleanse as well, and your goal intentions. So you have this journal, because what we all do is we forget I don't know.
Ashley James (0:52:21.774)
This is the page every morning during a challenge and every night during a challenge.
David DeHaas (0:52:25.575)
What choices did not serve me, what challenged me the most. Good choices I made. You rank yourself good, better, best, what you had for lunch and dinner. We forget, we get going and we forget and I love it. Change your thoughts, change your world and this is not an overwhelming book, folks. This is really nice. I love the font size.
Ashley James (0:52:48.309)
Yes, I made it so you don't have to put on your readers.
David DeHaas (0:52:50.846)
I love it, especially since I don't like straining my eyes, and it's very simple and you get into just going through week two, week three, week four, just a couple steps forward. If you miss a week, so what, just pick back up,
Ashley James (0:53:05.317)
Yes. Do it at your own pace.
David DeHaas (0:53:06.854)
Great explanation about high antioxidant foods. You did a really nice job of laying this book out. Other sweeteners, what's other choices you could use for sweeteners, cause we all like to have a little sweet taste.
Ashley James (0:53:21.668)
Yes, so every week we're choosing a different challenge, and you're talking about the week where we challenge ourselves to either go completely sugar-free or switch to healthier sweeteners as one of the four challenges in that week. Not every week is a physical thing, we have weeks that are about mental health, emotional health, in some cases, spiritual health. So there's physical health challenges, but then there's also mental, emotional health challenges as well.
David DeHaas (0:53:51.472)
Yes, and you've got back here at Restored Home Hydrotherapy. You've got power showers, the cold contrasting showers, so you got a little bit for everyone. I mean I would say to listeners, you probably won't do everything, some things resonate, some things won't, but, in this health journey we didn't come with a manual when we were born, unfortunately, we needed a manual.
This is a good way to start on that track and, of course, listen to podcasts, like what Ashley and I do is a great way to quickly and easily. I think back in the 90s if I would have had just a few of the podcasts were out there, I know I spent so much money. I probably spent 200 grand plus all the money I lost because I was sick.
Every Friday I would go away and go see my guru and go to the hot springs. Friday was just toast, non-productive, not to mention how tired I was. I remember how Huggins looked at me when I was doing my dentistry and he says I don't understand why you're even awake, David, your blood chemistry says you shouldn't be awake that.
Ashley James (0:54:53.345)
That was me too. That was me too. I had a holistic functional doctor in 2009 who did my cortisol levels.
They always spit in the tubes all day long and she had been to the Olympics twice and her and I are still friends. She's in her 80s and she runs marathons in the desert in Las Vegas. She's amazing, I love her. That is normal, right, being able to run marathons in the desert is normal in your 80s and that's what we all should be aiming for.
She looked at my cortisol levels and she said, your highest cortisol during the day is everyone else's cortisol when they're sleeping. The only time I've ever seen cortisol this low was right after I did the Olympics. She bounced back. That was my normal. She was one of my guides to help me get back on track and she actually gave up her medical license when she realized that being a doctor was a drug dealer. She wanted to be a functional doctor, so she decided to give up her license so that she could practice functional medicine.
David DeHaas (0:56:12.152)
They're addicted to the standard of care.
Ashley James (0:56:13.219)
Exactly. Her husband is a chiropractor and they run a clinic together and they're wonderful. Shout out to Dr. Jenny Ross Wilkinson. She's awesome. She showed me that my normal energy levels were everyone's energy levels when they were sleeping. I also couldn't process human language in the morning. I was so depleted, so exhausted. My husband talked to me and I actually couldn't understand what he was saying.
So that was right around the time that we were doing that challenge where we went organic, but it wasn't until I met Dr. Wallach and he showed me minerals, and then I woke up within five days of taking the essential nutrients my body was missing and also cutting out.
He has 12 foods that he had me remove which are the cause of stress to the body and also stop blocking proper digestion absorption. Then he got me on the right minerals, so just cleaned up how I was eating, guided me that way, and then everything came back online and that's when I decided to turn around.
This is about 2011. I turned around and said I want to do this as my career. I want to help people get better, and yes, so it's been wonderful. So before 2011, I was doing neuro linguistic programming and timeline therapy with people doing coaching, largely helping people to end chronic pain and also end anxiety. I have a technique where I turn off. I teach people how to turn off anxiety, completely, turn off anxiety by getting to the root cause in 90 seconds and then so for many years I was helping people on the emotional, mental level, but I didn't have the tools for physical. So that's the book. The book is everything that I learned, that it builds the foundations of your health, and done in a way that's so fun. No matter how busy you are, you can plug into this book five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, whatever you have, and you will be able to build your health as a result.
David DeHaas (0:58:22.883)
And you can't complete a journey if you don't start taking a step, guys, and you've only got one body, one time on earth, to make this journey. How well do you want to live?
Live your best life, and this is a great tool to put in your wellness toolbox, as we call it, is having a little guide here to guide you through this, with some great suggestions about hydration and everything. It’s very complete. This thing about keeping yourself accountable because we all forget we get busy, we get stressed. This thing about keeping yourself accountable because we all forget we get busy, we get stressed. Next thing you know, you're grabbing a soda or a beer and sucking down some glyphosate or whatever, because you get stressed.
Well, what if there was a tool? What if you had a tool in your toolbox you could pull out to counteract that? You're all going to mess up, but I did many, many times.
Ashley James (0:59:15.378)
Also because you track your symptoms in this book easily. It's a fun and easy way of doing it. You'll see your progress every month. We do a monthly check-in and you actually see your progress. I have had two clients on separate occasions both forget that they had chronic migraines because once I helped them get healthy again, they forgot. That's why they came to me in the first place and then I asked them both two different people on separate occasions. I said how, how are your migraines? They said what migraines? I got their migraines gone by them following the steps. So we forget sometimes.
David DeHaas (0:56:53.431)
I've interviewed people after 10 days and I said well, what did you experience? They go through all these things. I said wasn't there something else? Was there something else? This one gal I remember the reason why she came to me because she couldn't squeeze her hands. I say remember this. I'm squeezing my hands. She goes yes, I forgot about that one. That was really big.
Ashley James (1:00:13.995)
Wow! Can’t write, can’t drive, couldn't open doors, couldn't put on clothing, but then she forgot because it came back. This is what happened. The part of the book is like checking in and being like, for example, this water challenge really is working because, wow, now I'm pooping three times a day or now my headaches are gone or now my stiff joints are gone. Now I have more energy.
You look back, can you remember what you felt like seven days ago? No, can you remember when you ate two days ago? No, like we don't. We don't necessarily remember how we felt. So when we make health changes, a lot of times it's like throwing arrows in the dark and we forget to keep doing the healthy thing. Keep doing the new habit, because we forget how good it made us feel and how it's helping our body be healthy. So that's why the book is so important to help you track that, so you can check back and go, Oh, I really should keep doing this new health habit, because it is making such a profound difference.
David DeHaas (1:01:17.248)
Yes, it's awesome. Addicted to Wellness. The healthy addiction 12-week workbook for creating a lifelong love of wellbeing. Guys, once you go two or three steps forward, half a step back, no big deal, just keep trudging forward.
Have yourself a way to kind of keep yourself accountable. Learn something new every day and let's get those bodies detoxed and back to wellness. Ashley, thanks for being on the show. Is there anything you want to add?
Ashley James (1:01:40.848)
Oh, I love being here. I also think listeners should check out the interview that you had on my show, which was amazing and I loved it. So listeners can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function, anything you want to search. I think I just published 520. So, yes, we've got lots of interviews with amazing experts.
David DeHaas (1:02:03.587)
I’ve around 200 something
Ashley James (1:02:06.924)
Well, just keep going, just keep chugging along. I had a mentor who when I started had over a thousand. So I was like, oh, thousands, a good number to aim for. I'm halfway there.
David DeHaas (1:02:21.078)
I couldn't believe how many I've done. It seems like yesterday I started, now, each week it's always a scramble. I don't interview everybody every week like you do. I go solo a lot, so it's always coming up. I've heard myself speak and say this stuff over and over and over and over. So you're sitting here alone in the studio talking to yourself, always trying to keep something fresh and new and always staying up on it. A lot of good episodes over there, for sure.
Ashley James (1:02:47.904)
I think, since you have clients in your clinic, even if they could come up with questions for you to answer, that would be great content. They could give you questions and then you could answer it in the podcast or you could even have them interview you and pick your brain, live. That would be cool. They don't necessarily have to be on video if they don't want to, they could be on the other side of the camera asking you questions and then you basically go live in a little classroom because everyone would be different. Then you don't have to preplan.
I know I would be curious to hear, like, how you answer things if it's coming from a client who's sitting there. The best interviewer is someone who's genuinely curious, and that has been my gift, apart from God's divine guidance, when I interview people, I'm just genuinely interested because I was sick and suffering and I got that my health got better, and I'm always looking to learn and help myself.
The purpose of my show, as is the purpose of your show, is to reach as many people as possible and to help them learn what it is to achieve true health, and that's why I named my podcast Learn True Health, because it is about this journey of learning what it is to achieve true health and how to get there and how to build your true health, and that's mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically.
As a fun side note, I had a client who says he was born with the gift of seeing angels and guides and he's Catholic and he says he would be in church and he would see angels in the church. I think it's phenomenal and he has some amazing information. We were actually I did a live interview with him and I was in his office, and when I hit record, he goes like you were just surrounded by angels guiding you.
He goes like all of a sudden they just came and I was like you know what so many times people compliment me and being a good interview, I don't even think like I'm there. I feel like I'm just a listener of my own show and I'm a fan of my own show, but when I'm sitting there interviewing, I feel like I'm being guided when it comes to asking questions. So the questions pull out the information, and the information is what we're here for, right. So you're a great interviewer and a great guest and it was wonderful having you on my show and it was wonderful being on your show, so thank you.
David DeHaas (1:05:22.714)
Yes, thank you as well. So, yes, I always just say a prayer. Give me the right words. That's my prayer. Give me the right words I need to say, and then I just go.
I love it pretty well, I do. I love making notes, I do. Now I've started scripting more things. you'll be, I'll be laying there at night and things will pop to my head go, oh, that'd be a great one, that's some great questions, then y'all remember that one and of course, no, don't remember you will not remember it, I've got better speaking the phone like no, and we got it.
Ashley James (1:05:54.414)
I don't actually prepare ahead of time for my interviews because when I'm scripted or when I have a bunch of questions written down, I'm too much in my head, I get discombobulated. When I'm present in the moment with a guest, I'm just super curious. I just want to pull the information out of them. I want us to extract and learn as much as we can from that person, so I'm way more present to them. Then the questions come to me and so many times my listeners say that was you just asked the question that I was on my mind. You said exactly my question. I can't tell you how many times people have said that to me. That's where divine guidance comes in which is really exciting.
David DeHaas (1:06:34.356)
I just did an interview not too long ago and I read the book and I read everything and I wrote down all kinds of questions and then, of course, I got an interview and then the questions were there and we just started rolling.
I got done. I looked down and went, oh, I hit them all. I didn't even look at them. Well, what a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much. Ashley James, Addicted to Wellness. Get it at learntruehealth.com for a slice of Addicted Wellness, or go to Amazon and put in the search terms. Get the book and start your journey towards wellness. Until next week, my friends have a blessed week.
Outro:
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Get Connected with Ashley James
Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness
https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness
Get The Minerals Your Body Needs: TakeYourSupplements.com
https://takeyoursupplements.com
Dr. Glenn Livingston's Free Book Defeat Your Cravings:
https://www.learntruehealth.com/defeatyourcravings
Check out Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson's Free Masterclass:
brightlineeating.com
https://learntruehealth.com/achieve-peace-over-food-with-neuroscience
Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and a renowned expert in the psychology of eating. She is President of the Institute for Sustainable Weight Loss and the founder of the worldwide Bright Line Eating movement. Her first two books, "Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free," became New York Times bestsellers and instant Hay House favorites. Her work weaves the neuroscience of food addiction with powerful insights from Positive Psychology, IFS, and 12-step Recovery to outline a roadmap for achieving true integrity and self-authorship around food. The Bright Line Eating mission is to help one million people around the globe discover lasting food freedom and have their "Bright Transformations" by 2025.
Join us for an enlightening journey with Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson as we explore the intricacies of overcoming food addiction and achieving wellness. This episode provides a wealth of insights and practical tools to help you gain control over eating habits and cultivate a healthier relationship with food. We discuss the concept of Bright Line Eating, a program that emphasizes clear, unambiguous rules to resist temptation and maintain a structured approach to eating. Discover how this method, inspired by Roy Baumeister's work on willpower, can help you achieve consistent results and prevent the shame spiral often associated with poor eating choices.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I have some quick things I need to share with you in regards to this episode. So for those listeners, I do the exact same thing, so I don't blame you. For those who like to skip it, skip the intro, let's just jump into the interview. Don't do it. I'm here to share something with you.
So this episode today I actually recorded it a while ago and then Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and her team reached out to me and asked me to hold off on publishing it because they were about to launch and they hadn't launched the membership yet, or there was something. There was something that they were going to launch with a book or something, and it kind of got put to the side and I just kept going and kept doing interviews and publishing. Then she reached out to me and said, hey, I'd love to do another interview. I was, oh well, we haven't published the first one. I've been actually really excited for a while to publish this one, and so I'm publishing this one first and then I'm going to publish the one I just did with her, which both of them are valid and they build on each other.
If you are looking for real results-based tools to overcome food cravings, food addiction, at any time where you feel you're not in control of your cravings or your eating, or if you have been struggling with weight loss and if you feel sometimes you can control food, but then there's other times where you end up getting two dinners or you kind of think back and you go geez, I actually ate multiple meals today, more than three. I had two lunches, two dinners and then a snack or some.
Food addiction shows up in different ways for different people. But if you don't feel in control and it doesn't have to be all the time but if there's some time where sometimes it's late night eating, sometimes we choose to skip meals and then we feel we're stuffing our faces late at night. So if you ever feel this lack of control or that you're constantly thinking about food and you'd feel you don't have peace around food and peace in your body and you want to get to a healthy weight and a healthy relationship with food, this episode is for you.
In addition to this episode, definitely tune in for my part two of this interview with Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, which will be published soon, and I also want to share that I have a few other resources. This is something that I'm very open about in the show that I have for years. Been working on my relationship with food and I've come a long way actually, just editing the show today and cleaning it up in order to publish it.
I was listening to what I shared and some problems I'm still struggling with and some problems I've actually overcome even in the last few months since we had this episode. So it was really neat to hear that I have made strides and we're always growing, and sometimes it's hard to recognize how much we have grown just because we're always thinking about what we don't have. When you take an account of where you were and where you are now, you actually see how much, how far you have come, and that's something that I focus on in my book and I'd love for you to get my book. I love the title because I've been healing and growing from my own addiction brain and what I love about my book is that we harness the power of addiction in a positive way and get addicted to wellness in a good way, in a way that is sustainable and balanced and healthy and really motivating.
So my book is fun and light and super informative and you can pick it up and do it five minutes a day, ten minutes a day. I just today had a reader tell me that they picked up the book and just in the introduction it motivated them to go from walking to jogging and they increased their miles and they feel they're back on track in their fitness routine just by reading the introduction. They found it so rewiring for their mindset and that's so cool. It's exactly what I intended.
So definitely check out my book, learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness because as we're working on reframing and restoring the negative addictions, we can also build positive ones, ones that get you jumping out of bed, going, man, I am craving that walk or that swim or that bike ride, or I'm craving that green smoothie, or I'm craving my mental wellness and the things I do for my emotional, mental, spiritual or physical wellness.
That's such a positive mindset to move towards and focus on what you want versus constantly battling what you don't want. That's the thing we kind of get bogged down into when we're learning to heal from addiction. We focus on a lot of what we don't want. I don't want to be tired, I don't want to be cranky, I don't want to be craving, I don't want to be constantly saying no, I don't want to. I wish I could just have peace, , I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't. So anyone who is looking to work on addiction or has been working on addiction, you'll find that it just kind of gets exhausting and we tend to really beat ourselves up and when you get my book, Addicted to Wellness, it's so much positive reinforcement, but not that sickly sweet, just kind of sugarcoating a mud pie. It's legit getting deep inside yourself and realigning your focus to be on what you want and moving towards what you want and then having these small wins that really build momentum and get great dopamine hits from those small wins. So check out my book. I'd love to actually hear what you think of it as you go through it. Please feel free to reach out to me. You can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. You can also come to the Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group. You can also leave me a five-star review on Amazon. I will totally read that and to get the book you can go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness.
There's another book I really want you to know about and it's free, one of my favorite guests of all time, Dr. Glenn Livingston. He also teaches overcoming food cravings and food addiction in a slightly different way, but it's interesting how there's crossover between Dr. Glenn Livingston and today's guest and yet I think it's really a good idea to learn from both of them. So you're going to get the message on a deeper level and I feel that they really complement each other. You can check out his free book called Defeat your Cravings and it is a great book. It's a workbook. There's no space in the book to fill out anything, but you can have a journal beside you as you read it and you could even just be reading it on your phone, digitally, and you could go to learntruehealth.com/defeatyourcravings to get that free book.
I love his interviews. We've had him on the show several times. I've been on his show, so that's Dr. Glenn Livingston, and I have several other episodes with different guests touching on this subject of ending food addiction and healing that part of us. But it is the ongoing process where we're building our strengths and I love that all the guests that I've had give us different tools that fill this wonderful tool belt. So you can go to learntruehealth.com and type in addiction or you can type in food addiction and you'll see a lot of episodes pop up. Chef AJ is one of my wonderful guests where she shares her story of overcoming and what she did to get there and what she teaches. She teaches a way of cooking and eating for those who have food addiction. So all those guests I feel complement this picture and Dr. Susan Pierce Thompson, coming from the neuroscience background, has figured out a way that gets such great results. You're going to love today's interview and be sure, obviously, to keep listening. Make sure you're subscribed and getting notifications so when my next episode comes out with her with the updates that you will have it. Enjoy today's interview. Please share it with those that you know want to have inner peace when it comes to their relationship with food and their relationship with their body.
Ashley James (0:08:56.892)
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 524. I am so excited for today's guest. We're handling a topic today that most of at least America, most modern countries are struggling with this problem. So pretty much you throw a rock, you're going to hit someone who's going to want to hear what our guest has today.
Reading about everything you do, and especially the research, I got to tell you there's a part of me that's like, this really sounds too good to be true. So I can't wait for you to show us that it actually is true and how amazing it is the work that you're doing.
Dr. Susan Pierce Thompson, welcome to the show. Now you have a PhD and you're a professor and you're a researcher. I want to dive in. What is this amazing thing that you have created that is going to help impact over a million lives?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:10:06.525)
Yes, Ashley, thanks, it's so great to be with you. It's called Bright Line Eating, and it's an approach to food and eating and life that it's pretty radical, it's pretty unusual, and I basically take everything you ever heard about how to lose weight and I turn it on its head, which if you just think about it even superficially makes so much sense because if you look out there, half of Americans are trying to get their eating in check and lose wait. Obesity keeps climbing unchecked and just climbing and climbing, and climbing, with a ferocity that's just horrifying and our collective solution to it is, let's normalize bigger bodies, and just stop hating ourselves and fat shaming each other but really the problem is bad, health-wise, mobility-wise and nothing is working, nothing is working. People are trying all kinds of things and nothing is working. I've just got a very different approach and the research shows it's phenomenally effective. So, yes, I look forward to talking about it with you, and I know you go deep in these, in these episodes. So, yes, yes, exactly, here we go.
Ashley James (0:11:24.969)
Yes, well, let's start by understanding a bit more about you and how you and so are you the inventor of bright line eating? Did you name it?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:11:34.414)
Yes. Well, I mean, I don't know what your spiritual beliefs are, but it felt to me like it named itself. I don't know if God named it or whatever. I was in my morning meditation, 18, 19 years now. I've been meditating for 30 minutes every morning, and I was meditating on January 26th, 2014 and suddenly, a booming, clear mandate, was it just filled my meditation, write a book called Bright Line Eating, and I'd never heard the words in that order before. I don't think anyone had.
I knew what they meant, though, because I had been reading a book recently before that called Willpower, by Roy Baumeister, who's a very venerated psychologist just a really well-published, well-cited psychologist and he wrote this book called Willpower, and toward the end of the book, there was a chapter on using bright lines to resist temptation. So he was talking about Eric Clapton and sobriety and a bright line for alcohol. So a bright line is a legal term. It's a clear, unambiguous rule that you just don't cross. It's a standard that you apply consistently to get consistent and reliable results. So, in the temptation domain, if you're going to be the designated driver, you'll be better off that night saying I'm not going to drink any alcohol. That's a bright line. As opposed to gee golly shucks. I'll be sure to drink moderately tonight, which is a very fuzzy line and you never really know if you've crossed it , and so you could end up getting in trouble with the I'll be sure to drink moderately approach.
Ashley James (0:13:18.461)
Yes, so after dinner I brush my teeth and floss and then, three hours later, if I'm hungry, I say, nope, I brushed my teeth. I'm not eating anymore because I'd rather go to bed on an empty stomach and actually let myself sleep, and I feel so much better the next day than if I go, well, I can brush my teeth again. I'm going to go back downstairs and go to the kitchen and fix up a 9pm second dinner.
Then the next day I feel UGH, it could be a super healthy meal, it could be, I'm going to go down and make a salad, whatever it is. I'm still digesting. When I go to bed, my body doesn't go into that deep, deep healing mode and restorative mode. So then the next morning I just feel it yes.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:14:08.203)
So you have a bright line.
Ashley James (0:14:09.928)
I have a bright line, I brush my teeth, I floss. Because flossing is a real pain in the butt, but also having to get, I mean, thank God I'm knocking on many items that I think are made of wood now. I've never had a dental procedure, like drilling deep into a tooth and root canal. I saw my husband get a root canal and that cured me of never flossing. That is my bright line now I will floss because I saw a root canal. You should just go on YouTube and watch a root canal. You will floss twice a day.
Then I say to myself I brushed my teeth, I spent the 15, 20 minutes it takes to floss and now I am not eating, after 6 or 7 PM and that's really helped me. The next day I feel better about myself. I woke up. I have more energy because, when I wake up, feeling gross because I ate late in the night, I beat myself up and that self talk, and then you want to go and eat things that are not as good for you to make you feel better. That little kid in you wants to go and and put your hand in the cookie jar to self soothe from all the negative self talk about the bad day you had before. So, yes, crazy spiral.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:15:35.115)
It's a shame spiral, yes, and then you eat more to assuage that shame and comfort yourself and numb it out. Yes, I think that's a cycle that a lot of people get in with their eating. I also noticed that if I eat later into the evening, I don't sleep as well. My aura ring tells me. So I wear an aura ring and I like it. My stats aren't good and my brain will say, did something disturb your sleep last night? My heart rate will be up and it'll gradually come down over the night. But it takes hours for it to come down.
I like to eat my dinner pretty early, I eat around five usually, sometimes six. Life gets lifey and sometimes I eat later. I don't care particularly, but I will notice I never eat after dinner. I'm like you. I eat three meals a day with nothing in between. So meals are a bright line. The four bright lines, just so people know, are sugar, flour, meals and quantities and quantities so that you eat enough. Actually a lot of people if they're trying to clean up their eating they make the mistake of way undereating, and that's terrible. I help people lose weight, but I make sure that they eat enough, and enough of the food. So I actually advocate a digital food scale, believe it or not, and I think I'm crazy, but, oh my gosh, look at the people, the bodybuilders and stuff people whose physiques are noteworthy. They're all weighing their food. I promise you. It's so easy to get off track, unless you're pretty clear. So, yes, those are the bright lines, but, I came real, if you asked about how I came to all this, and it really goes way back before that moment in 2014. That was the birth of Bright Line Eating, but there was a lot that came to that point, so we probably should go back.
Ashley James (0:17:27.093)
Yes, let's go all the way back. Well, you have a PhD, let's go. Let's go all the way back. What motivated you? What happened in your life that made you want to go down this road through education and research?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:17:38.899)
I was into school as a kid. I had dreams when I was a kid of visions of going to Harvard and so forth, but what happened was I went off the track when I was a teenager by getting into drugs. I like drugs because Iike to party and Iike to experiment, and my first drugs were psychedelics and I had a great, mind opening, incredible experience that way. But I also drugs because they would keep my weight off and solve my eating problem, which I already had. I already had a very addictive relationship with food as a kid and I didn't think of it in those terms, but absolutely I was addicted to sugar as a kid and eating in general. I weighed more when I was 11 than I weigh now and I started to get concerned about it in high school. So I started doing drugs and the drugs escalated.
So by the time I was 16, I was addicted to crystal meth and that resulted in me dropping out of high school. Yes, a lot of drug induced psychosis, like real schizophrenia, real intense psychiatric issues. I stopped crystal meth, thank God that's the devil's drug right there. It's really really nasty stuff and I never went back to it. But then I just got into cocaine, and then freebasing, and then crack cocaine, and so by the time I was 19, I was a high paid call girl prostitute and I was smoking up the proceeds in the crack house regularly, just smoking away my life. I hadn't been in school in years and I was pretty far from a PhD in anything. I hadn't even graduated high school.
So I had a moment of clarity in the crack house on August 9th 1994. I had my head shaved, Sinead O'Connor buzzed short and I had a blonde wig on my head and it was a Tuesday morning actually I'd been there in the crack house smoking crack all weekend long, and now it was Tuesday morning. So I'd been up awake for days, smoking and I just had this moment where suddenly I came to consciousness. I'd been awake, but I wasn't conscious, really, not really. I wasn't aware and I came to awareness and suddenly I just looked around. I was in San Francisco, where I'm from, and I was in this seedy, pay by the hour or day or week or month type hotel, just really a nasty place. It wasn't my room, it was this guy, Joe Brown's room, and there was a couple kicking heroin over to my side. They were twitching, like a fish on the deck of a boat. They were just flopping out from heroin withdrawal and there was still more crack rock on the table. So it wasn't that we were out of drugs or anything like that. I was paying for it for everybody like we had. I had a lot of money in that, we had a lot of drugs and my consciousness opened up into a clear awareness of who I was and what I was doing and what my life had become and it felt like such a creeping non-choice.
My life had just kind of gone that way. I think the drugs just gradually took over more and more of my life and I didn't really choose in the way we typically think of choices. I didn't really choose to end up there, it was just sort of, there I was and anyway, what happened was, I got the gift of a deep knowing that if I didn't get up and get out of there that second, that is all my life would ever be. I would just go through cycles of addiction and drug use and prostitution and that was going to be the rest of my life. Not that I would die, but there's that I would keep living that and try to quit and go back to it. I just knew if I didn't get up and get out of there then that was it for me and I just grabbed my jacket and I walked out the door. The thing about addiction is it's so pernicious, and I didn't have any tools for recovering. But I now believe in a very benevolent, higher power, mysterious force of the universe. I don't know how it works or what to call it or whatever.
But by a fluke that night or by a miracle, depending on your point of view that night I had a date, a first date, with this super cute guy that I'd met at a gas station at three in the morning a few nights prior and he took me to a 12-step meeting for drug and alcohol recovery that night on our first date. I'm not kidding, this guy was a sex addict. He was four years, clean and sober, and he knew I was a call girl. He used to drive as a chauffeur for a call girl and so that's. He saw my pager and he knew what I was up to. So he was a sex addict. He wanted to go out with me and he took me to this meeting and I'd never been to such a thing before. But I got a 24-hour coin because at that time I was 28 hours off the crack pipe and I've been clean and sober since that day, so I haven't had a drink or a drug in 27 years, thank you God. What happened then actually was I just got really fat really fast, I just my addiction, just hopscotch to food and before I knew it I was hitting Taco Bell and 7-11 for pints of ice cream and Safeway for boxes of pasta and English muffins and candy bars and I just ate my way into obesity by my mid 20s.
Meanwhile, I dove into academia. So I went to San Jose City College and crushed it there and transferred to UC Berkeley and crushed it there. 4.0 spoke at the graduation and I majored in Cognitive Science because I wanted to study the mind and the brain and I yes, I wanted to learn what was up with my brain, how my brain took me so far off the rails. So when I finished at UC Berkeley, I got into every graduate school I applied to. I wasn't done. I was still fascinated by the mind and the brain and I got into every PhD program I applied to and I ended up with a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in one of the top schools in the world, with a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences in one of the top schools in the world.
I did a postdoc in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, for two years, and then I came back to the States and I was a psychology professor for 16 years and I taught a course. I became an expert in the neuroscience of addiction, and food addiction in particular, and for many, many, many years I taught a course on the psychology of eating and the neuroscience of food addiction. I lost my excess weight and finally, started my real food addiction recovery journey when I was 28, right on as I was graduating from finishing my PhD and moving to Australia for the postdoc right at that juncture is when I lost my weight, I was 28. So I've been in a slender, right-sized body for me. I have no judgment about what size anyone else wants to be, but for me I had a lot of weight to lose to be in a body that felt right -sized for me.
I've been in a in a right-size body, or I’d like to call it a bright body, for 18 years now and I published studies and I help people lose their excess weight and I teach people about the neuroscience of food addiction and then when my morning meditation, when God said, or the universe said, or I thought, whatever it was, however, the idea came to write a book called Bright Line Eating. That started the Bright Line Eating movement and since then I think 1.8 million people have joined the Bright Line Eating email list and we have a membership where people join and the program, the success plan, just guides them on their journey. It's brilliant, it's really effective. So there, that's the story.
Ashley James (0:26:09.398)
I was crying through part of that. I don't know if you could hear me.
Here it’s like, oh, we have this PhD. She’s like, okay, I was a crack whore.
I love you, I love you. Okay, I went to this clinic with these three different naturopaths and one was maybe 30 pounds overweight, had a bunch of tattoos, dyed hair and she was super fun, she was dressed, super fun, and she kind of got the most clients. Then there was one that was a bombshell. She's a size zero. She's an athlete. There's not an ounce of fat on her, she's perfect, she dresses perfect, she looks perfect and all three of them were highly qualified doctors but she'd get the least amount of clients.
Then our doctor was kind of in the middle. She was kind of in the middle between the two of them and we talked about this dynamic and what “in the middle”, she told us, it's really interesting, but the reason why women would gravitate towards the woman that was had the tats and was a little heavyset I mean not unhealthy by any means, she was still within the range of healthy, because she was tall and she was muscular, but she wasn't the petite athlete, which is what we perceive as the healthiest. The women wanted to work with her because they wouldn't feel judged and they'd feel that they were understood, because they're working with someone who understands them and who's struggled and or been through the ringer, and she's lost 50 pounds and kept it off. That's the doctor that they wanted to work with, more than the doctor who's never been fat never, never looked to have ever struggled with a body issue, and what's funny is that the skinny one was, I worked my ass off, I got up at 5:38. I spend 90 minutes in the gym, I prepare all my food. I work so hard. I've worked so hard my entire life to maintain this, but she looks like on the outside that she's never struggled, and so it's just interesting that from the outside, oh, this PhD, what's this PhD who is so uppity in the world of education? What's she know about my struggle, and here you are, I've been there and your struggles have probably been worse than the average listener, and so, now we can really relate . Gosh, I hope so. I mean now we can really really relate. Now we're like, okay, now she knows my struggle. If I struggle with cookie addiction here, you've had every street drug I'm like okay, I can listen to her. Your struggle gives you credibility.
What really hit me was just yesterday I was listening to I don't know if Jacob Israel on YouTube. My husband turned me on to his really interesting Christian perspective. He's kind of if you were into conspiracy theories, research, looking for signs and Christianity and he pulls things and gives really interesting perspectives in a beautiful way, like very heartfelt messages. But he said something yesterday and it really struck me as you were talking. He says your low point, the lowest point, if someone who's listening is struggling and at their really low point. You have to remember that is your testimonial, because some people are suicidal and in this last year and a half I've been through one of my lowest points in my life.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:29:47.533)
Yes, I think a lot of us have. The last couple of years have been hard.
Ashley James (0:29:51.539)
I lost my daughter during childbirth and she died. She died four minutes before she was born and I got to hold her for hours. The medical examiner came and was going to take her away and I'm like, nope, I got to hold her for hours and hours and I can still feel her and hold her in my arms and she'd be 15 months old now.
So in this last year, I gained 40 pounds with struggling with the hurt and working through it. I'm working through it. Then, since about March, I've lost, I think, 11 or 12 of those 40 pounds. So I'm on my way back down and I'm being intentional and making that bright line, brushing my teeth and then saying, nope, no more food. Because at night, when things are quiet, that's when the emotions kick in. I've just and I've noticed this with my clients as well, but that's really when we do most of our comfort eating because during the day, I can not eat all day long. I get super busy. I'm a crazy busy mom and then it's at night that it's where we can eat three dinners through the course of four hours .
So, yes, when he said your lowest points are testimonies you have to remember, for those who are struggling or maybe in your future struggles, when you're at your lowest point, you can't see a bright future, you can't. So when you were in that crack house or whatever you were in that moment, those low points, that's your testimonial to the people now that you're helping, so that for me like, I'm coming out of my low point, I can help people. I can help people because I can share where I've been and where I am now. Look, we're going to have a bright future. You just have to know that. Your testimonials now, so rise up.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:31:53.573)
Yes, I love that. It's so important. I think it's the 12 step model of like you tell the story of going down and hitting bottom, and it's not just a story of, like you said, perfection, and look at me, I'm perfect. It's really struggling profoundly with something, hurting yourself, falling down again and again and again and then triumphing. It's the transformation journey, the point where things change and then you're heading back in a positive direction. I feel it's really what people need to hear is that people suffer. Life is difficult. I think that's the first line of M. Scott Peck's amazing book, The Road Less Traveled. Life is difficult. Period.
I think you're so right about that people and what we struggle most with is where our medicine is for others. It's that special medicine that's given only to those who've experienced that same difficulty in all its tragic fullness. Those are the ones that have the medicine for others, because you can't relate to someone who's never had that particular struggle. I have three children. I have never lost a child and so I don't have that medicine in that way for what you've been through. I had twins who were born at one pound and I went through one pound each and I went through four months in the NICU, with one of them almost dying all the time from health complications due to that prematurity, and so I have experience for someone who's going through that of okay, I know what it's to to show up in the NICU every day and stare at your baby through a little glass box, and so I'm so with you. I so agree.
Ashley James (0:33:50.914)
Mary Lou Henner, I don't know if you know her. She's this iconic red headed actress. She was in Taxi. She has a photographic memory. She actually has not only photographic memory. She can remember the date. Let's say, you met her 19 years ago. She'll tell you the date and the time, what you were wearing, where you met, the weather, what was in the news with the headlines. It's crazy! But I've actually spent some time with her, a few times, and she has this great story which, I'll sum it up, is choose your heart. No matter what you're going to do, it's hard. It's hard to like going out and eating junk food is hard, it's the instant gratification, but then, the next day, I feel poopy and that's that's hard, and then I beat myself up and so it's, choosing the foods that you're addicted to is hard, just like choosing the drugs.
Going out and buying drugs and alcohol and getting sloshed, that's hard. You're choosing instant gratification, but you're hurting yourself, so that's hard. Choosing not to do it, that's hard. So she goes, it's going to be hard. All your choices are hard. Choose your hard. Be cognizant of choosing the hard that's going to lead you down the path you want to go and that there's so much more reward and internal satisfaction when we choose our heart.
Your program, which I want to get into the research because you could say you cure everything, but the proof's in the pudding. Prove it to me. What is it, Missouri? The Show-Me State? Prove it to me. But first I want to talk about this idea that people have lasting results. Anyone can lose weight on the grapefruit diet. Anyone can lose weight on the “I only eat three pieces of cheese a day”, I don't know, whatever but that's not lasting, that's not sustainable, and that's not healthy. Most of the diets out there are not healthy or sustainable. But your program is designed to help people get to a point where they have lasting results. So why is your program different from every other diet out there?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:36:13.087)
Yes, great question. It's different in some pretty major ways, major ways. So first of all, we educate people about addiction and I just need to say food addiction is real. You'll hear out there that it's controversial, blah, blah, blah. It's really not to neuroscientists who study addiction in the brain, you can just hold the brain scans up. Here's the brain that's been eating too much processed food. Here's the brain that's addicted to heroin. Here's the brain that's addicted to cocaine. Here's the brain that's addicted to alcohol. It's the same. It's dopamine downregulation in the nucleus accumbens. So when you eat things like donuts, for example, what happens is too much dopamine floods into the brain and the receptors thin out, they down-regulate, they get less numerous, less responsive, and then you have to keep eating like that in order to feel normal, just in order to get through the day without your skin crawling.
So I teach people about addiction and the reality is actually not everyone is susceptible to addiction even at all. One third of people and one third of rats, one third of mammals in general are not susceptible to addiction, meaning they won't even get addicted to heroin. You can inject them with heroin over and over again, you can send them home after back surgery with opiate prescription pills and they won't have any trouble weaning off as soon as the pain is gone. Then other people get hooked. So one third of people are highly susceptible to addiction. Addictions of all kinds. One third are moderately susceptible and one third are not susceptible.
I teach people about food addiction, which is the same, it follows the same profile. So I have a quiz people can take on a scale from 1 to 10. It tells them how susceptible they are to the pull of these addictive foods. I'm a 10, God bless me. You might have guessed that already. But if you're higher on that scale, from 1 to 10, if you're up there on that scale, you're going to need a different approach. What you'll find is that when these people actually, that they eat one bite of dessert and they put their fork down or their spoon down and they're, oh, they just savor it. They're like that, hit the spot, that's all I need. I kind of my head cocks to the side like a dog and I'm just like, what, because for me I need to eat the whole thing and then some. The one bite of dessert experiment, it never works for me. It does not hit the spot.
Ashley James (0:38:57.621)
Does it open up a gateway where let’s say you're at a restaurant, you have a little dessert, and then you go home and now you're making dessert because you don't have anything in the cupboard. So now you're like, because I don't keep junk food in the house, so I've invented. I'm going to take a banana and I’m going to microwave it or heat it or whatever. Then I’m going to put some peanut butter on it. I have these sugar-free chocolate nibs, like the ones that I use when I bake for my son. I’m going to put that in it. Now you put maple syrup on it. Now I’m going to microwave it. I just take a bunch of pseudo healthy things and I’m like, I have to make a dessert.
Well, I used to be addicted to sugar until I did a massive sugar fast. I would read labels. I wouldn't even buy a hot sauce if it had sugar in it and it was about 30 or so days. Then I noticed the draw wasn't there for me anymore and now I can do the one taste.
I used to be the, I have to eat the whole thing and then some, and now I can have one taste and be okay. But if there was a piece of cake and I had one taste, I told myself I'm just going to have a taste and I had a taste, and if it got taken away I'd be okay, it's not in my eyesight, but if it kept sitting there, 20, 15 minutes later, I'd be okay, now I have to have another bite. But I noticed that my need, that urge, has almost gone away, a hundred percent, whereas it used to be. I used to be a 10 out of 10 for needing sugar, and now I could take it or leave it. It's weird. So I feel I've almost healed that part of my brain. Can you do that? Can someone recover to the point where these substances, no longer are a draw to them?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:40:40.713)
Yes, great question. So the way it works, Ashley, is that yes and no, or yes with an asterisk. So when you take the quiz so you go to foodaddictionquiz.com, you'll notice the instructions say I want you to think back to a time in your life when your eating was at its worst not a day, but a stretch of time, a few weeks or whatever, and I want you to answer the questions as if it were that time, and so you would maybe test out as a 10. But you could take the quiz again as you are today and you might test out as a six or something, and so that would measure the degree of healing. But here's the thing, they say, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.
It is true, once a food addict, always a food addict. What that means is you will always have to be more vigilant than someone who never had the issue to begin with. For example, not keeping a cake in the house, because if it's there, you're going to eat it and then eat some more, and then you're going to rewire your brain before you know it for that pattern. So the way it works in the brain is that behaviors and addictions wire up slowly over time with neural energy. It's electricity and it forms fiber tracks in the brain, so it wires up the brain kind of like the electricity is water flowing over dry land and it's grooving a riverbed in the brain. So like the water flows and eventually it grooves a river and it can be the Grand Canyon. It can groove a massive swath of land away. Now, if you dam the water upstream, you can dry out the riverbed absolutely and not have any activity flowing through that old pattern at all anymore. But what happens is the dry riverbed is still there. So if you let water through, it doesn't take hardly any time at all to clear away whatever bushes or grasses have grown up and before you know it you have a Russian river again. So you need to be careful. There's a lot of lines of research that show this, that the brain remembers, and so you're going to have to be more vigilant.
But recovery is absolutely possible and I live in the world right now, someone who has no food issue at all, I just have to follow a few simple rules to keep like the rules of the sort of I don't eat after dinner, I don't keep cake in the house, things like that, my bright lines. I follow my bright lines and I have utter freedom. I have three kids. I serve cupcakes and cake at my kid's birthday party and, Sir, I'll cut the cake, I'll get frosting on my hands and it’s like I have paint on my hands.
I don't have any urge to lick my fingers. I go to the sink, I wash it off, no issue at all, and it looks like plastic to me. I don't have any draw toward it, but that's because I follow my bright lines. If I started to get involved again in a world where I ate cake and ice cream, I would be absolutely obsessed by it.
Ashley James (0:44:02.146)
Now, something you pointed out earlier is that if we give up a substance. I'm just going to say substance, because it could be alcohol, drugs or food or pornography or sex or whatever.
If we give up the substance that we're addicted to. Oftentimes people trade it for another substance and they don't realize it, because it's socially acceptable for an alcoholic to then start eating donuts every day. Every alcoholic who's clean and sober I have known, is incredibly addicted to baked goods and sugar. This one man who was the boyfriend I had 20 plus years ago was a super, super nice dad, and he was always surrounded by halloween candy. It was January, how do you have Halloween candy? It’s August, how do you have Halloween candy?
He'd buy enough Halloween candy to last him a whole year and he'd be surrounded by at least those giant bags of Halloween candy. He'd have at least two of them right by the couch and he'd always be sitting on the couch watching some kind of sports. He was a really sweet man. He'd smoked like a chimney. He was a destructive alcoholic, abusive, destructive alcoholic. He gave it up because he realized he was destroying his family's life and his life and he never drank another drop until the day he died. But every day he did copious amounts of caffeine, sugar and cigarettes, and so these other substances, just, from the neuroscience standpoint. He was still running the same program, just choosing different substances that were destroying his body in a slightly different way. It wasn't destroying his life because he was sober, but even when you're on that much sugar, you're not actually sober, you don't truly have control of your brain.
I had Dr Joan Ifland on the show, who talks about processed food addiction. What I thought was really interesting is that she talked about when we're in addiction, maybe you can elaborate on this, people have characteristics and they don't realize it. I'll just speak to me, let's say when I have PMS and I'm snapping at my family. I feel normal. There's nothing wrong with me, but all of you are suddenly pushing my buttons and incredibly irritable, you're irritating, all of you people are irritating me. Then a few days later, I’m oh okay, I was the one that was hypersensitive and everyone was acting normal.
People who are within addiction get quick to anger, quick to blow a fuse, and it could be just that they have traded alcohol for sugar and now they're sober from alcohol, but they're still running the same neural programs of addiction. They're still chasing the dopamine having these highs and lows of dopamine, and they're still highly irritable, short fused with anger. That's what I grew up with. My parents, my mom especially, was incredibly short fused and so I grew up in a household where there was addiction, they were sober, but she'd be addicted to the weirdest things like red jujubes and then she'd come home and have some alcohol, but it was never to the point of slurred speech or anything like that, but she'd have red jujubes all the time, and my dad definitely had food addiction. So the two of them I'd see their personalities and the amount of quick to anger, quick to being irritable, snapping, so there's an experience that your family has around you when you're in that addiction brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:48:00.560)
Yes, well, what you're talking about is cross addiction and it's a very real thing. I mean the dopamine receptors.They want their excess dopamine and they can get it from drugs or alcohol or food or pornography or gambling or any number of things. I think a lot of people, like you say, quit alcohol and they go to sugar. I mean, if you think of the molecular composition there, what's alcohol made out of but sugar and grain really so the sugar and flour of baked goods is very molecularly similar. In the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous it even says a lot of us have found that some sugar will do the trick if you're having an alcohol craving, and so that's encouraged.
For some people, depending on how bad their alcoholism is, that can be a harm reduction approach. I'll just eat sugar. But you’re very right that it's triggering the same receptors and, yes, they want their hit from somewhere. I've been in recovery now for 27 years and the reality is that recovery is real and it's a long, slow process. Those receptors will heal faster if you don't deluge them with anything. If you don't drink caffeine, if you don't smoke cigarettes, if you don't eat sugar and you don't get into relationships with a bunch of infatuation, and new relationship energy hitting those receptors, that'll do it too. You don't watch pornography. But I certainly haven't managed to do that and I don't know very many people who have. But over time you can kind of step yourself down and wean yourself off. I'm in a place today where I am mercifully free from all addictions. I don't smoke cigarettes. I don't drink caffeine. I'm just in a state of freedom, but I'm not always there. Sometimes I'll be back on caffeine.
My God, a few years ago I started smoking cigarettes again. I was outside a meeting and there were all these young, good looking people in a circle smoking a cigarette and I just bummed a cigarette. God bless me. I have three kids at home. My husband hates cigarette smoke and suddenly I had to buy a pack after that meeting and I smoked up most of that pack within the next 24 hours, I'd smoked up that pack. It felt like I wanted to puke. Now I was in a state where I was sneaking out of the house to smoke cigarettes and to get back in the house.
I had to sneak in the house, strip down my clothes, throw them into the washing machine, go into the bathroom, get into the shower, wash my hair, brush my teeth, just to emerge to see my family, and I would do that multiple times a day and my life got so unmanageable. Then I'm out in the middle of the night smoking cigarettes in the snow, snowflakes falling on my head and I'm smoking eight cigarettes and then going back in and showering and washing my clothes, and then I quit. Here's the kicker, Ashley. I quit a few weeks and a month or two off cigarettes, free, mercifully and then I'm outside a meeting and I bum another cigarette and I went through that cycle four or five times over a year or two. I finally quit for what I hope, god willing, will be the last time, on April 7th of 2018. So over four years now without a cigarette, merciful, so grateful.
Ashley James (0:51:43.712)
What kind of bright line could you create to not hang out outside of your meetings and bum cigarettes?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:51:49.924)
No, no, not a puff of a drag of a cigarette. None. The bright line is no cigarettes. So meetings are important and healthy and I still go to them, but no cigarettes. I read a book, I think it's Alan Carr's, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, I think, and it really really helped me psychologically to just remember that what a drag of a cigarette does is it predisposes you to need the next puff of a cigarette, that there's nothing relaxing about it. Cigarette people who smoke cigarettes are more anxious, more agitated, all it does is make you need the next cigarette. So the part of me that looks at people smoking and thinking, oh, they have it good, they're just hanging out and smoking I think, no, no, no, they're tortured, they're going to leave that social circle and need another cigarette and another one and another one. I'm the one who's free. Thank God I'm free. That switch helps me.
Ashley James (0:52:41.120)
If you look into how they used PR to transform smoking from being back in the golden era of Hollywood when everything was black and white. It was Edward Bernays and he's fascinating. People should definitely watch documentaries on Edward Bernays. I believe he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Don't quote me on that. I think he was related somehow, maybe a cousin of Sigmund Freud, but Edward Bernays, he is the modern father of PR and back I don't know, maybe it was the 40s somewhere, this is before I was born. So this was back in black and white everything, and they don't have TVs yet.
Only the bad guys would smoke. So you go to the movies, it would be a Western and the bad guy, the bad guys with guns, chasing down the other cowboys with the Indians and all that stuff. The bad guys would be the ones smoking and I don't know, maybe the Indians would have peace pipes or something in the movies, but it was always this macho bad guy thing. Or maybe there'd be a movie about these car racers and it would always be just these cool bad guys, and so men were, oh, it's this macho thing. Women were, ew, I don't know, I'm not going to smoke. That's manly, that's gross. Edward Bernays was hired because the tobacco industry realized they were pretty much missing out on half of the population. The women wouldn't smoke. Then what he did was he linked smoking to the women's freedom movement. You are free because women, they didn't have careers.
You could be a teacher, you could be a nurse, or you could be a homemaker, you could be a secretary, but yes, but until you have kids, then you have to be a homemaker and so, he linked it to you are free, you're a woman, hear me roar, you're so sexy, you're like Marilyn Monroe, you're so sexy, sexy women.
So in Hollywood, all of a sudden, all the sexy women who are free and jet setting and shaving their legs was a new thing, because women didn't shave their legs either and the razor companies wanted to literally double their sales. So all of a sudden they made women look like they were prepubescent by shaving their legs. Women never shaved their legs before that and they got to double their sales of razors, double the sales of cigarettes. Because they tricked, they brainwashed an entire civilization into thinking these were sexy ideals. But if you go a few years before, just a few years before, women had hairy legs and that was considered sexy, hairy armpits, that was normal and sexy. Women didn't smoke. I mean, this was in America. I'm sure women smoked in Europe, but it was just in our culture.
Because I don't drink alcohol and it's not because I was ever an alcoholic. I've never really done it. I was a bartender and taking care of drunk people just really turned me off alcohol. I mean, I was a bartender. I can appreciate a good drink, but I don't like it. This is nothing about alcohol. When I'm on vacation, I go to the bar or like you're at a restaurant or whatever and there's a bar there, I'll look at the pretty shiny bottles, and then I'll look at the menu and there's these fun looking drinks and I'm almost glamorized by the PR of alcohol. You're going to look cooler, you're going to feel cooler, you're going to be one of the hips. You're going to be in.
This is what's going to make you one of the cool kids, and I'm almost glamorized by the PR of alcohol and I snap out of it and I go, well, that's gross, it's not good for my liver. I start listing off this as my bright line. I can start listing off all the chemicals in a cigarette, all the bad things, how my body has to detox the alcohol. I could talk myself out of those things. But that little part of my brain is, ooh, that'll be fun, let's go on a bender. That doesn't sound fun to the rest of my body. But how much of addiction is influenced by the media? Like you said, I look at these cool kids smoking in a circle. I'm like, oh, that looks fun. That's the marketing you grew up with.
You don't realize it, but when you were a kid, the shows you watched had all the cool kids smoking. The movies you watched, I mean, when I watch old stuff with our son and old movies that I used to watch when I was a kid, and all of a sudden people are smoking and I just want to turn it off because I can't believe how much smoking there was in the 80s or the 70s. And all the cool and hip kids and everything, I don't want that getting into my seven-year-old son’s brain but that's what we grew up with. How much addiction have you seen in terms of neuroscience is affected by, because it's like mirror neurons? It's controlled brainwashing by marketing.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:58:06.534)
It is, and Ashley, I love the cigarette analogy. Then let's think about it in terms of food, because our society is in a collective food addiction trance. We have been so conditioned by the big food industry to think of food as celebration, as fun, as entertainment, as relaxation, as self care, as indulgence, as everything that's good in life. We're under the spell. They are pouring billions of dollars into our orientation toward food in that way so that when someone moves into your neighborhood, you bake them cookies or bring them a pie or bring over some food to say welcome to the neighborhood if you're a good neighbor.
We don't think about bringing over flowers, or fresh cut flowers from our garden, or apples off our tree, or anything like that. We think of bringing over processed foods. Just think about birthday parties and what you have to serve at a birthday party, or kids menus in a restaurant. The kids' menu is absolutely the most processed food, and we've gotten to the point where now two thirds of the calories that our kids are consuming are classified as ultra processed foods. They were born in factories, made out of chemical industrial ingredients and poured into bags. Two thirds of the foods that they are eating are ultra processed, and we've got a long way to go in terms of detoxing our minds about what food is and the role that it should play.
The reality is that food isn't the best connection, celebration or entertainment. As a matter of fact, it's distracting from the real connection, like when you're just eating and they're eating, and you're eating and everybody's just face down in the food. There's less laughter, there's less eye contact, there's less genuine connection. We're just all eating together, and yet most gatherings focus around food as opposed to things that would foster real human connection. We've got a ways to go, Ashley.
If you think about the role of food in the media, and especially commercials. The addiction piece comes in around cues. The addiction reward centers of the brain focus on the cues that predict rewards, the cues that predict a hit, the sights, the sounds, the times of day, the brand name, outlets and so forth and anyone with an addictive brain is going to wire up and be drawn toward those cues and then get their hit after that. So the media giants know it, the food companies know it and they market their materials. Basically, they put people in fMRI machines to make sure that both the taste formulations and the commercials advertising their products hit the addiction centers in the brain optimally, that's what they're testing for. They know they're hooking us and they've got us by the short hairs really.
Ashley James (1:01:34.244)
I actually interviewed a food chemist. I think she helped make one of the Doritos, one of the flavors of Doritos, and she explained, because I was like, how evil are you guys, do you guys have a secret evil cackle like an evil scientist? Do you put your fingers together, you clasp your hands and put your fingers together, they go, (evil laugh), that's what I imagine they're doing, and she goes, no, none of us have that in the culture. In the lab, we all geek out on how we can make these chemicals hyper palatable. How much sodium can we pack in? How much sugar can we pack in to get that balance, like you said, to hit those dopamine receptors to absolutely do maximum damage, to do maximum addiction, iImpact, and do it in a new way, in a new flavor.
She left that industry realizing how much damage she was doing, and now she basically teaches people how bad all the processed food is, just like Edward Bernays did to smoking, cigarettes were already highly addictive, now, the chemicals that they spray on it are even worse.
My husband said something yesterday about quitting. He said quitting Marlboros is harder than any other brand. I said why, he goes, because the chemicals they use, it’s like you're not just detoxing from just tobacco, you're coming off of whatever, all the stuff they put on. They get to put chemicals in those cigarettes in addition to the tobacco. It blows my mind because they need to make them hyper, hyper addictive, as addictive as possible. Your food is the same if you buy it. You need to eat plants, not food that comes from plants. If it came from a plant. There's a room with a bunch of evil food scientists that want to make the food so crazy that it tricks your brain into needing more of it. That is sick because you said the cross addiction, let's say you get that bag of Doritos and now you've had the bag of Doritos and a few hours later now you need to come up with something to now get your dopamine up, because that jacked up your dopamine. Now it comes crashing down. Maybe it's 10 hours later, I don't know how long it would take. But now you're going to go for another substance. It's not necessarily to go for Doritos every time, but you might cross addict over to now you're going to pick up a pack of cigarettes, if you haven't smoked since college but now you're going to go get a pack of cigarettes, or you haven't had any while you have some sugar and now you're off buying some ice cream. Now the next day you're getting some alcohol. So that's the slippery slope is that when we use processed food, even if we're thinking we're using it in moderation, it is designed to mess with our brain so much that we're more likely to cross addiction into other substances.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:04:51.042)
Yes, totally, and it's interesting what you said about plants. If you think about it, heroin, cocaine, sugar and flour, they're made the same way. Think about what a drug is, what makes something a drug. Where does heroin come from, Ashley? Pop quiz. Where does heroin come from?
Ashley James (1:05:08.952)
I'm going to really get this wrong, but I think it's gasoline in the coca plant?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:05:14.041)
No, so cocaine comes from the coca leaf.
Ashley James (1:05:18.179)
Poppies
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:05:21.622)
Yes, yes, exactly. So cocaine comes from the coca leaf, which is a bush in the Andes mountains and hikers pluck off the leaves and put them in their cheek and chew them. There's literally a published scientific paper saying it's not addictive. It does make the inside of the cheek a little numb and it gives people a little bit of a lift, maybe, like drinking half a cup of caffeinated tea or something but it's not addictive when you just chew coca leaves. However, if you take the inner essence of that plant and then refine and purify it down into a fine white powder, you've taken a harmless plant and you've turned it into a drug. It's the same with the poppies. You can eat poppy seed bagels. If you eat a few poppy seed bagels, you will fail a drug test. You will fail a drug test, but you won't get addicted, it won't harm you. But when you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and you refine and purify it into a fine brown powder, you've created heroin. This is what sugar and flour are too. I eat corn, I eat beets, I eat wheat, like wheat berries and boil them and it's like rice kind of. I eat wheat, I eat rice. But you take the inner essence of any of these plants and you refine and purify it down into a fine powder and you've created a drug out of a healthy plant. So that's what a drug is by definition. That's how we make them.
Ashley James (1:06:56.029)
We have to look at everything that goes into our body and ask ourselves, was this processed to make it more addictive? Or is this in its whole plant form? Because you could eat two to four cups of broccoli a day. I mean, besides getting a little gassy, you're going to feel great, and there's no negative impact on the brain. In fact, there's lots of positive impacts on eating, on eating vegetables. Okay, so we want to set up some bright lines in our life. Let's say not eat things that are made from flour, which is my addiction. I think right now it is pasta, and I'm gluten free, so it's brown rice pasta. It sounds so innocent, but it's made from flour and I know that is my addiction now, because when I think about cooking, I'm like okay, well, I'm going to start with the pasta and I'm like no, let's just eat brown rice and vegetables.
So I know I definitely get an addiction hit, when I get to have pasta and then when I just do the brown rice and vegetables, I don't get any hit. In the process of cooking food, I love cooking and I make these great stir-fried vegetables. I'm whole food, plant based, so I'm making these vegetable stir fries and the brown rice and everything, and my brain the whole time is telling me this isn't going to be fun.
I've got fresh ginger grated in there and I love using some stuff that makes it spicy. I like spicy food or I love curry. I put curry in there and I don't cook with oil. I'll put a little bit of broth at the beginning to saute or water, and then a spoonful of arrowroot powder at the end. It's made with stir fries but it gives a great mouthfeel and it's a prebiotic, so it's really good for the gut.
But the whole time I'm making it, my brain is telling me this isn't fun, let's go make some pasta to put with this, or this isn't fun let's go add all these other things that aren't good for you. The whole time my brain's like this isn't going to be satisfying, this isn't going to be fun. It's the addiction brain talking to me, yes, but when I sit down and actually eat it, it's delicious, I'm happy, and when I'm finished eating, I'm satisfied. Does your program address that? As you're following your bright lines, your addiction brains are doing its best to get you to break those lines. What can you do to quiet that chatter?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:09:45.519)
Yes, great question. So, way back in this conversation you asked what's different about Bright Line Eating? So I started talking about first, we teach people about the addiction and I think we've covered that food addiction is real. Not everyone is equally affected. But now I think we've come to the point where it's like, what do you do if you are affected and you've got that brain that's trying to hijack your eating pretty much at every turn? The answer is that a structured approach to eating is going to be the road to freedom. For people who don't need it, putting a bunch of structure on their eating feels just unnecessary and if you have an addictive brain, you might really balk at making your eating structure. But when you do it you'll find that you have freedom. So, just like you said, when I actually sit down and I eat the meal, I'm satisfied and I totally enjoy it and it feels great.
So in Bright Line Eating we have a food plan and we write down our food the night before. This is a big kicker. You write down your food the night before. Now we don't do this alone, we do this in the Bright Line Eating community. There's a membership. It's just a monthly membership. It's super affordable and it's really, really effective. So you get with a group of people. Every health attempt that is done with others is way more likely to succeed. so you write down your food the night before and then you commit it. You can commit it to a buddy, you can commit it into the Bright Line Eating group community. We have mastermind groups and just different ways that people can connect up with others.
But you commit what you're going to eat and your food plan is categories and quantities. So, for example, you're plant-based and you're talking about cooking stir fry for dinner. You would have vegetables, you would have a protein in there, so you could have tofu or tempeh or beans or what have you? Nuts or whatever, and once you've lost the weight you need to lose, you would have a grain of brown rice or whatever as well, and a fat. So you could do nuts for your fat serving. You don't have to do oil or anything like that. But you've got these categories and certain quantities and that, so you would commit the night before. Actually, you'd be writing down I'm going to have 14 ounces of stir fry vegetables, I'm going to have four ounces of tofu, I'm going to have four ounces of brown rice and I'm going to have half an ounce of sesame seeds for my fat and sesame seeds are great in a stir fry, you'd have written that down the night before. What happens is, at first it feels like you could feel the parts of you really wanting to break out of that structure and balking against it.
Ashley James (1:12:43.909)
It's like an unbroken horse, an untamed horse. My brain now is like, I'm not going to do that. You can't tell me what to eat tomorrow. I want the freedom to choose. That addiction brain is giving you the middle finger now.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:13:00.629)
Totally, and that is a rebel part and usually if you have a strong rebel part of you, often that comes we get that, honestly. I don't know if you had a parent that was rather (inaudible – 1:13:13.353)
Ashley James (1:13:17.420)
Maybe you haven't listened to my episode, but I love my mother and she was nicknamed and I hope no one is offended by this and I love my mother. She passed away when I was 22. She was my best friend but she was nicknamed by other members of our family as the Nazi because she was so controlling. It was insane growing up in my household and I thought that was normal because as a kid you think your household is normal until you visit other people's households and all the other moms I'd visited. I was like, you guys are like aliens. This is so weird.
But my mom was so controlling around food. It was scary. She actually stood up in a restaurant once and screamed at me in front of everyone. It was very uncomfortable. I was 12, and I thought I made the selection. I ordered the grilled fish with a side of steamed vegetables and a side of rice, because that sounds like something you'd order in a restaurant, and that's what it came with. I just said I'll take the fish, and she stood up and yelled at me. I was athletic. I did not have an ounce of fat on me. I did sports every day when I was 12. I was incredibly fit. She was so scared I'd be overweight because that was her mental thing for herself. So she projected it onto me. Carl Jung teaches us, we project our unresolved material onto our people closest to us in our life.
I get how much pain she had in order to treat her family this way, but for a 12-year-old who's already insecure, going through puberty, she stood up and yelled at me because there was rice on my plate, and it took me years before I was comfortable with eating rice. In whole food plant-based, they're like, eat as much rice as you want, especially if it's brown rice. This is healthy for you. I'm okay, are you sure, though? Because I was told that rice was literally made by the devil.
Incredibly controlling. So it's just the fact that I'm this highly rebellious part of me, which I recognize in a lot of my friends too. So it's interesting, the pendulum swings. If our parents are really really strict with something, then we kind of swing the other direction and become really lackadaisical with our children, and then the lackadaisical children then swing the other way and become very strict with their children. So we need to heal. We really need to heal so that we are more balanced with our children. I'm consciously doing that with food around my son, because I’m constantly catching myself being my mother, who isn't when they're a parent?
But at the same time, I want him to make good food choices for himself, and so I let him have a little bit of sugar and then we talk about it. What is it doing to your body? How do you feel? He doesn’t like how he feels when he eats too much sugar, and so he chooses not to eat too much sugar because he hates feeling sick. So, yes at age seven he's got it. That took me into my 30’s to get but being conscious of it.
So the fact that you said that because I've got this rebellious thing, it's because of how I was raised I imagine a lot of listeners do as well, and that's why I am so vulnerable on the show, sharing my what I go through, because I want I want you to be able to to come out and share how this works and how we can heal, because I know the listeners are going through the same or something similar.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:16:49.821)
Totally, and this is probably a good place to mention that in Bright Line Eating we do our inner work on this stuff we eat over. There are reasons we eat. We're eating often as a coping strategy to handle emotions and life, and we do something called internal family systems work. So I don't know if you've heard of IFS, Ashley?
Ashley James (1:17:13.295)
I've heard of it, but I don't know much about it, so please go on.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:17:18.099)
Yes, so it's often called parts work. So the idea here is that we have parts of us. We're not just one unified consciousness with one unified desire and one unified way of reacting to the world. We have a highest self, our authentic self, which is we know we're operating from that place.
They call it the eight C's when we're calm and clear and compassionate and confident and connected and curious and courageous and creative, that's when we're in our authentic self. When we're anything other than that, calm, clear, connected, compassionate place when we're anything else, we're in a part of us. So when there was a part of you that was raising up giving me the middle finger for talking about writing down food the night before, that's a part that's not calm, clear, connected, curious, compassionate. It's rebellious.
So there are different parts. There's wounded parts, which we can all relate to, wounded parts, and then there's protective parts. The rebel part is a protective part. It's protecting the wounded, the wounded child who was over controlled as a kid, and a rebel protector part came in. So we have protective parts that are trying to get ahead of our wounding. So a rebel part would be a manager part that's trying to make us not be wounded in the future by over controlling influences, and other types of manager parts are controlling, trying to organize life and the world to be just so a lot of us with food issues have a food controller part that tries to restrict or control our food to the extreme, get all the ducks in a row, in order to help us lose weight or to get our food together and that controlling part is often in polarization with a food indulging part, and the indulger protectors are swooping in after we're wounded, trying to numb us, distract us, soothe us, comfort us.
Ashley James (1:19:30.431)
That was my dad.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:19:31.584)
Okay, there you go, you had the controller and the adulterer in your mom and your dad.
Ashley James (1:19:36.623)
Absolutely. It would happen just like that, my mom would come down on me for food, my dad would take me out for ice cream. It was like, here, let me, let me soothe you and at the same time he was soothing himself.
It was a beautiful dynamic and so I have this really big love for food because when I was three years old, my dad took me. It was one of my first memories with my dad just spending time with him. I think it was the first time I ever just spent time with him. On my third birthday, he took me out to an authentic sushi restaurant and I fell in love with Japanese food.
Then he took me out to dim sum and he wanted to share with me his world of food addiction and so he brought me to these really unique restaurants and I completely fell in love with the food and, at the same time, I was feeling love from my dad, because that was where we connected and we also had our little dopamine hits at the same time. So we're shooting up heroin together.
So we're using together and so these foods, especially really greasy foods and typically Asian foods he gravitated towards and greasy chicken. For me. I realized it was actually on the show as an episode with a woman who kind of decodes food addiction much different from you. She doesn't talk about bright lines or anything like that, but she did talk about understanding our stories and our family stories around food. I realized that at the time I wasn't whole food plant-based, I was still very addicted to chicken, eating it every day, and that wasn't helping with my weight. It's really funny about chicken.
They say eat chicken breast for weight loss, but at the same time they also tell bodybuilders to eat chicken breast to gain weight. So I'm like, oh well, that is contradictory, which one is it? But for me, if I eat chicken, I just start gaining weight like crazy. It's really weird. But I was addicted to it and I didn't understand why. She asked that question and all of a sudden I was like snapped back to every happy memory with my dad and even a few with my mom, and there was always chicken in my mouth and in my hands or chicken wings or something, and it was, oh, I associate because both my parents died in my 20s and I miss them both.
I was the only child. I love my parents and I sympathize now with their pain, because I can look back and see, especially as a parent, their flawed behaviors were really their cries for help and their pain. They were beautiful, complex and incredibly intelligent, incredibly successful. They both had their own businesses, separate from each other. They both independently became millionaires and they both built beautiful businesses when I was a teenager, and in my 20s, I watched them become incredibly successful but also very self-destructive.
I see that the specific foods that I had the greatest addiction around, chicken and Asian food that it would bring me right back to the emotions of feeling safe and loved by my parents, who I missed, and so I had that addiction brain going on, but I also had that anchoring, that association with those past emotions.
Glenn Livingston, who I had on the show and he also asks questions to help people make food rules, his program is great and your program also seems much more complex. So different but similar, which is beautiful because you're seeing that these bright lines work and he asked questions like, well, what can you do in your life besides eat chicken and still have the same emotions and get the same outcome.
So, yes, I can sit here and meditate in a happy memory, remembering my parents and just feeling my love for them, and I don't need to have food in my hands or my mouth to do it. So I can still recreate and fill that need or I can go spend family time, bonding time with my family, not around food, because you talked about how when we all kind of get together and eat, it's we're at a feeding trough. I look up at my husband, my son and my mother-in-law and we're not talking, we're not connecting, our eyes are down. I feel like we're a bunch of cows at a feeding trough during our family meals. There's no emotional connection here, whereas if we played a board game together or went for a walk or nature, bird watching or something together that didn't involve food, it's much more emotionally satisfying to do a conversation together.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:24:12.066)
Yes, food is a poor proxy for most of the things we use it for. Food is a poor proxy for connection. It's a poor proxy for entertainment. It's a poor proxy for comfort. It can fill those needs to some degree, but not, well, I just want to say, for the listeners who feel I'm an ascetic around food, that I'm into denial and purity, and not enjoying food. That couldn't be further from the truth. I love my meals, I enjoy my food and what I do, though, is I eat, because I follow this structured way of eating.
I'm in alignment with my eating. I'm in alignment with my body. I'm not obsessed or owned by food anymore, and my meals are like a hot shower. I love taking a hot shower, but I don't think about it obsessively before or after. I'm not looking forward to it all day long. If I think to really enjoy it, which I often do while I'm in there, I take a very long hot shower. I live in a part of the country where we have ample water, which I'm really grateful for. I live near the Great Lakes, where there's a big chunk of the world's fresh water and, yes, I take a long hot shower every day and that’s like my breakfast, lunch and dinner. I sit down with my meal, take a deep breath, and just think, oh, this is awesome! I love this food, I savor it, it’s delicious, it hits the spot. I’m satisfied afterwards and then I move on with my life and I’m not thinking about it in between. For me, that's food neutrality. For me, that’s a healthy relationship with food and that’s what I help people achieve.
I used to teach this college course on the psychology of eating and I used to draw a big circle up on the board and I would say imagine, this is a pie chart, everyone. This is a pie chart and I want you to carve out a slice that represents the proportion of your life focus, your thinking, your energy, everything you're about, like your thinking and your focus and your energy that relates to your food. You're eating, your weight, your exercise, what you've eaten or not eaten, whether you're on your plan or off your plan, how many miles, how many calories, how many pounds, what percentage of your life is not. And Ashley, I’d tell you I would have slender, regular weight, lovely, college gals start to cry. I would just say I noticed you're having a reaction to this exercise. What's happening for you? She would just carve out almost all but this tiny sliver and she would say 95%.
So the way we eat in Bright Line Eating is the antidote to that. If I do that pie now. I don't know what it would be. 10%, 15%. It takes some effort. I got to focus. Do I have enough blah in the fridge? I got to go to the grocery store and I worked out and blah, blah. But mostly my life is about my life now. I have my life back. I don't need to be thinking about making my food sexier. I don't need to. It's in its place.
Ashley James (1:27:39.695)
Yes, I'm not there, I want to get there. The needing to make the food sexier. I know this food’s delicious because I love shiitake mushrooms. They are so delicious I put them in everything. I'm looking forward to those shiitake mushrooms and I got some lion's mane mushrooms. My gosh, the mouthfeel of these things is insane. I love them and they're also really good for your brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:28:05.412)
Mushrooms are so healthy, ridiculously healthy.
Ashley James (1:28:08.097)
That's what I made for dinner yesterday. I did a three-mushroom, I did oysters, and what's cool about oysters is when you cut them, they're like little scallops, you cut them so they're circular. It kind of tastes like scallops, not taste, but it has that mouthfeel. It's a little meaty, yes.
So I did a three-mushroom, I did oyster, lion's mane and shiitake stir fry with onion and tofu, and then my hot sauce because I'm addicted to hot sauce. I read this study that it's really good for you on many levels and I'm down for it. It's anti-parasitic, it helps the body. Anyways, so many good things about hot sauce and I'm sold. So now I realize I actually can't eat a meal without hot sauce. Now, I'm wondering if that's an okay addiction or not, but it's fun, it's fun to put on food, and in moderation, I guess. It's so delicious.
But there's that part of my brain that's saying the whole time, so I'm in a part this isn't going to be good enough, this is going to be yummy enough, and it won't. That part wouldn't be satisfied until there's, I don’t know, peanut sauce, and noodles, or chicken. That stuff that's not optimal for me and I know the next day I'm not going to feel good having eaten that meal. So there's this part of my brain that isn't happy until I've adulterated a healthy meal to make it unhealthy and I just tell it to buzz off. I tell it to buzz off. But I'm really looking forward to the day that I can cook a meal in peace, because now I'm not cooking in peace. But I've come a long way because I look back to where I was in 2010, living off of the dollar menu at fast food restaurants, we hit a rough streak financially and we thought that we would save money eating at the dollar menu and turns out you actually have to eat way more. We'd end up buying like 10 burgers, we each have five, dollar meal burgers. We'd feel horrible then. Very soon after, we really hit a good stride with healing foods. It was good that we hit that bottom and experienced that. Also just how crazy addictive the dollar menu is, that at pretty much any fast food restaurant.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:30:38.644)
I did a study recently that you can eat for way cheaper than the dollar menu on Bright Line Eating. People say that healthy food is expensive but not all. For example, in Bright Line Eating, you have a serving of fruit at breakfast and a serving of fruit at lunch, in addition to, obviously, a lot of other things. But for serving a fruit, you can have a pint of organic raspberries out of season for $7 or you can have a banana for 12 cents or whatever.
Beans and rice and bananas and cabbage, oh my god, cabbage can be so good. You get the whole cabbage and you slice it up and you cook it in some vinegar with some salt and pepper and it cooks down and this really cheap cabbage can yield a whole week's worth of vegetables, practically. There's so many ways to eat inexpensively. The dollar menu is not. It's not the way to go.
Ashley James (1:31:40.816)
It's not. But the person I was back then highly, highly addicted to processed foods could not say no to sugar. It was a daily thing. My blood sugar was out of balance. I was incredibly sick. It kind of ramped up to my late 20s and early 30s. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist I'd never have kids. And the thing is, every MD I've ever been to, said you can't cure that. I'm like, watch me, and my last few blood tests I've had showed everything's normal and I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome. I'd had three cycles a year, infertility. I was told I'd never have kids and I conceived naturally twice and we have our son.
I also had out of control diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and I had pica or cribbing, so my body was completely void of minerals. Then, I got on this healing journey. I got on these really fantastic supplements that filled those gaps. I started eating healthy. I cut out processed foods and I just watched as things transformed.
Just the first month of all I did was shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. I wasn't even avoiding things I'm allergic to like dairy, and I was eating meat. I was eating dairy, but I was only shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, so I wouldn't buy anything in a package and then a cereal box, none of that, and I chose organic. That first month my chronic infections that I was on monthly antibiotics for went away, and that was in 2008. That was my first big health wake up. That was like, oh, I can solve something with food. It's interesting because all the doctors I've gone to say I have to be on all these drugs for the rest of my life. But look, I can make a health change. One, one change, well, two. I chose organic and shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, still wasn't eating healthy, frying up big steaks and stuff like that but it was steak and vegetables as opposed to a bunch of packaged foods, and choosing organic and so, just getting the process, getting the pesticides out of my life, boom, all my infections went away.
I also had chronic adrenal fatigue, so bad that in the morning, I couldn't process human language. It took me about an hour to two hours before my husband could speak to me. I couldn't even understand what people were saying. It was really weird. My cortisol levels were incredibly bottomed out, but it was food. Then, like I said, supplements just to fill in the gaps. But it was food changes. Everything melted away and MDs told me I would have these problems for the rest of my life.
Of course, in addition to all these health problems, then I would have food addiction. But I didn't even know because I was self-soothing, because I was in so much pain from out of control diabetes, from polycystic ovarian syndrome, from chronic infections, from chronic inflammation. I was in so much pain that food was just what I could use to soothe. Thank God I don't like alcohol because I would have become an alcoholic just to numb the pain. So I understand people out there, because 70% of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. They don't need to be on and so we've got at least 70% of the population feeling so sick in their body they're turning to processed food to self-soothe. So it's like you said some one third of the people aren't necessarily susceptible to addiction, but that doesn't mean they're not going out and self-soothing.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:35:27.755)
Yes, bad habits. I mean you can eat a lot of processed food just out of liking the taste and mouthfeel and out of bad habits, and the difference there is that without necessarily getting a lot of support around it, if you just really make up your mind to do differently, you can. So addiction is where you're really trying and you still continue to harm yourself in the same way.
Ashley James (1:36:02.561)
That's a good distinction to understand. My father-in-law was an alcoholic and he smoked cigarettes and then one day I think he got into a minor car accident or maybe he drove home drunk, and that was his wake up call. He was always drunk and always had a cigarette in his mouth. This was I don't know in the 70s, when it was acceptable, and he just snapped. He just goes, I'm not going to drink anymore. Boom! No backlash. No addiction. Then he decided he was going to stop smoking because I think it was affecting his cycling times. He was kind of a professional cyclist. He just went boom! He just stopped and anything he had ever been seemingly addictive to other people. He could just stop and have no cravings and be done with it. So I thought he was really weird. But you're telling me one third of the population is like that. Okay, because that's definitely not my experience of life.
It's interesting because listeners who are those people where the addiction brain isn't a thing for them. Please have compassion for your family members who are struggling with addiction, who say they're going to stop and they can't and they say they're going to stop and they can't because it's easy to get angry at them and say, well, you're not trying hard enough, you're just lazy, but they're having an internal fight that is so hard. They don't want to destroy their lives and their family. So please have compassion and even though you don't personally understand that, you could put yourselves in the shoes of understanding that there's an internal struggle going on.
So you have these people who have food addiction. They try to diet over and over and over again, and that keeps failing. Then they blame themselves. But because the underlying problem is processed food or food addiction in general, mostly processed food is the culprit and so they've got food addiction. Now they hear about Bright Line Eating, is this a 12-step program? What are the first few steps? Someone's coming in. They're not even 24 hours sober yet, they just finished their last bag of Doritos and they log into brightlineeating.com. Walk us through the first week of food sobriety.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:38:26.684)
Yes, sure. So someone goes to brightlineeating.com, they sign up for the membership, they do a free trial, so they haven't paid a dime and they're just going to give it a try, and the first thing that happens is they'll get a warm welcome message from me and they'll get to create their password and log into the system, which is super easy, and then we'll walk them through getting started. They'll get to download the food plan, they'll need to buy some supplies, they'll need to get a digital food scale, a food journal, some things like that, and they'll need to clean out their kitchen, like really clean out the cupboards, clean out the kitchen. There's guidance on that. It's fine if you live with people who eat differently than you. They don't have to do Bright Line Eating but then maybe have a conversation about like, okay, can we keep the pies off the counter? Maybe we could put them in this cupboard or here's a place where all those foods can live and you can access them freely, and then they just won't be out for me on the counter. That kind of thing.
Two or three or four or five days, for some people, one day, they're all set up and they're ready to start. Then, we have like a day one experience where, it's kind of ceremonial, you start and we have a meditation called the Crossing the Line Meditation, where we guide them to really step over the line and step into a world where they're committed on their Bright Line Eating journey and they really begin. They write down day one in their food journal. They write down what they're going to eat the next day and they start their day one. The game is really you write down your food the night before and the next day you eat only and exactly that, and then you start setting up morning routines and evening routines to support that. You start to form your place in the community. You find a buddy. You join a mastermind group. You start to get connected in a community.
After the first couple weeks, what will happen, Ashley, is someone will have lost if they have weight to lose when they come in and not everybody does but they'll have lost a significant amount of weight. Often they'll be stunned by how much they lose in just those first couple weeks and their brain will have already healed so much that their hunger will be lower even though they're losing weight. Their hunger will be down statistically. Their cravings will have already subsided significantly and they'll start to have this automaticity that comes in.
What's happening, Ashley, is we're wiring their brain so that the part of the brain that governs eating is no longer the, what do I feel like I want? something sexy? or what am I choosing at the moment? Part of the brain which is very vulnerable to willpower depletion and looking for a fix from our food and we're starting to use the same part of the brain that executes brushing teeth for most of us, which is a part of the brain that just kind of does it. Whether you're tired or in the mood doesn't really matter whether you're traveling or you're sick or whatever, you just brush your teeth. That's the part of the brain that we start to access by this pattern of writing down the food the night before and then the next day eating only in exactly that. It's kind of like you’re starting that habit of after dinner I brush and floss and that pattern starts to get really anchored in.
Two months after they've started, what happens is they've now lost one and a half times clinically significant weight loss after two months and then after a few more months it's three times clinically significant weight loss. So we measure it typically as a percentage of starting body weight, but we're talking about enough weight that their joints aren't hurting anymore. Their inflammation is way down. You were talking about all manners and I can't make medical promises or whatever according to the regulatory bodies, but what we see is people who are on insulin are getting off their insulin. What we see on average is that people who are on all manner of medications are starting to phase off their medications. That's not a promise to anyone, it's just a prediction on average from what we see. Cravings go down after the first two months to levels of little to no cravings anymore ever. Hunger goes down to little or no hunger ever. This is published research that we've published in peer reviewed scientific journals. We also see people at every age of the lifespan losing weight equivalently like in those first two months, women in their 50s, 60s and 70s are losing the same amount of weight as women in their 20s and 30s, which you might think. Well, that's not possible, because it's harder to lose weight as you age, and everybody knows that. Well, the reason it's harder to lose weight as you age is that estrogen, which goes down in both men and women. In the 50s and 60s it plummets in both men and women, but because women had more estrogen to begin with, the difference is more striking for a woman's body. Estrogen has a facilitating effect on insulin, which helps to smooth out the edges as you eat processed foods made out of sugar and flour as you eliminate sugar and flour from your diet, it doesn't matter as much anymore whether you have the estrogen to facilitate your insulin and so with sugar and flour out of the equation, what that does is, it levels the playing field. Women in their 50s and 60s postmenopausal women are losing weight just like they were 20 and 30. Again. So that's really exciting.
A lot of people come with thyroid issues. They think they can't lose weight just like they were 20 and 30. Again, so that's really exciting. A lot of people come with thyroid issues. They think they can't lose weight, or autoimmune conditions or PCOS, like you and I had. I have Hashimoto's thyroid too, and it really works across the board. Within two or three months, people are on their way, they're hooked, this is their life, and what we call them are bright lifers. Bright lifers, they're just doing it for life. We published results showing that two years later, they're maintaining every pound on average, on average every pound that they lost when they started Bright Line Eating two years later, published in the Journal of Nutrition and Weight Loss in 2001.
Ashley James (1:45:29.694)
Wow, congratulations.
I read a study once where they took people who've always been of the healthiest weight possible and people who are obese and I think kind of being a neuroscience study people who have always been of the best body weight for them, the healthiest they have almost no pleasure derived from thinking of food before they eat it, and when they ate food the pleasure was high, high, high, high. And then they went on with their day. It was like, I don't know, I don't think about it.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:46:17.248)
It was like my hot shower analogy.
Ashley James (1:46:22.835)
You don't sit there like getting off on thinking about your hot shower that's coming up. Although, I could think about a nice hot bath and I can't wait for that. I have this tongue scraper and I love using it, I can't believe the stuff. I use it twice a day. Everyone needs a tongue scraper. Go, run, buy it now.
I had a listener ask me in our Facebook group, why can't I just brush? I'm no, no, no. Someone else said because you're just brushing all the bacteria around, you're not actually removing it, but you're removing this biofilm that the bacteria lives in on your tongue. It's pretty crazy and I love doing it. It's the best part of brushing teeth, but I don't think of it throughout the day.
I gain maximum pleasure while I'm doing it, like for the 30 seconds I'm doing it to get, let's see all the crap coming off my tongue twice a day. It's really cool, and how clean my tongue is afterwards. It feels like your mouth doesn't feel good until you've cleaned your tongue. Go do it. It's amazing. But it's just this metal, round, u-shaped thing you just scrape your tongue with, but I don't think about it throughout the day.
So the study, they found that, the ideal weight people who've never had obesity issues don't derive pleasure from thinking about food, but when they're eating it it's orgasmic. The obese people, they poked them up to machines, looked at brain scans and saw that they derive quite a bit of pleasure. Not as much pleasure as the skinny people did from eating food, they would drive, but still substantial pleasure just from thinking about the meals they could have, like chicken wings, hot dogs, whatever. But when they went to eat it, the obese people were disappointed because the fantasy was better than reality.
My husband told me a long time ago, when you're not married and you're dating around, let me tell you, he goes. He's a happily married man. The fantasy of what you can do with women as a man, because in their mind you're the God of the bedroom, and if you live in that fantasy world, you're always disappointed from reality. So that's the same with pornography. If you avoid pornography and you avoid this fantasy world, then the actual real thing is amazing and when you actually get to go do it in the bedroom with your spouse, it's amazing.
That hit me because first of all, I thought everyone thought about food throughout the day, I thought that was normal. That's what made me go, wow, I really do think about what am I going to cook later? It's pleasurable. I love cooking, but it's making up these meals in my mind and I realized, wow, I do get more pleasure from the fantasy of what the food is than when I sit down to the meal. So your program gets us to the point where now we've rewired the brain to be all the skinny people.
We have the preset of what we're eating that day, and then we don't fantasize about it and then we start to drive more pleasure when we're sitting down to eat. So it’s as if you're getting people to rewire their brain to become skinny people. Have you ever heard of, they take the mice, who are always, always skinny, and they take obese mice and then they give the fecal transplant of the skinny mice to the obese mice.
They all eat the same and get the same exercise. But the obese mice become skinny and the skinny mice become obese just because the microbiome changes. It's like you're taking a fat person but giving them a skinny brain way of making their brain be skinny brain people and having skinny brain habits.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:50:25.236)
Yes, totally, and the research you were talking about is what addiction scientists would call the distinction between liking and wanting.
So, the liking and the wanting systems are very different in the brain and as addiction wires up, what happens is your wanting goes up and up and up, but your liking, once you have it, goes down and down and down and that changes over development as you wire up an addiction and it is its own kind of torturous hell.
To live in a world where you're wanting food, wanting food, wanting food, but then when you eat it it doesn't give the payoff and then you're thinking, oh well, now I need something sweet, now I need something salty and you're eating but you're not even liking it that much. But you still want it and the elbow wants to bend and the mouth wants to chew and you still want to be eating and you're wanting and wanting but not even liking. If you haven't had an addiction it doesn't make sense but that is the experience of it and that is exactly what Bright Line Eating does. It heals that. It heals it and it's rigorous and it's not for everybody, but it works. If you have weight to lose and you want to have a brain that doesn't torture you about food anymore, it works.
Ashley James (1:51:41.050)
It sounds very empowering. In terms of getting people back into their place of feeling freedom in their body, freedom in their life, freedom in their brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:52:03.764)
What else can you be doing in the world? Ashley is the person who's going to solve cold fusion like it isn't even working on those equations right now because they're starting Atkins for the third time this year. Think about how much wasted potential is buried underneath all of this obsession about what we've eaten or not eaten, whether we're on our plan or off our plan, how many miles, how many calories, how many pounds, what we're cooking, what we're eating. The food that we're wanting to eat. There are so many. I mean it's like two billion people now in this world are overweight or obese and food obsessed.
Ashley James (1:52:41.900)
I'm very, very, very grateful. My son, his body shape is just like me as a kid. I was thin and muscular and athletic, and he is the same way and he could take or leave food. In fact, when he's playing with his friends, I'm like, can you please eat your lunch? He's like, no, I'm busy playing. It's only when the world has calmed down there's nothing more fun to do. He keeps asking like, okay, are we doing something more fun? I'm like, no, now it's quiet time and let's eat our meal. Then he's hungry. He's not hungry until there's no nothing else to do in the world, whereas me now, as an adult, I'm like, well, the food is the fun. What are you talking about? Let's go, let's go eat, but as a kid I watched him. He is just go, go, go, fun is fun all the time. He could take or leave food, so I'm so grateful for that.
But clothing doesn't fit him and I think this is crazy because I have to go out of my way. I go to kids clothing stores and I have to order online their special sizes for, quote unquote, skinny and slim, the skinny, slim fit, because I am telling you, he is not. We go to an amazing pediatrician, a naturopathic pediatrician. She measures him, she says he's healthy and healthy rangers, he's not unhealthy weight or anything. He's growing, he's so tall now I can't believe it. He just grew up to now he's in eight-year-old clothing. He's seven and he just went another size up. Yet I have to go out of my way to find clothing that fits him, because the average child now is obese and he has a lot of friends that have more weight than I saw as a kid in the 80’s.
And that is because, like you said, most kids now eat processed food. When I was a kid it was kind of an oddity, I didn't know I had a choice. The parents go, my kids only eat macaroni and cheese, or my kids only eat hotdogs. When I was a kid I didn't even know I had a choice. I had to eat what my parents ate, and so we sat down and we'd have grilled fish and we'd have wild rice or we'd have legumes, we'd have grilled chicken, we'd have a Caesar salad with grilled chicken. Those were pretty much the staple meals in our house, were vegetables, some kind of lean meat and steamed vegetables and some legume or a little bit of complex carbohydrate in there, but that's how I grew up eating and I don't remember eating much processed food at all. Maybe on my birthday I could get that. Once in a blue moon was processed food, and now children are once in a blue moon having a vegetable.
Imagine this generation. Yes, we have adults who need to lose weight, but I think you need to make a bright line for the parents who want to help their kids heal, because now we have seven-year-olds with processed food addiction brain and twelve-year-olds with processed food addiction brain who are going to rebel and who are sneaking sugar. I even have a friend whose daughter steals. She's 10 or 12 years old. She will steal. When they're at Target, her mom has to pat her down because she will always find hidden candy bars that she's stealing because it's that processed food addiction brain that we've given our children, because they've grown up mostly eating foods that have hijacked their brain. So, yes, we need this for us, we need the Bright Line Eating program for us, but we also need a gentle one for the children to help the children heal and maybe the children could just heal when we start actually feeding them real food like teaching them to listen to their body. We have to be gentle.
So my husband once a year does a fast and he's aiming for 40 days. This time he's done 28 day fasts and it's water only fast and he's fantastic at them. But today's day eight, and what I noticed, because I've been more conscious, I would say actually since my interview with Jonah Flynn, so this was maybe March or February and because of the last year, I really did turn to food as one of my mechanisms for handling grief and then I acknowledged that on the scale. Now, I'm coming back down and being much more conscious of how I'm eating and I wasn't going off the rails either last year. If I'd gone off the rails it would have been 80 pounds, not 40 pounds, but my husband has been fasting for the last eight days.
I have observed myself and I realized it has been so much easier emotionally to cook healthy. The thing is he also eats whole food, plant based, and he will eat whatever I eat. So he's sitting there like, oh let's crack out the whatever processed food, but just having to be responsible to feed multiple people, cause I mean I'm feeding our son, I know what to feed him, but just to be responsible for, or sometimes it has to be like, oh, let's just go eat out and then giving into that. It's kind of being with the person you used to be with, because he and I used to have food addiction together, go to the dollar menu, get off on that together many years ago. He showed me his sugar addiction back when we were dating. We sat down to watch a movie while we were dating at his house, and he cracked open the family-size, family-size, this is a thing of ice cream so big that it requires a handle. Have you seen those? It has a big round lid and it's a tub of ice cream. The tub has a handle that's like a bucket of ice cream.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:58:56.137)
No, no
Ashley James (1:58:57.543)
It’s in Albertson’s. It’s crazy. He told me every weekend he'd polish one off single-handedly and he was so excited to share it with me. I did not do dairy, so then I did dairy with him and that was a disaster. But it made me see, wow, this is an addiction. He's inviting me into it.
Sometimes he'll pull me into that and be, let's go eat out at a restaurant. Yay! It's easy to give in. If he had said let's go get a pack of cigarettes or let's go do this addictive party together, when you've got an accomplice. So now that he's not eating for over a week, I haven't had an accomplice and it's just been me and it's been so much easier. I just want to talk about this, how does your program help people who have a spouse or have kids that they have to cook food for, that isn't on the program. How do they heal their addiction and have to be surrounded by the substances that they're craving? Because you said there's a point of willpower that your program helps to remove by planning what you're going to cook the next day. But now let's say you've got the spouse who wants the bad food and you have to cook for them also.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:00:22.286)
Well, I won't lie, sometimes that can be hard. What I have found is that if you're cooking for a family, typically you can prepare what you're going to eat, which in the initial weight loss phase, for dinner, for example, is going to be some protein, some vegetable, some salad, some fat on that, and you can prepare that and then also add, for example, a big pot of pasta and some bread and butter for the family, and they can eat that, and you're having the protein vegetable salad that you've also made. So you don't need to cook a whole separate meal. Typically you can just add, typically, a big pot of starch of some kind for the family to add to that. So that's typically what I recommend.
This isn't 1950 anymore. Other people can also cook for themselves as well. But I mean, that's the way I always did. It is have done it, and I have three kids and a husband who none of them eat the Bright Line Eating way, and so these days we do some sort of mix, because my kids are older and my husband can cook, and so we do some mix of I'll cook or, or everyone will fend for themselves, or we'll go out to dinner, or if I'm cooking, I'll cook what I'm going to eat and I'll add, I said, another component or two for other folks.
Ashley James (2:01:52.292)
In your program when you're planning for the next day. Can you plan for eating out and would you look at the restaurants, choose a restaurant, let's say, your family's going out because we're getting together with friends or other family members. Would you choose the restaurant, look at the menu and already choose what you're going to order and how are you going to order it to be on program?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:02:12.244)
Yes. So you can pretty much eat out in any restaurant and do Bright Line Eating and you're still looking for the same categories of food. I don't always choose in advance what I'm going to eat, because sometimes you arrive and the menu's changed or whatever, and so I would just commit a Bright Meal out, but in the restaurant I'd be looking for the same, protein, vegetable salad kind of thing. If it's a Thai restaurant, I'm ordering vegetables and tofu or whatever.
Ashley James (2:02:47.478)
Well with Thai restaurants, I love that if you don't see anything you like, you can order, the side menu always has steamed vegetables and brown rice, and I've done that where I've said can I please have a big thing of steamed vegetables, big thing of brown rice, and then bring me soy sauce or something, or sometimes even they'll steam tofu, which I mean steamed tofu, to me is delicious, but I'm I'm one of those people.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:03:11.466)
Yes, me too.
Ashley James (2:03:14.742)
It’s Bragg's liquid aminos and I'm all good. Okay, we've been teasing the listener the whole time because we've been saying we would talk about the statistics. I want to talk about statistics. Let's wrap this up by really talking about your studies, because you even said that your hunger goes down statistically, and you emphasize the word statistically, meaning you are tracking people's results. Do you have any more data or more studies to share with us about your program? Also that people have lasting weight loss, because what I said earlier anyone can do any diet, but how do we have lasting success to being as healthy as possible? This isn't about weight loss. This is being as healthy as possible and feeling mentally and emotionally healthy, along with physical healthy.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:04:11.058)
Sure. I've mentioned the studies before, but I've got one additional one to mention, but I can give you the numbers. By two months after doing Bright Line Eating, not only have people lost weight, but I just want to emphasize, when most people lose weight in most ways, their hunger and their cravings go up. Because that's what happens when you deprive the brain and the body of enough food to survive. The brain compensates by making you hungrier and crave more, but not when you do it the Bright Line Eating way.
The difference is you're not eating processed foods, you're not eating sugar and flour, and you're eating enough whole foods and vegetables to create enough bulk and you're weighing it. People typically don't eat enough vegetables unless they weigh it. So know you're good. The amounts and the fact that you're using a digital food scale to make sure you're eating enough it's not about restricting quantities. It's about making sure you're eating enough. It dupes the brain into feeling you're getting ample food, so you're losing weight.
By two months in your hunger ratings on average are down to 1.5 out of five, that's average, little to no hunger anymore, ever, and craving levels are below that, below 1.5 out of five. So hunger and cravings go down.
I mentioned that people at every age are losing weight equivalently, which is just a miracle and a blessing. If you're over 50, you're just like, yay! So after two months, people on average are losing 13 to 17 pounds after the first two months and three months after that, that's doubled. Those weight loss results are maintained years later, literally two years later, on average, zero pounds regained. We have people in our Bright Line Eating who have been around now for about seven years. Our first program rolled out a little over seven years ago and we have people maintaining their weight loss all that time.
Then the study that I didn't mention actually has to do with a study we did after COVID hit, where we looked at the well-being metrics of someone, psychosocial metrics, things like energy, perceived social support, which means like, are you feeling lonely in the world or are you feeling deeply supported and connected? If you had an emergency, do you have people who would come over to your house to help? Do you have enough support in life?
We looked at depression, days of bad mental health versus good mental health, levels of depression. We looked at these metrics and what we found is that after two months of doing Bright Line Eating, people have more energy, less depression, fewer days of bad mental health and their feeling of feeling loved and connected and supported in the world has gone way up. But then we looked at that during COVID, I'm talking about the heat of when COVID was first rocking the world. We're talking April, May, June of 2020.
We looked at those months versus before COVID hit and versus after COVID had been around for a while, and what we found was that those effects were actually heightened during the worst catastrophe. So, in other words, people experienced a lifting of their depression, but even to a greater degree. During the worst of COVID, people experienced more energy, but to a greater degree. People experienced feeling more loved and connected in the world, but to a greater degree, meaning that Bright Line Eating as a community and as a way of life is so conducive to well-being that during a catastrophe or an emergency. The effect was amplified because people had a community to lean into all the more and a program to lean on to get them through the worst times. Ashley, I've been thinking about you over the last year. Food can help us cope to some degree but we've been talking about it, it's a poor proxy for real support and connection and coping. When people have Bright Line Eating to lean into, they flourish extra during the hardest times. It's quite remarkable.
Ashley James (2:08:54.512)
I love it. I love your program. I love that it's science-based. I love that it's holistic, because it's looking at every aspect of your life and you're showing that it brings in that joy and satisfaction throughout someone's life. So that is truly holistic. That is what true health is. To me, that's the definition. My husband, he's the one that titled the podcast. But the idea of it being true health, the True Health Podcast, the true health is all aspects of your life are in that balance, that have joy and that have health. So it's not just physical, it's not just mental, it's everything. It's emotional, it's social, it's spiritual, it's every aspect. So the fact that you have this very well-rounded result is beautiful.
I'm so excited that we brought this information to the listeners today because, just statistically, we have helped some lives today and even if we help one person to get out of that torturous suffering, this has been an incredible success. So I feel so blessed that you came here today to share this information. Thank you so much.
Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Thompson does is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com, including brightlineeating.com and the link to the membership. Is there anything you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview and please, I want to say, come back on the show when you have more studies, more information. We'd love to have an ongoing conversation, because what it sounds like is you are always refining and making this even better as you study this further.
We're never done. We're always developing and you've developed a fantastic system through this constant evolution with your community and being totally geeking out on neuroscience. I can appreciate that. So definitely come back on the show, but is there anything you'd like to say to the listener to wrap up today's interview?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:10:59.806)
Yes, I guess I just want to say there are a lot of people out there and maybe you, dear listener, are one of them who really have tried so hard to change the way you eat, to turn the corner with your health, to start taking care of yourself better, but the food just keeps being an issue. I just want to say you're not alone. It really is a real thing. It's addictive in the brain and you're not alone. I just want you to know that I have walked the path of that struggle and I see you, I feel you and you got this. You got this. So come check us out at brightlineeating.com. We would love to see you. There is a roadmap that works. There's a path that works.
Ashley James (2:11:44.612)
Brilliant. I'm so happy that we're helping people. I say we because I was here too, but you are helping people today to end that suffering and get on that roadmap to success. I geek out on personal growth and development. That's one of my favorite things, so thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's have you back.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:12:05.148)
Thanks, Ashley. It'd be great. I'll come back anytime and it's just been delightful talking with you. Thank you so much.
Outro:
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